Less is more - Smart Wardrobe
Background
The Smart Wardrobe is a wardrobe and a wardrobe keeper. He understands how often you use each item and records for you. Without any special efforts, your belongings are well organised!
Don't forget to consult him before getting unnecessary pieces from the sales!
Process
Paper Prototype -> Software and Hardware implements -> Product design
01
Paper Protytpe
To identify whether keeping a list of all items in the wardrobe can affect shopping decisions, a paper prototype test had been done with a subject. The subject noted down all the clothes and kept a daily recording on which pieces were used.
With two-month persistence, she did not buy similar items that were already in the list and consequently reduced the monthly expenditure on clothes by 80%. Moreover, 3 pieces of clothes that were either rarely used or did not fit her well were donated to the charity shop. A tidy wardrobe and the increasing savings brought the positive feelings such as relief and ease.
This practice proved it is helpful to avoid emotional shopping or compulsive shopping by tracking and recalling the existing possessions. However, not everyone can persistently record the data, that is the reason why an “IoT wardrobe assistant” concept came to exist.
02
Design Process
Final Product
To use it you need a personal account. Then add your clothes information into it and set up the maximum clothes quantity you would like to have. Smart wardrobe detects the changes of the total clothes weight on it. According to the change, it recognises which piece is worn and records its usage times. Based on that it calculates P/T (price/usage times) to show the price of each usage. When you try to add one more to it, the wardrobe will refuse if the wardrobe capacity reaches the limit. By this means it suggests you think over whether you want to give up this shopping or donate one of your clothes away by twittering with the hashtag “LIM_donate” to spare for the new one. The two sharing suggestions are the one with lowest P/T, which means you have worn it for most of the time, and the one you used the least and kept for longest.
Reflection
In this project, I built up a tangible product with a digital platform. I design the product with the concept of IoT, using my website, database and JAVA coding skills to implement my design with AJAX, JQuery, PHP, MySQL and Arduino. I designed a relatively complicated suggestion system and a real-time updating system.