<aside> đź’ˇ My ideas, research, and exploration for my final major project.
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In order to come up with an idea for my final major project, I want to conduct some research into existing problems in today’s society and build a project around one of them.
I want to find a problem that is relevant and relatable to many people as I will be able to gather more information and structure a design around the user.
I want to narrow my research down to a national level so I did a quick search for “the biggest problems in the UK right now”. From an infographic on yougov.co.uk, I found the top 6 biggest problems we are facing in the UK right now. They are as follows; Health, Immigration & Asylum, The economy, Tax, Housing, and the environment.
We can see from the graph that the economy, health, and the environment are the top 3 issues we are facing right now. There are a series of different reasons why these issues take top place but it is mainly down to the fact that they are currently controlled by the UK government. I think it would be a good idea to tackle a contributing problem to one of these umbrella terms.
I fact-checked these statistics using a few other sources such as https://www.statista.com/ and engagebritain.org.
I could also develop something for an area I am interested in or something that I have found issues with in the past. A few examples of these are transportation in NI, Waste Disposal in NI, and improving hospitality services.
I narrowed down my interests to only show the ones that I thought I could make something from. I then considered possible ideas that I could develop from these interests and related them back to problems that I have encountered first-hand. It is important to me that the idea I choose is one that I can see being a long-term solution to a problem.
I really want to explore the possibilities of what I could do a bit more and consider designing without worrying about the constraints of current everyday devices. I also want to think about what we could use in years to come as technology is advancing so fast and it may not be the same in 50 years. Phones may not exist, so what would we use? maybe I should think about that, and consider the longevity of the product.
Some of my favourite ideas are wearable devices for hospitality staff or an app for Google lens which helps with orders etc and creating transparency for transport services in NI as it is a big problem. I also like the idea of creating transparency for homeowners on how much energy they are using in this cost-of-living crisis. This could maybe be done through a device that hooks up to their sockets and measures the amount of electricity being used by specific devices. The last idea I really like is home health care. A system that monitors the health of your home and prevents sickness or the building from depreciating. I also like the idea of google lens glasses for retail staff to scan items keeper and look up style numbers and online store anywhere in the shop.
Now that I have a few areas and ideas I could tackle I need to narrow them down to 3 ideas. I’m going to audit the few ideas that I have favourited and choose 1. I’ll look at the problems that I could solve in those areas through some more research and then observe the pros and cons of each. I’ll also look at who they would help and what sort of device would be most appropriate to use.