Design Awaken

After a long while, thoughts on design thinking

2010-03-13T18:07:00.000-08:00

Today is the first day of Spring break, a time when I can relax a bit after what has been a very intense semester so far. I just realized I haven't posted anything in a long time (May 30, 2009 to be more precise). So much happened since then... over the summer I traveled to South Africa with Global Studio, and also to Kenya with UHartford, Brown University and U. of Rhode Island teams (and had a brief visit to Amsterdam!). Then for the Christmas holidays, I visited Argentina, reunited with family and long time friends. And after a short day of layover in CT, I packed my bag to go on my second implementation trip to India. And then classes began and I have barely had time to process all these experiences.

So, today I am relaxing. And what do I do to relax? Listen to music, watch TED videos and read articles (doesn't seem to be much different of what I regularly do! –except of course, not teaching). In any case, my mind is in a different synchrony now, as I'm trying to slow down.

But of course, the workaholic in me is always thinking about stuff, and as I watched videos on TED.com I found an inspiring talk by Tim Brown (the CEO of the "innovation and design" firm IDEO) urging designers to think big:

Tim Brown says the design profession is preoccupied with creating nifty, fashionable objects – even as pressing questions like clean water access show it has a bigger role to play. He calls for a shift to local, collaborative, participatory "design thinking.

Brown talks about engagement of everyone involved in the design process (participatory design). Also he explains how design thinking is related to learning by doing, and paying attention to users' needs.

Just yesterday I was finishing a grant application for an engaged learning fellowship. I tried my best to summarize how I see design, and how I envision to apply the outcome of the grant research to my course "Design Global Change." I wish I had watched Brown's talk earlier as it summarizes how I would hope my students will see design thinking after going through this DGC course.

At least I know I am in the right track!

Global Studio Johannesburg 2009

2009-05-30T22:30:00.000-07:00

In about 3 weeks I'm going to Africa! Last Sunday May 24th, I was accepted to participate as a Global Studio project associate, to work on a UN Millennium Development Goals program in the Diepsloot slum of Johannesburg :-))))

This video shows the project in 2007, same place where I will be collaborating beginning June 26-July 21. And this map shows the location of Diepsloot.

This is a great interdisciplinary project. I'm super excited about this opportunity and I'm thankful to the coordinators for choosing me among many qualified candidates.

Exhibition Design at the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center

2009-03-24T19:24:00.000-07:00

On Friday, March 27th, from 4:30-6:30pm, the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center is having a public reception honoring my senior design students, who worked last fall semester 2008 on the reinterpretation of Stowe’s visitor center.

“Enlivening the Past: Exhibition Design as Storytelling” is an investigation of alternative ways the visitor might experience Stowe’s Hartford home created by University of Hartford students under the direction of Professors Natacha Poggio and Lauren Cook. Students were challenged to incorporate senses beyond sight and explore new methods to bring the story of Stowe’s life alive.

Harriet Beecher Stowe Visitor Center is located at 77 Forest Street, Hartford, CT 06105.

The exhibit runs until April 30th, 2009.

CLIMATE WARS: Because we've always needed reasons to kill each other

2009-02-08T09:54:00.000-08:00

Posted by John McGrath @ Grist.

Canada's public broadcaster, CBC, has just finished airing the three-part series Climate Wars, based on the Gwynne Dyer book of the same name.

As if we didn't have enough "to worry about in a melting world, there's the sad fact that we'll have more reasons to kill each other over dwindling water and food supplies. When you consider that the 20th century was bloody enough as economic and industrial opportunities were expanding, the 21st century is looking mighty depressing if you believe that wars can start over resource scarcity."

Global warming is moving much more quickly than scientists thought it would. Even if the biggest current and prospective emitters -- the United States, China and India -- were to slam on the brakes today, the earth would continue to heat up for decades. At best, we may be able to slow things down and deal with the consequences, without social and political breakdown. Gwynne Dyer examines several radical short- and medium-term measures now being considered -- all of them controversial.

Climate Wars - Part One January 19, 2008

Climate Wars - Part Two January 28, 2008

Climate Wars - Part Three February 2, 2009

............

NHNE's Climate Change Resource Page

NHNE's 1000 Most Recent Climate Change Articles

A DIY Eye Controlled Mouse

2009-02-06T10:50:00.000-08:00

Two students from a technical high school in Argentina!!! (ORT) developed a mouse that can be controlled by eye movements, which allows people with total paralysis to use the computer.

