Challenge

Verallia is one of the largest glass production companies in Europe, supplying global brands such as Heineken & Conserve Italia. The challenge they put forward was "Imagine a glass container that transmits the values of Italian food & culture".

Vision

In a world overwhelmed with products & information, creating a beautiful bottle simply does not suffice in generating value for the user. In order to create a bottle truly valuable for our user, we must leverage human connections to generate a poignant and emotionally attaching product.

Process

In order to generate insight & stick to the brief from the company, we elaborated upon our understanding of Italian food & culture. We drew four key values, those being: simplicity, freshness, tradition and most importantly (as consistently mentioned by our nonne) SHARING. We asked ourselves; how can this rich deep-lying culture of sharing be most explicitly seen in a modern Italian context? The answer was clear and as such our scenario was set: the Aperitivo. We exasberated our understanding of what Aperitivo is. Of course Aperitivo is about food & drink, but much more Aperitivo is music, games, friends, strangers and even romance. This lead to our definition of the Aperitivo: "Liberated & facilitated by food and drink, Aperitivo is a time for human-to-human connection."

From this, our concept Connection was born & our endeavour to create a bottle that fostered human connection begun. In order to understand what connections we could leverage in our Aperitivo scenario we created a persona and a story that highlighted his trip to a popular bar in Milan for aperitivo with some friends. This process helped us highlight three key moments of connection, those being: "Cheers", Music & Play. "Cheers" or toasting is a practice adapted all around the world where strangers and friends alike lock eyes, tap glasses and celebrate their evening together. Music is captivating for us all, it’s a classic ice-breaking conversation & can often create immediate friendships. When we play we show our true colours, we go back to a childish state, we compete, we work together, we have fun and most importantly, we connect.

Result

From our three moments of connection, we created three corresponding bottles, which we believe can sieze the moment to foster connections and generate value for users. Our bottles were named "Secret Cin", "Washboard" & "Champ", they were created using extremely simple yet effective designs, which focused not on their own beauty but the beauty that can be created in our interactions with them. "Secret Cin" leverages the cheers moment to ecourage it’s users, known or unknown to create their own secret cheers, stimulating conversation and fostering a connection. "Washboard" leverages music through an inhomogeneous set of grooves that create a diverse set of sounds, to encourage users to play & create music together. "Champ" or The Champion bottle, leverages the playful side within us as it takes you back to a classic childhood game of table-top soccer, engaging the users to connect in a light-hearted and familiar game. The outcome was one we were very proud of: effective, engaging and highly marketable bottles.

My Role

Being in a team of two, we worked very closely together on all aspects of the project. Our research phase lasted two weeks in which we submersed ourselves into the challenge and the target sector - including deep-dive research, ideation & trend analysis - in order to create our final concept. Once our concept was created we conducted customer journeys and scenario casting. I assisted in sketching and aesthetic choices. Finally, as my partner completed the renders, I created the final presentation, which I also delivered.

Achievements

I by no means am a product designer. For this reason, coming into this project I was a bit worried about how effective I could be. I am really content and excited by the outcome. I proved to myself that it isn’t necessary to have technical skills in something like product design in order to create something that is valuable.