My partner for this project was Olivia Noh. Together we created a product called “conessant” and it is meant to solve the problem of a croissant which is that the flakes from the croissant fall off and can make eating a croissant messy. If you would like to learn more about our product and the process of designing it feel free to read along.
Before we designed our final product we had a few different designs that we were deciding from. We thought of foods that had problems while eating them and thought of different ideas that would fix those problems. We Brainstormed for about two classes and for one of them I was absent so we had individual ideas for this part. The first food that I thought of was donuts. With donuts I thought that when eating one with icing and sprinkles those things can fall and it can get kind of messy to eat. So I thought that creating something that would catch those items could be an idea. What I created was a tray that had to spades and how it would work was that the tray would catch the sprinkles and icing and using the spades they would be pushed to either side. The spades would push either sprinkles to the left side and the icing to the right side to make it neater. The second food that I thought of was tacos. I found that with tacos they can be a bit messy to eat how the items inside the taco could fall out and create a mess. I thought that something to protect the items falling on you as well as catch them could be a potential design. I thought that it would be hard to carry something that big around with you so I made it so that it would be a utensil only in restaurants. What it is is that there is a smaller platform on top that protects the items from falling on you and underneath is a bigger platform that later catches the fallen items. So it’s basically one small platform on top and one bigger platform beneath. The third food that I thought of was noodles. I found that eating noodles with chopsticks could get tricky with the noodles being oily and falling from the chopsticks. I first created chopsticks with a platform to hold the noodles but then I thought that the noodles could still slip so I added small spikes so that the noodles could go between them and be held in a stronger grip. So it is basically chopsticks but with a platform and spikes to hold the noodles and prevent them from slipping off. For my final utensil design I thought it could be used for a few different foods. Some foods that can be eaten with a fork may be difficult because the food could be bigger or thicker making it harder for it to stay on the fork. So what I thought is that I could create different attachments for the fork so that for certain foods you could add a bigger tine to make the food stay on the fork better.
These are the four utensils I talked about in the paragraph above close up.
During our design process we had an activity where we looked at each other’s ideas and gave feedback on others posts. The feedback we received was mainly to add more labels on our drawing but this helped us because we could think more deeply about our design and its functions. In the beginning we had a simple cone with the idea of just having the cone catch the flakes but we tried to think of ways the different parts of the cone could be used to solve our problem. We knew we wanted people of all ages to be able to use this product but we didn’t really make that clear in our design. Somebody approached us and said that young children tend to hold things loosely and taking that into consideration we designed our cone to have a stronger grip. Where on the cone the patterned lines on the cone would lift up and be folded a bit so that others could have a stronger grip on the cone so it wouldn’t slip out of their hands. On our original design we had our cone and a paper cone so that it would be neater to eat. In the activity we did somebody suggested we just have the one cone and not the paper cone. After we started thinking about how our cone could have a stronger grip we decided to take that part out because we thought it would create a looser grip and in the end there wasn’t really a need for it.
This is the before and after we added the feedback on our design:
Some of our designs strengths are that it helps making eating a croissant easier and a lot neater than without our product. Another benefit is that it is made for anybody age 4 and above because the cones pattern is made so that it’s kind of folded so that younger children have a stronger grip on the utensil. One other strength that our utensil has is that it is designed to hold many different shapes and sizes of croissants. Some weaknesses that our utensil has is that although the cone is meant to be strong it could potentially fall apart. Another weakness is that the cone might not be able to hold every single type of croissant depending on the size and shape. The impact this utensil is meant to have on others is that it will make eating a croissant easier and neater for many different people ranging from different age levels. It is also meant to help others eat neater in general as this utensil can be used for croissant but also for other foods if anybody would choose to do so.
Here is my elevator pitch:
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