What is a wearable?
Wearables is an assignment in which you design a prototype that can collect data. This prototype must solve a problem for the character you received. My prototype is designed for a heroic knight who suffers from sleep problems.
Bloodtracker
The Blood Tracker is a special sword that keeps track of the amount of blood that has come onto the sword during battles of a knight. This allows the sword to keep up with the energy of the person using it, which is very beneficial.
Do you dare to fight?
User interface
The user interface of the blood tracker is multifunctional. It is mainly intended to track the blood on the sword, so that the user knows how much energy he has left to fight. It also has other functions. It can keep track of the position of the sun and it keeps track of how the user has slept.
Try it out!
Research character
This is the character I was given, Sir Robert Redwood. I have turned this into a persona with his character traits, problems and goals in life.
I have started researching my knight's problems and what he needs. To do this, I first did research into a knight himself. What does he look like? What are his habits? What era did he live in? I made word webs out of this.
Conclusion research
My character research revealed the following. Sir Robert Redwood has serious sleep problems. This is because he does not realize when he is tired. Because of this he just keeps fighting and fighting. As a result, he experiences hallucinations and nightmares and no longer knows what is reality and what is not.
Mood & style boards
Knight in general Character
Sketching concept ideas
Each of my sketches has one solution to sleep deprivation. My ideas range from feasible to impossible to make. I came up with quite a few and presented them to my test person. Some worked better than others. From these conclusions I chose The Bloodtracker.
Final sketch
My final idea is a sword called The Bloodtracker. You can carry this sword with you on a belt in the sheath of the sword. This sheath can measure how much blood is on the sword when it is sheathed. There will be a user interface on the scabbard on which the knight can view his data.
Prototyping
First design
Improved design
Final design
Sketching user interface
A user interface is an interactive screen that helps the knight with his problem. As a first step, I made sketches of what information I wanted on my user interface.
(sketch on the left)
I presented these sketches to my knight, but a few things could be improved. For example, I designed the screen in portrait position instead of landscape and also used other icons that fit the style better.
(sketch on the right)
My user interface can therefore keep track of how much blood is on the sword, so that the knight knows whether he needs to rest as he does not realize when he is tired. The UI can also keep track of how much he sleeps, once he sleeps and the sun position of the day (time).
I developed the UI in Adobe XD.
Biography
I also had to come up with and write a story for a character myself. This was about a farmer who was in love with his pig and has no other social contacts.
the biography is added to assets if you are curious what the farmer's life is like :)
Reflection
To start with, I thought this was a really fun assignment. I liked that we actually had to work with our hands on the prototypes and I really liked that there were many different parts throughout the project.
After my previous project, which did not go smoothly, I was determined to show myself in this project. So I got off to a good start from the start.
I found the story I was given complicated at first. This is also reflected in the sketch phase. I didn't really know yet what the biggest problem was, so I had designed something for everything. Ultimately, I chose not to tackle all the problems, but the overarching problem. Once I did this it went very smoothly. Developing the idea, testing it and designing the prototype went smoothly.
My next obstacle was creating the user interface. I had never worked in Adobe XD before, so I was struggling with this for a while. Fortunately, this turned out well with the help of others. I just think it's a shame that I'm not very good at it yet, so the style doesn't really come across. This is an improvement point for next time.
I also think that I asked for a lot of feedback and that I also applied it. This makes me very proud of my end results.
