"The Product Design Research Mission"

Hey, Ming here and lately we interns have been all working on to our product design research. Hester Street Collaborative is looking to create a product, or a line of products that would create extra income. And the product that HSC would produce, would have to serve the purpose of what HSC is doing. We as interns were to first do research on different products, their cost, how they packaged, and so on. And our mission on this trip was to profile products that we think would help inspire us in creating our product.

Early morning Tuesday we set out on our research mission, but before we left we split up in to two groups. One group is to visit various shops in the downtown area, while the other group visited various shops midtown. I was in the group that visited the downtown shops, and our group consisted of Dylan, Dennis, Annie, Amanda, and me. The first shop we visited was the Moma design shop; there we saw many cool products. Most of the product there are over price, but I still bought this little voodoo doll thing, which cost 10 dollar. Also at the Moma store, I found this product call the staple free stapler, a stapler that can stitch up to 5 pieces of papers together without the need of staples.
Then we continue on to the scholastic store near by where I found this cool book on how to build a solar car. The price is high but it is really interesting for little kid to see how solar car works.

As we press on, we stopped by the center for architecture on our way to a store call mxyplyzk. When we finally got to mxyplzk, we found ourselves wondering in this small crowed store. Despite the sized of the shop, the amount of items there are overwhelming. We found this set of cups with pictures of a variety of noses on them. The purpose of the pictures is for when the cups are used, the nose picture would overlap the drinker’s nose making it look like the nose is the drinker's.

The next stop was Flight 101, a store that sells packaged items for mainly travel use purposes. But before we visit the store we stopped by for lunch at a hot dog store, where I got 2 hot dogs and a soda for $3.50, not bad… Anyway moving on, Flight 101 like mxyplyzk was a small store. However the products in there make up for the size of the store. It is at this store where I found my favorite product of the day. The Survival Kit in a can, a small can that contain all the tools you would need to survive for when you get lost or something. The can looks like a canned food can, and it’s packaged again with a plastic bag with air sucked out of it to make it easy to pack in to all places.

Then after that we visited the Books of Wonder, a huge library like book store. After looking at all the expensive books and paintings in the store I found myself on line, buying an ice cream from a restaurant inside the book store. Then all of a sudden, camera flashes started to hit my face from the right. As I turn right toward the entrance, I see some cameramen, taking pictures of this lady as she walks in to this book store. As the cameramen continue to flash at her, she lined up behind me, emotionless as she waits for her turn. After I got my ice cream I sat down with the rest of the interns, watching as the lady got her ice creams and left. As we exited the store, Annie couldn’t resist wondering who the lady was. So she went up to one of a cameraman, who told her that the lady was Mischa Barton. WHO?!......I still didn’t know who she was, but she turned out to be this star who was in the show the OC.

Anyway the last store we hit was a toy store call Kidding Around. As we entered the store I immediately walked toward the pile of hand puppets we saw. As the others looked around for products, Dennis and I picked up puppets with play with. But we moved on, and walk toward the back of the store. There we found board games, costumes, musical toys, etc. There as so many things in there, I didn’t know what to choose for our research. After playing around with more toys and finding the staple free stapler at a lower price then the Moma store in this store, I finally found this kit on painting you own tile. I thought of the stepping stone we made in the design camp, that is this pretty similar. After profiling this product, we got ready to leave. As we wait for Dylan to buy the things he wanted to buy, we played with the puppet some more.

Our mission is finally complete, now we can go back. As we walk, tired and out of breath, we came to the near by train station. We got in the train station, and waited for the train to come. And when the train finally came we got on and went back to the office. The next day we had a discussion on the products that we profiled on our product research mission, and what a discussion it was. Each of us took turn talking and describing about the various products we found. Even though everyone seemed to be bored, the ideas that we’ve produced was quite interesting. Like how the product we were going to make should target urban environment, in helping to improve the environment. Also we had an idea like how the packaging of the product can be a product as well, that way there would be less trash.

Aside from our product research project, I’ve been working on this blog as the blog master. My responsibility is to expand the blog, and making contact with the online communities. To improve the blog, I first started to create links with other sites and blogs that serves a similar purpose to our organization.