ORION
September 2021 - June 2022
Orion was the culmination of a nine-month-long capstone project for my Manufacturing & Design Engineering major. Along with four team members, I went from the process of finding an opportunity space through interviews and surveys to identifying unmet needs, ideating solutions, designing and testing prototypes, and fabricating a final high-fidelity prototype. My team and I also filed a provisional patent and created a manufacturing plan for Orion.
DESIGN
System Overview
Torchiere Lamp
The torchiere lamp, which is plugged into an outlet, provides bright ambient light for the room, holds the portable luminaire charging docks, and can be used to change all of the portable luminaires' brightness at once.
Image courtesy of Khizr Maqsood
Portable Luminaires (PLs)
Battery-powered, rechargeable lights that can be placed around the room for localized light. Each one has capacitive touch control for brightness adjustment.
Charging Dock
Each PL can be placed on a dock that charges it using Qi wireless charging. The docks can also charge other Qi-chargeable items like phones.
SKILLS
Research
User research, literature research, patent research, root cause analysis
Testing
Experimental design, competitive product analysis, user testing
Opportunity
Needs and requirements identification, product differentiation planning
Prototyping
FDM 3D printing, SLA 3D printing, rough mockups, CAD (Siemens NX)
Project Documentation
2D Drawings, weekly planning
Design for Manufacturing and Assembly (DFMA)
Manufacturing methods, GD&T, cost analysis
PROCESS
1.
Problem Exploration
Identifying opportunity spaces and stakeholders, executing competitive benchmark testing
3.
Design Exploration
Ideating, mocking up, prototyping
5.
Lean Design Strategy
DFA, DFM, material selection, manufacturing method selection
2.
Unmet Need Finding
Root cause analysis, patent research, user testing, identifying user needs and requirements
4.
Design Validation
User testing, refining prototypes
6.
Commercialization Plan
Cost analysis, basic marketing plan, quality management strategy
USER PREFERENCE TESTING
A major part of Orion was user lighting preference testing. My team and I created a testing procedure and setup to evaluate what lighting distribution users selected for each of three different scenarios: hanging out, playing a tabletop game, and pregaming before going out. The different scenarios were selected to represent activities that the user would need lighting for in their temporary living space (apartment). We carried out testing in the same apartment living space with the same furniture setup for each participant.
For each of the three activities (the order of which was randomized) users:
1. Were given a description of the activity
2. Filled out a pre-activity questionnaire
3. Created their lighting setup with a variety of existing lighting products
4. Carried out the activity for which the lighting was set up
5. Filled out a post-activity questionnaire
After completing testing for twelve participants, each for all three activities, I was responsible for using MATLAB to create "heatmaps" showing the illuminance distribution throughout the room for each of the 36 setups. I also made scatterplots to analyze trends in lighting product selection.
General Findings
Participants created ambient light in almost every setup
44% of setups were uniformly illuminated*
Higher cognitive tasks tended to use higher illuminance setups
Typically, light was concentrated in a corner, along a wall, or uniformly throughout the room
*defined as setups in which |(each lux measurement - avg. lux of setup) / (avg. lux of setup)| < 1, a method initially identified in the 10th Edition of the IES Handbook
These results informed our user needs and requirements, as well as our designs and prototypes. Participants' preference towards floor lamps for ambient lighting led us to a design that included a torchiere floor lamp. We also used other tests, like competitive product benchmarking, throughout the project.
PHOTOS
