PD 8 Food Waste Blog Post
Q: What was your biggest obstacle?
A: My biggest obstacle was basically designing my prototype. Since my client Audrey is too lazy to pick up stuff at the bottom of her bowl, I had to design something that made accessing the food easier. At first, I thought I could just design utensils that are extra long. But firstly, how do I make sure these utensils can be used for any type of “deep bowls”? Also, these long utensils are pretty hard to control, which means I probably have to make some adjustments to the bowl to make it accustomed for normal utensils. I got inspiration from a hot pot shop I ate at recently before lock down happened, and they had a mechanism where there would be a metal plate at the bottom at the pot, and when you press a button, than metal plate pushes the food up from the soup. I thought that would be a good idea, except I would replace the mechanical engineering of the button with a spring, that would be weighed down by the food, and it would rise as the food got lighter.
Q: What was a skill you developed?
A: A skill I developed through this time was my sketching skills on Procreate. Through the sketching summative, I was able to learn how to use Procreate to add combine adding text and pictures together, as well as using different layers on Procreate to make working easier for me. A big benefit of doing technical art for sketching is that you can perfect each angle and each line of your shapes, which makes them look more professional and clean. I also focused on learning how to do that when sketching on Procreate.
Q: What do you want to change about your project?
A: I’d like to change the spring part of my project. While experimenting with my prototype, I feel like even when there was a lot of food, when it wasn’t heavy enough, the spring wouldn’t go down. My bowl was full of food, yet the spring still wouldn’t go down. If it still was like that, the food would seep outside of the bowl. So I would like to change it. Maybe some type of mechanical arm would work better, but I think that would require a lot more engineering.
Q: What is one piece of advice you would give to future students in this project?
A: One piece of advice I would give to future students of this project is to look around your daily life for inspiration. At first, when we started the project, I was kinda lost at what to design to solve the problem of the food being too deep into the bowl. I thought it was sort of an unsolvable problem, or there would be ways to solve it like dumping the food into a more shallow bowl. However, after looking around the house and just day dreaming, I thought of the example of a hot pot, which was able to bring the food up. So for anyone who is stuck, looking around your daily life or simply day dreaming about the past can be helpful, even though they might sound time wasting.
Q: Why do you think your prototype successful?
A: Overall, I think my prototype was a success. It was able to lift a certain amount of food and served the purpose of preventing scraps from sticking at the very bottom of a deep bowl. I do wish that it would’ve worked better because currently, it is only accustomed for foods that are square shaped, which is not super ideal.
