Fertile

Design question:

How might design increase people’s awareness of their environmental impact from single-use products?

The Team:

Haili Wu

Ruka Kameda

The Project Outline:

We noticed that many sustainability ideas try to address the problems caused by single-use products. However, pollution never really decreases because the single-use item market will always be there. So we should approach the problem from another perspective: reduce pollution by changing people’s behaviours and increasing their awareness of single-use products by adding value to the single-use object.

The Fertile coffee cup is our outcome. This will encourage people to be responsible consumers while providing an excellent experience.

Design Process

Persona

We focused our user group and scenario on the modern office, where people have a high demand for coffee and very little time to recycle.

We analysed the lifestyle of young office workers and put together two personas that help us get a good reference of the users during our design process.

Outcome

‘Fertile’ is a sustainable coffee cup that creates a new relationship with single-use products for people with busy modern lifestyles. It creates a positive experience by letting users grow plants in it, adding value to the existing single-use cup.

This project began when we saw the bins in the city. They are always full of single-use coffee cups, often not washed or separated into different materials for recycling. We worked on a more sustainable solution by making it easier for busy consumers to be environmentally friendly.

This cup doesn’t require a plastic lid because it is made from 100% biodegradable, recycled paper, and from the container to the lid, it is made from one piece of paper using the Origami method. Consumers will receive this cup with a handle made from dissolvable paper. Inside the handle are seeds, soil, and coffee grounds, which act as fertiliser when used to grow plants. These comfortable, handy steps could encourage people to grow more green in offices and promote responsible consumption and production.