Greentech Supermarket of Excellence Blog
Alexander Clemente s3897219
Apart of our submission criteria we were tasked with writing up a week by week blog as we progressed through our studio, noting our challenges, feedback and experiences in developing the supermarket of the future!
Week 01
The interview with Coles was an interesting look into the management of stores. We had several representatives from the tech section, and someone from the sustainable research department. They were very encouraging about looking to the future and exploring as many paths as we could. They spoke about the tech they were rolling out, store layouts that had been updated, and looking into the future of sustainability. I thought it was interesting getting an insider perspective from the coles team, we had a constructive discussion back and forth with the class that went over key issues with sustainability and the company.
Week 02
This week was spent researching coles and the topics that took us of interest. We were tasked with creating a mind map of our thought process and then representing that in a series of slides to present the week after. Lots of backward and forward research finding articles that aligned with ideas I wished to explore.
Ended up wanting to focus on layouts, customer satisfaction, energy usage, waste and refrigeration. Using Miro I created a mind map to branch out and visualise my ideas, with this I could add, link or change points of contention.
Week 03
On monday we presented our research on our topics of interest, my presentation covered the need for a store redesign with improved signage and navigation, a change to refrigeration and its inefficiency and waste management. I thought I still had a lot of broad topics, I didn't want to limit myself. My strongest contender was a change to the store layout, I really believed that the store needs to be redesigned to have a better flow for customers. And the feedback I received from that supported that I had a lot of information and routes for opportunity. Thursday's class we spent mingling with other students to find out what each of us were interested in and what we liked.
Week 04
Monday we finally got into groups, finding some people with similar ideas and interests. We all liked the idea of changing the store layout, and also trying to tackle the refrigeration problem. Nick had a focus on single use plastics, food waste and energy consumption. And Sebs was energy, refrigeration, and trying to reduce costs. We liked the idea of the central coolroom a lot and wanted to explore the idea of that being brought into a new layout. Also we liked the idea of working to reduce single use plastics. We began developing our scope of interest and deciding our project intent. We liked our cool room idea a lot and started to plan out what that might look like potentially. We also had a discussion about how we could potentially reduce waste. The main takeaways being a complete removal of single use plastics and trying to replace them with greener alternatives. We took an interest in the flow of supermarkets and the labelling of products with signage. Outside of class we decided to explore some supermarkets to find out what needed to be changed. After visiting Coles, Woolworths, and Aldi we noted down what we liked and didnt. Most supermarkets feel cramped and can sometimes feel you feeling lost. There was poor signage across all supermarkets, and we struggled to find things sometimes, which forced us to hunt down for things. We found there was a large amount of single use plastics and packaging that wasn't necessary, it could be easily replaced with paper or other recyclable materials. Labelling wasn't up to scratch for most things and we found products without the Australian standard unclear with their instructions for disposal. After our supermarket escapade we got to work creating a powerpoint to show our findings. We aimed on trying to highlight what we found interesting and of note towards our area of focus.
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Week 05
After our supermarket escapade we got to work creating a powerpoint to show our findings. We aimed on trying to highlight what we found interesting and of note towards our area of focus. Discussing our ideas we found that we really liked the use of dispensers to greatly reduce the amount of plastic in the store and wanted to try and come up with a solution for it. We considered both a dry goods dispenser and a wet goods dispenser. For already existing products that can’t be put inside the dispensers, we came up with designs for a rough concept of pulp packaging to be used with most items. To improve navigation we came up with a simple UI interface that would be used for finding items. Using a database for items on the shelves you could create an app that is updated with what stock is in the store. An app could create a way to navigate the store and look for products. Seb came up with the idea of a central cool room somewhere in the store, this would create a closed system for cold items to be stocked in.The fridge would in theory use significantly less power than running multiple fridges. We were very happy with the progress of our ideas, we had so many to pick from and follow a path on from, and it was very empowering to have the choice to redesign a whole supermarket from the ground up.
Week 06
This week started with A simple prototype being built by Nick to show a possible design for a dry goods dispenser, A User interface for a navigation app and a few prototype cad models of what the store could potentially look like orientation wise, we liked a hexagon shape that was created by Leslie, placing the cool room in the centre of the store we could almost create a one way system for customers to flow around the store. The Thursday class saw us presenting our findings and showing off our early concepts for our ideas so far, our feedback we received told us we had a lot of good ideas but we needed to find a way to cover all of our topics under one statement to tie it all together.
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Week 07
Week 7 saw us come back after the break working on developing our concepts, fleshing out our ideas further to gain an understanding of how everything would work in our store. On monday we did a survey of the class asking what their shopping habits are to understand what people are familiar with. We aimed at planning the order of our store around what people are used to. The mechanism of the dispensers were further fleshed out and our store layout was updated to something that could be presented. Our information from our previous slides were updated and consolidated to start preparing for the presentation for week 8. On Thursday John took us to the NGV to visit the exhibits for design week, to help inspire us and think creatively. The experience was interesting and I liked the exhibit of the products displayed vertically in an out of body kind of way. We needed to think about how this store would fit within a normal retail space.
