Glasgow School of Art
Innovation School
Product Design
WEEK 8
Final design outcome
#Concept Description
Mínyma is a future experience based on a collective intelligence database, permitting to create a new emotional language with senses, adapted to cancerology service. It is a new non-spoken language. Mínyma is an experience of emotional sharing through poems, touch and smell. The service is creating a new vision of patient, not only as medical data but also as emotional data. That permits to explore emotional environment of people close to death. Over time it will improve and allow a fluent interaction with people in terminal phase through touch, which is one of the last senses you keep before to pass away.
My story is based on a distance family relationship between Alice, my main character, and her grandson Camille. During all the development of my project, I really wanted to develop a distance communication by moving away from screens.
Mínyma is composed of two sensory kits and the database connected to them. Through my user journey map I wanted to represent in addition all the other impact that Mínyma has on society, the contribution of knowledge in the medical field on the emotional data of patients at the end of life, or the impact on society thanks to the creation of a new dialogue between my characters which directly echoes in other relationships around them.
Furthermore, I have chosen to represent my database as a plant with roots, connecting all my different artefact together. I took inspiration from the « fungus network », plants talk to each other using the Internet of fungus. They are sharing nutriments and informations. Albert Bernard Frank coined the word « mycorrhiza » to describe theses partnerships, in which the fungus colonises the roots of the plant.
#Video
#Video Argumentation
My project is built around a personal story, which I went through in my first year in Glasgow. My grandmother had to deal with several cancers at different times in her life, and in October 2017, doctors told my family that she was going to be leaving in the coming days. My last physical contact with her was a few months before leaving for Scotland, we had promised to meet again at Christmas.
She was for me a life force and an example. That day, in October 2017, my aunt called me, I left the Haldane studios to talk calmly. She tells me that my grandmother will die in the coming days. My only reflex and ask her to talk to my grandmother on the phone. You should know that verbal communication is not a strong point in my family.
She couldn't stay on the phone for long due to her poor ability to breathe. I cried, suffocated, my words didn't make sense, I think I was trying to say "I love you" and "I will miss you" to her. She laughed, she played down the situation. You have to have a hell of mental strength to be able to play down your own death on the phone with your crying little girl on the other side of Europe.
We hung up. I stood there, sitting in the park in front of the studios, crying trying to understand. I waited, called close friends to scream and mourn the emotions I was feeling.
Now I understand how lucky this goodbye dialogue between us is. I would have liked to be able to communicate my emotions beyond words and prepare for this dialogue. I also understand her laughter and her jokes to explain to me that she was going to die.
In this video, I wanted to represent the sadness, the nostalgia, the intimate proximity of the relations between the two women, the dialogue between generations, the distance, the slowness, the temporality, the love of the slow and gentle life. The weight of death will carry away this sweetness of life that it represented for me. This life stops developing and evolves in our memories.
This video is an ode to life and death. Celebrated in a non-verbal speech.
Warm tones represent closeness and family ties, life. The sad, slow tone of the pictures and expressions represents death. I try to evoke these two opposing emotions together. Death does not come without life and sadness does not come without love, these emotions live together and balance each other. They have the same importance in this project.
60sc video
#Service Map
User journey//Detailed
User journey//Summary
#Final Prototypes
My two kits are made in cardboard. They are composed of differents connected artefact,manual of use and a card explaining how to connect each artefact the boxe is composed of.
#Understanding how the service is working.
Detail of the 2 user manuals of my service
Each boxe contain a manual of use to explain step by step how to connect your Kit.
Furthermore, each of my boxes contain three cards to explain how each artefact is working.
I chose to represent them as little card to intensify the game side of my concept.
#Prototypes Development
#Ideal Props
Because of the sanitary situation, my prototypes could not be made as I wanted, with the materials imagined.
"The uses of bamboo are so numerous in China in the nineteenth century, the services it renders are so great, that it justly deserves the name of national tree. It is needed by the architect and the navigator, the doctor and the man of letters, the carpenter and the confectioner, the schoolmaster and the coolie, the soldier and the traveller, the sculptor and the umbrella maker, the fisherman and the musician, the judge and the opium smoker, the farmer and the monk. It is used for the yards of sails and the props of houses, it provides the brush with which to draw characters and the paper on which to write. Its leaves are used to cover the poor man's roof and, when fitted into a coat, protect him from the rain.[...]
the bed, the mattress, the chair, the table of the Chinese, his pipe, some of his food, the wood with which he cooks it, the kuàizi (筷子) or chopsticks with which he eats it, the broom to clean his room, or chopsticks with which he eats it,
the broom to clean his room, the paper from which the schoolboy's book is made, the pedagogue's rod, the fearsome instrument used to execute the judge's rulings, the light stick used by the musician to draw melodious sounds from the houng ho, all these are due to bamboo."
Moreover, for the Chinese people, life and death is a common topic of conversation. The pragmatic approach of the Chinese is illustrated in the sayings: Human life is nothing but a stage in which the sun and the moon work like two spotlights; We live our lives in the same way that grass goes through the seasons from spring to autumn.
That's why I chose bamboo as my main material, its lightness, its flexibility, its fineness, its history and symbolic correspond to the values of my project
#materialmockup
