Business and Entrepreneurship
Understanding the particularities of how a current day business is run, and identifying the gaps where innovation is possible, serve as useful skills as a designer. This is an expertise area which I especially wanted to enhance, as it was mostly in the periphery within the first academic year.
Visualization of Eco-score system on the Coolblue website.
Cool Blue Redesign
That said, ‘Design and Innovation Methods’ served as an ideal foyer into the field of Business and Entrepreneurship. Due to the way the course was set up, each student was allowed to select a current company which is currently operating within the Netherlands to analyze through the quartile. In my case I was given Coolblue, a predominantly online electronics and whitegoods delivery/installation service, where we had to propose a new value proposition. The proposal we offered was aimed to make Coolblue more sustainable as it would be a unique value that could be enhanced within the current market. This would include the implementation of a ECO-score on their website, which would take the pre to post use carbon footprint of each product in order to determine how sustainable they are. This would inform users in a simple and clear manner of what is actually put into these devices, by showing their impact on the climate. This approach also aligns with the company values, as Coolblues main focus is keeping customer satisfaction as high as possible, through providing a superb service and easy to access information.
Circularity
Value hill framework applied to Dryshower solution.
Visualization of current hairdryer system.
To add on to this, the course ‘Sustainability and Design’ one of the themes addressed was circularity of products, and the impact their system has on the planet. Due to the global nature of production in the current day, the footprint of many products tends to have severe negative consequences on the environment. Hairdryers, the product I analyzed, are a prime example of this as they are made with the intention to not last and be replaced, leaning into consumerism. The proposed solution would be to rethink the concept of a hairdryer and make it a multifunctional tool, hence it was combined with a shower head. This approach was taken as both have a heating mechanism that tends to not be very energy efficient, and are used within the same context. Simply put, when someone does showering more often than not a hair dryer is used after. By combining the two, the user has a reduced environmental footprint, because the water and air will be heated simultaneously, alongside needing less material to make the product when compared to making them separately.