Zenblen Product Workshop
Zenblen Product Workshop
A Smoothie vending experience for small gyms
Faculty Lead:
Marty Thaler
Teaching Assistant:
Paolo Tanedo
Class:
Product Design Workshop
Project Team:
Xuanyu Chen
Sike Liu
Yuting Mao
Mithila Kedambadi Prasanna
Alexandria Rengifo
Yutian Sun
Janine Zhang
Pictured here are the Zenblen management team, Tom Zhang, Narayan Natarajan, and Stephanie Mellinger alongside the full-scale prototype and the student team. Thank you!
For this 15-week product design workshop, ID students teamed up with Zenblen, a startup based at mHUB, the premier physical product incubator in Chicago.
The goal of the project was to develop both the physical design and the digital touchscreen interactions for a self-service smoothie machine — a simultaneous exercise in both product and experience design. Gaining experience with the issues and constraints faced by entrepreneurial start-ups was an additional learning objective.
Physical and digital designs were developed through user observations in fitness centers to define user needs. From this, a series of prototypes — both physical and digital — were tested at full-scale to advance the design of the user experience.
