Design Thinking Project : Enhancing the Living Room Experience with a Multipurpose Dining and Work Table.

9 min readMar 22, 2023

This project was done as part of a UX mentorship program by Growth School, we were divided into group of 8 people and the idea was to use design thinking and work on enhancing the experience of different parts a house. But this was not easy as it seems everybody needed to fight for the topic they wanted to work on. Eventually after few debates I got that the topic I wanted i.e. the living room.

I wanted to work on enhancing the living room experience as it is a central space in many homes, serving as a place for relaxation, entertainment, and socializing. However, with the increasing demands of modern life, the living room is also being used for work, study, and other activities that require a dedicated workspace. My goal was to come up with a solution that would improve the functionality and versatility of the living room while also considering the user needs and preferences.

What is Design Thinking?

Design thinking is a creative problem-solving approach that is used to design products, services, and experiences that are innovative, user-centered, and feasible. It involves understanding the needs and perspectives of the users, defining the problem, generating ideas, creating prototypes, and gathering feedback to refine the solution.

Stage 1 — Empathize

To understand the needs, wants, and perspectives of the users, I conducted interviews with 5 of my cohort-mates and asked them about their experiences related to the living room. I asked a variety of questions to gather insights on how they use the living room, what they like and dislike about it, and any challenges or problems they face. I also kept in mind to not feed answers to users while interviewing and keep the interview conversational.

Here are the questions that I asked -

Tell me about yourself? (Interest's & Hobbies).
what is an ideal living room experience for you?
Is your living room the first place/room when you enter into house? (structure of your house).
Take me through your routine? or In your routine what all activities you perform in living room?
What are all the furniture and other gadgets & equipment’s in your living room?
What are the storage facilities in the living room?
How do you manage guests normally and in case of any small event/party?
How do you clean, maintain / organize your living room?
Anything you like / dislike about your living room?

During the first interview I realized that asking questions about the ideal experience at the start of the interview was not a good idea as it was a very confusing question. The same questions was easily answerable when it was asked at the end of the interview as they gained more idea about there space through the conversation.

After the interviews, I wrote all of the insights in a Fig Jam file and began to identify the most common problems and needs. Through this process, I discovered that people often use the living room for multiple purposes and that the living room is often small, leading them to desire a minimalistic design.

This empathy stage allowed me to gain a deep understanding of the user needs and helped inform the direction of the project.

Here are the insights I got through the interviews-

Stage 2 — Define

Based on the insights I gathered in the empathy stage, I refined my problem statement to clearly articulate the challenge I was trying to address. The problem was that the living room is often used for multiple purposes and is often small, leading users to desire a minimalistic design.

I divided all the insights I got from the interview into multiple sections such as furniture, house structure, guest management, routine, cleaning, Ideal experience which eventually helped me to find problems with the different sections in the living room.

Following are the common problems faced by the people -

Faced sitting related issue & back pain issue.
Had Unnecessary things in living room.
Didn’t had proper storage for work related stuff.
Have a dining table in the living room but don’t use it.
Issue with privacy and interruption while working.
Existing space was not properly managed.
faced neck pain issue.
Didn’t have a sofa to sleep and relax.
Faced issue related to accommodation of guests in living room.
Faced issue with the dust coming from the window.
Had problem with movement of heavy items while cleaning.
Had problem while eating food.
Faced problem due to lack of a specific workplace.
Multiple issue with the work area such as accessibility of items, height of the desk.
Less floor area.
There was no specific area for pets to play.
Uncleaned roofs outside so need to shut windows.
Issues with lighting adjustments in the night.

In this stage, I found out a key insight that users had dining table in the living room but didn’t use it too often also most of the users liked setting up there workspace in the living room but weren’t able to do that successfully.

To address this problem, I identified the specific user needs that my solution would need to meet. These included the need for a versatile and multifunctional living room that can accommodate different activities, the need for a minimalistic design to make the most of a small space, and the need for practical and easy-to-maintain furniture and equipment.

