Capstone Project

This project has been completed in a U.C. Berkeley design course named "Human-centered Design" by Alice Agogino.

The goal was to learn different design methods like doing interviews, analyse customer needs, generating and selecting concepts related to this needs, and prototype this concepts while working on a concrete project, which was the S2UV (Super-maneuvrable Unmanned Underwater Vehicle) for our team.

Overview:

The S2UV is a new underwater drone that is currently being developed at U.C. Berkeley.

If we think about air drones, they were unaccessible by casual people a few years ago compare to nowadays where everybody can buy a cheap one in a store.

We wanted to see if there was a similar market for underwater drones, but also what people expected from it if they could by one.

PROBLEM

SOLUTION

After studying their needs we generated around 80 concepts and we choose to do rapid prototyping on 2 of them; we had feedback from potential customers and we decided that the best way to "sell" the product was to sell the fun, the experience.

Then we decided to create an animation with 3DS Studio Max in order to show people what they could do with this drone.

In the video you can see some concepts generated like using VR goggles to be immersed underwater, or an autonomous object avoidance function.

Different design methods (open/close card sorting, think aloud, 2x2...)
Team working experience
How to use animation programs
How to create efficient surveys/questions

ThomasOrazzini