Digital Portfolio
It all happened a couple months ago when school started and we had the first day of our class called Trep Studio. This was a class where it was all about creating a business and designing a company along with making a product from that company. The teachers assigned us to think about an idea or problem that meant a lot to us and create a solution to solve that problem. As I sat there pondering, this is when I had a flash back to this car ride, that I had with my parents.
I was driving to Seattle with my parents and I had this idea to help solve the way people eat Pringles. I told my dad that I wanted to help benefit the way that people eat snack foods like Pringles out of a can to a more efficient experience. The problem that I personally have while eating Pringles is that my hand is too big to get into the can to get the chips out and I would imagine that other people have the same problem. When he asked me why I don’t just dump the chips out, I replied with “dad not only is that a little harder then I want it to be, but I don’t want my chips to break when they come out.” He says “son, that’s a great idea, what you could also do is make it so it was like a push pop or have some kind of magnet.”
The first step in the design thinking process was to gain empathy. In order for us to this, our team had to interview experts and possible users. The first person we interviewed was Dr. Steven C. Zemke. Zemke was a mechanical engineer who taught at Gonzaga University who told us that if we were going to make a product, then we needed to make something that people are going to want to buy. He also gave us a different perspective of the way we look at things. He had us think about being in the users shoes and had us look at what we would want to buy being a snacker whom likes Pringles. We also went around interviewing other people and the average came out to having 2/10 people that would buy our product, but these numbers were just around our school. These seem to be low numbers but, our goal was to still impact the 20% that might buy our product.
After we talked to Zemke, I just wanted to start prototyping, so I did just that. One of the phases was “The Rapid Prototyping” phase and it was quite useful because in order to have a product there has to be a prototype. Most people can’t just come up with a prototype on the spot, so the Rapid Prototyping is in place for people to come up with ideas for whatever product is taking place and build it.
I used it for just that. As soon as we got to the prototyping phase, I went out and got a bunch of different little things that I could prototype with like Pringles cans, big and little, and some wire and magnets. My first thought on the prototyping was to have a spring in the bottom of the can to prop up the chips but that idea fell through because of not being able to get a spring to the bottom of the can without taking the chips out. My second thought was to put the spring in the top and have the can flipped up side down then have the users and eat of the can upside down, but then I realized that people wouldn’t want to cut the bottom of the can. I then started looking at different ways to cut the can so that the sides fell down, but then there would be no support for this great tower of chips. From there I played around with the Pringles cans and came up with the idea of magnets. I will now slide magnets in the bottom of the can and use magnets to pull the chips up. This phase helped me because while I was going through it, I was able to make as many things as I could in two days, just so I could bust out some ideas for my future prototype
So my proposal was to have a spring underneath all of the chips so that when the chips got lower then the chips could then be propped up, but the problem that I had with that was, how in the hell was I supposed to get a functional spring to the bottom of a Pringles can but, I probably wasn’t going to be to.
Just picture this. You are sitting at home and you are snacking on something snacky like, like Oreos, but you then later decide that you want more out of life then just Oreos, so you get up and walk over to the pantry and start scrounging through all the things in you pantry. You’ve got lots of cereal, lots of Chex mix, and lots of Doritos, and just when your ready to give up and go back to your Oreos, you see just out of the corner of your eye, a can of Pringles on the tops shelf! You climb to the top of the racks to grab the last can of Pringles. You then go sit back down to eat your Pringles. As you’re sitting there eating them, you soon realize that as the farther down you get into the can, the harder it is to grab the chips. You start wondering if there is something else that could help the problem of getting the Pringles from the can. That’s where my product comes into play. The new edited Pringles can, that Pringles can use so that when you sit down to eat your snack it’s efficient for you to eat the snack that you not only love, but the snack that you deserve.
Improve the convenience for more efficiency, that is our motto and the company will do just that. Snack solutions has a dream to be a trend, meaning that in the near future, everybody may want to help better the way that people eat snacks today. The hope of the company is to one day, create recyclable product that may give our future a more sustainable future. Snack solutions wants everybody to be on board and be apart of making packages that set a better future for our world today. The reason people should be so passionate about how they view Snack Solutions is because Snack Solution cares about how we snack on our foods today.