Final Product

 

Here is the final net of my product, I have painted on the details that I would like to have shown on the box. I wanted to keep it limited with the amount of detail printed on. 

For this example I used watercolour to design the box, I think it works very well, and gives the impression of a professional product. I wanted to give a blue and yellow trim to give it a finished look. I painted the hobsons logo on the front, and the address on the back, along with social media logos, to show that they are associated with them. I also included a QR code which would be scanned and would take you to the Hobsons website. The hedgehog, gives a hint as to what the theme of the secondary use, even creating curiosity to the consumer, to wonder why it was on the box.

I am very please with the outcome of the box, as I feel it looks professionally and works really well as its primary use, as it is very strong and sturdy, and can carry the six full size bottles of Hobsons without fault. The secondary use is also a very strong use as it has associations with the hedgehog society, creating a very strong link between the two as well as being a positive influence on helping the environment.

Linking Hedgehogs to Hobsons

As part of my feedback about my product, was how does hedgehogs link with the Hobsons brand, was there already a link there or would I have to create one. 

At first I couldn't find/ think of a link, but after going to a local garden centre, I found them selling the Hobsons products, and to my delight, a hedgehog themed beer, where the bottle is associated with the British Hedgehog Preservation Society!

 

This was a great find and meant that my idea has a lot more meaning behind it, I decided to look into the Hedgehog Preservation Society to get a better idea of the company.

www.britishhedgehogs.org.uk

I found the website, which unfortunately is still underconstruction but they do have Facebook links, and other social media, but I couldn't find any links to Hobsons, which is unfortunate but at least now I know that my idea is a lot more stronger than before.

Seed Cardboard

For my bottle carrier, I want it to be as environmentally friendly as I can possibly make it, and as cardboard is a huge packaging offender in the industry I was trying to think of ways of making the cardboard, work beyond the secondary use it already has, so to a further third use. The idea that my tutor gave me was brilliant, use cardboard that has been impregnated with seeds, so once the carrier has completed the secondary use, rather than it being left the garden like huge pile pulp, having something grow out of it, sounds so beautiful, creating new life after helping a little one.

So I decided to do some research in to this, to see how it all works.

The first thing I came across was, the Life Box, released by Paul Stamets, a mycologist and mycomimicry.

 

 

the box can be torn up and soaked to activate the many seeds embedded in the cardboard. Each Life Box contains enough tree seeds to grow an entire forest ecosystem, with all of the species contained in the boxes approved as non-invasive in the United States.

 

The boxes are made from a specialist cardboard production technique that impregnates the corrugations with hundreds of tree seeds and thousands of beneficial spores, mycorrhizal fungi.

The concept is simple, as soon as you finish with the packaging, just tear it up and begin watering.  Within two months tree saplings will appear, which can be separated and planted.  The tree varieties include Alders, Pine, Birches, Hemlocks & Cedars, these represent a quarter of the species which thrive within the USA.  The company that produce the boxes estimate that one tree from the hundreds of seeds in each box should survive for around 30 years, providing one ton of carbon to be stored.

 

Roll-Out Veg Mat. Each season householders buy a new roll of corrugated cardboard impregnated with vegetable seeds.

 

I think this is a really good way to go for my product, as I think it would encourage people to build the hedgehog house, knowing that in a few months time after, they would then have a lovely flower patch, we could even use vegetable seeds to encourage home growing of vegetables.



Colour Pallette

Before painting the final cardboard net, I needed to work out the best colour/shade of blue. Even though I knew I wouldn't of been able to get the right shade, to give a good idea to the client, I thought using a similar colour scheme, would help identify the brand, and be able to see their product.

 Above is the shades of blue that i could find. i used the same cardboard as I would be using for my final piece, to ensure the same outcome. In the end I chose the bottom left colour. 

Secondary Use: Hedgehog House Instruction Design Two

As I changed the shaping of the box, I had to change the instructions. The original instructions say to use the handles of the box, but as I have completely changed the design, I had to think of another way that the user could make the tunnel, but without adding extra materials. That's when i decided that using the leaflet itself to make the tunnel would be a good idea, as then I am using all the elements of the box in the secondary use.

3D Prototype

Taking my prototype from a previous exercise, where I had all the measurements correct, I just needed to tweak and fix some elements of the box. 

I looked further into types 
 of handle locking techniques and found one that really made my box a lot stronger.

Even though there is a lot of tape around the box, when made for the final product this will not appear. It was simple because I was adding and taking away elements of the box, to find out what fitted best and what worked best in order to make the box the strongest it could be. 

I wanted to try it with six bottles of beer in, in order to get the idea of the weight and the strength of the box, and to see if it worked. I also included the raffia so that I could get a good idea of the appearance of the box overall, and to see if it worked as a protected to the bottle.

Overall I am extremely happy with this prototype and feel confident in going forward to creating the final product. i do want to neaten up the edges, and maybe make handles more round, rather than square.

Green Design Learning Report Draft Part One

In this learning report I will be discussing the research I had conducted and how this has led to the decisions I made to create my final practical piece.

To begin with I went around my local supermarket to see what is already available. My conclusion was simple, they were all very similar in shape and style. A handle at the top, all using just one piece of cardboard that is folded and stuck together, using glue for the structure to be able to hold the weight of the bottles. Through my research I only found one carrier that supported six bottles of which also had the thinnest cardboard which I thought was strange but it still worked.

I also dissected a few bottle carriers so I could get an inside and hands on approach of carriers that are already being used. This enabled me to see nets once deconstructed. The one piece of packaging that only used one strip of glue the least amount was also the only one that used a separate plastic handle whereas the rest used multiple strips of glue and the handle was attached to the cardboard as on piece. This suggests that the glue is used to hold the weight of the bottles, but using a stronger material that is separate to the net also works just as well. But you could argue which is more harm to the environment, which I would say the packaging that used more glue as you can easily separate the plastic handle from the cardboard, and recycle where appropriate.

As well as researching into cider and ale carriers, I also wanted to look at wine bottle packaging, as this can be more stylish and refined. This really opened my eyes to different ways of making packaging into a nice looking way of transporting the bottles.

The first prototype of the carrier design at first glance was a success. The finished product worked out the way I wanted it to work and look. The idea was to have a box with doors that open either side of the box which opens up to a window that shows off the product inside, like the client wanted. But unfortunately when I made a 3D version, I found that couldn’t make enough attachments for the box to stay together and be strong enough to hold the weight of six bottles. This was a massive flaw, which showed me that I needed to think a lot more in depth into my designs and so I went back to the drawing board to rethink my ideas.

The idea that I have taken forward into my final design was actually adapted version of my own comic book box I used to store my comics in which I had brought a couple of years ago. The box has a double layer of card at the bottom, which helps support heavy objects. The original however used glue on the one side of the net that I decided to take put and see if I could find a better, glue-less solution. I managed this by using a slot technique where the tab is scored on either side which folds out on the other side to be wider than the slot so it doesn’t fall back through. This has worked out very well and seems to be strong enough as a subtitle to the glue.

The handle has been made stronger through the use of the slotting technique. This was found out through trial and error, as a previous idea was to have layers of cardboard that wrap around each other each other. This seemed like a good idea, until I put it into practice and put weight in the box, and this is where the handle seemed to struggle and the box started to buckle in on itself. This led me to look else where for handle ideas, and I found this slotting technique, which meant that I had to add to extra tabs onto the sides that slot over the handle, to create a more stable carrier. I feel that making sure the bottom of the box and the handle of carrier as strong as I could without using excess materials, it would give the best support for the products it has to carry.

Raffia

Secondary Use

Improvements

Conclusion