A service design case study- Cake Monster
The project was part of my undergraduate dissertation and it was also exhibited in Tokyo Designer Week 2014.
1. The Challenge
My goal is to design a product or service that reflects my vision, which is to make a better world by balancing “too much” and “too little”.
2. My role
This project was part of my undergraduate dissertation in 2014 — department of Industrial Design, KAIST in South Korea. I took the lead of the project while being supervised by my professor supervisor and a teaching assistant.
Design tools
Internet Research, Ethnographic Observation, Service blueprint, Paper prototype (packaging), Illustrator (character design)
4. Research
The design process consists of 5 main steps- exploration, concept theme setting, user research and analysis, ideation, and prototyping.
After conducting research about donation and sharing economy, I thought that
sharing food is one of the simplest solutions to solve food scarcity and food waste altogether in one shot.
However, the idea of sharing physical food is not practical, due to logistic issues. After several revisions of ideation, I finally came up with the concept of food sharing through birthday cakes.
To refine the concept, interviews and ethnographic studies were conducted to see how people buy birthday cake and organize a birthday party. The findings helped me think about what product could be integrated into a birthday cake to complete the value chain that would satisfy every stakeholder involved in the service.
5. Solution
Someone has too much to eat, while some have too little. Cake Monster use birthdays as an opportunity for sharing. A slice of Birthday cake will be replaced by a piece-of-cake- shaped box with message card inside.
Customers will pay full price for the big cake and another customer will purchase the small slice cake, whose sale will be donated to the children who exercise their creativity by making drawings of monsters for package design.
This donation system was designed considering different stakeholders and their opportunities and roles that complete the service, creating values along the service line.
6. Deliverables
The final design was delivered in the form of a service blueprint, packaging prototype, and a concept scenario video.
7. Reflection
During the last semester of my fourth undergraduate year, I made an oral presentation to all professors at our department. Passing the test was awesome, but even better, I also scored high enough to be one of the few students to go to the exhibition. That was one of the happiest moment in my life.
It felt good that your hard work paid off. Being one of a hand few foreigners in the class, I had always depended on classmates for translations, getting updates on the class, etc. This positive evaluation helped me greatly to build my confidence as a designer.
Cake Monster was my first big design project that summarized my 3 years as a design student. I’m aware the design needs to be developed further to be implemented in real life, but I was proud of it as it reflects my core value as a to-be designer. This project was the important starting point of my interest in service design and social problems, which continued to develop in the following years of my design career.
