Sweet Avengers: Papercraft Characters of Sustainability
- Project Type: Product Design
- Duration: 2.5 Months
- Role: Project Manager
Results
- Product Presentation Slides - [pdf]
- Pitch Documentation - [pdf]
- Product Story:
Sweet Avengers are papercraft characters born in the forests of Canada and come offering delectable treats to students. Their hopes are to deliver their knowledge of sustainable and social responsible ideas for students to think about when they go out into the world and pursue their careers. After their long journey they have been battered, beaten and flattened. Those kind enough to take their offering of food will need to straighten them out and bring them back to their 3 dimensional selves. Once restored they hope to act as a reminder for the important knowledge they have brought and continue to share its knowledge with those around its owner.
Context
As team Catalyst, our mission statement was to promote a sustainable and socially responsible mindset in an enjoyable and attractive way. We were a team of 6 individuals coming from diverse backgrounds: 2 Design, 2 Marketing, 1 Entrepreneur, 1 Accounting. This allowed us to use our collective expertise and experience to effectively design, budget and deliver our product the Sweet Avengers.
Process
Early on in our process, I ensured that all members of the team, regardless of background, understood the importance of a quality design process required in developing both a provocative and profitable product. We began by defining what our team's mission statement was and who we would be designing for. Setting this foundation early on allowed everyone on the team to understand the value of putting in the time and effort for lateral processing and customer research.
To gather information about our potential customers, I decided to use a self-reporting ethnographic research method known as Cultural Probes. Myself and another team member who had used the method before, devised 5 activities. We put together 8 packages with all the necessary materials and sent them to 8 people who fit our targeted demographic to complete over the week.
Upon return of the cultural probes, we analyzed them, extracted needs, and then created profiles. While this was underway, I instructed the other half of our team to do online research into market microtrends that would inspire us for our product. It was important to find microtrends as these were trends that are only beginning to surface and have not been over used.
Having very few constraints as to what we could produce was great in terms of creative freedom, but difficult due to lack of direction. We had an intense brainstorming session where preliminary product research and user research was brought in to develop a viable idea. The session was run in various phases. First, I had all team members write down ideas individually without discussion. At this point the ideas can be completely random and crazy, which in the long run produces more unique results. These ideas were then put up on the wall. We then all went around with Post-Its and added to the ideas. After about 15 minutes the no discussion rule was lifted and paired discussions occured as we did this.
To nail down an idea, we finalized our session by having a group discussion of the ideas developed. We went though each idea and tried to develop them as far as we could. We then began to eliminate ideas that were dead ends. With the remaining ideas, we voted for the favorites. Finally we used the top few ideas and again continued to develop them. Some old ideas were fused into the top-voted ideas. At the end of this session, we had unique concept we were all pleased with that was backed up by research and customer needs.
At this point, we had decided to create papercraft characters that would communicate and be artifacts of a sustainable or social responsible theme. We invited fellow designers and friends to help create the characters' form and story. This allowed a fresh set of minds in producing more interesting and creative designs. Furthermore, the participants were potential customers and this allowed us to connect them and promote to them the product. The resulting characters from this workshop was then further developed by our team and used in our final product.
While developing the physical attributes of the product, a multitude of prototypes were created to test a large variety of attributes including shape, flaps, and printing.
To save many hours of manual labour, we were able to negotiate the use of a laser cutter to manufacture our product. However, we needed to learn how to use it. It took much trial & error and much consultation before we got it just right.
A lot of thought, time and effort was put into ensuring that the packaging was compact, cost effective, and appealing. To keep things cost effective, I ensured that we scoped out and negotiated with various suppliers to find a good balance between quality and cost. To promote our product, high quality posters were put up and a pre-order campaign was set. On the day of sales we had team members delivering pre-orders, pitching to customers at our booth and the rest walking and pitching around the venue.