Every year, I ask my students of the Digital Product Design course to design a product starting from a challenge. This year, teams had to choose a technology and explore their potentialities. The iPhido team chose Lorawan, a wide area network technology for the Internet of Things, and has devised a service to track a dog’s position.
During the investigation (empathy) phase, an important element emerged that guided the whole ideation and design phase. The team found that the owners of dogs were not particularly afraid of losing their pet, except when they went to the park. On that occasion, in fact, many owners leave the dogs free to make them play.
The product created by the three students of the team is a medal with GPS and Lora connection that can be rented from an automatic machine at the entrance of a park. The team decided to adopt the rental solution because they assumed that proposing the service at the entrance to the park could have brought the offer closer to the moment in which the need for a dog control system is perceived.
The result was a fairly original project. It is described in this storyboard:
I always ask students to prototype, so they came up with a model of the machine that distributes the medals to be attached to the dog’s collar and the app that allows you to use the service.
The iPhido team was formed by:
- Michela Pomobello
- Carlo Mastroianni
- Simone Romagnoli