Green Shift
Promoting the use of sustainable materials amongst Industrial Design Students and Professionals
Project Overview
The world is facing the most critical environmental issues in history with the increase in pollution and global warming, leaving future generations at risk. There is a dire need for industrial designers to utilize more sustainable materials when designing products. When the process starts from the very beginning of the design process, there can be a push for a more sustainability-focused industry.
Project Type
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Team Project
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1Semester (4 months)
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Aug 2021- Dec 2021
My Role
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UX Research and analysis, Ideation
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Contributing to low and high fidelity prototype designs
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Testing and Evaluation
Team
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Joseph Gaggiano
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Xiangyi Yang
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Han Wang
Methods
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Exploratory Research
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Competitive Analysis
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Surveys & Semi-structured Interviews
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Affinity Diagramming
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Storyboarding
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Discount evaluations
Tools
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Qualtrics
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Miro
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Figma
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Microsoft Teams
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Slack
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Google Docs
Problem Statement
Educate and encourage industrial design students choose more sustainable materials in the process of designing physical products to promote less waste and promote sustainability.
Background
There are a plethora of factors that a designer must consider when choosing materials, which can complicate the process. While designers want to consider sustainability, it is just one of the many factors that must be considered. Likewise, in practice, design students don't prioritize sustainability because final products will not be manufactured in a cost-effective manner. However, if students don't practice using sustainable materials in projects, how will they be capable of promoting the use of sustainability in a work environment?
Target Users
User Goals
Industrial Design Students and Early Designers
who have an intrinsic motivation to design more sustainable products, with high technological affinity
We conducted exploratory research by reading scholarly articles, and spoke with multiple design students and staff at the prototyping studio at Georgia Tech. During these conversations, we were introduced to several softwares that students use in the material selection process, and conducted evaluations to explore the problem space.
We found three main issues that industrial designers face when choosing materials for their projects. Thus the following are the desired goals our users would like to accomplish based on the problems identified:
Education on the choice of materials for projects
Identifying Sustainable Materials/Substitutions
Seamless Organization of All Factors Involved in Design
Solution Overview
1. Finding Materials - Search Feature
Users can search for materials for projects using the search bar or the search filters, & refine the shown materials by type, property, or by application. When a user searches for a material by the filters, a model appears that allows the user to select all of the material types they want their results to populate. Additionally, the Nav Bar has sign-in/ register options, and tabs fo Material Library, Resources, and tutorials.
2. Adding materials to 'My Materials' List and Acquiring Samples
After the user completes searching for desired material, they can see a list of materials on the page. Under each material, there is an option to ‘Add to My Materials', which allows them to store the selected materials in a separate section so that they can keep track of the materials they like. Once materials are added to the page, users can request samples from vendors who sell those materials. This allows the users to get an idea of the texture and feel of the material, and helps vendors introduce their materials to the market and potentially sell more units of the material.
3. Viewing Sustainable Substitutes for Materials
Once a user clicks on the material, he/she is directed to a page where the name and description of the material can be seen next to the image of the material. Below this, the user can get more information about the materials based on properties, application and processing, sustainability, and an option to download this information. The user is also provided with additional sustainable substitutes that are comparable to their selected material. The user can use filters and ‘sort by’ options to customize the substitutions they would like to see.
4. Compare Properties of Two or More Materials
The compare & visualize screens allow users to compare properties of two or more materials, which will assist them in selecting suitable materials. When materials are selected for comparison, they show up in the right panel of the screen. The information consists of the material name and associated vendor(s)/company selling that material. Upon selecting the number of materials to compare, and clicking the ‘compare materials’ button, the panel expands to a bigger screen with additional details about how the materials compare.
Exploratory Research
Competitive Analysis
We identified 5 systems that directly or indirectly compete within a similar problem space and user base. Strengths and weaknesses of each system were determined to inform our design and research decisions:
ArchiCAD EcoDesigner STAR
SOLIDWORKS sustainability module
MatWeb Online Materials Database
OpenLCA
Material ConneXion
Understanding Our Users' Needs
Semi-structured Interviews - ID Expert Users and Students
Method Details
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Participants:
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Expert Users: 2 industrial design professors and 1 graduate industrial design teaching assistant
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Novice Users: 3 industrial design undergraduate students
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Method: The interviews were held over Microsoft Teams, which allowed for greater flexibility around professors’ and students’ busy schedules and increased efficiency in meetings, as we were able to record the sessions and take additional notes at a later time.
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Analysis: Important notes, feedback, and quotes were recorded and organized in an affinity diagram to uncover relevant themes and insights from the interviews.
Goals
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To gain a better understanding of current usage of existing systems and users' problems
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To identify any challenges that designers encounter when attempting to design with sustainable materials
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To discover when in the design process a designer usually chooses a material
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To better comprehend the ID students’ thought process when choosing a material for a project
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To Identify which tools designers currently use when choosing materials
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Pinpoint problems that ID students may encounter when choosing sustainable materials
Affinity Diagram
Expert User Interviews
Novice User Interviews
Key Findings
Choice of Materials to Use
ID students tend to change their choice of materials as they conduct more research about different materials available. They choose materials usually in the research or prototyping phase of the design process.
Poor Experiences with Material Databases
There are very few softwares available to help designers selecting sustainable materials. The 2 most popular material databases available are openLCA and Material ConneXion, but students do not use them often.
Final products for their classes will not be manufactured
All participants said that they consider sustainability an important factor. However, in practice, they don't prioritize sustainability because the final products for their classes will not be manufactured.