Named the "Eye Mouse" this idea is not really new but what makes this case so different is that it is a DIY mouse that almost anyone can build with cheap and easy-to-find components.

How much does a glass of orange juice contribute to global warming?

2009-02-06T03:20:00.000-08:00

Super interesting article in the NYTimes about research conducted by PepsiCo, which owns the Tropicana brand, decided to try to answer that question.

TED2009: Pattie Maes and her "eco-friendly" wearable web-camera

2009-02-04T18:54:00.000-08:00

Mark Frauenfelder posted an article about Pattie Maes latest wearable-camera, via Boing-Boing:

MIT Media Lab researcher Pattie Maes is on stage at TED2009.

We don't have sense organs for data. Thanks to efforts such as Tim Berner-Lee's all of this knowledge has become available online. Could we evolve a 6th sense that would give us access to meta-information that may help us make the right decisions?

When you go to supermarket and you look at all the different kinds of toilet papers, you don't pull out your cell phone to look for which brand is the most eco-friendly (but I'll bet some of you Boing Boing readers so!).

Pattie is a wearing web-camera, a battery-powered projection system with mirror. It lets you walk up to any surface (including your hand) and interact with the projected interface. It responds to his gestures. If you hold your hands like you are taking a photo, the camera takes a photo, and then when you go back to the office, you can project all your photos and sort through them using natural gestures. She showed a projection of a phone keypad on her palm and dialed a number to make a call.

She shows a video of a guy looking at products in a supermarket. It projects a green, yellow, or red dot on a product, telling you whether or not it's eco-friendly (or whatever criteria you set up). If you look at a book, it'll project the Amazon rating on the book. Projecting a video of a news story on a blank rectangle on the Wall Street Journal!

Slumdog Millionaire could only have been made by a westerner

2009-02-03T01:56:00.000-08:00

Interesting article in The Guardian written by Nirpal Dhaliwal (Thursday, 15 January 2009).

It describes how blind Bollywood producers are to the reality of India

After its rapturous reception in Britain and America, knives are being sharpened for Slumdog Millionaire. Old iconic Bollywood blusterer, Amitabh Bachchan, critized the movie "If Slumdog Millionaire projects India as a third-world, dirty, underbelly developing nation and causes pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots, let it be known that a murky underbelly exists and thrives even in the most developed nations. It's just that the Slumdog Millionaire idea, authored by an Indian and conceived and cinematically put together by a westerner, gets creative global recognition," he added. Bachchan is no doubt riled, as many other Bollwood no-talents will be, about the fact that the best film to be made about India in recent times has been made by a white man, Danny Boyle.

The bitter truth is, Slumdog Millionaire could only have been made by westerners. The talent exists in India for such movies: much of it, like the brilliant actor Irrfan Khan, contributed to this film. But Bollywood producers, fixated with making flimsy films about the lives of the middle class, will never throw their weight behind such projects. Like Bachchan, they are too blind to what India really is to deal with it. Poor Indians, like those in Slumdog, do not constitute India's "murky underbelly" as Bachchan moronically describes them. They, in fact, are the nation. Over 80% of Indians live on less than $2.50 (£1.70) a day; 40% on less than $1.25. A third of the world's poorest people are Indian, as are 40% of all malnourished children. In Mumbai alone, 2.6 million children live on the street or in slums, and 400,000 work in prostitution. But these people are absent from mainstream Bollywood cinema.

Bachchan's blinkered comments prove how hopelessly blind he and most of Bollywood are to the reality of India and how wholly incapable they are of making films that can address it.

World Water day March 22, 2009

2009-02-01T22:29:00.000-08:00

The international observance of World Water Day is an initiative that grew out of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro.

In 2009, the focus of World Water Day on March 22 will be on transboundary waters, with UNECE and UNESCO as the lead agencies.

More information is available on the official UN World Water Day website: http://www.unwater.org/worldwaterday/

They have a very interesting display of collateral materials for promoting the event (posters, banners, web buttons, t-shirts and even mobile desktop wallpapers).

http://www.unwater.org/worldwaterday/campaign.html

Teaser Poster

Official Poster

Wallpaper 1

Large Display (240 x 320)

Wallpaper 2

Large Display (240 x 320)

Wallpaper 3

Large Display (240 x 320)

Screensaver 1

All Displays

Design #1

Download Template (PDF)

Design #2

Download Template (PDF)

300 x 76

274 x 113

215 x 124

Within Water for Life IRC will focus on water, gender and poverty alleviation. Water and sanitation are critical factors to alleviate poverty and hunger, for sustainable development, for environmental integrity, and for human health.

