Four-hour design challenge? Challenge accepted!

In todays class we were taken to a completely new part of the university to team up with the black box crew to create design and pitch an idea in four hours. A scary ask at first with being outside of our comfort zone of the product design studio but one that all product design students welcomed with open arms. After we sat down in tables or groups of four we were set tasks from the get go to go out and have a pitch for the Blackbox staff to critique after the time was up. First as a group we were made decide roles but in my opinion the roles had no effect in creating the product as we were going for the best pitch at the end as a team and this made things run very smoothly for our group.

Picking our topic

The first challenge was to pick a brief heading to confine us to one problem to look at. As a team we weighed up each option and decided that ‘Good Health & Wellbeing How might a start-up enable better health & wellbeing among its customers & beyond?’ was the one for us.

After we had our task, we were given time limits to brainstorm ideas for our ideation. With all of us contributing to the page of ideas we all agreed that we were going to push an idea that we ended up calling Strip facts this idea was highlighting the fat, sugar and any other nutrients that might be useful when looking at a product.

Where did our idea come from?

Our idea was birthed through our lack of knowledge into what was actually going into our bodies. We were aware as to what products we were consuming, but unaware of what was in those said products. The information provided for nutrition was numerical but gave no perspective relative to the product. The idea was to get rid of numerical information and try to showcase it through graphics, while giving perspective. We thought this was a creative and practical way for people to improve their lifestyles and health choices, without having to become dieticians.

Our main goal was to highlight the nutritional value of other products in a clear and simple way as most people would struggle to understand what the back of the bottle means and how many grams of sugar or any other nutrient was good or bad for you.

Here is our prototype that we sketched up and delivered to the design team at Blackbox where they gave us pointers about what we could do to improve what they liked and questioned us to see how much thought we put into the product.

This was on of the more enjoyable CDC classes as we got to explore designing as part of a team and pitch in front a team of designers that we had not seen before a group of total strangers. This was good experience in feeling more confident going forward with my presentation skills.