Interviews About Our Glue Gun Prototypes

WARNING these are a little explicit...

Of the ten interviews I conducted about the glue gun and our group’s redesigned glue gun prototypes, it seems like everyone who I interviewed ended up saying similar things. Before I explained the flaws of the glue gun, most people agreed that the original design is very efficient. This was a bit surprising to me considering that our whole group agreed that the glue was was very annoying to use. After explaining the flaws people began to agree that the flaws may be a bigger nuisance than they thought. But after I showed them the prototypes, a lot of them said that they wish that the new glue gun design was as simple as the original. My interviews were all very long, so I will only include one in this process book, and I think it will suffice. Hopefully you will get a laugh out of some of this person’s responses as well. It is a bit explicit, so I have made the interviewee anonymous.

Q1: What is good about the glue gun’s design?

“It’s simple, easy to use, very few moving parts, inexpensive, easy to reload, light weight, that’s probably it.”

Q2: How could the design be improved?

“Make it more sturdy, just as inexpensive, more reliable, bigger glue capacity.”

Q3: What is good and bad about the pencil glue gun prototype design?

“It looks like a giant penis. But put that down as a negative. I know some women who would put that as a positive though.”

Q4: What is good and bad about the modified glue gun prototype design?

“What’s good about it? Just the things you said. It holds more glue, it doesn’t leave spiderwebs... But there are negatives too. It’s probably heavier, probably higher cots, it’s not as simple.”

Project 2: Make It Better

Project Brief

For this assignment my BDS 101 class was asked to choose three $5.00 or less objects that we considered to be poorly designed. I consider a poorly desiged object as something that is hard or a hassle to use, breaks or malfunctions easily, or creates a mess while using it. This is how I chose my three objects, which were an Elmer’s Glue bottle, a spatula, and a Dove body wash bottle. From these three objects our classmates were asked, “How can you design these objects better?” We were split into groups to talk and brainstorm which of our objects (among the whole group) we should choose to design better. After much discussion my group chose the glue gun because we thought it had a lot of design flaws that could be easily fixed. To figure out the best way to redesign the glue gun we created word lists, which is a type of brain storming technique where a group extensively discusses a project and writes out words that may be useful in creating new ideas and solutions to a project. This helped us create and refine new ideas on how to redesign the glue gun. After deciding how to redesign it, we were asked to create a 3D prototype/model of the redesigned glue gun, create a poster showcasing how we were going to redesign it, and create powerpoint showing the ideation sessions and prototypes.