Moment of recharge

Design brief

This project is done during the course Exploring Interactions, which is of the main courses of the Design for Interactions masters program. During this project, a context was chosen and the interactions happening within the context were analyzed, to come up with a design that enriches the context and the interactions happening within.

The main elements of this project were to formulate a design goal, analyze current interactions in a chosen context, developing an interaction vision, generate starting points for an innovative design suitable for the context, and developing and testing new product concepts in the context with the target group.

Chosen context

The context chosen for this project is the highway gas station. The reasoning behind this context is mainly personal interest in this context and the conviction that this context leaves room to be designed to have a positive impact on its visitors beyond only being functional.

The highway gas station area where I conducted all the in-context research activities was highway gas station 'Esso Ruyven'. This was mainly due to practical reasons, as this highway gas station is the closest to my home and thus enabled me to easily submerge myself in the context for interviews and observations.

Researching the chosen context

After deciding on the context I went there interviewed 5 solo drivers about their experience of taking a break from driving at the highway gas station. The research questions I wanted to answer with these interviews were:

In total, five solo drivers have been interviewed when taking a break at the highway gas station. The main findings of these interviews have been summarized an can be seen in the image on the side.

Design goal

Based on the interviews and observations that were done in-context, a design goals was formed to set the intended goal for this project. Other research and design activities that were done during the projects influenced this design goal further, so the Design Goal constantly evolved during the project.

The Design Goal I landed on during the project is the following:

I want solo drivers to experience a moment of recharge when taking a break from driving the highway gas station parking area.

Looking into moments of recharge

After communicating this design goal with peers, it became apparent that the term 'moment of recharge' means can be interpreted in different ways by different persons. Therefore, a quick study looking into wat defines a moment of recharge for most people was needed in order to design such a moment for this project.

For this small study, seven interviews were conducted with random students around campus. From the interviews six key components of what a moment or recharge is about were found, next to several factors that have either a positive or negative influence on such moment of recharge.

Interaction Vision

To determine de type of interaction the solo drivers should have when interacting with my design, an interaction vision is composed. According to my interaction vision, interacting with my concept should be like:

Going on a short walk in a local park while listening to music when feeling stressed out about work

Four interaction qualities were distilled from this interaction vision and the affordances evoking these interaction qualities were determined. These affordances can in a later stadium be used in my own design to evoke a similar interaction when a future user interacts with it.

First concept

The first concept build upon the idea of an interactive artwork that responds to your movements when standing and walking in front of it. Soft and calm music is played in te background to make people curious, interested to try it out, and more relaxed during the experience. This concept idea was prototyped using P5.JS in two different versions and both version were tested with four participants.

The first version (desktop link only) is an interactive artwork of a flower that opens up when walking towards it. The interactivity was simulated by moving a slider to the right when a user walked toward the artwork. The second version (desktop link only) portrayed a trip through space when walking closer towards the screen and moving left/right in front of it. Again, the interactivity was simulated using two sliders during the usertests. In the second version the user could wave his hand in front of the artwork to add stars to the universe, which was simulated by clicking and dragging the mouse cursor over the screen.

After testing both version with four participants, the feedback was summarized into eight key findings. After reflecting on the findings, it was decided that the interactive artwork was not making a strong case for making the drivers feel more recharged. Furthermore, it would not be quite feasible to implement this concept at multiple highway gas station. Therefore, a second concept was developed.

Second concept

This concept builds upon an interaction people already have in the current context: getting coffee from the shop and drinking it in or next to their car. The imagined coffee cup has images printed on the inside which reveal themselves while drinking. The images function a a trigger to start exploring the context's surroundings by foot. This concept was prototyped in three different versions and tested with 5 participants.

The first version of this concept contains images of special plants that would be planted around the parking area. Information about the plant would be placed next to the plants so the drivers could read more about the plants if interested. The second version of this concept contains images of different locations within the context where clues can be found to a certain question or riddle that is also printed on the cup. After drinking all coffee, a message reveals itself on the bottom of the cup saying that the answer to the riddle can be found on the bottom of the cup. The third version of this concept contains images of characters from a wall painting that the driver can try to spot in a hectic wall paining painted on the side of the shop.

Third concept

Based on the findings from the second concept, a third concept was designed. Instead of getting clues to find an answer to a question printed on the cup, the cup now contains two activities: one activity to calm down the user during their break and one activity to prepare the driver for the rest of the trip. Furthermore, it was decided to go beyond text and images printed on the cup, and the interaction with the cup itself was also taken into account.

