Bringing design thinking to physical products

In late 2021, I co-founded Uuvipak with the mission to eradicate plastic pollution by creating fully sustainable packaging from fully biodegradable organic materials. After months of research on materials that we could use as replacements, we came to a formulation that worked and were excited to hit the market with new products.

But hang on, what products?

Step 1, Do your research.

To identify the right products to develop, we conducted a lot of market research, starting from people that use single use packaging. From take away containers, cups, cutlery, to things like packaging for products that sits on supermarket shelves.

Step 2, Prototype.

We concluded that starting from cups would have been a good approach, since cups are pretty ubiquitous and seemed to be a pretty approachable product. We designed our first cup, 3d printed it and then turned it into a product made Uuvipak's material. It was so exciting!

We went out and spoke to the people we interviewed during the initial phase of product design and discovery, and suddenly figured out we missed A LOT of details that go into designing a take away cup... Something we thought as very straight forward, turned out to be much more complex. We needed to consider things like weight, thickness, grip, diameter, lid fitting, storage, stacking, and many more details!

Step 3, Iterate.

So we iterated again. This time we went back to a more traditional cup design, created models and 3d printed them. We tested these 3d printed versions to start, and then turned them into Uuvipak products.

It turned out the cups needed even more iterating. We nailed almost all the details this time, except users expected the cups to be even lighter, and easier to stack, so that they would take up less space and feel like "disposables" instead of being heavy and feel very durable.

Next, we created another version of the Uuvipak cups. This time, lighter, stronger and much more stackable. People loved it!

As a designer, I loved going through this iterative process and learn about the nitty gritty of creating something that's seemingly so simple: a cup. Often, as users, we overlook details of the products we use, and don't even consider how much impact design has on objects we use every day. Details that only hard-core users notice when comparing your product to what they are currently using.

Thinking about how we developed this product, makes me realise how important design research is, and why a lot of products never make big once they hit the market. They are either designed in a vacuum, where nobody but the people that create them get to play around until they are in users' hands, or designed for a very particular group of users which is not representative of the whole population.