The FunHaler team set up a pop-up shop in the University Centre on Friday and encouraged people to come decorate some 3D-printed inhalers. We provided cardboard, duct tape, googly eyes and other supplies.
Why?
Our service is an inhaler customization service, so we hoped to gain some insights from this workshop. First, we wanted to see what people would do if given the option to customize. Second, we wanted to see if people would actually want to customize their inhalers.
Over the two hours that we tabled, we had 12 people come and create inhalers! Of those 12, 2 had Asthma. It was a lot of fun, and we got to talk to people about their views on Asthma. People got really into it:
“I wound up way more committed to this than I thought I would be”
“I’m so excited for my inhaler to be pretty”
“This is like a really good business idea though”
“This is really fun”
“This is the best thing I’ve ever made”
“This is actually making me really happy, because I’m always really embarrassed by my inhaler”
And our participants made some really amazing designs:
Final insights:
- People love customization. Our participants had so much fun designing and creating their own artwork. Some people worked on their design for over 30 minutes.
- Customizing inhalers made people think about inhalers in a new way. Of our 12 participants, 2 of them had asthma. One of them brought her own personal inhaler to our workshop, and decorated that. She said over and over how she was so excited for her inhaler to be pretty; she told us that she was normally embarrassed by her inhaler, but now she wouldn’t be anymore. The other person with asthma said that especially in elementary in middle school, a custom inhaler would have really helped her accept her asthma. Through our workshop, people started looking at inhalers as “fun”.
- People like characters, color choices, and creative freedom. They also like stickers. This helped us figure out what types of customization options we would give to people. Clearly, people enjoy the physical construction aspect, but since our service is online, we need to strike a balance between physical construction and manufacturing. Our solution is that we’ll have people design the colors and plastic that they’d like, and then let them add sticker packs to really own their design.
