Designathon17 at HSB Living Lab

Designing tomorrow’s interaction between users and machines in professional laundry was what brought together curious students and practitioners keen on experimenting and sharing their passion for a great user experience.

At a 24-hours design sprint at the HSB Living Lab at the Chalmers University Campus in Gothenburg, Sweden, they met the challenge to bring new ideas to smart washing and drying applications. Developing products and creating remarkable consumer and customer experiences alike demands an innovative approach to ideation. The HSB Living Lab offered the perfect location for this, building the homes of the future and offering a unique research arena.

26 student participants from six different countries, with varied expertise – from design students to engineers- formed teams and generated ideas on the theme tomorrow’s interaction between human users and laundry equipment. A Designathon is a “design marathon”, similar to a Hackathon, but here the focus is not on programming, but on designing.

At the end of the Designathon the teams presented their prototypes to the other teams and the organizers and the winners where then judged base on criterias such as value for customer and environment, ease of implementation, creativity and elaboration of the prototype towards experience and functionality.

“As the interaction between users and equipment is becoming central to current and future product development, we wanted to see how users of tomorrow would like to interact with our machines, with fresh eyes and open minds,” says Silvana Johansson, Head of Category Business Unit Laundry at Electrolux Professional. “The proposals suggested ways of interaction with a focus on ergonomics, usability and sustainability, which are completely in line with our values.”