Matteo – Viggo Blomqvist

matteo,
visions for
indoor wellbeing.

2019
Collaboration with
Electrolux

4 week design sprint

Challenge
The challenge of this four week design sprint for Electrolux was to rapidly design a product that enhances indoor wellbeing in a compact urban home environent. It was done in a small group together with Marius Kindler and Anna Hing. We were given a specific persona to focus on as well as keeping Electrolux' brand values in mind.

Approach
Our approach was to create an intelligent air purifier that blends in to your home. Our persona lived in a very colourful small apartment in Milan. Therefore we came up with the experssion "homey-tech", which is minimal yet playful that would fit perfectly in the environment given.

The brief started with one week focusing on getting to know our persona, as well as researching in current products on the market. Our persona have an allergy towards dust and therefor needs support with this. But he is not the person who wants a big plastic box in his home, so how can we create a more friendly design that blends in with his interior?

During the process we explored a lot of different iterations in both sketch and 3d-environment. It was important that it could stand on it's own but also blend in to our persona's indoor environment. We were also looking for a 360 degree direction of the product.

Since our persona is allergic to dust, it was crucial to take the filter change process to account. A more analog solution was made where you flip down a handle on the bottom of the product. By twisting this and pulling out you get a portable filter which is safe and does not leak out any of the dust it has collected.

Outcome
Matteo is an intelligent air purifier that enhances the indoor wellbeing. By adapting it's smart cleaning cycles to the user's living habits and raising awareness of the air quality, it leads towards a cleaner amore healthy lifestyle. Adressing people with allergies, a secure filter change mechanism reduces the pollution during the un-comforting filter change process. Ambient feedback gives the user ease of mind without calling for too much attention.