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

#servespeople
#servicedesign

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.

Pictured here is the Zenblen management team, Tom Zhang, Narayan Natarajan, and Stephanie Mellinger alongside the full-scale prototype and the student team. Thank you!