Product Design and Development...Developments

Today was spent on a road trip to Rhode Island School of Design (in, you guessed it - Rhode Island!).  We went down there to work with our RISD teammates on our product design and development project which is to improve the experience of using a water fountain.  Our goal is to create a faucet/bubbler spout that encourages you to drink tap water from a water fountain versus buying bottled water.

At first we thought about telling you how much money you'd saved from the amount that you drank, but through our process decided that the fact of how much CO2 you saved by not buying bottled water that had been packaged and shipped actually had more impact.  Our aim is to have a final faucet where you know how much CO2 you saved depending on how long the button was held down (roughly equivalent to how much you drank).

While we've tossed around designs for faucets, we actually ended up primarily tackling the issue of how to present the water fountain concept, in a functioning way, without being near a bathroom or faucet.  Today, between work time and an extended trip to home depot, we spent eight hours working on building a cart to hold the water fountain as well as making sure our electronics worked.

It kind of explains itself

We were in the store for probably almost two hours - going over what we needed and verbally iterating our design.  It ended up working out pretty well.

The final faucet form for the review on Tuesday (yes, this Tuesday) is still in process, though we know what we want it to look like.  From our time working at RISD, I snapped a bunch of action shots.  Hope you enjoy.

On a side note, I saw something today when we grabbed a late lunch at Wendy's that was SO COOL.  There was a soda machine with one dispenser and a screen where you could pick many different sodas, but add flavor to them!  I don't know if these versions of the sodas were ever made, but I thought it was awesome to pick almost literally, whatever you wanted.  I had peach Fanta mixed with raspberry Sprite.  Where else could you do that??

The actual dispenser (I have since learned that this thing is called a Coca Cola Freestyle machine)

The soda cup (They called this a medium?!? It was so big!) that listed all the different flavors you could add to the core soda