This was a two-week project for Stanford's Visual Thinking & Prototyping course.

I interviewed 20+ students in my dorm with one question: What is the most annoying thing about communal living in the dorms? Students reported their grievances with their roommates, noise levels, and strangely often lamented the hair left behind in the drains of the communal showers. I

then continued speaking to students about this specific issue. I found that students felt disgust seeing others leave their hair behind, but often didn't want to actually clean up after the previous user. Secondly, they often felt disgust while cleaning up their own hair, which likely led to the problem in the first place as people wouldn't want to touch something they find dirty. Another issue was that people often would forget to pick up their hair as they would have to leave the shower to get a paper towel/go to the trash can and return back.

I did some research and discovered that there is a biological reasoning behind our disgust with hair left behind: while it is connected to a human head, we perceive it as living tissue (even though it's not), and once it's separated from the head, we view it as dead tissue, inciting similar disgust responses as if we saw other dead living matter.

My goal, then, was not to minimize the disgust response, which is fairly biological, but to create something that would allow students to clean up the hair in a way that felt less dirty, along with minimizing the traveling students would have to do to successfully clean everything up.

I used a mix of traditional sketching, procreate, and Fusion360 to create a plan for a 3-in-1 shower caddy. It contained a holder for a small disk with a handle and spikes, that could be used to pick up the hair without making direct contact and pick up more hair, along with a hook for two rubber gloves to hang on which could be used when using the disk, along with a hook to hold a small trash bag (opaque, so that the hair inside would not be seen and cause the disgust response) so that students wouldn't have to leave the caddy to dispose of their hair.

This system addresses both sides to the problem: the struggle for students to dispose of their own hair after they shower, and the disgust at having to pick up hair from a previous user who left it behind.

We had one hour in class to rapidly physically prototype our product, limited to only foam core and cardboard.