PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Rebo is a research-focused exploration project that aims to aid off-trail hiking through the means of eco-conscious landmarks.
During the pandemic, hiking has become an increasingly popular activity. Moreover, many novice hikers have taken to off-trail hiking for a more exciting experience. Going off-trial often means weak reception, and hikers would resort to preplanned offline maps, or physical landmarks to aid them in navigation. However, these physical landmarks in turn negatively affects the environment.
Therefore in this project, my group members and I found opportunity in improving the off-trail hiking experience, without leaving a negative impact on the environment.
Process
Experiments after Experiments...
Experiments were highly involved in the ideation and development of Rebo.
Our project group was tasked to explore and understand the principle of "Vanish" through a series of experiments. Understanding the insights derived from these experiments helped us develop our definition of Vanish.
The definition of Vanish continued to be refined through contextualisation, developing our understanding of this principle in navigation.
We were particularly interested in the physicalisation of navigation elements, which was explored in our next series of experiments.
EUREKA!
We concluded our experimentation with a few main insights and foresights to guide us in developing our final idea. In our research, we benchmarked on current products used for navigation, and contexts in which the physicalisation of navigational elements were important. This aided us in understanding the limitations of off-trail hiking, and how we could utilise our experiment findings to improve on that experience.
Off-trial hiking often means going off the grid, and currently, hikers can only rely on pre-planned routes on GPS to hike off-trial. Some hikers use trial blazers to navigate, but these markings are found to be damaging to the environment, defying certain outdoor ethics. We realised there was an opportunity to design for this gap! How might we help hikers create navigation landmarks for spontaneous, but safe and eco-conscious off trial hiking?
Even more Experiments!
we started our product design process after, experimenting with forms and mechanism through prototyping. We took the last few weeks of the project to realise our idea of eco friendly landmarks for off-trial hiking. How can we make the creation of landmarks easy for hikers, and environmentally friendly? What is the most intuitive way to interact with the product? Iterations of prototypes and samples sought to answer these questions as we slowly refined our project to its final form.
