The Ventra Vending Machine

Aligning an information display with the user experience

Faculty Leads:
Tomoko Ichikawa
Jody Campbell

Teaching Assistants:
Rachel Huvard
Cagla Kuzu

Class:
Introduction to Visual Communication

Students:
Aamena Ansari 
Samar Anwar 
Rodrigo Dyer 
Samar Elhouar 
Lizzy Engele 
Jessie Gao 
Hugo Hsiao 
Noah Keppers 
Evija Kristopane 
Eddie Kure 
Shinichiro Kuwahara 
Stephanie Meng 
Anand Nagapurkar 
Veronica Paz Soldan 
Zack Schwartz 
Faye Sun 
Pukka Tackie 
Julian Walker 
Alison Yang 
Minyi Zhang

How can you redesign the information on a physical artifact, such as a vending machine, to better support a busy user? In a hypothetical project to improve the communication graphics on the ticket vending machine for the CTA (Chicago Transit Authority) — a standard and widely-used device throughout the city — students observed how users actually used the machine and redesigned the non-digital aspects of its information display.

This capstone project of the Foundation program challenged students to apply their cumulative learnings from the entirety of their Intro to Visual Communication course. The two-week project entailed deciphering and redesigning an informative and instructional portion on the top of the unit as well as a navigational portion that mapped to different parts of the machine.

The primary goal was to understand how users—whose main focus was to catch the train—would need to step through this experience in an efficient way, and to translate that insight into a visual experience.

The ID Foundation program at the Institute of Design welcomes students with no design background. Students take Foundation classes in Communication, Product, and Interaction Design, together with Photography, to become versatile, well-rounded, designers.