Stage 3 — Ideate

After the define stage, to generate a wide range of ideas and potential solutions to the problem of enhancing the living room experience, I used techniques such as Crazy 8 and sketching. This technique involves coming up with 8 different ideas in 8 minutes or less, encouraging quick, intuitive thinking.

I worked on multiple ideas and different variations of a single idea. for example, people were having problem like back & neck pain issue while sitting on a chair. The chair was used in different conditions like while working or while watching television for a long time. Both of the problems are related to the chair but require different solutions.

I started ideating in this way gathered a large number of ideas using these techniques, considering factors such as versatility, minimalism, and practicality. Next, I evaluated and refined these ideas, considering factors such as feasibility, user needs, and potential impact. I removed all the surface level ideas and focused on developing the most promising ideas further, considering how well they met the needs and goals identified in the define stage.

Here are the Top three ideas which I finalized among all the others to go forward with.

Idea 1 — Multipurpose compact dining table.

Generally people used the living room for multiple purpose and need of a multifunctional table is must. I ideated a multipurpose table that can be used for dining as well as working which solves problem for a large group of people, considering the impact of the solution and different use case of this table this was among the top ideas to work upon.

Idea 2 — Adjustable Chair.

People spend a lot of time sitting on a chair it can be while working, watching television for a long time or any other reason. Sitting on a chair brings lot of issue such as neck & back pain. Multiple variations of a adjustable chair can be created considering user demands such as adding a cushion to support the back with ability to stretch the chair , slider with a cushion to support the neck area or a dynamic chair where which converts like a mini bed where user can also rest his leg and sleep.

Idea 3 — Inflatable air sofa

This is one of the most effective solutions when you need to manage guests, mostly people have furniture in there house according to members in the family but sometimes when we have guests it becomes hard to manage that. An inflatable sofa solves this problem can be used & setup within mins and easily stored by removing the air when not in use.

Ideating possible solutions for different issues

Stage 4 — Prototype

The next step was to create a prototype to effectively test my idea and gather meaningful feedback. All the above ideas were solving meaningful problems but I moved forward with developing a prototype for the first idea, I.E creating a multipurpose dining and work table. I selected this idea because of the impact of the solution and the problem it was solving.

I started the prototype by finding the dimensions of a work table and a dining table, to define the ideal dimensions for a multipurpose table. One of the insights I got from the previous stage was the living room is not typically big and has to accommodate multiple things. People had dining table in there house but the chairs with the table were only used for dining and were not used often but consumed a lot of space.

So one of the major points while creating the prototype was to minimize the unnecessary space and still able to provide good experience. To solve that problem I thought of folding chairs that can be can be folded when not in use and kept in a section inside the table.

Keeping all the constraints in mind and by using my mathematics knowledge defined the dimensions for the table and created a rough design. The idea was to design a table that can be folded when not in use and consumes space according to the type of work it is used for. for eg — When using it for doing work, only one side of the table should be opened and limited space will be consumed . I kept on iterating until I landed on a design that what was practical. Here are some snapshots from the prototyping stage .

Stage 5 — Test

After creating the design for all the possible views, it was time to test it and get real feedback from the users. While I was showcasing my design , one of the users told me they have seen a similar table on the internet and shared it with me. The table was mostly similar to what I had designed but had some architectural differences. This resource helped me better explain my design.

Feedback From users -

Users were not sure about the amount of leg space and asked to work upon the dimensions for that.
Users who were working professional wanted the table to be of adjustable height.
The design of the chair was not suitable for the old age people to sit for a longer period of time.
Need more space to store important items.

Learnings

The most important that I learnt was “I’m not the user” and removing the bias while designing the product.
How to empathize with the users and how important it is while designing products that provide good user experience.
The importance of group activity, multiple opinions and ideas of my teammates helped me to get unstuck while ideation.
How to prioritize and solve problems effectively.
Learned the process of Design Thinking, and how it can be used to create effective experiences.
Learned that designing is a iterative process and creating good products require continuous testing and iteration.

Thanks my team mates who helped throughout the case study and Special thanks to my mentor, Anudeep Ayyagari for guiding me.