About a week ago we watched a very informative video in which I learned a lot. It was watched at the very beginning of our project, so the subject matter being redesigning something was very fitting. A group of professionals was put together and given the task of redesigning a shopping cart. Shopping carts have just always been the way they are so sometimes it's very hard to come up with a way to change it.
They went through much of the same process that we have for our project. They brainstormed and then each made separate prototypes presenting their ideas. From there, the best concepts from each were taken and merged into one. The main key to redesigning the cart was to list all of the problems with the original. In their case just a few of them were that (1) they are frequently stolen, (2) they are bulky to take down aisles, and (3) checking out took a while. The way they gathered to fixed these problems were (1) they made the the cart just a frame with baskets, so who would steal just a frame?, (2) the baskets in the cart were removable to take down the aisles and then put back into the cart, and (3) they made a scanner so you could scan your items as they were placed in the cart and then the cashier takes it from there. Overall, they were able to come up with some very innovative ideas.
We thrived to use the same process for our prototype considering theirs went so well. The problems with our ice cube tray was that (1) it is hard to fill up, (2) it spills on the way to the fridge, and (3) getting the ice cubes out is very problematic. Many sketches later, we came up with the winning design. We made it so that (1) It is filled in an upright position with a closing lid, (2) it completely closes and forms a seal tight bond, and (3) then opens in a horizontal position with the dividers then lifting out. We are very happy with our winning prototype and owe a little thanks can go to the IDEO video for helping us with the redesign process.
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