Communities have complex priorities for the use of water for economic activity and for household use. Men and women often have different priorities and responsibilities. A gender focus is not simply about ‘involving women’. It is about recognising the roles of men and women, and ensuring that the voices of women, who are mainly responsible for household water but who also want economic activity, are acted on.

This woman from the Sironko District of Uganda is a true citizen of the 21st century – a multi-tasking manager with daily performance targets. She wakes early to fetch water, store it, distribute it and manage sanitation facilities in the home. She goes to bed long after dark, when the cooking, cleaning, laundering and other chores are done. She probably has more work than her mother, being also responsible today for domestic animals. The 21st century woman participates in community development work, and uses her ‘spare’ time for income generating activities. She lives a high-pressure executive lifestyle, lacking only the income, the status, the holidays, the help in the home, a lifestyle consultant, a retirement date and a pension. Will the action decade - Water for Life - make a real difference to her life?

Picture from Allen Wekoye, Uganda.

Students Take Back The Tap

2009-02-01T18:58:00.000-08:00

This is a great initiative: I love tap water campaign

Students are vying for $1,500 and making a pitch to their campuses to kick the bottled water habit.

Check the video

In the Flow

2009-02-01T11:00:00.000-08:00

Nick de la Mare writes in his article "In the Flow"

“Going with your gut” sounds like an offhanded way to approach something, but the more practiced people are in their profession, the more often their instincts are right. This is what athletes and creatives call being “in the flow.” Flow is the result of natural ability combined with practice and skill acquisition. When people are at their best — when they are truly in the flow — they can get out of the trenches, see beyond the next bump in the road, and look holistically at a landscape.

For designers, getting in the flow is a good goal to have. If we focus on relationships rather than moments in time we can better achieve a holistic view of the world surrounding any object of focus. This in turn allows us to gain a deeper understanding of a design problem.

At the same time, it’s necessary for even the big thinkers to get down in the trenches sometimes, to ground-truth the environment and maintain realistic assumptions of the lay of the land. Empathy is critical to design.

Slow Innovation: Good ideas take a long time to perfect

2009-02-01T10:37:00.000-08:00

Reading David Hoffer's article about Innovation

Innovation takes a long time — longer than most businesses realize or even want to admit. Richard Luecke, the author of several books from the Harvard Business Essentials series, defines innovation as “the embodiment, combination or synthesis of knowledge in original, relevant, valued new products, processes or services.” Within this “synthesis of knowledge” is a twisting vortex of new ideas that have to be extracted, implemented, and exploited in order to become real innovations. In other words, identifying new ideas is only the first step in a long process. Bringing them to market and then dominating that market is an entirely different matter.

Take the music industry. Edison’s cylinder phonograph was invented in 1877, and the first wax cylinders were mass-marketed in the 1880s. This technology lasted until the 1910s, at which time disc records became the medium of choice for at-home music listeners. After that, the cylinder business petered out, but it took 30 years for flat discs to mature and develop into the dominant player in the industry.

More recent innovations in the recording industry are better known. Vinyl lasted for 80 years before it was challenged (meekly, some say) by cassette tapes and 8-track cartridges in the '70s and '80s. Real change, however, came in the 1990s with compact disc (CD) technology. Now digital music recordings are challenging the CD’s dominance, but MP3 technology didn’t simply appear in the late '90s. According to many accounts, that technology began life in the 1970s. Here again is another 30-plus-year innovation cycle.
[...]

Innovation isn’t only about new technology. In fact, it’s mainly about culture. Humans are by nature habitual animals, and it takes a lot to move us off of our habits. Technology may be advancing quickly, but that doesn’t mean humans have the interest or the aptitude to adopt it right away.
For example, Swiss inventor George de Mestral invented Velcro in 1941 after noticing the burrs of a burdock had small hooks that caught on his clothing during a hike. Yet it took him nearly 10 years to develop the invention, several more to get the patent (1955), and even longer to sell the product to some pioneering early adopters, including NASA and one or two sporting-equipment companies. So while Velcro was a brief moment of invention, the process of establishing it as part of the culture took much longer.

Eco calculator widget

2008-10-24T22:18:00.000-07:00

Check this out!Want to know how much greenhouse gas, trees and wastewater you can save by using eco-friendly paper products? Find out and keep track of environmental savings today by adding Green Printer’s Eco-Calculator widget code to your blog.

