Prison Cake — Design Exercise

During one of my low seasons I was looking to keep my design skills sharp. I thought of checking out what the web has to offer for good design exercise. Lo and behold I came across a crazy design scenario that I couldn’t resist playing with!

Brief

Prison cake care package: Imagine that a loved one has landed themselves in prison. Your desperate to spring the prisoner, but the only way to do it is through a loophole with the prison. No contraband is allowed in the prison, with one exception: if it can fit in a cake. Fortunately, you are a professional baker. Design a cake with as many tools as possible fitted inside of it, and that would help the prisoner escape. There’s no limit to the number of items, just as long as they’d fit into a normal sized cake.

User Research

So my first course of action would be to determine the target user. Since the brief mentioned breaking out a loved one it would make sense that only the loved one is the user. At first I thought this implies there is only one user. However on second thought I realized the target user group could be any prisoner and the secondary users could be the prison staff. This gave me the focus the develop my user interview script

Interview Script

Prisoner

• Tell me about the last time you tried to escape
• Tell me about the last time you thought of escaping
• Why haven’t you escaped yet?
• Tell me about the tools you used for escape attempts
• Tell me about your interaction with the guards during escape attempts

Security

• Tell me about the last cake that was delivered to a prisoner
• Tell me about the security process involved with the cake
• Tell me about your interaction with the cake
• Tell me about the last cake package you rejected

Goals

• Find out the cake screening process
• Which tools are practical for use

Interviews

Since this was just an exercise I was not going to spend time and money recruiting actual prisoners and security guards. I found two colleagues who were willing and happy to do some role playing. I unfortunately did not record or transcribe their responses though I wish I had because they were hilarious!

Security Guard — Observations & Insights

• Someone used a 1 lb cake with vanilla to disguise the smell
• There was a 3 layered cake that we let through that had drugs in it. We found out later when we noticed the prisoners were acting strange
• We cut into it, we taste it
• We bring dogs in to sniff it
• I also conduct a digital scan of the cake
• The last cake I apprehended had a bomb inside it. The dogs sniffed it out

Prisoner— Observations & Insights

• I’ve tried to get a nail file here
• I see the keys jingling on the guard’s side and want to get them
• After getting out of the cell I need a disguise
• Once I got a spoon and dug through the floor
• I got hold of a magnet but it wasn’t strong enough or close enough to grab the keys
• I put mud all over me so I look and smell like earth

Market Research

To find out what my possible ‘competitors’ or ‘comparators’ might be doing and to get more ideas I decided to do some market research. I found that some of the common tools people try to smuggle in are : files, handsaws!, firearm, knives, chisel, batteries?, nail file, art tools?

Design

And viola! A delicious (or rather, not so delicious) cake to get your loved one out of prison. Contents would include:

• Gun powder and matchsticks to create disctractions
• A file to cut through the bars
• A shovel to dig under the fence
• A chisel and hammer to break some brick
• A magnet to get the keys

The outer layer would be a sweet frosting maybe an inch thick to trick the tasters. The interior would be a mud (real mud) cake that can be used as a disguise and to trick the dogs. The mud interior would be coated with an EM repellant such as lead spray (I know, my loved one might die from lead poisoning! Desperate times…) to prevent the scanners from picking up anything.

Disclaimer: Don’t try this at home, or a real prison, it won’t work (Had to put that in here because, well, some people… :-) )

Hope you enjoyed the article. Thanks for reading!