The various powder-based drink mixes that I consume sit in our cabinets in non-recyclable plastic bags that unseal easily, look similar, spill regularly when being loaded into a bottle, and don’t pack well into storage. I had some free time, and this product issue topped my personal design “bug list,” a concept taken directly from the founders of IDEO, so I jumped into some super quick and crude ideation and sketching for ways to improve the powder-based drink mix packaging below. Full disclosure, this exercise was done in a short span (to practice ideating and sketching quickly), so there may be room for improvement, or ideas that you can add to the pile!
Going into this exercise, I had a mental jumble of problems and solutions related to the drink mix containers shown above, so I took 15 minutes to “organize” them into a mind map— generally one of my favorite solo brainstorming tools. The mind map came out looking like:
From the mind map, a few key themes emerged:
- Being able to see the level of “fullness” in the container without opening it (especially good in humid locations)
- Ensuring that the product has recyclable components
- Using a scoop (especially with non-standard sizing) should be avoided if possible— avoiding spilling should be a priority
- Combining (1) and (3), for any dispenser that doesn’t use a scoop, there needs to be a way to easily pour the right amount of powder for a given drink
- The overall form factor of a loose bag does not store well in shelves, especially with multiple bags all together
- It’s impossible to tell what flavor some of the brands are from 50% of viewpoints
- There may be treatments to the powder itself that enable different storage and use mechanisms (see Nuun tablets, e.g.)
Based on the mind map and the resultant themes above, I ideated and sketched solutions that met some or all of the upgrades that I had ideated.
In order to keep the article short, I stopped after ideation and sketching, but wanted to put my proverbial sticky notes on the ideas or features that I thought had the most merit that I would continue to pursue. The major winners for me were:
- Cardboard- or clear PET-based container with a transparent plastic window/slot to view the fill-level makes the product more recyclable and provides more user feedback on current fill-level. I would want to explore the efficacy of using a digital scale and the ability to pour into a bottle without any measurement from the user by creating some super basic sketch models from bent foam core or cardboard and using sand or my existing powder supply to test out different shapes, sizes, and effectiveness.
- Changing the medium of the powder into a congealed tablet or dissolvable sphere would open up a lot more recyclable and user-friendly deposit methods into a bottle. Next steps for this route could be as simple as getting some cookie or ice cube molds and testing out how different liquids and compounds you could purchase at the grocery store can transform the powder into something more rigid or pliable.
- Creating a solution that automatically dispenses a single serving size would take a lot of the burden off the user. This could take a ton of different forms, so my first next step would be to ideate and flesh out some more sketches of mechanisms that could accomplish this before I started putting physical models together.
Each of solution spaces above has uses outside of this specific focus as well— that’s often the beauty of starting with a very specific problem and then seeing how your devised solution relates to adjacent problems.
But anyways, that was a quick run-through from problem identification to sketching of one of the items on my personal bug list– and how I would go about solving it (at least at a micro-level)!
Recess 023