Fluid Age Design - Hold My Hand
Re-imagining Grab Handles on Public Transport Systems
DR2004 Product Design II
NTU School of Art, Design and Media
DR2004 Product Design II
NTU School of Art, Design and Media
In conjunction with GoGlobal Singapore 2018 - Design For Our Future Selves, a collaboration between the Royal College of Art/Imperial College London (United Kingdom), LASALLE College of the Arts and NTU School of Art, Design and Media (Singapore)
Team members:
Jorris Olde Rikkert, Sydney Chestler, Andrew Edward, Guillermo Whittembury Castillo (MA(RCA)/MSc Innovation Design Engineering, Royal College of Art/Imperial College London)
Gwendolyn Seah, Patricia Kok Fangling (BA Hons Design Communication, LASALLE College of the Arts)
Tan Wei Ming, Quek Pin Yi (BFA Hons Product Design, NTU School of Art, Design and Media)
Jorris Olde Rikkert, Sydney Chestler, Andrew Edward, Guillermo Whittembury Castillo (MA(RCA)/MSc Innovation Design Engineering, Royal College of Art/Imperial College London)
Gwendolyn Seah, Patricia Kok Fangling (BA Hons Design Communication, LASALLE College of the Arts)
Tan Wei Ming, Quek Pin Yi (BFA Hons Product Design, NTU School of Art, Design and Media)
Project Summary - Fluid Age Design
The increasing life expectancy forces us to reconsider established lifecycles. We introduce age-fluidity as a design strategy to enable well-being for all. We reshape the urban environment to allow people to feel the age they want.
The increasing life expectancy forces us to reconsider established lifecycles. We introduce age-fluidity as a design strategy to enable well-being for all. We reshape the urban environment to allow people to feel the age they want.
In current society, age is directly linked to a specific life stage. However, age is an individual experience - linked but ultimately independent from the social constructs that define its boundaries.The social stigmas around age are a symptom of the age
categorisation. As our life expectancy increases, it is time to rethink the artificial boundaries that determine what it means to be a ‘child’, ‘adult’, or ‘elderly’.
We introduce interventions that reference the many ways in which children interact with the city: A bush becomes a place to explore nature, a handle becomes a mothers comforting hand, and a pavement becomes a playground. By conducting these experiments in Singapore, we intend to open a dialogue between urban mobility and age - to provoke a curiosity within public space.
Age-fluidity can be implemented as design strategy at multiple scales - from the building to the handrail. These simple, joyful interventions allude to a world in which we can curate our stages of life, promoting curiosity, creativity and playfulness at any age. Fluid age design can thereby become the first step towards a significant shift in the social constructs of age - from a universal to a personalised, fluid definition of life.
Hold My Hand
As part of our Fluid Age Design strategy, Hold My Hand was conceived as an intervention into the design of handles, especially that of grab handles found on our public transport systems.
Children explore a city in an extremely sensorial way, so with this intervention we hoped to focus on touch.
What we found most interesting was that this exploration was most often spent whilst holding a parents hand.
When moving around the city as an adult, in public transportation the act of reaching up towards a handle is very much similar to the way a child reaches for their parents hand.
Lo-fi testing; a simple plasticine and string model placed at height to find out how users respond intuitively to the object without prompts or guidance, simulation of the grab handle and its setting.
Testing out our model at a full scale train cabin mockup at the Land Transport Authority, Singapore; discussing and sharing our ideas with their senior staff
Prototyping process - from paper to product, two-dimensional to three-dimensional; utilising both traditional foam modelling and rapid prototyping techniques
