Testing and Finalising Ideas

Ava Shepherd
Jan 6, 2023
4 min read

Designers: Ava Shepherd, Parth Loliyania, Willow Yan, Ziyuan Dou

This week is all about testing!

After class on Friday Parth and I decided to put our food tunnel in a park to see if anything bites. We were shocked that after 2 hours that was clear animal markings in the food. We decided to then leave it again over night and return the next day to see if there was any more changes. There was! This was really exciting for us as it shows that animals like the food and are able to chew it easily.

Before 2 hours 24 hours

With hindsight we realise it would have been beneficial to stay and watch the tunnel or set up a recording device however we were still happy with the results.

Testing with a Hamster

Ziyuan and Willow were also able to test our design with a hamster over the weekend. This turned our to be really beneficial for our design as we discovered that our tube brick was too small and the hamster got stuck. Additionally, we have found that the food entrance is compromising our structures stability. We may have to consider getting rid of this in the future. This means that this week we need to redesign our bricks to cater to larger rodents and with a stronger structure. However overall the hamster seemed to enjoy our design.

Final Tunnel Designs

After testing our tunnels we began to start focusing on our final designs. We decided that we wanted to build a few different style of brick that could be build and structured in various different ways. This would allow people to build different style tunnels depending on what is best suited for the area / wall.

Takram Vist

This week we also visited Takram's head office in London for an informal meeting about our projects and for us to learn more about the work that they do. While visiting Takram, they asked us about our final visualisation of the tube system and if we wanted to make it something intentionally visible or invisible to humans. Due to the stigma around rats, we decided that it could be interesting to make it comical and design it with a very human centred approach in mind to help ease the tension. - Essentially we wanted it to look similar to the London Tube

Takram mentioned how this idea reminds them of the Necropolis line. A line that used to transport dead bodies around London. Even though it was something people wanted to ignore, it still had its old emblem. This idea of the emblem was great as it was that human design we had been looking to add to our work.

Working on Final Visualisation

Following the Takram I decided to start work on our emblem and final visualisations. I wanted to create a design that represented the traditional old English emblems but with Rodents as the primary focus. It was at this stage that we also decided to name our design the 'Rodentia Line'. Rodentia is the old english word for Rodent and therefore thought it would be a good use of old english to match the emblem.

Development of ideas

For our final visualisation we also wanted to create a block out of plaster to demonstrate the final size, shape and weight that our final outcome would look like it we had more time. Therefore Parth and I met at LCC to plaster cast our final brick.

Making the plaster

Leaving the plaster to set

Once we had made the plaster we filled the mould. However despite an additional run to the uni art shop we were slightly short and were unable to completely fill our mould to the top. While this was really annoying we decided to leave it to dry over the weekend and come back and sand it to be even next week.

Rats!

Finally at the end of the week we received a message from someone who has pet rats! She said that she would be really happy for us to come and test our design with them next week. This was really exciting as we felt as though everything was starting to come together.

This meant that our main focus now was to finalise our tunnels for testing next week.

Reflection

Overall this was another really positive and busy week. I found the Takram visit this week a really great opportunity. When we first started this brief I was very lost as to why we were doing it. However, when visiting Takram's studio, they demonstrated how this is the kind of brief they receive from clients. Seeing a real design studio have the ability to create really exciting and unique UX design is something I found really motivating and was a great refresher half way through the year.

Additionally, our group is starting to get into the swing of things and can now see the end goal. I am really looking forward to our last week.