Redesigning the measuring, aligning and marking process
10-week term project in collaboration with Bosch
Saturday afternoon. You just bought a new kitchen cabinet. First time building it yourself. Afraid of something going haywire?
You are not alone.
“I don’t usually drill at home because I am afraid of ruining the walls”
What are the most common causes of DIY mistakes?
Time-consuming and unprecise tools
Not everyone uses DIY tools everyday. Individuals at their homes tend to use these tools occasionally, making them not proefficient with the tools they have available
Unconfidence of having marked the right spot
Current products in the market for DIYers are generally not ensuring that users mark on the right spot, leaving tolerances that can accumulate into fatal errors.
Need for extra hands
Measuring tape, ruler, pencil, spirit level… Often these tools need to be used at the same time, making it complicated for DIYers to have free hands to make marks.
Making calculations on the fly
It is often needed to add or substract millimiters while measuring. These operations can sometimes be complicated and lead to dimensional errors.
How might we prevent DIYers from making mistakes when working on walls?
Piko
The new measuring and aligning tool for DIYers
Piko is the first combination tool that allows the DIY user to both align and measure at the same time, helping them be more confident in marking on walls and boards. Merging laser measuring and levelling boosts the user´s confidence and reduces the possibilities of making mistakes while marking. Piko uses the analogy of a measuring tape to reach an unbeatable precision in an intuitive way. It has the potential to encourage people to engage in more DIY projects by removing the element of worry that stems from fear of ruining homes or wasting money due to a silly mistake. These so-called silly mistakes are often caused by a mishap or error in measurement, which Piko can virtually eliminate.
Precise measuring
Use the whole device for aligning and measuring or fix the device on the wall and detach it to set a reference point. Making a parallel line to the ground at a specific distance, measuring from a reference point or offsetting are easy tasks with Piko.
Freeing up hands
DIY users can finally forget about asking for help to hold tools. An adhesive pad sticks to the wall to fix the device, freeing up on hand to hold other tools to proceed with the marking process.
The perfect alignment tool
Guessing parallel and perpendicular lines is now a thing of the past. Users can finally measure with precision easily without worrying whether lines will be straight or not.
The playground.
From design research, to quick prototyping and to even create a storytelling video… The type of tasks have been extremely colorful. This is a sneek peek of the journey.
Creating a storytelling video
Materializing the learnings from the project into one storytelling video that ressonates with the - some intangible - user needs is not a piece of cake. It requires lots of storyboards, video sketches, understanding who will be the audience and lots of backstage work to make it happen. Have a look at the Making-of video just below!
Design research and ideation
Students at the design school can be the best candidates for design research, as they most of them match with the user group I wanted to focus on: Young spontaneous DIY users. I took advantage of their previous experiences as DIYers in a ideation workshop to dig out different problems these users face in such contexts. After som processing, I validated these insights against new unbiased users using a card sorting exercise. This helped pinpoint the key user problems to be solved.
Think, shape, make, test, repeat.
Paper, wood and foam mock-ups were used to understand how would people understand this new way of measuring. Where do they think the reference 0 point is? If the device indicates a spatial misalignment, would the user know what to change? This type of questions helped me shape the product through many iterations.
