TEAM NORWAY II

Team Norway II. Foto: Claire Dennington

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Concept: EMBRACE

Our aim has been to embrace the principals of Inclusive design and look beyond function alone, to consider opportunities for delight and aspiration in our designs.

Our challenge has been to bring together all the complex aspects of inclusivity including our view to embrace personality and deliver both everyday and other more demanding products to illustrate the ideals.

We have taken the three themes of Living, Moving and Connecting to form the cornerstones of our project, and used them to highlight product categories and types.  It was important to us to address issues like stigma – people with disabilities do not want to carry around a sign saying ‘…I have a disability…’ and this makes some of the things designed to help, a white stick for instance, a burden.

We felt that the design language, the materials, the look and the feel of many of the gadgets we saw were perfunctory – they were designed to answer only the practical brief but not the emotional brief.  We saw the need for each and every item to be desirable – whether or not useful – to all consumers.

Our expert user, Birger, was able to vocalize a wealth of valuable insights about what worked and what didn’t and his time with the team has been very valuable.  As well as providing a foundation for our thoughts he helped to steer our product ideas.

It is important to say that for the purpose of the project we have illustrated only six of the items that comprise our embrace concept, but we listed many more during the 24 hours that have value.  Essentially we have developed an aspect of common behaviour – the collecting  and adaptation of essential, useful objects. We have refined and innovated these groups to produce a series of what we are calling charms, gathered together and rfid tagged to their ‘holder’, what we call the charm keeper.

We feel that there is significance in proposing a product that is on a permanent and adaptive journey, rather than one that can evolve no further.