East Timor - Coconut grinder, coffee press, tai boxes

I was recently hired to design a series of products to demonstrate the potential value of design education to those living in East Timor. The country is one of the poorest in the world, and has had trouble generating entrepreneurship and steady development while also recovering from civil war. Working for a group composed of United Nations employees and people from Griffith University, I developed three products that fit the country's context - their traditional products, available skills, tools, and materials - and could be leveraged to create opportunities for their unemployed and under-employed. I presented these concepts to East Timor's Minister of Culture, and they are serving as a demonstration of the potential benefits that creating a design school in East Timor could have. The first product is a coconut grinder. (Click the images to see full size)

Check out the coffee press and the tai boxes:

This coconut grinder is an update to an old Timorese tool. The old tool requires its user to straddle a beam, and shave the inside of a coconut with a piece of metal that is fastened to the beam. A large bowl is placed below the metal, for the shaved coconut pieces to fall into.

The updated version of this tool is intended to be sold to people outside of Timor that use fresh coconut in their dishes or desserts. Twisting a cracked coconut over the spikes in the middle breaks little pieces off. Removing layers of the grinder allows the spikes to scrape deeper into the coconut. This tool could be easily created by skilled woodworkers, using readily available sandalwood, mahogany or bamboo, and finished with non-toxic sandalwood oils.

East Timor produces a large amount of coconuts, but this is not reflected in their exports. Packaging this new tool with fresh coconut produce could potentially generate renewed interest in this market.

 East Timor is also a quality producer of coffee beans. Their proximity to coffee-loving Australia  means there is some potential for increasing their exports. Australians are more particular about their coffee selection than other western nations - Starbuck's failure to penetrate Australia as proof - which means many would likely be adventurous enough to try a new brand/ blend.

The product here is a coffee press that can quickly create a single cup of coffee. It operates as a hand grinder to grind the beans, and can quickly be converted to a press. Products similar to this (without the grinding capability) are becoming popular in Australia, and this product can be cheaply fabricated and assembled in a Timorese metal shop, and can be sold in Australian shops with a large mark-up. as part of a package that would include coffee beans and a hand-painted cup made by a local artist. This strategy could create further awareness of the coffee industry and the arts scene in East Timor.

Many people in East Timor are employed selling cheap souvenirs such as flip-flops and necklaces, which are imported in bulk from Indonesia and re-sold with tiny profit margins. Tais are hand-made textiles that take weeks to create and dye, but sell for only a few dollars. By selling tais or jewellery in a more appealing package, they can be sold as higher-end souvenirs. Including certificates of authenticity or other information about the history of their craft opens up opportunities for the package to be sold as a gift, or a product that can be presented tovisiting businesspeople, politicians, or wealthier tourists that are less interested in cheap souvenirs.

The next post shows parts of the "typical" design process - brainstorming, market research, sketches, renderings, drafting....