Week 08
This week on monday saw us presenting our ideas to the class and a panel of coles representatives that gave us the best feedback yet. We needed to think about how this store would fit within a normal retail space. We needed to find a way to clearly show off our ideas. We have a lot of ideas but we need to work out how to communicate them clearly. The panel really liked our cool room and the feasibility of it and wondered if we could expand on it. The feedback got us thinking about how we can further refine our ideas, what can we cut and what do we keep. The class afterwards saw us discussing how we should tackle the feedback we were given and how can we improve and refine our concepts from it. We decided it would be best to finally divide our three main fields that encompassed our project. Central cool room, Dispensers and a new store layout. This was one of our best weeks for fully developing our concepts, taking on some critical feedback and being able to build off of it to refine our final vision.
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Week 09
This week saw us ramping up towards a presentation for week 10. Everything is a go, Our layout is nearly fully complete, after some reconsidering we came up with our second layout for a standard retail setting, allowing us to keep our main features of our larger store but distilled down into a more practical application. The dispenser's design was in the final stages and we had begun to render components and Nick has slowly been building up his prototype mechanism for the dispenser. The main layout received some quality of life improvements, we are considering entrances and exits, staff areas, elevators, loading bays, stock areas and overall look of the store to fully realise our layout from bottom to top. Our poster and video have now started to be put together, the former using renders from our CAD work to show off our layout and features. The latter following the brief we decided to use lots of b roll footage and working out to create a journey of creation showing our progression through the class. Beatrice has been encouraging us to get some kind of user testing done and John has been questioning our technical application of how things work in the store, what goes where and why. This is really helping us understand our store and work out how things function and why we made the choices we made.
Week 10
So far week 10 has been a mad rush to get everything finished for thursday, our blog, poster, video, presentation and prototype are all being worked on simultaneously and rapidly to have things ready for thursdays presentation.
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Week 11
After presenting in week 10 infront of the coles executives we wanted to examine and discuss the feedback we received from them. Mainly, there still needed to be a more clear problem statement but also the feedback we received told us we should try and consider some other layout ideas. They liked the store layouts and liked how we were thinking about customers, but they also thought that we should try and work around a square layout. Taking on this information and looking at the time we had left we decided to plan out roughly what we wanted done by what points over the next few weeks. We wanted our dispenser prototype working, and we wanted a prototype layout model to help get our vision across. Our presentation was to be further refined to be clearer and less back and fourth, and we needed to start considering our final video and posters.
Week 12
This week saw us working away on our prototypes, Nick and Seb worked on our dispenser, reasonably satisfying looking but still needed a lot of work with electronics to get functional. Leslie and I worked on the process of working out how to build the architectural model. We knew we were going to laser cut the walls and base out of acrylic, but leslie came up with a cad model to 3d print shelving and details. Assembly begun in the latter half of the week trying to put together both prototypes as fast as possible. Lots of sanding, painting, cutting and test fitting helped us work our way forward.
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Week 13
This week saw us working on the prototypes some more. The layout was assembled and glued together, then placed on a large baseboard for strength and ease of transport. A key was created on the side of the layout to show what the sections are, this was laser cut from mdf and aligned, with this the prototype was 99% complete. The dispenser on the other hand was taking time, more time than we had, assembly was being completed later in the week than we hoped and we kept running into setbacks of needing to buy more parts or get more paint to get it up to scratch. We also started drafting our presentation and our video, the latter we begun filming at the end of the week and afterwards looking at the footage I was extremely unsatisfied with the end product and it facilitated the need to take a step back and look at our options. With time dwindling, leslie and I hatched a plan to re-shoot the footage and add some liveliness to it.
Week 14
This was our last week, over the weekend Leslie and I had been frantically shooting footage, and prepping a mock presentation for monday. The feedback we received helped us hone our presentation to be the best it can be, working on optimising images and what we were going to talk about. The dispenser was still not done, electronics proving more of a challenge than Seb thought, we may have bitten off more than we can chew but we certainly have tried our best. By wednesday the dispenser still needed parts, the layout was done, the pres was done, the posters done and with not much time left we had a mad rush on our hands before the thursday presentation.
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Course Reflection
This class saw us take on a number of design challenges and take on critical feedback to enhance and help our creative vision of what a supermarket of the future could look like for Coles.
All of the people in our group are very practical and hands on and I believe because of that our project took on a more physical shape rather then theoretical. Sebastian has had extensive practice prototyping from his product design course, Nicholas had a background in engineering so he knew how to create mechanisms and work on functionality, and Leslie and I had worked together on several occasions to design, prototype and make some really in depth outcomes. With a team as technically equipped as us we wanted to see if we could push the boundaries of what we could come up with for our concept. We looked at practical problems that we could try and find solutions to, refrigeration, store layout and plastic waste seemed to be areas we could all combine our ideas towards and create something around them. This lead to the idea of creating a whole new store layout to address these issues in one all encompassing comprehensive manner. With the store layout dictated by us it allowed us to explore systems, designs and ideas in a highly iterative way in order to come up with something that made sense for customers, was appealing to Coles and tackled the issues of sustainability. From here our prototyping allowed us to develop these concepts, along with feedback we received from tutors and Coles representatives, we continued to refine to our final concepts and prototypes. Where our technical ability took over and allowed us to greatly display and show our concepts in a very physical way and make our ideas extremely clear to understand. Overall the course was a lot of fun and a really good one for learning how to take on constructive feedback to enhance and improve our ideas. I don't think we would have come so far if it weren't for the direct feedback from the Coles representatives, (simulating a designer and client back and fourth). It felt very real having to present our concepts in a clear way and I think we all benefitted from prepping presentations and organising our work to show to a client that had no idea what we were doing. I think this studio is a great class tailored to coaching students in the way designers actually work with clients under a brief.