FoodWorthy
Innovative Product Design
Dr. Rob Shepherd, Sirietta Simocini
Team of 8
August 2023 - December 2023
Skills:
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CAD (Fusion 360)
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Design Thinking
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3D Printing/Rapid Prototyping
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DFMEA, RCA
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Customer Needs, User Research
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Conjoint Based Analysis
and we deliver solutions to mundane problems. Addressing the question "how do we help students not just survive, but thrive?", we have released our first product, the FoodWorthy lunchbox, a product designed for college students everywhere.
Designed to be a space-efficient lunchbox which fits into the water bottle pocket of any backpack, the FoodWorthy container is not a mundane solution, but a solution created to address a student's busy and chaotic life. The FoodWorthy container enables students a hands-free way to carry their lunch with them anywhere in an easy manner without fear of making a mess within their backpack.
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Leak-proof: The FoodWorthy lunch boxes contains an O-ring gasket in the lid and 4 draw latches which ensures that once you place food within the container, none of it is getting out.
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Modular: The FoodWorthy lunch box consists of two differently sized containers which attach together at the lid through two lollipop pin-slot joints. The differently sized containers ensure that the FoodWorthy lunch box can sit in any backpack's water bottle pocket. The two pin-slot joints also ensure that once fit together, the containers will not separate unless you unslot them yourself.
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Microwavable: Made out of silicone and HDPE, the FoodWorthy lunchbox is food-safe and microwavable, ensuring that students can have access to a hot meal while still bringing their own food.
We are NoteWorthy...
An emotional data map we created, where we identified needs, insights, and surprises students had in their daily life
Preliminary Fieldwork
To help us come up with a product, we first conducted empathy fieldwork to further understand the population we were designing for.
We conducted interviews, made detailed observations, and immersed ourselves in parts of campus we didn't normally frequent to get a better understanding of the student population and their everyday lives.
From our emotional data, we identified multiple areas we could focus on to try to improve daily living for students. We grouped our data and organized it into an emotional data map to help us visualize these areas.
Designing the Student Experience
After our preliminary fieldwork, we decided we wanted to answer the question:
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How can we design a lunchbox/food storage container to support a student's active and busy lifestyle?
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We noticed that in our user research, a lot of students complained that the take-out containers given at dining halls were prone to leaking, meaning they could not put it in their backpacks due to fear of leaking and had to carry the takeout containers by hand.
Similarly, students who brought lunch noted that moving around campus with a backpack and a lunchbox was inconvenient as a majority of them did not put their lunchboxes within their backpack in fear of leakage. Thus, we saw an opportunity for improvement, as well as an opportunity to utilize a space almost every student had access to: the water bottle pocket of the backpack.
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Design Zero
After coming up with our idea, we decided to perform some rough prototyping using cardboard and hot glue. We wanted to incorporate a few features into our initial design:
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Volume: Because we were constraining ourselves to design a food-storage container/lunchbox to fit within the water bottle pocket of a backpack, we had to find a way to ensure it had enough food storage space.
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Modular: We wanted to add modularity so that users could organize their food better
We also decided that our product was going to be more akin to a Tupperware and directly store the food.
User Feedback
After we finished our initial rough prototype, we needed to gather user feedback. We walked around, talking to as many students as possible, and asked them to "use" our product. We also asked them for as much feedback as possible, critical or not. From this data, we learned quite a lot:
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Too big: Our initial prototype was designed to take up the same space as a Nalgene water bottle to maximize volume. However, as we talked to more and more students, we discovered that even Nalgenes did not fit in a majority of the water bottle pockets of students.
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Too tall: Our prototype was also really tall. It was prone to tipping over and the connector design we wanted, which was to just have friction-fit joints between the two containers, was likely to not be sturdy enough to keep our lunch box together.
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Design One
After gathering user feedback, we could change our initial prototype. We made it smaller so that it could fit into more backpack's water bottle pockets and made it attach horizontally to conserve space and make it more stable within the backpack pocket. We then created another prototype out of cardboard and tape to test our ideas with more users
Choice-based Conjoint Analysis
We used Sawtooth to create a choice-based conjoint analysis survey which would allow us to identify which features users valued the most as well. We identified different features, such as price point, material, portability, and other ones we thought users would care about, and sent out the survey to gather feedback.
We figured out that users really valued a product which was affordable over using higher quality materials such as aluminium that allowed it to be insulated, but were not willing to risk the container being leaky to have the cheapest product possible.
We used this data to identify how we wanted to manufacture our final product. To keep manufacturing costs low, we decided that we wanted to keep the bulk of our FoodWorthy containers and lids to be manufactured from plastic, which would allow us to injection mold everything and keep our tooling costs low. We also decided to add a silicone gasket to fit between the lid and the container to keep the container from leaking.
Manufacturing Considerations
While creating our final design and manufacturing plan for the FoodWorthy containers, we created a DFMEA report as well as a house of quality matrix to help us convert our customer and user needs into engineering requirements.
Final Design
After conducting multiple rounds of prototyping and user research, we were able to create a finished prototype. We used Fusion 360 to create and model our lunchbox. We tried to simplify our design as much as possible to allow our design to be injection molded by adding draft angles and rounding out corners, even if we were going to be 3D printing our . We also purchased parts, such as latches and a silicone gasket, from McMaster Carr, for parts that could not be 3D printed. We presented all of our work at a final showcase to industry advisors.