Vectorized Recycling Symbols for Designers

2008-10-24T17:33:00.000-07:00

I found this website with useful recycling symbols, so if you are still struggling with a symbol that doesn't look right, download the PDF and open it up in Illustrator.

Read the statements regarding proper usage of these symbols.

Teapots in Indianapolis

2008-10-17T02:54:00.000-07:00

After the MACAA sessions today, we were taken to the Indianapolis Museum of Art, for a highly inspiring lecture by Alfredo Jaar. At the museum shop I purchased two packaging items that I thought were connected to the tea packaging project.

One is actually tea, a bolder version of the bamboo cane I showed in class; the other is a candle holder, also made of bamboo sticks (Liz, this is a different way of approaching your concept, but it shows it could be simplified).

I also saw an interesting book with several examples of Chinese teapots. And I've been looking at different sites that sell teaware, like the Tao of Tea to try to find the book (because I didn't write the name down). In my search I cam across more links like Teapots through the Ages.

Last, I also found this interesting blog about tea pots and Chinese Gaiwan.

The new 15-inch MacBook Pro embodies Apple’s continuing environmental commitment.

2008-10-16T23:48:00.000-07:00

Highly recyclable and even more energy efficient, the new MacBook Pro is designed with the environment in mind.

A commitment that starts with products.

When it comes to being environmentally friendly, Apple approaches the challenge differently — through products like the new MacBook Pro. Unlike other companies, Apple controls every aspect of the production of its computers. So Apple designers and engineers can minimize their carbon footprint in ways others can’t. They design them with fewer parts. They build them using recyclable materials. They even create software that makes them more energy efficient. The result is a new standard for green design.

Find out what Apple is doing to protect the environment.

So how effective are arts in communicating about climate change and environmental issues in general?

2008-10-06T02:55:00.000-07:00

We can’t know for sure. But what is certain is that art has the potential to move us. As Karen Raney, editor of engage: the international journal of visual art and gallery education writes, “One reason art can work so powerfully on our perceptions is that artists tend to link different spheres and orders of experience.”

As we struggle increasingly to bridge the gaps between urgent, planetary crises and public engagement and political inertia, the turn to arts as a viable mode of communication makes sense. It’s not about being didactic; it’s about trying to make coherent that which is, on some levels, unthinkable.

On a related note, in lieu of the class canceled on Wednesday October 15th, you will read Learning Deficiency by Joel Towers [PDF] and write answers to the questions posted on Blackboard by Friday October 17th.

Argentinean Scientists Develop Biodegradable Material Similar to Plastic

2008-10-06T02:15:00.000-07:00

by Paula Alvarado, Buenos Aires on 11.20.06

Two teams of Argentinean investigators have been developing for the past three years a new biodegradable material from soy and sunflowers proteins that was recently awarded with the Dupont-Conicet Scientist Technologic Development Program: a 25 thousand dollars prize. Its main utility: agriculture and food packaging. Proteins to elaborate the material are obtained from soy and sunflowers seeds. Once isolated and dried, compost similar to flour with 90% proteins is obtained. Then, with water and other components, films of the new material are produced. “The material’s main disadvantage is that proteins are permeable to water, and that widens the applications it can have”, said to Argentinean newspaper La Nación doctor Adriana Mauri, one of the project’s coordinators. Its advantages are that as soy and sunflowers seeds are used to make eatable oil, the material could be produced from oil industry’s leftovers; and also, the material’s permeability to gas: "this is great because food packaged with this could have longer conservation time”, explained doctor Patricia Eisenberg, another project coordinator. With this prize, the team will begin to add other components that can help reduce the materials’ disadvantage. One of the best applications of the material is to enhance bilberries’ life, by covering them with a thin transparent eatable film. “A market that will require this type of materials is the organic food industry”, points the expert.

:: Via Treehugger :: Via La Nacion

Definition of Sustainable Packaging

2008-10-06T01:11:00.000-07:00

In 2005, the Sustainable Packaging Coalition℠ (SPC) completed version 1.0 of the Definition of Sustainable Packaging. This definition represents an important first step in articulating a common understanding of the term sustainable packaging. It provides a common vision and a framework for understanding activities directed toward improving packaging and continues to inform the future vision of the coalition and its individual member-companies.

