Magdalena Breitinger
PRODUCT DESIGNER
THE DRESSER
WITH:
Coen de Zeeuw, Liqun Zhou
The project
The first semester of the Master was conducted as part of the ‘Studio Silver’ squad. This squad focuses on design for the elderly and improving their everyday life. As a group of three, our brief was to design a product to help people with dementia cope with the illness. The project was accompanied by ‘Pleyade’, a company dealing with care for the elderly.
The outcome was a smart closet, that was able to help the user to dress independently.
Dressing is a very private experience and you want to keep doing it yourself as long as you can. In order to make dressing easier for people with dementia, we designed a drawer system to help getting dressed by filling it once a week with chosen outfits and pointing out the order in which the clothes need to be put on.
This way the care-recipient can stay independent for longer and the caregiver has more time for social activities. Personal experience and research around the topic gave us the impression that not being able to dress themselves is a serious issue for people with dementia. By designing a solution for this issue, we want to not only address practical needs by saving time but also give back key values for people such as: independence, self-esteem and privacy.
The process
The project started off with a ‘pressure cooker’ to generate initial ideas for a concept to help people with dementia to cope with everyday problems.
After this initial phase, the real project started by first benchmarking the current market of products for people with dementia which gave us an idea of what we could contribute to the area.
This was followed by a brainstorming session to come up with possible concepts. The results were presented to the professors who gave us feedback and advice on the choice. As a result, we decided to design a closet to help people with dementia to get dressed more easily.
Afterwards, the design process began with sketching and further brainstorming to develop a concept that is easy to implement and use for the person with dementia.We designed a product that presents one handle of a closet each day that can be opened and contains all clothes for the day which are ordered for the user to put them on step by step.
Additionally, we had to implement the background structure to make sure that the closet is always supplied with clothes.
Following the midterm presentation, we were awarded with a price to push our project further. This made it possible to work on the prototype itself and include a lighting system to indicate the order of clothes.
After successfully developing this feature, we had to test its usability on potential clients.
To do so, we visited an elderly home to test the interaction of the residents with the design.
After the evaluation of the test we proceeded to build a functional prototype for the final assessment and a presentation for the client.
