Home Lighting Designer: Develop a conceptual tool for home lighting design

Home Lighting Designer: Develop a conceptual tool for home lighting design

Hu, J.

Pont, S. (mentor)
Vermeeren, A. (mentor)
Sekulovski, D. (mentor)

Industrial Design Engineering

Design for Interaction

Design for Interaction

2013-01-18

This report is for the graduation project- Design a conceptual tool for home lighting design, which is done in the group of Visual Experience at Philips Research Eindhoven. The aim of the project is to understand how home users conduct the home lighting design activities and design a tool based on the user-centered insights. The project comprises of three phases, research, conceptualization and evaluation. In the research phase, literature on light and lighting design was studied to form a theoretical basis for further exploration. The literature research has found that most of the knowledge, principle and design process are developed for professionals and commercial spaces. The necessity of developing a tool for home users is outlined, in which the professional knowledge should be translated in a plain and simple way. A contextual study was performed to gather insights by approaching the targeted users. The contextual study has revealed a four-step framework, Problem-Design-Evaluation-Execution, which demonstrates how home users conduct the lighting design process. Under the framework, insights are classified into contextual facts, problems, wishes and demands. Similar solutions on the market were also analyzed to find a unique positioning for the new tool. It is found that no current solution supports the process of home lighting design very well. The link between different design phases is missing whereas the supports for each phase are not adequate, especially for the phase of design evaluation. The research findings led to the formulation of design focus in concept development, which was “To develop a tool which assists users with their creative activities in the process of home lighting design.” A number of design criteria were also created to guide the conceptualization. - Link the various phases in design process - Cater to individual situations - Preventing the obtrusive experience - Response to user habits - Utilize the characters of online interaction - Novel and creative - Feasibility In the conceptualization phase, 6 concepts were proposed, selected with user-centered design methods. The final concept is a home lighting design APP that provides users with fast and extensive information of a lighting fixture through augmented reality. By scanning the image of a lamp from magazine, shops and websites, people are able to see a great number of design examples, product specifications, customer reviews and the lighting effect in their home. For the light setting designed by the users, the tool also gives diagnosis based on the intended atmosphere. The final evaluation was done with an interactive prototype of the concept. At the end of the report, suggestions are made that in short-term the concept should fix the usability problems as well as improve the key functions based on the user test feedbacks; in long term, some features of the concept can be developed into independent applications with advanced functions. A group of home lighting design tools will be arranged as a tool kit to meet more personalized demands of the targeted users.

Iphone application
lighting
design

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:224f43de-2cc1-4131-b13d-9e7783afe7c0

Campus only

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2013 Hu, J.