The way this concept works is first the user slides around the upper ring on the outside of the cup to reveal a short mindful exercise. Afterwards, the user twists off the lower part of the cup's packaging to find the map of a scavenger hunt leading to a discount stamp which can be used when completing their purchase next time.

A quick prototype was created for the packaging of the cup and it was tested with a fellow student in order to get feedback about using the cup. Afterwards, the idea of the concept was discussed. Again, the findings were summarized on several main findings.

Final concept

As the third concept was received well and build upon the strengths of the previous concepts, the final concept was created as a more detailed and worked out version of the third concept. For the final concept, the cup was redesigned to combat all remarks / points of improvement that came forward when testing and discussing the third concept.

The final concept guides the user towards taking part in the mindful exercise first and the explorative exercise second. This is done by letting the mindful exercise stick out slightly to attract the attention of the user. Several ribbons and a arrow pointing in the twistable directions act as use cues to twist the top part of the wrap. Furthermore, after a little wile the cup's wrap reveals the message to twist loose the bottom part to find out about the explorative exercise to find the hidden discount stamp. This color change is possible when using thermochromic ink on the wrap to change the color of the message only after warming up due to the hot beverage inside.

Final prototype creation

After detailing the final concept a final prototype was created. Due to the fact that this project was done during the Covid pandemic and because people would need to drink out of the prototype during the test, five similar versions of the cup were created. This way the design could later on be validated in user tests with four different participants while always having one prototype as a spare.

The created prototypes were fully functional to the extend that the full concept could be validated in the user test. In other words, the upper part of the wrap was twistable to reveal the mindful exercise, the bottom part could be twisted loose to reveal the explorative exercise, and even some parts of the wrap changed color after filling the cup with a hot drink. This last part was realized by using chromatic pigments mixed with white paint.

The final prototype

See here the result of the final prototype creation process. This prototype is used during the in-context concept validation test as will be explained in the next

In-context validation

To validate the final design concept, an in-context evaluation study was performed. The aim of this evaluation was to evaluate to what extent the design goal is reached with the design and to what extent interacting with the design matches the the interaction vision. Four participants were randomly selected and asked to take part in this in-context evaluation study. In return the participants received a free cup of coffee.

During the test, the participants were observed while dinking their coffee and interacting with the cup. Afterwards they were asked about their experience with this concept and they were asked to fill in a short survey.

In-context validation - Results

The results of the survey questions show that the designed concept helped the participants to take their minds of current thoughts and stressors (6 out of 7), made them feel moderately more calm than usual (5 out 7), made them more active during their break than usual (6 out of 7), and made them feel moderately more energized than usual (5.5 out of 7). These results indicate that interacting with this concept does fit the intended interaction vision.

Since the interaction qualities were selected because they align with the findings from the research (mentioned above) which looked into what what makes a moment of recharge 'recharging', the results also indicate that the design goal successfully has been reached with this design. This conclusion is backed with the results of the last survey question which asked the participants directly whether they felt more recharged after using this concept compared to how recharged they normally feel after taking a break from driving (6 out of 7).

However, this validation test also showed that for some people finding the scavenger hunt by reading the map too hard and acted as a barrier to start the energizing activity. Secondly, the instructions on the cup were not clear enough for users to know what was expected of them without anyone explaining it to them. Furthermore, using the discount stamp on the wrap of the cup was difficult when there is still coffee in the cup.

Final iteration

Based on the results from the in-context evaluation one last iteration was done to solve the difficulties the participants experienced during the user test.

First of all, the map pointing to the discount stamp was replaced with a set of 5 simple instructions. These instructions both explain how to find the stamp and explain the concept of the explorative exercise the driver.

Secondly, instead of reading the map the users can now follow pavement tiles guiding the user towards the discount stamp. This lowers the barrier to start the explorative activity and is easier than having to read the map. Some pavement tiles contain questions about the context to make the diver more focussed on their surroundings instead of their thoughts. By remembering the numbers behind the right answers to the questions the user finds the code to open box that holds the discount stamp.

Lastly, the placeholder for the discount stamp is now located in the bottom of the cup, resolving the issue of having to use the stamp on the wrap of the cup when it is still filled with coffee.