Design Thinking Task

Design Thinking is a thought process which emphasises asking the right questions in order to identify the problem. By doing this it gives you a more informed opinion on what the best solution is to the problem, rather than choosing a solution arbitrarily.

The task was to find a way to encourage people in the UK to eat cooked insects, because they're a sustainable food source and incredibly high in protein.

Using the design thinking strategies with identified that no-one in the UK eats them because there's no market for them. There's no stereotypical person that eats them, so we suggested selling them on their novelty, and championing the quirkiness of it, and decided that an ornate Thai-inspired food cart for places such as street food festivals would be a good way to create a market for them, as people who're interested in quirky food would become more aware of the benefits of eating insects.

By coming up with a brand for the cart, it makes it easier for insects to be sold in supermarkets as awareness slowly starts to be raised, because the sort of people that will but them will recognise the brand from the food markets and festivals, and buy them on the strength of the brand. This will then slowly grow eating insects into a more common thing.

The idea for the brand we came up with was Moph, coming from the word Entomophagy, which is the technical word for eating insects. It also plays on the idea that a moth is an insect. The style of the branding had to be clean to rid insects of their dirty connotations, and the m is taken from the Thai alphabet to have some more oriental connotations.