Surprise Me

Day 6 – A few ideas

Howdy,

Well, its been a few days and I have been trying to think of what could possibly be surprising for a product designer to come up with – which I think will be quite a difficult feat.

I have been collating a list of ideas which I feel would be areas that had potential to surprise. I have 4 main areas that I feel would fit this;

1. Challenging the Ethics of Product Design

2. Exploring features that consumer wouldn’t want or didn’t know they wanted

3. Exploring products that had no use or solved no problems in any way

4. Creating dangerous products that could cause harm to the user or others

 

My main idea is based on the idea of  ethics within product design. I want to challenge the ethics of product design within education and create a product which definitely not be expected as a university project. The main area I think I will focus is designing some sort of weapon.

A weapon, or more specifically a gun, is something that would be highly surprising as a university project, as it challenges many of the ethical codes that I would normally have to comply to, mainly creating a product which could harm users – especially one that is built specifically to harm people. I think it would also be entertaining to create a product that would technically be illegal to own within the UK. Overall, I think this idea would meet the brief perfectly, though I am unsure how much scope for development there is and also whether I feel this is actually a legitimate use of my time…