A sustainable home gym solution for teenagers
Designed alongside Joshua Summerfield, Ben Wood & Jake Lovett
Brief
Today’s teenagers are focusing on fitness more than ever with the prevalence of social media and sports. There’s a great range of diversity to cater for including living arrangements, costs and knowledge. COVID-19 outbreaks have caused a number of spontaneous lockdowns restricting access to sporting facilities, the effects of this on young people's health is still unknown. Sustainability is becoming increasingly important to younger generations who are well aware of the impacts of climate change and so designing for the environment must be evident in the final solution.
Design Intent
How might we lower the barrier for entry to routine exercise through an online platform aimed at providing physical education, improvised/low-cost equipment and community to its users?
Process
The Over Drive app was developed to be a guide for teenagers offering value from safety and education perspectives, as a team we brainstormed features that would encourage teenagers to engage with the app. These features were further refined further to enhance their value.
Wireframing the app allowed the team to fully flesh out the different parts, seeing possible connections and preventing any 'double-ups' in functions. One of the apps unique features was it's trade feature allowing users to pass along pre loved equipment or getting creative and repurposing household objects to make improvised fitness equipment.
The App
The main goal of the app was to establish healthy habits through regular exercise and sustainable behaviours.
The app is designed to cater to a variety of individuals from those who want to compete for prizes or glory amongst their friends to those seeking self improvement and achievement. Sustainability is encouraged through the trade feature giving pre-loved equipment the chance to be used by others or the sharing of of how to improvise equipment, from using a milk jug as a weight to building a DIY bench-press. The 4 workout streams Cardio, Strength, Flexibility and Mindfulness provide a wide variety of benefits from adding variety to a future athletes workout schedule to helping students relax and check-in with themselves during stressful periods.
Process
A critical part of this project was to design a range of versatile products that could be produced sustainably to go alongside the app that were affordable and would only add value to the experience of using the app. Sketching through team meetings were instrumental in the developemnt of this product range in ensuring as we ensured these products could be used in a variety of ways and remain affordable to a demographic with a low-income. Ultimately the products were influenced by each workout stream Cardio, Strength, Flexibility & Mindfulness.
The Products
The Plyo Box was a key part of the product range as it not only offers discrete storage of other equipment, it's also a highly versatile tool in a workout. it's unique design allows users to dock their phone into a passive speaker, amplifying their music as well as keeping the screen visible for timers or instructions on the next activity.
The Plyo Box's design is stremalined for production, consisting of a total of 5 unique plywood parts, this helps in simplifying assembly as well as repairs since there's less confusion over which part is needed.
The product range consists of the plyo box, heart rate monitor, skipping rope, sand-bag dumb-bells, cork roller and a cork mat.
