For this project we were told to imagine up our world 30 years into the future in context of a chosen theme and then design a product for that world. My group decided to use the theme ‘wild’ and not as in the Wild West. We started brainstorming what this world might be like and to be honest, it sadly wasn’t very wild at all. We were saying things like increased climate change, larger economic divide between rich and poor, wars, advancements in medicine etc. The world we imagined was very corrupt, unpleasant and far too inevitable. Each of us chose to target a particular area of this future wild world and designed a relevant product.
My Product
I chose to design for a problem which is rather prevalent even today but will probably be more so in this future. That problem is the invasion of flies in our homes and buildings. In our future world, the temperature has risen drastically as well as the humidity which is perfect for fly world domination. I wanted to design a product which would be highly effective against large numbers of flies without us humans having to lift a finger. So I got to designing and below is my design process page on which I founded my product.
As you can see its called… S.P.I.D.R. which stands (rather desperately) for Special Permanent Insect Defence and Radar. I came up with two methods of this, the first one was a ceiling to air missile system which tracks and shoots down flies and other such pests within a limited range. However, I realised this is slightly hazardous because people won’t want to be bombarded by little pellets every time a fly enters the room so I needed another system. So, I thought about it a bit more and came up with a device which emits a specific radio frequency to kill flies quickly and humanly. It is completely silent and harmless to humans and other things larger than your average fly. This was a much better system and I decided to stick with this and develop it. Below are some images showing the design and building of this device.
After designing this, I knew I would have to include the ceiling to air missile system for comedic purposes so I decided to build a small artillery gun based on the ones you find on battleships. This would be for taking out slightly larger insects like wasps and mosquitoes. Below is a picture of this finished gun.
The Bazaar
Finally on Thursday, after all of our products had been completed and we had some very rudimentary marketing laid out, we began the Bazaar event, Our table was moderately successful and gained a fair bit of capital. Sadly though, not because of my anti fly defence systems. It was very interesting to see how other people had dealt with the brief and what products they had come up with for their world. A lot of the models were also very impressive and looked like professional product models. Below is a picture of my table during the event.
Conclusion
Overall, this project was a very fun and captivating experience which had a good balance between the freedom of the brief and the pressure from the time. On top of this, it was great to see how my fellow class mates responded to the activity and to see the great products which many of them imagined and built. In terms of my own product, I think for one, I need a better anagram for S.P.I.D.R because my current one is pretty desperate and far fetched. Furthermore, I would explore the aesthetic of the models a bit more as well as the way they interact to their environments and the flies in them. The artillery gun for wasps etc was also rather desperate and needs a lot of fine tuning before it is even mildly plausible. On the whole though, I did quite like the concept of my product and think that it has potential to be an effective fly defence system in various circumstances.
