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Designing for second life

Rethinking the lifecycle of appliance packaging

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Graduation project on systemic design for sustainable packaging of front load washing machines.

#packagingwaste #upcycling #designforreuse #massrepurpose #sustainablepackaging #unboxingexperience 

Client

IFB Appliances

© AshwathySatheesan

Guide

VS Ravishankar, National Institute of Design, Bangalore

Seungki Bae, Design Head, IFB Appliances

Year

2018

Environment and its conservation has become the crucial topic of discussions everywhere. “Beat Plastic Pollution”, the theme for World Environment Day 2018, is a witness to this. Mass manufacturing is a word now most designers are thinking twice about. With the ever growing consumerism, packaging cannot be considered as a secondary thought while designing products. Appliance packaging becomes an even more concern because of its materials and volume.


Everyday more than 1000 front load washing machines are manufactured and packed at IFB’s manufacturing facility at Goa to send to various parts of the country. About 1/4th of the volume of this transported freight is just packaging. After its dutiful journey from manufacturer to customer, this packaging then ends up at the customer’s house from where it retires from its use to disposal.

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The Scale and Impact

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These facts state only the impact of the packaging of IFB’s front load washing machine every year.

Now one can imagine the impact of the packaging of all the appliance industries

This project is a quest to understand the whole system of appliance packaging in mass manufacturing industry and find opportunity in it to create a positive change. As a designer it is our responsibility to motivate and inspire through our ideas. Thus this was a great opportunity to work with a mass manufacturer and pitch in an idea that had to work both ecologically and economically. This also came in with a lot of challenge and working with constraints.

The project started from scratch to understand the micro and macro aspects of front load washing machine packaging. The journey of packaging moves through various areas from manufacturing to retail to customers to waste management to finally landfill. Understanding this entire system was crucial for this project because of the its scale and impact. The process was to research through these different areas dealing with the life of packaging. This data was mapped out in detail later to discover opportunities.

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Packaging Parts & its Assembly

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There is a lot of energy left in the materials that needs to be put back in the value chain

Recycling value

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Synthesis

 

The core and fun part the journey was connecting the dots. It helped the ideas to resonate with the findings. Data collected through primary and secondary research was filtered through many stages of questioning and comprehension. Mapping of the data helped to bring structure to the findings. Use of design toolkit and method cards aided in this process.

 

Here is a glimpse of the maps.

Ideation themes

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Themes were made based on synthesis data and idea bank for clustering and cross fertilization of ideas. More than 160 variegated ideas were generated by this method. 

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Bundling Ideas into concepts

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From 160 to 6 

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6 key trends

Identified from the refined concepts

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Detailed documentation of research and further process of this project can be shared if required. One of the outcomes of this project can be viewed here Upcycle before Recycle

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“ Stop looking at yourself as a consumer and think of yourself as just using resources in one form until they can be transformed into another form. ”
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- Mike Biddle

Relating systems thinking and design ( RSD8 ) Symposium Presentation

IIT Institute of Design | Chicago |  October 2019

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© AshwathySatheesan
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