Vessel: Transforming your bathroom into an oasis
Product design for enhancing the home environment through plants
Project Snapshot
Liane
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Chieh
Cierra
Chinelo
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Team & Timeline
September – December 2020
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Role: User research, product design business development, sustainability, and social impact lead
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Team: Academic work in collaboration with Chieh Hsieh, Chinelo Onuoha, and Liane Yue, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2020
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Illustrations on left by the lovely and talented Angélica Chincaro
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Problem
How might we create a greater connection to nature and the outdoors in the home environment?
For our first IDM project, we were tasked with developing a service or product throughout the fall semester in teams of four students. We had a budget of $1,000 and regular check-ins and milestones throughout the semester.
Students were paired based on shared interests, and our team came together around creating a product or service that combined nature with urban living. We were inspired by the World Health Organization's estimate that by 2050, more than 70% of the world's population will live in cities, and we wanted to understand how people could bring nature into their urban lifestyles as urbanization increases.
At the start of the project, we explored three concept spaces and did a DFV (desirability, feasibility, viability) analysis to identify our concept area, choosing urban agriculture. This later was refined to indoor gardening.
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Overview
For this project, we were able to practice the entire human-centered design process. We began with problem exploration (via market research, user interviews, and ethnography), moved onto solution exploration (via sketching, sketch modeling, business modeling, prototyping, functional testing, and consumer testing), and ended with final design implementation (through ensuring our final design was desirable, feasible, and viable and backed up by a finalized business model).
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Outcome & Impact
Our final deliverable was a fully functional looks-like/works-like prototype that was aesthetically pleasing and created a compelling user experience, made out of clay. We also had a second alternative made from sintra.
The prototype was combined with a final business plan that included costing and pricing, financial projections, supply chain strategy, distribution and marketing strategy, market research (size, anticipated penetration, demographics), competitive analysis, IP position, environmental sustainability, and a technology overview. We presented our work in a final 15-minute presentation and demonstration.
While we saw great promise in the product, our team decided to pause further production to focus on our academic coursework.
One core issue we were unable to solve in the timeframe was the need for indoor grow lighting. While time and resources were a limiting factor, addressing lighting would be a greater focus for our team if we could go back and do the project again. Our team used an agile workflow throughout the project, and I also learned the importance of conducting "glows and grows" sessions after each significant milestone or project deliverable.
Because IDM is home to such empathetic designers, our team occasionally found it challenging to voice criticism. Anonymous feedback followed by real-time conversations helped us quickly and effectively identify areas we were working well and where we needed to improve team dynamics.
See our final looks like, works like prototype in action!
How We Got There
Some comments we heard regularly included:
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"I want more plants, but I have nowhere to put them."
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"I'm not sure how much love (water, nutrients, light) to give to my plants."
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"I love plants in my apartment but don't have much time to care for them."
Process
User research
We started by seeking to better understand how people engage with plants in the home and the associated challenges through user research, developing and deploying an online survey (taken by over 100 urban dwellers in 14 countries), and conducting over 25 in-depth user interviews.
We also carefully observed family and friends to identify latent needs. Through these interviews, survey responses, and observations with friends and family, we began to better understand how people currently grow plants indoors, as well as what's preventing would-be gardeners from getting started or keeping their plants alive.
When speaking with urban dwellers, we found that people were bringing more plants into the home than ever before - with 16 million people becoming new gardeners in 2020 in light of the ongoing pandemic. However, the people we spoke with cited many challenges, including that they didn't have adequate space or knowledge to conveniently grow as many plants as they would like.
Data synthesis
After conducting interviews, the team developed a strategy for synthesizing the data and identifying pain points and user needs. From the large group of interviewees, we identified a spectrum of gardeners who varied from:
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novice to experienced
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people with limited space vs. no shortage of space, and
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lazy gardeners not willing to invest excess time or those gardeners who treat it as a labor of love.
We mapped out our interviews and found that most users were new to gardening, had limited space, and wanted something relatively easy to use.
We took this data and narrowed our focus, identifying a key persona on our persona spectrum: Chike - a young professional living in an urban setting with limited space, experience, and limited time seeking a greater connection to nature. Chike represented the majority of users we spoke with, and our goal was for every design decision to be taken with our core persona in mind.
User needs prioritization
Our next step was to analyze our persona's expressed needs and quantify how these needs repeated over the users we interviewed. We developed several journey and empathy maps and used this information to establish a list of prioritized needs to inform our concept ideation.
Across our interviews, four core needs appeared most regularly:
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Minimal intervention (set it and forget it)
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Connection to nature and community (connects to nature but gives back to the community in some way)
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Beginner-friendly (easy to use and keeps plants alive!)
