SMARTIFYING DESIGN ICONS: A WORKSHOP TO IMPROVE UX IN DESIGN PRODUCTS BY SMART MATERIAL INTEGRATION

Abstract

Learning by doing is an effective way to teach to design students and enables educators to provide them a durable knowledge about materials. This way of learning is essential for designers to exploit with awareness the potentials and the limits of materials. In this perspective, the presented workshop focuses on introducing the class of smart materials to the students, in order to facilitate a material replacement activity in some product design icons. Smart Materials are a peculiar category of materials characterized by a “non-intuitive” behaviour when submitted to the action of a certain chemical-physical stimulus. The use of those materials allows designers to imagine new kinds of interaction between users and products: the responsive behaviour of smart materials is very effective when designing products is oriented to emphasize the user experience. So, the object of this work is a one-day workshop with the aim to transfer theoretical knowledge, deepen it, touch it and apply it to product design. The aim of this study is allowing students to have a hand-on appropriation of smart materials characteristics and properties but also to let them understand that designing starting from the materials does not lead only to technical performance improvements, but it can act directly on the user-product interaction.