Sustainable packaging:

	•	Is beneficial, safe & healthy for individuals and communities throughout its life cycle;
	•	Meets market criteria for performance and cost;
	•	Is sourced, manufactured, transported, and recycled using renewable energy;
	•	Maximizes the use of renewable or recycled source materials;
	•	Is manufactured using clean production technologies and best practices;
	•	Is made from materials healthy in all probable end of life scenarios;
	•	Is physically designed to optimize materials and energy;
	•	Is effectively recovered and utilized in biological and/or industrial cradle to cradle cycles.

The criteria presented here blend broad sustainability objectives with business considerations and strategies that address the environmental concerns related to the life cycle of packaging. SPC believes that by successfully addressing these criteria, packaging can be transformed into a cradle to cradle flow of packaging materials in a system that is economically robust and provides benefit throughout the life cycle—a sustainable packaging system. SPC recognizes that the timelines for achievement will vary across criteria and packaging materials. Together, these criteria characterize the vision of sustainable packaging. No ranking is implied in the order of definition criteria.

One-page Definition of Sustainable Packaging (PDF - 32 k)

Full Definition of Sustainable Packaging (PDF - 173 k)

The Designer’s Field Guide to Sustainability, by LUNAR

2008-10-06T00:54:00.000-07:00

The LUNAR Elements team has recently published “The Designer’s Field Guide to Sustainability”, a tool designed to help all designers and engineers, no matter what their level of experience, design more sustainable products.A quick note about the guide: None of these tips is a turn-key solution. They are very complex issues that often warrant added thought and discussion. Together, they provide a good start, and can help form a checklist of considerations to take along the design path to ensure that no sustainable opportunity has fallen through the cracks. Reviewed often, they can help us to make sustainability a fundamental part of our design and engineering processes.

Via ecolect.net

Social Studies: Educating designers in a connected world

2008-10-05T14:00:00.000-07:00

From my Issues in Design class evaluations, there were comments that I am more knowledgeable about issues of the world than issues of design... [to whom it may concern, I take that as a compliment]. If that is truly the case, the people who decided on the theme for this year AIGA design educators' conference were probably thinking on a disparate educator, someone like myself...

This conference addresses the social life of design. Graphic designers work with clients, institutions, users, and communities to make things happen in the world. Yet education often focuses on the individual voice. How are we preparing students for a lifetime of working with and for other people? How are our students connecting to the world?

I'll let you draw your own conclusions about how closely my assignments relate/d to the issues to be discussed in this conference. For the purpose of this blog, I wanted to share the links to the sessions on Sustainability.

Sustainability # 1 has a presentation on Package Design and Sustainability!!!

Sustainability # 2 features Eric Benson—the professor who critiqued your archives, and who will be looking at your process blogs—presenting on how future design education will be one that empowers the designer to become proactive in educating and advocating for positive social changes that can sustain our craft within a new green economy.

Preparation for field trip to Japanese Tea Ceremony at Wesleyan University

2008-10-03T20:01:00.000-07:00

In preparation for our field trip to Wesleyan University Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies on Monday October 13th, 2008, I would like to share some links that I found helpful to understand what is involved in a Japanese Tea Ceremony.

In 2001, at the international center at Stanford University, I attended a chaji (literally “tea function”) or traditional ritual demonstrated by a Japanese Chado Tea Ceremony Master. This native Japanese woman wore a beautiful kimono and followed every detail of the ritual. She first explained what she was going to do, and what the attendees were supposed to do, and then proceeded with the ritual without uttering a single word for about one hour! The ceremony lasted about 2.5 hours in total.

It was an experience I will never forget, all my senses were involved in this ritualized sequence of movements, a formal dance of significant gestures, the stirring sounds, the scent of the hot tea brewing, the bitter flavor, and the touch of the smooth cold teaware.

“The tea ceremony requires years of training and practice . . . yet the whole of this art, as to its detail, signifies no more than the making and serving of a cup of tea. The supremely important matter is that the act be performed in the most perfect, most polite, most graceful, most charming manner possible.”— Lafcadio Hearn

Among the Japanese meditative arts, none is more highly esteemed or inclusive of different artistic media than chado, or “way of the tea.”

About the tea ceremony, Gerald Yoshitomi says, “the art of the tea has been characterized as the very essence of Japanese culture, embodying as it does the various artistic disciplines of ceramics, architecture, visual art, literature, and calligraphy, not to mention the mental discipline which goes into the formation of one’s character.”

