On week 6 of our Design And Technology experience, our theme then embarked on a brainstorming process to find potential areas where we could ‘make smart’. We segregated a simple household into 4 main parts, the living room, the bedroom + the balcony, the kitchen and lastly the washroom.
In each of the areas, we started by listing the typical products that would normally be in the area. E.g. A stove in the kitchen and a shower in the washroom. Next, we proceeded to find existing smart products in the market that is within the list of products we listed. By doing so, we know which areas we can focus on and how we can adapt existing products to form a better more efficient one to be used in the household. For the next phase of our project, we will now start to think about potential problems that specific groups of people may face when they’re in a particular part of the household.
In order to increase our awareness and knowledge about smart products, each of us in the theme was passed a smart product from the big-brands here in China, namely XiaoMi, TmallGenie, and DingDong. It was so surprising to see that these smart products can be bought at such a cheap price from Taobao. Comparing it to other brands around the world that make smart products like the Apple iHome, Alexa and the Google Home, these Chinese smart speakers could easily be half the price. The only drawback is that the user would have to speak to the speaker in Chinese rather than English. This exposure to the different smart devices really did help us to know more about what we can do for our final showcase.
