Design

Theory and Practice. Our design practice includes a full perceptually-based design practice in acoustics, audio-visual systems, Lighting, Daylighting and Vision, Thermal Comfort and Indoor Air Quality, in order to provide perceptual comfort for the user, and these standards may be for the normal user of working age, or can be for the perceptually ore cognitively disabled user. This includes those living with aging, dementia, autism, mental illness, PTSD, ADHD, sensory processing disorder, blindness and deafness.

In product design, large firms often have a user experience department, and this department can have many disciplines of experts. Yet most user experience departments do not have any substantial measurement capability, and thus having an outside lab familiar with human perception and measurement can be of great benefit.

This project for the ATV industry, was a visual quality study of the appearance of ATV products, based on a number of design variables that the client wanted to investigate with quantitative subjective research.

Specialties. In the product development field, we offer the only multi-disciplinary sensory consulting package in the country, and we have the only set of measurement tools to measure and confirm each area of design. We were the first consulting firm in the U.S. to employ many of these measurement systems, and we are the only firm equipped to provide measurement in all fields.

The project on the right was the design of a Burger King Drive Thru concept that was intended to be the world's first enclosed video ordering system, and this was also the project where order confirmation was invented and is now an industry in its own right.  This project was prototyped at BK Headquarter in Miami and then at 3 restaurants in different parts of the country.  The result as a large increase in sales at each of these facilities.

Philosophy. Conceptual Design is often completed without any definitions that are clear enough to measure successful outcomes. We have been very focused on having quantitative definitions for perceptual comfort on all projects before conceptual design is complete.

This study was a Visual Quality study of diagnostic environments to begin to understand the influence of environmental design on patient comfort, security and stress.

Summary. Most clients would like predictable design processes that provides known results. Without the science of sensory design, there is no ability to predict or to confirm success in providing comfortable and satisfying products for our users.

This is a study of refrigerator appearance to understand what expectations were engendered by different approaches to product appearance. This visual studies are also called cross-modal studies, as the subjects are trying to infer quality and performance based on industrial design. There are very few quantitative studies of the impact of industrial design on the user, and many practitioners of ID, much like other designers, believe that their client will like what they like, and this is often not correct.