Collaboration with Gumtree gave me a smile on my face. After the debriefing from our faculty and UX Researcher Jenny from Gumtree gave us a few ideas on the current frameworks and drawback of the system. Trading of bodily fluids seemed highly personal and made me feel repulsive.
As soon as we decided and formed teams of four people, we sat down to decipher the brief and break it down into its components.
Different words or phrases that popped-up in our mind while reading the brief where documented
On the other hand we explored the different types of bodily fluids. I remembered Jenny recommending us to look into products similar to the brief and look at how it is currently being marketed in the down-low.
Urine- source : https://nypost.com/2020/09/03/german-man-drinks-seven-pints-of-his-own-urine-a-day/
Blood
Sweat
Breast milk
One of the most common and already available market was breast milk. Sites like ‘Only the breast’ gave us guidelines on how the mechanism of the packaging and receiving happens. The question of ethics and legality of the methods that would be adopted in order to obtain the product came into play.
After looking at various bodily fluids, we looked into the various fluids that could be sold online and found out that Sperm, Plasma, eggs, breast milk and urine had an existing market. Source
Interesting finding was that blood in not sold for a cost as this might trigger black market for it which could lead to be unethical.
While looking at various factors that forms trust could also be built with eyes by looking at the product visually and being able to identify if its in a good state or not. Inspired by Glob.
Source: https://www.akashmuralidharan.com/portfolio/glob/
Source: http://www.plantcellbiology.com/2011/07/stitched-science-where-science-and-crafts-meet-to-produce-wonderful-things/
Our tutor gave us this inspiration to look at ‘Poo lunchbox’