My Fox Design Challenge Experience
Last week, our MiD program took part in the Fox Design Challenge. This year, the theme was "talking trash." This sounded like a great opportunity for me because I am bothered by the level of trash in Philly and I sometimes wonder why some people simply don't care about where they throw or leave their trash. At the challenge, we were put in groups that were made up of students from different disciplines so my group was pretty diverse.
Right off the bat, we started sharing what we had learned from our own personal research about trash and all of a sudden ideas started getting tossed back and forth all around the table. No one was recording any of their ideas though someone had passed out post-it notes and writing materials were right before us. After posting some ideas myself and suggesting several times that people record their ideas, others finally started to do so and post them on our board. My team had some interesting ideas and somehow, we started to lean towards incorporating all these ideas into one final product. It seemed like everyone wanted a tangible product, even the idea of an app was quickly eliminated.
I personally felt uneasy. After saying I was an industrial designer, there was already an expectation from me and the graphic designer to make an attractive product. Later on I felt inclined to re-explain what I do. I can imagine myself immediately jumping on the idea of designing a product if I still had a traditional industrial design mindset but since being in Uarts Mid program, that mindset has changed. There is nothing wrong with designing a product but I wanted us to start from the root of the problem and ask why people litter in the first place. In my opinion if we had started with taking a stab at understanding and seeing how to possibly change the way people think, we would probably not have needed a new product. I just felt like we jumped on the idea of a product being the solution too quickly.
Our final idea was a trash can. Not just any trash can but one that was "sexy." It was animated, solar powered, it gave rewards to people and no one had to touch it. On a more serious note, our driving points were that no one likes to touch something that contains trash so people don't always put away their trash in the Bigbelly trashcans that re all over Philadelphia, people do not know what to recycle or not, people do not realize how they personally affect the environment by littering and people like rewards. Our final product, iCan, was not only a trashcan, it was a movement (we did put a lot of emphasis on the trashcan though). The idea of iCan is a better version of the Bigbellys and the Unlitter Us movement because it focuses on making people more aware, educating them and using role models and celebrities to reach the community. The iCan trashcan was able to encourage people to not litter by giving them positive reinforcement such as thanking them for caring for their environment and by randomly giving rewards/vouchers to people who throw away their trash.
As for team effort, my team worked really well together especially in putting together a presentation. One of the guys on my team was really good at helping us emphasize our role in the project and why iCan is important. In the end, we got third place and I honestly did not expect us to go as far as we did in the challenge. I expected us to be out in the first round but apparently most of the judges liked our idea. Getting third place in the whole challenge was an accomplishment and I was pretty proud of my team.
Being in this design challenge made me remember how product oriented human beings can be. We have gotten used to creating things to solve problems that sometimes we go further and further away from the root of the issues. In our attempts to solve our challenges, we sometimes take a band-aid approach and tend to focus on finding a solution in material things instead of focusing on the people behind the issues. I hope we can all grow in the way we address problems.
