Aeri: Handheld Milk Frother
Project Team: Aishwarya Tandon, Tan Yong Kuan, Lim Zi Jie, Vilvum Kris
Project Collaborator: NUS Division of Industrial Design
This project was pursued as a student NUS Division of Industrial Design. The main aim of the project was to redesign a common handheld product into something different from the norm.
The product matrix study is conducted to learn more about the market, and find areas that are unsaturated to develop. From this product matrix, it can be deduced that frothers which are perceived to be luxurious and serious tend to have a metallic finish, and possess geometric forms while those perceived to be fun tend to have vibrant colours or prints, and comes in forms that may deviate from geometry.
A low number of products that fall within the luxurious and fun categories, and hence, this could be a potential area for exploration.
After brainstroming and creating the concept map based on the user persona, it was decided that the frother should reflect the personality of the user, and should be a 'Sociable' Milk Frother. By sociable, we meant that it should be something of a fun talking piece such that people would want to talk about it and as a result, end up socializing. In the context of socializing, two important areas were recognized
- The frother should be easy to pass around
- The frother should be a talking piece (Inspired by Phillipe Starck's Juicy Salif)
From these insights, we found a few points that can contribute to the design of a sociable milk frother:
1. Larger surface area for passing
2. More faces of the frother to grab
2. Standing frother that does not dirty the agitator when placed
The purpose of building the mood board was to create a literal and visual vocabulary to describe the intended design direction. Form semantics were studied to discover physical attributes that would evoke the intended emotional responses from users.
After a lot of form development and detailing, the final form was decided.