With rising concers, health organizations and governments
warn for the danger of a less active and healthy population. Municipalities have stated their goal to create more
opportunities towards physical activty in public areas, so that everybody is able to be active and healthy. Buoyant fulfills this goal by facilitating a playful match and game raft in recreational swimming lakes. The base with goal and slide encourages friendly competition and collaboration. This base has multiple upgrades like the basketball ring, athletics bar, volleyball net and boulder wall turing the water surface into a match court. Lift up your aquatic game with Buoyant!
Buoyant is the final design concept of my Final Bachelor Project (FBP). This solo project for TU/e Industrial Design squad “Vitality” was meant to analyse the possibilities to stimulate vitality and active lifestyles amongst the public with “Motivating Environments”. The project focussed on recreational swimming lakes in The Netherlands and the opportunities to facilitate the ability towards active playfulness in the lake area. I was able to gather insights from lake visitors regardign their values and needs towards a joyfull day of leisure at the lake. Next to that, I talked with municipalities owning and administrating lake areas who stated their goal to stimulate vitality but noticed various constraints doing so like safety and budget. I was pleased to be able to have many external contacts to gather opinions and statistics which stimulated my skills in Business & Entrepreneurship, especially regarding partner relationships. Moreover, the analysis of user values and prospective business models including brand promotion design.
The promotion design for Buoyant also relates to the Creativity & Aesthetics skills I gained and enlarged during my FBP. Altough I was familiar with Adobe programs, I now learned to incorparate my own design concept into the graphis and style. The prototypes for the midterm concept Drup and Final concept Buoyant were of rather large scale. In order to still get a clear vision on the concept, I made various 3D models in SolidWorks. This Technology & Realization skill is definetaly something I improved during my FBP by self-learning tutorials and thus leaning many SolidWorks features and techniques. Additionally, I made a second midterm prototype to simulate the interactive technology from the “Drup” concept. This was made with foam modelling and Arduino electronics.
The underlaying principle of the Buoyant concept was in line with my Professional Identity. Both include playfulness, joy and competition as core values. This designer identity is of great value to me, as I try to incorporate these in projects and design iterations. Within my FPB, this was shown in the sports and games included in Buoyant were players are introduced to competition and collaboration.
