Shopping Cart in your Bag

A folding grocery bag that can fit in your backpack and easy to carry out.

Overview

Course:

Product Design: Designing for People

Group Member:

Ruiling Huang, Man Fung Tse, Yuanyuan Wang, myself

Challenge:

Design a physical product for urban mobility. How to help a petite international female student transport heavy groceries from the grocery shop to home in New York City.

Outcome:

A prototype grocery card made by chipboard and tape measure.

Duration:

February 2020 - March 2020

Role of me:

Researcher, interviewer, idea provider, information manager

Choosing Topic

When we got the course topic that we have to design a physical product to change the problem of urban mobility. My four group mates and I listed out all the problems we care about in New York City and we vote one that we are most interested in. We found that international students study in a different country would have a problem of buying foods from grocery shops far away from home and having trouble transferring them home, especially for female students.

Provocation

We did some provocation on our own, and we list out our assumptions about our topic. And we found the best fresh idea for our assumption.

Focus area: Experience of transporting groceries to home

Boldest provocation: ”Bag that doesn’t touch the ground”

Best fresh idea: wearable grocery container.

Research

Interview

First interview, we did three people, we found their hobby of buying groceries. They are all ITP students and we used post-it notes to write down their hobbies.

Interesting Found

We found that two females will put the grocery bag on the subway chair or put on their leg, and that guy will put on the floor.

Define

Persona

We found that our one of the interviewee, Yiting, her situation is the best fit of our idea, we made a persona based on her information.

Insight and opportunity

Each of us wrote down some opportunities and insights, we vote for the one we are most interested in.

Ideation

We set down our opportunity statement is “There is an opportunity to provide female students a better way to carry heavy groceries through public transportation with less effort.”

Random Entry

We use two different things that are not related to our product to do a brainstorm and came up with some ideas.

Each of us chose three ideas that we like from the brainstorm and we draw a storyboard for thee of them.

We did another round of interviews to see different people have different opinions and suggestions.

Final concept and statement

We came up with our final update base on the interview we had.

Our new opportunity statement is” There’s an opportunity to provide female students a more portable, fashionable design to carry heavy groceries through public transportation with less effort.“

We came out with a new storyboard.

Prototype

We came up with the magical roll-out unique design of the handles and the grocery holders inspired by origami. The measuring tape is having a convenient characteristic that it is easy to put in the bag and carry out. We thought that is a good fit for our grocery cart.

We open up a suitcase to find how a suitcase work.

We used the cardboard box to do a rough prototype and did a user test for feedback.

The feedback from the instructor is why do we have two layers, and she thinks it will be better if we could change it to a one-step one layer box.

The cart is a two-layer grocery card that has a compact design in both boxes and handles and easy to put in the bag and carry away.

We final decision to make our cart in two layers due to the amount needed for the student. Because the may student will do meal prep base on our research, they will need to buy a lot, the grocery card needs to contain a large number of items including heavy, fragile, and liquid. Two layers could help them better manage to set their items when transferring them to home.

For the inside design, we used fabric to connect the chipboard together. It could be that more affordable for the heavy stuffs. We used the fabric from the suitcase we open. We thought that can waterproof, will be the best fit for a containing product. The zipper design in the front could easy to put in and put out something. When it folds together, it is like a 15 inches laptop size that can perfectly fit in a student's backpack.

Final Outcome

Further Steps

Urban motility is always a problem people care about. We chose to solve the problem we are most familiar with. The purpose of doing that is we want to show our prospect of how this problem is important to us, and we hope to use our way or in the further people will use our way to solve this problem.

We may have to fix the problem of how to hide the wheels and how to lighter its’ weight and make it fitter for the student's backpack.