Opportunity Mapping
Laxman Prasad K
Sem 5 Industrial Design
National Institute of Design Andhra Pradesh
Guide: Kuntal De
The assignment that kicked off this course was mapping areas of conflict inside our houses. I went on to make this conflict map, with thermal mapping, showing areas where conflicts happen most frequently in red and minimum in blue.
The bedrooms, living room, dining hall and kitchen all had conflict areas. In the bedrooms, it’s either between me and my bothers, or between parents. In the living room it’s mostly for getting control over the TV remote. The dining area is where we open up, talk and sort things out, sometimes eventually ending up in bigger conflicts. The problem in kitchen, is cleaning. Everyone uses the kitchen, for cooking what they like, but sometimes leaving the kitchen in a big mess. So then fight breaks out starting with my mother calling out for whoever was responsible for the mess. This was a fun exercise to do.
The next thing to do was to map out resource consumption and variations in it over different seasons and times.
So after making this kind of a map, I thought of combining day and night maps and represent them in a 3d graph
In summers, fans work extra hours, but lights are rarely used during daytime, because there is ample amount of natural lighting in the house. Another thing that I noticed is that water pump works more, as we have to water the plants and crops, in summer, as there is less rainfall.
In winters, water heaters consume more energy as frequency of usage increase due to the cold climate.
After the resource mapping was done, we had to find out problems in the house, that we were facing. This was not much of a big task as we were aware of the existing problems.
To start with, we have a big leakage problem from the roof, it becomes a pain in the butt having watch this every monsoon, and later when it dries, layers of wall falling apart.
Moving on, we face problems drying coconut and other things. A lot of the time it ends up getting infected with fungus. The problem here is humidity. Even though there is enough space to sun dry these items, keeping them warm/dry at night is a task in it’s own right.
The next problem is the TV remote that goes missing frequently. This is a problem I’ve seen in a lot of households, worldwide. Sometimes I feel it’d have been nice if there was a find my remote app or something.
Another universal problem that exits in my house also, is the table that is impossible to keep clean for more than two days. The messy table retains it’s messy look in less than a week from cleaning up the whole thing.
Out of these problems, I chose to work with the problems faced in storage of dried goods. There are a lot of goods that are sun dried and kept for consumption later, or for selling out, all around the world.
So I took the case of drying and storing coconuts. But to gather more information, I generalized it to dry fruits and made this presentation.
https://prezi.com/i/lshiuofqjfeq/
