Jack Moore - Product Designer

The brief for this group project was “Design a product for an environmentally driven mail-order company whose skills and plant are built around laser cutting sheet material: card, ply, mdf and plastics. Identify a club, institution or company and design a gift that can be enclosed as part of a marketing mailshot or festive greetings card.”.

 

The company we selected to create this corporate gift for was EE, the mobile phone network.

 

Our approach to this project was to make the item we were designing as easy to manufacture and post as possible. In other words minimal processes during manufacture and an item that would fit inside a standard A4 envelope.

 

These decisions and goals were driven by the fact that often with corporate gifts of this nature people will possibly throw them away immediately or only use them for a very short period. So to be in keeping with the environmentally minded company we wanted to keep the carbon footprint of getting the gift from raw materials to the customer as small as possible. If thrown away we wanted the environmental effect to be minimal.

 

The basic idea for the gift that we came up with was to make a passive or acoustic speaker for a smart phone. The concept being that EE would send this gift out to customers in the post when they had either taken out a new contract or renewed an existing one.

 

The initial development was to try to find a shape that would produce the best possible sound. This consisted of making  some very basic cardboard models. Once we’d found the best shape for increasing the volume of the smart phone we began to look at how we could achieve our goal of making it with as few processes as possible whilst posting it in an A4 envelope.

 

In a way we were able to kill two birds with one stone. We began to look into living hinges and how they could help us with turning a flat object into something three dimensional. We also wanted to find a way we could use the living hinges so that it needed only one cut to make the gift.

 

This resulted in making a net for our acoustic speaker enclosed in an A4 sized packaging that could be all cut in one single go on the laser cutter. The gift was made from MDF that had already been pre-finished before being cut so once the laser cutter had finished cutting out the speaker in its packaging it could be removed from the machine and put straight into an envelope to be posted.

 

Once the customer opened the letter all they had to do was push the speaker out of the packaging and fold it together to form a 3D acoustic speaker for their smartphone.