A co-design workshop is a collaborative approach where designers and stakeholders jointly discover the desired qualities of a new product, focusing on the real-world context and the user's perspective. It focuses on enabling users by involving them as experts in their own experiences, ensuring the product aligns with their needs and lifeworld. This process democratizes design, enhances usability, and aims to increase user satisfaction and engagement
Co-design session
During the session the group presented three different concept, which was mentioned on the "Ideation" page. The client tried both of the low fidelity prototypes, which did not work but were the most effective way to show the aim and vision of these ideas. After explaining the ideas we also wanted to take the opinion of the user into account. The client wanted the watch to be more personalized, such as the design being much more like old watches, with snake skin pattern leather straps. Also, a friend of the client left her his dog, which based on her opinion was the best emotional supporter through these harsh days. Hence, she wanted something that could also remind her of the dog.
The Meeting
On the right, there are the sketches of ideas that the client wanted to include in the design. She made the design much more personalized by requesting the dog for the display, much more of an old-fashioned design with snake skin pattern leather straps and the watch's main body being a rectangle. The dog does not have the same facial expression as humans, thus using the full body of the dog was much more noticeable, instead of only a "face". For instance, when the dog is happy it would have its tongue out and wag its tail but when it is tried it would crawl and go to sleep.
Specification
The dog in question
This is the dog that helped her during the harsh period of her limitations. The Group are tried to add this dog to the design because, as the groupmates did not want the caseholder to feel like this product is only a reminder of her limitations and pain, but wanted to add a meaningful element of design to it so it does not become a mental burden to the user. Particular thing about this dog was that in a way it was encourgaing Anne to go outside with it more and do certain activities, and the watch was inended to have a similar encouraging quality, but now regarding resting.
NOTE: The permission was asked for before using the image.
Style
As mentioned, during the Co-design session, Anne had a lot of input into the style, that the Group went for. It happened through showing her different styles of watches on Pinterest, and her eventually choosing, which one fits her style preferences the most - that can be seen on the "moodboard" type of picture. First of the things that she liked about this watch was the color pallette - very natural, with a use of an off-white, aged color, dark and deep green, and subtle gold, all blending together, delicately contrasted with black elements, to achieve a sort of "vintage", classy and elegant feeling. The caseholder also was fond of the watch's shape - rectangular, "tank" style, with sort of elongated, golden beams extending on the sides. Lastly, a crocodile type of texture on the strap was another thing she was a fan of, as it added more movement into the design. To complement this, also a classy and minimalistic pictures of the dog were made, as presented on this page, shown in the final version later.
