Design Project: The Caffinator
Northwestern Design Course, Winter 2018
Our team of four engineering students collaborated with Kranze Technology Solutions, Inc. to help streamline their prolonged mobile device testing procedures. Before our collaboration, any prolonged testing on mobile devices required the presence of someone to manually stimulate the devices every 10 minutes or so in order to prevent the devices from going to sleep. Due to software limitations, a hardware solution was desired to stimulate the devices and alleviate the need for a constant human presence.
Our team tackled the process of iteratively brainstorming and considering dozens and dozens of different design approaches, constantly incorporating our feedback from communication with our client and from user and performance testing. One we narrowed in our design direction, we started refining the details like materials selection and implementation avenues.
Next, with our plans in hand, we started constructing mockups, forging our way to our final prototype. From the start, we made efforts to include human-centered usability features in our design. Not only did we want the caffinator_to move a belt and swipe across a row of devices, we wanted it to be easy to setup and utilize.
After completing our prototype construction, we presented our design to our client with a live demo and instructions on how to set it up, use it, and even construct duplicates in the future.
