After a fantastic experience working on designing a product that we have recycled, as well as a rocky road, we’ve completed the project and can close this chapter in our book. But before we do that, we invite you, the reader, to participate in the ups and downs of the projekt week by week in this five week project.
The project itself was to create a package for a recycled product and give the product new life by giving it a redesign.
Week one
We started the week by forming groups and going to the local recycling plant. This group is based on Erik Subäck and Erica Ericsson, both students at Mittuniversitetet, Sweden. It was a cloudy Tuesday with a light drizzle when we searched the recycling plant in hope of scavenging some used product to du a redesign as well as creating a new package for it.
After going through piles of trash, we had found a couple objects that we settled for and took them back to the school where we discussed the benefits and downsides of some of the objects. Some were too large and heavy, some where impossible to make a redesign of. We settled to redesign a smoke detector in hope of breaking into a market that doesn’t exist. We have a lot of work and research to do but we are holding our heads high.
Week two
This week, we’ve got some feedback from our teachers about our smoke detector and we’ve already run into a few problems. Main problem is to get a product like a smoke detector to sell to the public, knowingly that it is recycled might be a risk that the consumer is not willing to take.
We tried to contact Brandskyddsföreningen (https://www.brandskyddsforeningen.se/) about the requiemrements for a smoke detector to be sold in a market and if our product idea would be possible. They did not answer our questions via mail nor phone call. The more we looked into the issue the more apparent it was that this might be a bigger problem than we initially thought, especially when the main goal was to recycle and repackage a product.
We hit a dead-end on friday and after some feedback, we realised that this project might just create more problems than solving them. Even if we scratch the idea completely or use some bits of it, remains to see, but we’ve learned a lot in the past week and gained so much just from experimenting with different kinds of packaging techniques that we can take on anything by now. We’ll rest and get back to the drawing board next week in hope of getting some more inspiration about common household items that the average joe can recycle.
Week three
This week have been, no doubt, the most time consuming week so far. We started out almost disoriented since our last brief as we did not know what direction we wanted to take, and since we’ve decided to move on from the smoke detector we’ve been searching high and low for anything to work with.
We settled on the idea of recycling glass bottles into something new and created the name “Happy Jars” with hope of spreading awareness about recycling and the creativity that can go into recycling common objects. The current idea is to use these jars as penholders, candle-holders or pot.
We will use the same kind of package, only slightly modify it.
Week four
It has been an incredibly productive week and we’ve come a long way with our new project. We started the week by trying to come up with a new idea. First thing that came to our mind was glass bottles and how we can recycle them. After some research of what glass bottles are capable of being recycled into, we settled on the design to make it like a plant pot. Later inte the process we decided that the smaller ones could contain candles.
We started looking what other companies did with their glass bottles that they sell just to get a hint of what we can use and what the customer recognise as a bottle. We got inspired to use as little color as possible as well as using a pattern or the company logo on the bottle itself. After a trip to the local hobby store we gathered some needed material and got to work.
We’re looking forward to continuous productive week!
Week five
Final week of this course and the project is starting to look like a real product. This week took off right where we left it last week, except we’re more motivated and confident. Just as last week, we’ve made a few changes to the overall design as well as minor changes to the blueprint. We decided to use leaves as our overall design for everything, the poster, the product and the package.
We’ve also prepared a shorter pitch for thirty seconds that we are going to present our project with, as well as common answers that people might have about the project. Above our monter we had hung up a big poster that would describe the project a bit more, to fill in on common questions that we might not have time to talk about.
There were a surprising amount of people that came to the presentation as well as people coming to ask us about our project, which was a relief! We thought that no one would show up and we would’ve just stood still by our product all day. There were even people that came with inspiration and ideas about how we could use our project and evolve even further. It gave us inspiration and motivation to continue with packaging design and insight about what people think of our product and what they would prefer to purchase in the store.
