With Lumalive LED fabric, the tent could provide integrated light sources for the interior and exterior, creating a soft light that is much better than harsh flashlights.

Kelty is a brand built on low-cost innovation. The current product line is dependable and admirable, but another look at manufacturing and use of materials will make Kelty’s products once again stand out as a leader in outdoor gear for serious adventurers. The Mantra 6 is a large tent that will most likely be used by a family that is experienced with camping, but not serious about gram-shaving and sparse living. They will most likely have a car to get their equipment where it is needed. By taking a look at the new and interesting materials out there, the tent as a mobile living space can be transformed. Obviously in this exercise, price is no object!

For example, campers have had to deal with the inevitable fact that their metal tent stakes will bend when hammered into hard ground. This can be a big problem when you’re hours from the nearest camping store and your 10 year old has bent half of your stakes. By using a memory metal, such as nickel titanium, you could heal bent stakes right in your campfire, the staple of every camping trip. By having the stakes “remember” their original shape when heated above a certain temperature, a bunch of useless hunks of metal have been revived, saving the camper money and keeping them from being left in the forest as trash.

My whole proposal can be downloaded as a PDF here.

A visual map of how people create, carry and share photos.

How do people interact with photos? In a group, we made a grid of all the actions people take with their photos, which were then translated into the map above. Likening the process of a tree taking in nutrients and then creating branches in leaves, we mapped how people take and store photos, sort them and then ultimately display them. After doing the research and creating a visual map of this process, we could then move forward with ideas on how to improve it. As a side note, this map was created before the past 18 months, when facebook finally took over every other social media site as the standard for distributing embarrassing party photos.