MS-EDI Students Innovate With Bottle Cap Designs

May 28, 2009

For the students in the Master of Science in Engineering Design and Innovation program at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering, no design challenge is too small.

Take, for example, bottle caps. When students in the Design Studio course were asked to design one-handed bottle caps for household products and liquid foods, they first wondered what innovations might be needed.

“I didn’t think we would come up with anything interesting,” said student Chrysta Irolla. “I mean, it’s caps. I thought that everyone had thought of everything already.”

But Irolla and her classmates would soon learn that veteran design doesn’t necessarily mean good design. Irolla and her teammates were given the task of redesigning a bottle cap for a liquid food. They soon found one of the most common liquid foods — oil — garnered a lot of complaints from users.

“Oil gets around the bottle, it’s gross, it’s disgusting and slippery and you have to clean it,” Irolla says. The team also found through observing both chefs and home cooks that people generally pour oil in three ways: to coat a pan, to eyeball for recipes, and to measure out for cooking.

“Oil is used in a bunch of different ways, and yet the bottle closure doesn’t help them with these different scenarios,” Irolla says. When they observed students in a cooking school, they found that students poured oil into a different, easy-to-pour container before using it in the kitchen. But such time-consuming task was likely too tedious for the average home cook, so the team got to work and developed a valve-top system.



The cap works like this: if you turn the bottle over and squirt it through the top valve, a discreet amount of oil comes out — ideal for coating a pan. Then, a user could pop open the cap, and the valve would flip over and reveal a small spout — ideal for users who want to eyeball or measure the oil.

“We found that by creating two caps in one, we were able to accommodate these different scenarios,” Irolla says.

Pour or refill?

Student Mark Drayer and his team, faced with designing a bottle cap for a household product, tackled a different problem. They decided dish soap could provide an interesting cap problem, but when they went into people’s homes and observed how they used dish soap, they found that the real problem was storage.

“We found a trend where people would buy in bulk and would refill dish soap bottles from the bulk-sized bottles, but they faced size constraints because they put it under the sink with other household products. It was a trade off between having a lot of dish soap and having enough room to store it. The problem was bigger than the bottle cap.”

So the team set about building a new kind of refilling system, and they brought a prototype back to the people they originally observed to see how well it worked.

Their final design had mating enclosures, where the user inserted the dish soap refill bottle into the actual bottle. Users then give the bottle a quarter turn to start the flow — an element of control that was important to users, students found. The team also developed a refill container that was similar to boxed wine, so it seemed economical and environmentally friendly to the consumer.




When the projects were finished, the teams presented their ideas to a company and found that good design and business don’t always mesh.

“They said our cap was way too expensive to be profitable,” Irolla says. “That opened our eyes to the business side of the process.”

Even though Irolla’s and Drayer’s teams designs weren’t taken up by the company, they still said still learned about the design process — and that the initial task might not be the actual problem.

“I thought it was interesting that we were given one task, then we found that another issue was more important,” Drayer says.

The program, a one or two year master’s program, was created in 2007 by the Segal Design Institute within the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University. The EDI program is one of relatively few graduate programs existing today which teach the human-centered design process to engineers.

“It has really given me a method that I can use to design things better,” Irolla says.

“It has really shown me what my undergraduate education was lacking,” Drayer says. “When you get here, design makes sense. I want to design consumer products, and now I feel much more prepared for that.”

- Emily Ayshford