Designing A Difference: Smallbean’s Solar Suitcase

Design­ing A Dif­fer­ence: Small­bean Part 1 from Design Muse­um Boston on Vimeo.

A team at Design Muse­um Boston is col­lab­o­rat­ing with Small­bean, a non­prof­it cor­po­ra­tion based in Boston, to devel­op the next gen­er­a­tion of Smallbean’s solar suit­case. This video doc­u­ments phase one of the redesign, which is still in progress.

Phase one focused on under­stand­ing the impor­tant work that Small­bean does in the devel­op­ing world, includ­ing spe­cif­ic infor­ma­tion regard­ing the solar suit­case. The team first need­ed to iden­ti­fy and under­stand all the issues, then they orga­nized the issues accord­ing to user touch points. A visu­al map was cre­at­ed based on those user touch-points.

After study­ing the visu­al map, the team jumped into ideation — brain­storm­ing a mul­ti­tude of con­cepts as poten­tial solu­tions.

The con­cepts were orga­nized into four larg­er cat­e­gories for fur­ther devel­op­ment before the next char­rette:

• Sta­tion­ary Sys­tem: assem­bly of parts, stor­age, expand­abil­i­ty
• Mobile sys­tem: mod­u­lar assem­bly, hid­den pan­el, schemat­ic for set-up, work­space
• Solar Pan­el: frame struc­ture, cord man­age­ment
• Bat­tery: Hous­ing, charg­ing

The next design char­rette is sched­uled for Sept 26th, where the team will focus on refin­ing con­cepts and begin pro­to­typ­ing a new solu­tion.

Also check out Smallbean’s Cit­i­zen Archivist Project.