How objects and emotions are interlinked?

Significance of shapes to express meaning

When we think of shapes and expressions it’s always fascinating how shapes hold their power in making people think, feel, and act a certain way. Decades of new products launched in the market have clearly determined how people use it in different ways. We still use many of the basic lessons we learned in our early design discovery process: examining shapes, textures, and thinking about how form affects the end consumer.

A shape can communicate gravity, stability, and balance in both 2 dimensions and in 3 dimension space. It may sound strange — it’s not like gravity is a real force pulling objects downwards as it does in real life. But gravity is so engrained into our perception of reality that it translates even to static objects on a static space. Take the image below as an example. How the first shape is giving us the feeling of stability and gravity, stands on its own making us feel grounded and peaceful.

Where in the second shape its imbalance and unstable, its very uncomfortable. When we are communicating via form, visually heavy objects at the top can be perceived to be uncomfortable and create anxiety. It’s the most common feedback from non-designers as its completely obvious, but there is a sense of freshness there and a sense of lightness. Unless of course, that’s the feel we want to go ahead and covey to the user.

But here in designing bloom, we found a common ground that draws a balance between peaceful and a few uncertainties. So we deliberately came up with an idea that the form should be floating or levitating in space. This idea differentiates the product language compared to a ton of flat wireless chargers that you have to lean over to look at your device. If you look at the 3rd shape, it has a relatively thin base compared to the top creating a nice juxtaposition between uncertainty and tranquility.

The final design is a combination of stability and imbalance: the concept of levitation emoting peace and light (weight).

The concept of levitation is just the starting point. The form has a smooth subtle blooming effect flaring out but doesn’t have any tension to it. It might sound strange again when we talk about tension to the form.

Let me start to describe what is physical tension in product forms. It’s the feeling you get when you see an object place at the edge of a table.

Often visual tension is just unintentional — designers not realising that they accidentally put shapes adjacent to each other that create tension unknowingly. This can come across as sloppy.

Here in our concept we intent to create tension, not so evident but to create a balance between soft and tactility. We iterated different textures and its scaled to the back side of the product to define the an intentional tension.

Sense of colour to uplift the mood : colour iteration and its meaning

When we think of a product it’s quite likely the first thing that comes to mind is colour. Many brands have made a specific colour synonymous with their business. We created a colour language for this super classy and fashionable brand “JUST Elegance”.

We created just elegance’s colour system revolving around blush and coral, the colour of the brand being rose gold and classy coral rose. Here in this image, we can see the colour structure is the combination of Metallic and its original matte tones. Silver with matte grey, rose gold with matte coral, and black metallic and matte black.

Balance between technical constraints and design expectation

Bloom has enabled elegance, self-expression, and celebration in a wireless charger. Bloom is not just a tech accessory, it has a beautiful ring light in the center to act as an ambient light on your bedside table. We added this feature with a deep understanding of how charging is accessed in a user’s lifestyle. In short, Bloom is not just a wireless charger it is Just elegance.

The QI charger for Bloom’s wireless charger is kept inside a durable ABS housing and beneath a panel to blend durability with tactility. All of the internal components: charging coil, PCB, copper capacitive touch are discreetly packed into a durable ABS core to meet the changing demands of future devices.

Designing interaction to trigger behavioural responses

Wireless charging is undoubtedly the future of mobile devices, offering a convenient, cord-free existence. While wireless charging speeds have improved steadily, it’s just becoming another stagnated market finding space to charge a growing stable of enabled devices

In bloom, we added a subtle ring light in the center to communicate: charging status and also it acts as an ambient light next on your bedside table. In the middle of the night if you want to grab your water bottle or to reach your washroom this ring light gives you a vision without disturbing your sleep.

The interaction to light it is uber simple and natural, just with a rotational touch you can easily increase or decrease the intensity of the light. The bottom is heavily weighted to makes sure the object doesn’t tilt when you are not fully awake. There are also 3 standard modes with proximity chargers that help light up the object when you wake up or wave your hand.

We believe that Interactions are very important to products and its always been part of our design philosophy to inject life into objects. It’s only through such interactions that we can create lasting memories and brand affinity. Objects that are able to communicate seamlessly create a sense of purpose and also have consumers gravitate more towards such products instead of the stand-alone – do nothing elemental artefact. Whether its a subtle message through symbolism, a certain familiar association from your past or linking it to your favourite brand attribute, products live through these associations and it’s our job as Industrial designers to convey these emotions to the end consumer and as rightfully said ” Any product that needs a manual to work is broken – Elon Musk “

“ Having Industrial Designers, UX designers and design engineers working at the same time brought out a very different aspect to the project. A lot of debates and arguments were settled with a visual and not with just plain assertions or examples. We do like to dish out a lot of analogies in design debates.” — VT RAO, Creative Director