Chado is a complex series of hundreds of steps designed around the act of serving tea and requires a connoisseurship of all the necessary physical accoutrements as well as acute sensitivity in the disciplined interaction among its participants. When properly practiced, the natural setting, the delicately wrought tea utensils, the simple elegance of the decorations, and the smooth, regulated movements of the participants combine to remove the host and guests from the pressures of the outside world and place them in an atmosphere where each finds inner peace and tranquility. Historically, chado has left its mark on many other art forms. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for example, tea masters influenced the shaping of some of the most beautiful of ceramic tea ware, always preferring the simple, rustic, and spare over the highly finished and refined. {1}

I tried to find a video showing a traditional ceremony in the way I witnessed with the Chado master. The closest I found is this Living Asia Channel - Window Program video.

The main component of this trip to Wesleyan –which I really enjoy!– is the opportunity to visit a Japanese-style room and garden, an architectural ensemble consisting of Shôyôan, a room in the style of Japanese domestic architecture, and its adjoining Japanese-style garden, Shôyôan Teien (Shôyôan Garden). The Freeman family garden Shôyôan Teien was designed and built in 1995 by Stephen Morrell, a landscape architect specializing in Japanese-style gardens. Stephen Morrell has learned the art of Chado in Japan and will be demonstrating the Tea Ceremony.

I cannot promise my students that this Japanese Tea demonstration at Wesleyan will make such a remarkable impression in them (as the one I had in 2001), but at least I would hope that they gain a better understanding of a different culture and how the Tea Ceremony –which has been forgotten in China, the land of its origin– lives in Japanese culture as an exercise in courtesy and an art. But also as a journey, a spiritual refreshment, when one learns to spend precious moments in the small things, appreciating the beauty of life, of something as simple as making and serving a cup of tea.

For the students who have kindly volunteered to carpool to Wesleyan, these Googlemap directions will help you become familiar with the drive prior to the trip (I'll print them up).

Field trip to Tisane for tea tasting

2008-10-03T19:54:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday October 1st, we went to Tisane Tea & Coffee House.

Hartford Art School Alumna Erin Gamble has kindly presented my class with an introduction to the history of tea, also allowing my students to taste the different varieties of tea (white, green, oolong and black) and experience the brewing of tea in a new way.

I think the trip was an interesting experience, at least to see the different tea leaves and checkout the famous brick tea...

Some photos of this field trip will be uploaded soon.

Students process blogs

2008-10-03T19:33:00.001-07:00

Check them out, you can follow your peers progress by adding their blog into your dashboard in Blogger.

Cotto, Lyrette
Cunningham, Joseph
Gowen-Segovia, Constanza
Gummelt, Ashley
Herrmannsdoerfer, Kim
Kazmierczak, Tomasz
Kempain, Jordan
Kozlosky, Ashley
Lee, Grace
Luciano, Stephanie
Miller, Hali
Minkler, Jacqueline
Nicoll, Michael
Reyes, Elizabeth
Sangeorge, Alexander
Wald, Klayton
Willey, Jenness

Challenge: Design a sustainable/repurposable tea packaging

2008-10-03T18:46:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone!

My name is Natacha Poggio and I'm an Assistant Professor of Visual Communication Design at Hartford Art School, University of Hartford. This blog will serve as an account of the assignments I created for my classes, which revolve around my commitment to design ethics and sustainability in design education.

Currently, this blog will post updates regarding the second assignment for the senior course Design Problem Solving, the project challenges students to design a sustainable tea packaging. I usually save bookmarks related to Sustainability and the Tea packaging assignment to my delicious account. Please, check them out.

Here are the guidelines for the Sustainable Packaging Design project* that my students are currently working on:

Design the packaging and brand suite (3 varieties) for "awaken" tea company.
Design the logo for "awaken" and basic stationery.
Create a 3D mockup of the packaging concept (digital or physical)
Document in a process blog the progress made through the five weeks the assignment entails.
Packaging must have limited impact on the environment, i.e.; has to be sustainable (recyclable, biodegradable, water soluble, repurposable)
Consolidate in a powerful presentation the brand application, packaging comparative analysis of competitors, and SWOT.

Awaken Tea is targeted to environmentally-concerned young professionals (green advocates who think green, shop green, live green). In the 25-40 years old niche, this audience is health conscious, and interested in organic and eco-friendly products and activities.

The project was assigned on Wed. Sept 17th and it will be due on October 27th, 2008.

*This project was "recycled" from a course created by Professor Eric Benson, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.