Why not strawberries and cream? I’ve heard they taste great.

Sword fighting is also a great at times too. Who needed that group member anyway? Today we slashed our way through cardboard and formed a kitchen for our knife prototype. Like some cell phone plans, the knife comes free with a meat subscription. The best part of the deal is that it does more than just cut…

…and the winner is – build your own meat!

After presenting yesterday, our group narrowed our four concepts down to a final one – “building” your own meat. The idea is to invest in a subscription plan. Ranchers, who detail what sort of feed, care, and accommodations the animals receive, offer the various meat subscriptions. In this sense, the consumer invests in his meat not at the point of purchase at the supermarket, but well before the animal is slaughtered.

View slideshow with photos from the first week of Design Camp 2009.

Today’s weather? – so much better!

Chance to make out with a celebrity? – well, we did have three local “celebrities” come and present as our personas. Actually we were the personas with our acting hats on.

Mette, Nikolas and Tove graced our presence and spoke about their daily lives, activities, and meat relations.

After another fantastic lunch we set back to work coming up with concept ideas. By the end of the day we narrowed the list to four. Check out the blog again on Monday to see the ideas and pictures of the presentation.

Download and view our midway presentation here.

At times our brains are also in “dusk” mode, including our group today. Blame it on the weather, but sometimes hearing a bit of reassurance and an outside perspective helps. Additionally, after processing the results of our interviews yesterday, we were convinced our pitch and success criteria needed a bit of tweaking.

Pitch: Strengthen the consumer-meat relationship via digital media communication.

Success Criteria: Returning consumer trust through a sensorial experience.

That set, the rest of the day was spent developing a couple of personas, brainstorming some design spaces and preparing for tomorrow’s presentation, but don’t tell the apples that- they are sleeping.

Pitch: Communicating to supermarket consumers the life story of meat.

Success Criteria: Encourage ethical consumer behavior.

These set, we headed out to the school cafeteria and two local grocery stores to conduct interviews, which at times involved braving the cold of refrigerators and wading in meat juice.

It seems this question has gotten so complicated.

“Yes, I live in Germany,… but actually I’m American.”

Experiences like this have been commonplace this morning. Our group comprises of an Indian from South Africa, a half-Sri Lankan from Denmark, and a Chinese living in Denmark, which makes for longer and intricate web of an answer to the question.

Who are we then really? Is our identity our nationality? My impression is that the Danish strongly identity themselves with their national flag. In the airport families wave them with pride to their arriving loved ones, they hang in rows over the city center streets, and can be found just about anywhere the eye looks. This is my perception at least.

Identity/perception is one of our themes as a Space and Time Team in the Kolding Vision 2020 project.

Here are the themes in brief:

Time

Identity/Perception

Connection/Interaction