Exploring interactions - GO GREEN

Indiviual project of the master design for interaction TU delft

The HÄNGLA is a new way of arranging your clothes. Instead of making piles of your clothes, the HÄNGLA makes it possible to hang everything in your closet, without using more space compared with using piles. The HÄNGLA stimulates to place the most used clothes in the back, whereby the older clothes will appear in the front. This will stimulate the rediscovering of your wardrobe. Normally the clothes which are not often used will disappear in the bottom of the closet. By making them more visible, they will not disappear. You know what you have, and you can easily pick them out.

During the firt phase of the project the method of context mapping was used. Ten participants between the age of 18 to 75 years old, men and women, had to fill in a booklet for 4 days. After these days they got an individual interview in front of their wardrobe.

After all these interviews the interesting and overlapping phrases were selected and combined in statement cards. Furthermore, collages were made to make a clear image of the different personas and their behaviour around their wardrobe.

After analysing and clustering all the findings from the booklets and the interview, the interaction of feeling ashamed about your wardobe by women appeared. A lot of women don’t want to show things in their wardrobe they normaly don’t share with others. This are often broken clothes, underwear and old fashioned clothes. This can be seen as the “secrets of their wardrobe”.

After having this clear image of the conetxt, the following design goal was formulated:

To let women rediscover their own secrets in their closet, to extend the lifetime of their wardrobe.

To find solutions for rediscovering your wardrobe, it was important to understand the behaviour in and around the wardrobe really well. Therefore, a test of three days was done with four women between the age of 18 and 23 years old.

The research question was: How do women currently use their wardrobe and how to influence this?

In the current wardrobes, clothes disappear within the piles. Furthermore, taking out a T-shirt from the bottom of a pile gives a frustrating feeling. It is a big struggle to only take out the T-shirt you want to take out (most of the time everything on the pile starts to move as well). Making them visible and easy to grab will make the step of starting to wear those hided clothes much smaller.

Beside this, women pointed out they prefer hanging their clothes above placing them on a pile. The only problem they felt is hanging clothes needs much more space compared with stacking your clothes.

After the research, testing, prototyping and iterating, the final solution can be presented: The HÄNGLA.

The HÄNGLA is easy to place in almost all the closets, without screwing or making irreversible changes in your wardrobe.

Using the HÄNGLA in your closet, will result in having a better overview of your wardrobe. This makes you all the time rediscovering your own clothes, and therefore, extending the lifetime of your wardrobe.

Scenario