Reflection 2: The Barbecube

Our first design project was to create a product to help four people carry everything they need to hold a barbeque (except the grill and at least half a mile over any type of terrain).

My initial reaction when watching the presentations was that it was incredible how differently such a seemingly-simple problem statement was interpreted by each group. Our solution, the “barbecube” came primarily out of interviewing about 25 people who were about 22-30 years old. We realized that this user group most enjoyed the socializing aspect of barbequing, least enjoyed the clean-up, often had trouble figuring out how to coordinate and remember to bring all necessary barbeque items, and had the least space in their apartments to store a lot of things. We focused primarily on how we could address these four things with our product and allow our user to truly carry everything he/she might need to enjoy a barbeque. I really enjoyed watching the groups who chose a different user group, primarily the one that chose to try to re-create the 50s picnic and the one that created a device for people who don’t generally barbeque. I learned from this process that it is incredibly important to have a clear user in mind and found the presentations of the groups who did so much more successful than those who didn’t. It helped direct the visions of the final products and gave them a story and a sense of direction.

Another important lesson was how important pacing is in these projects. If we had had more time, I think it would have been really wonderful to have gotten to create our cart-table to carry the cubes. One way that I think we could have created more time for ourselves would have been to conduct even more rapid prototypes. For example, we spent at least 4 hours putting together a Velcro latching system between each of the boxes that turned out to be completely unnecessary (and somewhat detrimental) to our overall design. We ultimately ended up removing all the excess Velcro, but a quick prototype of our carrying mechanism would have led us to this conclusion before we had invested the time in attempting it in the first place. I was impressed by how much information could be gathered through rapid-prototyping. In addition, having a suggested timeline was incredibly helpful in making sure that we finished all stages of the process in a timely manner. It makes me think that perhaps I should invest an hour crafting such a timeline for my 203 project in order to ensure that it gets done by the end of the quarter!