Yeti: Collaborative Design

Earth5R |1 month
Team Saurabh Gupta, Sunny Singh and interns from US, Singapore, Scotland, Malaysia and Peru

Problem statement

Yeti, In the folklore of Nepal, the Yeti is an ape-like entity taller than an average human that is said to inhabit the Himalayan region of Nepal, Bhutan and Tibet.

Earth5R wanted to roll out their line of herbal products such as Neem, Tea and so on.

Major Challenges for the design

Sustainable, absolutely no plastic packaging
Easy to make envelopes
Design should resonate with core values of Earth5R: Respect, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Restore

Why collaborative design?

Earth5R, as an organization believes heavily in collaboration. All of the design mockups are usually presented to entire community of volunteers, who provide feedback on the design. This ensures that the final design speaks of democracy in the system.

Initial Designs

The collaborative process

International interns who joined us for the workshop in Mumbai were asked to provide their feedback on the design.

Further engagement

After providing feedback on the design, interns participated in the process of learning to make the paper bags themselves.

Final Design

Reflection

During this process, I had the opportunity to work with a bunch of international interns from all over the world. I learnt that collaboration with people from different cultures who also speak different languages could be difficult but extremely rewarding. Sometimes, you are trying to tell something but it is lost in translation. Being tangible and showing them what you are trying to do through sketches and photos really helps to align everyone.

In this particular project, a lot of the students were really skeptical about being able to sketch, when we handed them paper and pencils. But, as we encouraged them to not think about the fidelity of sketch and rather focus on the idea, they started sketching. A good amount of appreciation while they were doing this also helped.

At the end, we took everyone’s ideas which they had written or sketched on paper and discussed it with everyone, and that when more and more people started bouncing ideas off each other’s ideas. I wrote down all the ideas on one of the printed paper bags (That time I did not know the power of post-its tbh).

To round everything up, we taught them how to make paper bags with newspaper, so that they could engage with the entire process of making and designing an eco friendly paperbag.

Visit Earth5R’s website and learn more about the amazing work they are doing.