DISCOVER – Understanding the problem
USER RESEARCH
My team interviewed female soldiers and scoured reddit to better understand what menstruation is like while serving in the military.
“On deployment, the ship’s store is required to never be out of pads or tampons, but it happens on occasion so it is best to leave port with enough supply to last you. The ship will typically have smaller travel sized boxes and with 0 variety… 1 pad option and 1 tampon option. God help us if a man picked them out of the catalog. You can tell because it’s the awful kind no one wants to use. No offense to the men working on this project, but you’d think they would at least ask a sample group of women what they would use.”
“Being a woman in the military means paving the way for those who come after me. There are women paving the way for me right now who are the first to complete intensive trainings that in the past only were available to men. I think it’s pretty remarkable how far we have come, but there is still a lot of room for improvement.”
“There is a military doctor onboard who will give out Motrin for cramps —- that does nothing, so I usually suck it up.”
DEFINE – Specifying actionable objectives
PRODUCT OBJECTIVES
In order to design a product that resonates with women in the military, I outlined three main pain points to solve for.
ARCHITECT – Outlining the concept
PRODUCT SKETCHES
I worked closely with my teammates to create low-fidelity sketches and mockups in order to test our concept with potential users.
Early sketch
Early mockup
Early sketch
Annotated mockup
DESIGN – Materializing the Pelican MTK
BUILDING IN CINEMA 4D
Over the course of five days, I turned a simple cube into a period toolkit, expanding my polygon modeling and animation skills along the way.
Each individual component of the Pelican MTK
Products included in the Pelican MTK
Playing around with keyframe animation
Tools: Physical Prototyping, Sketch, Cinema 4D, Illustrator, Photoshop