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Accessible (doesn't take up too much room and is affordable)
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Environment-enhancing (aesthetically pleasing, reduces stress, and creates a sense of well-being and tranquility within the home)
Concept ideation
We then began to generate concepts and potential solutions mapped to the needs of Chike and the rest of our target market through group and individual brainstorming. We sketched hundreds of ideas and internally selected four key concepts to test with users: a kitchen herb rack, a wall hanging solution that creatively divided the apartment space, a window box, and a solution that used an often-underutilized area: the bathroom.
User testing
Our next step was to take these ideas back to our initial interviewees for feedback. After consultation and a second user survey, most of our stakeholders listed the bathroom space to be the most desirable, innovative, and exciting area to explore.
More Concept ideation, initial prototyping & user testing
We began further ideating in the bathroom space and explored potential solutions ranging from a planter for the shower and a planter connected to the toilet to recirculate toilet water to water the plants sustainably. We adopted a build to learn approach and built out potential solutions to test feasibility, desirability, and viability in real settings crafting low fidelity prototypes to test product features.
While our initial designs were met with positivity, through additional user testing, we realized users were unsatisfied with the shower vessel and the toilet vessel "as is" and we're looking for a combined product that had more flexibility (could be placed in more than one area) and better enhanced the environment. See our user tests and early prototypes below.
Prototyping
We then began prototyping a solution that included the best features of both the shower planter and the recirculating toilet planter and continued to refine our concept through iteration and user testing. We prototyped using a range of products, including foam core board (Sintra), cardboard, paint trays, pumping systems, grow lights, and more.
During this process, we learned that the plants (while beautiful and calming) were attracting small pests into the bathroom. Through desk research and conversations with experts, we learned essential oils are both natural pest deterrents and environmental enhancers all in one and decided to include them in the final product. In addition to solving the pest problem, this feature helped meet the user's need of being "environment-enhancing."
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Sustainability
It was also essential for us as a team and our target market to use sustainable materials in the manufacturing process and give back to the greater community. Tasked with leading these efforts, I researched various materials from recycled plastics to ocean plastics to plastic alternatives, including birch, blended polypropylene, hemp, and cork. While each material choice had its trade-offs, reusing ocean-bound plastics from areas with waste mismanagement had the most significant environmental impact, was the most cost-effective and most desirable with our users.
Social responsibility
In this research process, I also learned that 1 in 3 people (over two billion people) lack basic sanitation facilities worldwide, resulting in over 400,000 deaths a year. I started to think about how we could develop partnerships with groups like water.org who are dedicated to supporting safe water and sanitation at home. I surveyed our users throughout this process and learned that over 62% said they would pay more for a planter that supported creating greater access to sanitation facilities. We priced our model accordingly and planned to donate 10% of all net margins to water.org.
Feasibility vs. desirability
We combined all of these features into one planter that met the majority of our users' needs; however, when showing our designs to real users and our peers we found that people thought it looked more like an appliance than a planter and questioned if they would want such a planter in their bathroom.
After consulting with industrial designers in our network, it was clear that we needed to incorporate more emotion, art, and creativity into our design to shift the product from simply a functional planter to more of a functional piece of art. Here you can see the images that inspired us the most, which included a lot of white, airiness, more curved lines vs. straight edges, and images reminiscent of an ocean oasis.
Consumer testing insights
The team conducted two rounds of user testing with our refined design, which helped us develop the prototypes and refine the concept. We gathered the feedback in a shared database and drew conclusions for a final design that could be placed on top of the toilet or hung on the wall.
Market research, business & go to market strategy
We found that in 2020, 114 million US households spent over $57 billion on the lawn and garden sector, and 40 million households spent over $7 billion on indoor houseplants and supplies alone. We looked at the competitive landscape and found that there was currently no product on the market that combined both a planter and an essential oil diffuser.
We mapped out existing products and our consumers' willingness to pay, as well as developed our business model, mapping out the cost of goods sold (COGS), a bill of materials (BOM), operating expenses, non-recurring engineering (NRE) costs, and more, pricing our product accordingly. Combined with competitor and market analysis, we expected to reach 10,000 people in our target market in year one.
We also developed a marketing strategy, which included online advertisements via social media, grassroots marketing via our educational network, and strategic partnerships with relevant brands such as essential oil brands and online nurseries. The goal with these strategic partnerships was to offer vessel bundles that included special discounts on plants that thrive well in conditions with low lighting and high humidity (ideal for the bathroom) and essential oils like rosemary/ eucalyptus/ basil/ peppermint, which are said to reduce pests.
Our final prototype included a water reservoir, which indicated the water level in the V marquee on the side and had an easy-to-access refill spout. We arrived at this final design through several rounds of iteration during prototyping.
Our final product and business plan was prototyped to create connection, using plastics that would otherwise end up in the ocean with a % of each sale going to support sanitation efforts in the Global South.
Our final prototype was beginner-friendly and included pop-in flower pots, simple to follow plant care guidance, and customizable mounting options that could be mounted on a wall or sat on a surface (for increased flexibility, something desired by our users).
Our final prototype included essential oils which could be easily refilled by the user to enhance the overall bathroom environment while deterring pests.