VTA Kiosk

For my senior project, my group decided to create a device that benefits both the general public and homeless communities. With this device, we can educate the general public on homeless people's situations and provide a way for them to connect and help each other out.

Research Phase

My group went out to inter view homeless people in San Jose to understand their perspective. Upon interviewing, we pitched some potential public furniture design ideas to them to see if it would benefit their everyday lives. We got negative responses from them and the most important feedback we received is that they just want to be understood and want access to public restrooms, showers, and a place to wash their laundry..

We discovered that there were many organizations that were already discretely helping out the homeless. In this particular instance, a part time worker distributed food from Lee's Sandwiches.

THE CITY WE ARE DESIGNING FOR

San Jose's public spaces consists of many shapes and sizes. Of all the things to choose from, my group choose designing for San Jose's parks because it's a well populated and publicly shared place for entertainment, recreation, and leisure. The one park that stood out the most was Roosevelt park. It's prime location, high population, and large variety of amenities caught our eye.

STORY BOARD

People unintentionally stereotype and misrepresent others which results in a massive disadvantage to those who are victim to the false stereotypes. Altering perspectives can allow a person to think twice about homeless people. For example, the homeless believes the general public views them as unmotivated, dirty, alcoholics and drug addicts. In reality, some people out there actually want to help the homeless but at the same time, they are concerned for their safety. My job as an industrial designer is to design a product that educates both parties of each other's background stories. By slowly educating each community, both parties slowly grow closer and become well acquainted. After gaining a better perspective of each other's situation, both parties are more willing to converse with each other. By using my product, these two communities will have broken the stereotype barrier between them and continue to aid each other.

SOCIAL EXPERIMENT

During our design process, my group decided to go out onto the streets and get strangers to break out of their shell. In this instance, we had two strangers on opposite sides of an intersection to play a game of rock paper scissors. During this experiment, we collected mixed reactions to the idea but we confirmed the fact that people were willing to break out of their shell to try something new. Our group was hoping to focus on the game play to entice the user to open themselves up to strangers and become more willing to donate or acknowledge a stranger in their community.

Ideation Phase

During our journey to figure out what this product will look like, we explored a wide range of functionality and shapes to determine which form will benefit the user the most. We were conscious on making our kiosk handicap friendly.

Ergonomic Study

One of our main goals is to have our product accessible to everyone. In order to ensure that, we studied what height is most comfortable for people to interact with a kiosk.

Final Model

Shape

Our shape was inspired by VTA's new logo. We took advantages of the angles from the V and the A and incorporated it into our design. The colors we chose are also from VTA's logo.

User Interface

Here are a couple of our UX/UI screens that will be our GUI for the kiosk. We got inspiration from VTA's color scheme and implemented it into our interface design.