Canting: A Batik Drawing Application

Canting is a design exploration to create a batik-drawing application for tablets with stylus.

It is awarded as the winner in 2020 International Design Challenge hosted by Binus University and sponsored by CHIuXiD.

Duration

April 2020 (2 weeks)

Role

UX lead, working with Laksamana Kusuma

What is done

Ideation, wireframing, and prototyping

Made for

2020 International Design Challenge

An award-winning design exploration

Shout out to my friend that joined me in this competition, Laksamana Kusuma!

He is really hard-working and resourceful. Without his help, there’s no way our team won the 2020 International Design Challenge.

Background

There are

5849

batik motifs in Indonesia._¹

Sadly, people do not realize the diversity of Indonesian batik motifs. In fact,

9 out of 10

most popular motifs are coming only from Java.²

Most Indonesian batik makers are currently over

40 years old.³

Image by Bernard Gagnon, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

“We saw that the number of young people who want to become batik painters are still very limited.”³
Haris Munandar, Secretary General of the Ministry of Industry of Indonesia

“Batik seems to lose its soul and people don’t get the correct values and motifs.”
Iwan Tirta, Batik designer on rise of printed batik

UX Methodology

We use Design Thinking as the methodology for researching, designing, and testing to create Canting.

Because the competition had a very tight deadline, most of the steps are shortened.

1. Empathize

We’re starting to search for ideas on how to make young people want to learn the traditional batik drawing process.

But, we need to remember that we can’t just create a product then try to match it to our user’s needs. It should be the other way around: user’s needs drives us to create a solution.

After some brainstorming and user interviews, turns out that most young people are actually interested in batik. They just don’t know where to learn and how to preserve batik as an important Indonesian culture.

2. Define

After creating our persona, it is important to see the problems from their view. Here are several problems that we found:

Firstly: What about finding the closest batik painting class? We searched around in Jakarta and only found 1 location: Textile Museum. We also found out the schedule of batik painting class doesn’t fit our persona’s busy and mobile lifestyle.

Secondly: Where could we find some inspiration? As far as we know, there’s no dedicated platform to share batik creations online.

Thirdly: What about people’s appreciation to the art of batik drawing process? The rise of printed batik pattern makes batik affordable. But, commercialization of batik can be a threat to the art of creating batik. People who bought those may not know what those patterns represent.

Lastly: What about government support? While there are some support of wearing batik4,5, but it is mostly formality. The government doesn’t have a solid program to educate people about the diversity and artistic values of batik.

With all the problems defined, it is time to create our solution.

3. Ideate

And an idea came to mind: Why not combine the best of both worlds? Why don’t we make batik drawing process digital yet respects traditional processes?

We chose Canting as the name of our product. Canting’s name came from the instrument used to transfer wax in batik drawing process.

It turns out that tablets with stylus can replicate fabric and canting intuitively. Plus, it is also one of the tools that our target users usually have.

We also want Canting to be the place to find inspiration to share user creations online. Plus, we wanted to add some education about batik patterns and its meaning.

Being a digital product, Canting is far more flexible than traditional batik drawing process. It allows us to draw anytime and anywhere we want, share our creations to the world, easy layering and correct drawing mistakes.

4. Prototype

When creating the design, we decided on the motif on our application as well. We chose partially-rounded rectangle inspired by the batik pattern Kawung.

Try it out in Axure Cloud

Design system

We used 1920×1440px (4:3) Android device as the canvas for our prototype and uses Google’s Material Design for the design system.

Typography

For the logo font, we use Upakarti by Adien Gunarta.

For other elements, we use Roboto. It is the standard font in Android to make our app blend in and as non-distracting as possible.

Color

Our main color is deep brown, inspired from the color of wax used when drawing batik. The rest of the application is monochrome to help you focus on the canvas.

Iconography

We mostly used Google’s Material Icons and some handmade ones. There are slightly rounded icons with some angular ones. We did that because some icons can be hard to see if it’s rounded. (For example, the difference between pencil tool and canting tool)

Tools

We used Adobe Photoshop to create all user interfaces, Axure RP to create user interface flow, and Inkscape to create custom icons.

5. Test

Due to limited time and COVID-19 pandemic, we only did basic heuristics testing and user testing to 1 person.

Before testing it to our users, we did some user flow checking for all use cases to make sure they can create new drawing and explore inspirations in the prototype.

In conclusion, the test result showed that the demand for apps like Canting exist.

“I think this application is great. It’s also easy to use, you can even see a diverse unpopular Batik motifs. I think it is very important to have a platform for people to learn how to paint Batik, even if it’s not real like using canting and real fabric. You can see your drawings and discover others too.”
“I suggest you to add tutorial videos on drawing batik and more detailed information about the selected batik patterns.”
Vivian, 21 years old

Conclusion

Canting helps:

Young generation to learn about the diversity of batik patterns and how to draw them
Artists can create and elevate batik as an art form
Support the government on batik education and preservation

Thank you for reading this case study.

Postscript: In Retrospective

This case study is one of the project that lit a spark for me to pursue UX further. With such a limited time to conceive a solution that can be presented for the international competition, I learned how to brainstorm, ideate, and delegate tasks with my team.

Finding inspiration to preserve batik as a cultural heritage is not easy. It took a few trips to the Batik Museum and art galleries to find inspiration for creating Canting. I learned that sometimes, to think out of the box, you need to find the right environment and some downtime to get my creative juices flowing to tackle the problem.