Design in Daily Life: Waste container modal from Muratpaşa Municipality and more

Another practice before we start the Ironhack Bootcamp was evaluation user experiences of our life in terms of design principles.

The concept I’m going to apply here is The 10 Principles of Good Design by Braun’s designer Dieter Rams. This is by far, the most well-known collection of principles in the history of design as a discipline.

I decided to evaluate 3 user experiences of myself regarding 3 products that I enjoy using.

1. Reusable veggie bags

Product of Oceancare as a solution to 9 millions tones plastic waste end up in the oceans every year. It is simple, cheap and environmentally friendly. The light bags are easy to fold and can be stored in every bag. The blue drawstring and the flag label on the side for barcodes make it a practical companion in everyday life. The veggiebags are made from 100% pollutant-free recycled PET.

Myself as a user, I rate my experience 5 stars and regarding the concept of Dieter Ram’s principles, it is useful, long lasting, detailed and environmentally friendly.

2. Waste Container of Muratpaşa Municipality

Muratpaşa Municipality from Antalya, Turkey developed a waste container model and also owns the patent of the product.

Containers are placed underground that works with a lifting system. It gives the user the opportunity not to open with hand but with foot, eliminates the hygienic concerns of the user. On the other hand, user can hold trash bags with both hands while opening the container by foot.

The innovation of Muratpaşa Municipality provides more public space by using the underground as a storage.

It is useful, aesthetic, environmentally friendly and innovative.

3. Toilet Seat Cover working with Sensor

Solving the hygienic concerns of the user by preventing spread of germs, cutting down spread of illness and safe guarding public health. This product makes the seat cover change task effortless for its users. This happens when the user waves a hand in front of a wall-mounted, hands-free sensor. The toilet seat cover is then changed for a clean sanitary toilet seat cover set in place for each user.

The product is honest, innovative and useful.

Take aways:

• This exercise was asking the top 3 best and 3 worst user experiences of our life. However, even after forcing myself to think and find the worst user experiences of mine for so long, I couldn’t end up with any worst results.
• After struggling with the decision making, I started to think about the reason why I come up with the positive user experiences of mine very easily and not the negative ones.
• The outcome I ended up with after self questioning was this: Myself as a user, I am impacted by the positive experiences. No doubt I have had a lot of negative user experiences but I can’t recall them. Therefore, I can tell they have no real impact on me.
• I’m not sure how to define this situation. What I’m sure is: I shouldn’t be approaching user experiences so personal anymore if I want to become a good UX/UI designer. I believe, reading and learning more and more design and usability principles will help me in the future.