Lack of knowledge about Sustainable Materials
The lack of knowledge about sustainable materials indicates an empty market for tools that present materials’ sustainability levels. The root of the problem is not that there isn’t enough data, but that none of the tools have a good user experience to have recurring users.
Sustainability is not considered a priority over other factors
Designers, especially in industry rarely consider sustainability to be the most important factor. Rather, most designers consider costs, aesthetics and other physical properties as their priority. Thus, there is a need to incorporate all those dimensions of the material in an interface.
Lack of knowledge about the product lifecycle
Most industrial designers are aware of the concept of the life cycle of materials, but since they have little opportunity to be directly involved in the material acquisition or degradation stage, it’s hard for them to comprehend the amount of energy and work needed in this stage.
Online User Survey
Method Details
Goals
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Participants: 25 undergraduate and graduate industrial design students from different universities
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Method: We used Qualtrics to create the surveys, and utilized convenience sampling to gather responses from multiple sources including friends and social media. We also encouraged respondents to further disperse the survey to others, effectively utilizing snowball sampling.
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Analysis: We used Descriptive and inferential statistics to evaluate our survey results.
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To develop a more comprehensive understanding of the needs, wants, and requirements of industrial design students in sustainable design
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To validate our findings from the interviews with a larger sample size
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To identify the rough proportion of students who actually use the material selection tools mentioned
Key Findings
Most Users have not used any tools (databases or any technological interface) when choosing materials
Ease of Use. the Ability to see the material were the most important features in a materials selection tool
Feasibility, costs, &
aesthetics are the most important factors when choosing materials
Availability, cost, & limited knowledge are the barriers faced when selecting sustainable materials
Users believe sustainability is important, but find it difficult to justify the use of sustainable materials
Recyclability & low carbon footprint are ranked as top important sustainability-related factors
Ideation
Design Idea 1
Material Inspo 2.0
Material Inspo will help Industrial Designers learn about & choose more sustainable materials when designing a product. The product can be used during any stage of the design process to learn about new materials in the market and learn more about specifications of various materials available. The interface will also recommend sustainable substitutes for materials that are not as environmentally friendly, and provide visualizations for the user to view the product life cycle of the materials on the material detail page.
Storyboard
Design Idea 2
CAD LifeSpan 2.0
CAD LifeSpan will allows users to learn about various materials by selecting and applying them to their design work (FR#1). The program will give them real-time information on the product lifecycle and suggests more sustainable materials as an alternative for the ones they've chosen. Additionally, this program enables users to pick, compare, and evaluate the product's lifespan on one platform(FR#2 &3).
Storyboard
Design Requirements
Functional Requirements
1. The future product should allow users to learn about materials
2. The future product should allow users to compare materials
3. The future product should recommend sustainable substitutes
Non - Functional Requirements
1. The future product should inspire designers with new materials
2. The future product should be easy to use
3. The future product interface should be visually appealing and calming
4. The future product should promote a sustainable mindset
Prototyping
After the ideation phase, we considered the pros and cons of all our different design ideas, and tested our concepts with Industrial Design experts and students, and concluded to a final prototype.
Evaluation
Expert Feedback / Heuristic Evaluation
Goals
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Determine the ease of use of our solution in a relatively short amount of time
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Identify confusing elements and ways in which we can improve our interface and interactions
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Gather feedback on the overall layout and design of the product from expert users
Method Details
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Participants: 4 expert users (4 MS-HCI students)
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Method:
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We gave the users a background of our research, findings, and the intended use case of Green Shift.
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We had our facilitator walk through the tasks.
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As we went through each task, we encouraged the participants to intervene with any comments/ questions and prepared questions for the participants to assess the product.
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We walked through Nielsen Norman’s 10 usability heuristics with the expert users at the end to determine the usability of our product.
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Analysis: An affinity diagram was created to uncover insights presented in the feedback session. Each heuristic was given a severity score by the users, and these scores were then averaged across the four users to provide a quantitative indicator as to what usability issues we should address.
Key Findings
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The Eco-Indicator score needs an information pop-up and clearly indicate what scale it is on
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More images or examples could help users learn the application of the materials, and therefore the users are more likely to switch to this material
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The different colored sustainability tags on the materials did not make sense to the users. Consistency in colors would be better to avoid confusion.
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A search icon does not make sense next to a password input box on the login screen
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More information may be required on the ‘My Materials’ page than just the material name and company name. This is because users may not know a material by just its name.
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The wording of ‘My Library’ is confusing. An alternative name like ‘My Materials’ may be better. However, both titles can have different meanings in different contexts.
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The users expected to see a footer section in the bottom section of each of the pages.
Lessons Learned
The challenges presented throughout this project helped me grow a great deal as a researcher. Here are some key lessons that I learned:
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Pilot testing can save a great deal of time and resources in the long run. Each of our research activities had its complications that we had to overcome on the fly during the research sessions themselves because we refrained from pilot testing them first. Ambiguous questions, confusing tasks, and unclear directions could have been sorted out before the research studies even began during pilot testing to promote higher-quality sessions.
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Diverse perspectives can be extremely beneficial throughout the human-centered design process. Our group consisted of a diverse set of perspectives, with backgrounds ranging from computer science to industrial design to business. Differing perspectives allowed us to come up with more creative questions, solutions, and design elements throughout the process, which conveys the importance of including a range of stakeholders throughout the HCD process.