As a part of our module we had to spend some FABulous time in FABLAB London. Our job for the day was to create something from… waste. Or in other words for a day we learned how to create something from nothing.
Sometimes I am amazed how creativity can take whole new levels. And that we can see everyday around us, especially when you live in such a gigantic capital of the world like London. Even in the millions of DIY tutorials we watch everyday while we are scrolling down on our ‘Instagram’ feed. Some of these tutorials are pretty useful and easy to do I may say. Actually the last one I have watched gave me a wonderful idea of how to use my old swimsuit and turn it into an amazing top for the summer. Creating value from wastage is a common practice in the creative world. And that day we learned the process of making something out of these old and useless items we have at home.
First we had to make a prototype plan for our product. The plan consisted few steps- using our MVP(minimum viable product) canvas as a starting point; looking at ‘the concept’ and ‘the features’ and making two lists- Looks Like Features & Works Like Features; sketch and think about HOW to prototype these features; unifying the 2 lists in a single prototype and last but not least we had to show’n’tell everyone what we did at the end of the day by presenting our working MVP. Here I must admit that me and my team found it most challenging when we had to think about how are we going to prototype the features of our MVP, because we only had the tools and materials that were available in the Lab.
We saw some amazing techniques like laser cutting and 3D printing and all were pretty excited to try do something on our own.
I have to admit I was really active on my social media profiles that day, because everything in the Lab was so inspiring. We saw some really innovative technologies and some of us even get to try them out for their MVP. And most of all we had fun!
We shared ideas, laugh and worked hard! Me and my team in general went trough couple of stages and ideas during making our product. Our idea basically was to make a speaker out of your old books, by putting your old phone inside of the book and when it makes sounds, it will come out of the speakers and the cover of the book will move as if it is a ‘speaking mouth’. Have you watched ‘Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban’? Do you remember the monster book that Hagrid gave to everyone to study for their class? The one that opened and closed as if it was speaking? Well our idea was quite similar, besides the teeth and fur of course!
Sometimes an idea may be really cool, but when you have to thing of a way to make it work, this is where you meet struggles! Anyways we did not give up and we tried couple of methods when creating our book speaker. First we thought we will laser cut the book to make the hole in it for the phone that will go inside, but we could not do that because it would have set the book on fire and the last thing we wanted to do is set the building on fire!
Yes we even tried to cut it with knife! After all we went for the drill. We made quite a mess and pieces of paper where ‘floating’ everywhere, but we had fun even cleaning it up!
After all I must confess our MVP was not the perfect one, due to the fact that we were not able to prototype the features when the book would open and close. But what is important is the way we went trough and all the struggles we met during that day and trying to fight them! We learned that creating value from something old and useless is as important as the product itself! We learned that the process of creating the product is not easy but there is always a way! Also we learned (or at least reminded ourselves) that the team and the people you work with are (if not) the most important piece of the puzzle, because you go trough all of this together and fight to the end as a team!
Also the fact that we saw our colleagues product gave us all hope and inspiration. There were some genius ideas I must say and there was one, that was not actually our idea or any of my colleagues but it looked like this:
This tiny piece of 3D printed plastic took more than 4 hour to be done and when you put the flash on your phone and put it on top, you were able to see the ‘Bat sign’! Now that is what I call creative!
We spend the whole day in FABLAB and it was one of the most inspiring and useful days we had! We were all really exhausted by the end of the day, but we had a good laugh at least! And although at the end of the day we are still not batman or superman, we are learning to become one for our businesses and that’s what counts!
