NextRound Tulip

Abstract

This report contains a full description of my graduation project for my Master degree in Design for Interaction (Industrial Design Engineering at Delft University of Technology). I did this project in collaboration with the start-up company Sports-f(x), the creators of the NextRound boxing system.

The NextRound boxing system currently consists of an intelligent data-collecting punch bag, paired with a tablet. This system gives users direct feedback on their workout, and enables them to see their improvement in their workout data.

The system has potential to help many different kinds of people to exercise at home. However, there are many barriers withholding people from getting a bag like this into their homes. The main barrier is that positioning a large product like a punch bag (especially one which also needs access to Wi-Fi and electricity) and its accompanying tablet is quite the task.

My graduation project brief was to solve exactly this problem; helping people to position the NextRound system at home. For this purpose, I designed the NextRound Tulip.

To get to this concept product, I undertook a number of design research and exploration activities. To start off, I researched what kind of people might benefit from owning a boxing system as such. From this research I made five personas for potential users.

I used these personas to recruit people for a co-design session, as I wanted to get to know the values of the potential users. These values would afterwards lead to both a proper Design Goal and a list of Requirements & Wishes, which would guide the product development in later stages. The most important value found during the sessions was that people do not wish this big boxing system to be in the way in the house, so other activities done in the house would not be disturbed.

With the findings from this research I set up a brainstorm session with fellow DfI students to try and satisfy the Design Goal. From these sessions I made a Morphological Chart, which led to six ideas. From these six I chose three to develop further into concepts.

I developed the three chosen ideas into three further iterated concepts. Potential users gave their opinions on these concepts through an online survey, which I used, along with the opinions of the company, to choose to develop the NextRound Tulip further.

I made some improvements on this concept and built a full-scale prototype to test and evaluate the concept with potential users. Lastly, I wrote a list of recommendations for future development for a product based on this concept.

The NextRound Tulip is a concept product which should satisfy the needs of users and Sports-f(x). It can be used with the NextRound punch bag, as well as other punch bags. In my opinion, it is a product solution to help people do boxing workouts at home.