Eggtivate is the resulting multisensory experience for the ritual of setting and awakening by an alarm clock. This product is especially designed for business people who want to start their day with a happy, healthy and active morning routine. The product encourages the user to wake up, do exercises in the bedroom, fresh him- or herself up in the bathroom and have a healthy breakfast in the kitchen at home.

Eggtivate consists of a bracelet and an associated docking station with a built-in egg cooker. Users can set the alarm clock by interacting with the touch screen on the docking station. After waking up, the user puts on the bracelet and starts with a morning exercise. The bracelet slowly changes color to orange, the temperature increases and the material gets hard. These interactions try to build an active emotion to users. Then, the users will go to bathroom for morning grooming. With the water splashing on the bracelet, the color changes to blue, the temperature decreases to room temperature and the material changes to a special tactility which could bring a happy emotion to users. Finally, the smell of freshly baked bread provided by the egg cooker in the kitchen will stimulate the user’s appetite. The users then can put the bracelet back in the docking station to release the egg. And a successful healthy morning routine is completed. 

First, we chose the business people as our target group. They were described as: Young business people (Male & Female) in an age range from 20 to 35, and without children. Most of business people in this category work long days at the office and have a busy lifestyle. They are 

individualistic, full of ambition and want to be successful at work. During recent years, it became harder 

to balance the life inside and outside the office and the daily stress begins in the morning. It is common 

that these business people regularly skip breakfast and daily exercise, but do not really realize that this is actually unhealthy for their bodies.

Eggtivate  was created to encourage business people to build a stable and healthy morning routine. Product was designed with the consideration of bring users happy, healthy and active emotions. We hope this product can call the business people’s awareness of healthy lifestyle.

Working on this product was extremely interesting, and it presented quite a few unique challenges. 

The first challenge was about how to represent a happy, healthy and active morning routine. The overall user experiences are related to several types of human senses, not only a vision. With this in mind, we decided to design this product by utilizing multiple senses such as olfaction, vision, tactile and audition. Firstly, several workshops were contributed to finding the related keywords of each mood (happy, healthy and active) underlying different senses (See Figure 5,6). And the mood boards were built in order to evoke interaction concepts. We then tried to define the activities that can transfer the experience to the morning routine. The workshops and research of morning routines resulted in three important activities for a happy, active and healthy morning routine: doing exercise, cleaning/washing and having breakfast.

The interaction between user and product is influenced by emotional, aesthetic and meaning experiences, depending on both personal associations and context.  

Figure 1. Keywords about different moods from Vision and Audition perspectives

Another challenge was in making a product prototype and the workflow which integrating all experiences and activities together while ensure the usability. The prototype was built step by along with several workshops. The concept was developed through brainstorms and sketches (Figure 1).

Figure 7. Sketches early design phase

We then mapped activities with different locations and designed the workflow. The workflows were designed as intuitive as possible so that the product could be naturally used by users. Furthermore, the user interfaces were designed with simple content and visible font (Figure 8). 

Figure 8. User interfaces of Eggtivate

Working on this project has given me experiences of developing a product. From concept design to model prototype design, it has taught me a lot about process and collaboration in this product 

development case. It’s also given me a good opportunity of designing user interface for a standalone device which I never did before. It helped me to think about the user experience in a special case which would be a good experience for my future works.