I joined a product development day created by Open IDEO and IDEO CoLab, hosted at Sidebench! This event was roughly half a day of getting to meet new people who are also design-minded and wanting to use our skills to help better the world.

IDEO worked with Nike to help create ideas for Nike’s typical waste material recycling program (Nike Grind).

I love being in a creative atmosphere where people from differing perspectives can share and collaborate to make things that just one person on their own wouldn’t have been able to conjure up! We were all in high spirits throughout the day and getting to know everyone was so much fun!

all getting to know each other!

We got put into groups and started brainstorming ideas for what we could use the materials for. We really wanted to do something that could both be used for typical consumers but also be helpful for the homeless population. I started thinking about backpacking and with my group, we eventually went with a backpack that could come apart and reassembled into a sleeping pad. I was able to use the provide material samples to create our super quick prototype of the rollable backpack bed. We storyboarded for our typical consumer (a long distance backpacker) and also wanted to do a donation of one backpack for every one sold. Our bit of innovation was that the straps would also be able to be detached and reassemble to the body of the backpack to extend the length of the sleeping bag/bed.

Only one person could present, so my teammate presented and I answered some questions at the end while our other teammate filmed! The Nike materials are super soft and cushioned, so it felt like this could be a strong potential solution!