Design Explorations #1: Traditional
Of the three kits from the mock store, the ground up mealworm mix was the easiest for people to take home because it reminded them of the instant baked good products they typically find in grocery stores. The participants who chose the Mixed Kit said that needed the highest form of mediation to help ease their anxieties with the insect form. Since the insect is ground and mixed with the other ingredients, it can be seen and treated as another prepared ingredient requiring no extra effort or attention. The ground, pre-mixed form was also convenient for those who wanted to put the least effort into cooking their own food. The Mixed Kit provided the accessibility, comfort, and familiarity that the participants needed, which inspired me to use the subversive methods of traditional branding for this audience.
A brand name can mask the contents to a point where the product has lost its original meaning. This led me to explore a nomenclature strategy to transmute the insect word into a more traditional, more appetizing brand. I began my exploration by selecting a few insect-related words such as “Arthropoda”, “mealworm”, “cricket”, and “insect.” I tried to find my own creative methods to generate brand names that would transform the words from their previous heavy associations to something more appetizing. What I ended up with was a collection of words, most of which were unappetizingly unpronounceable, but including a few that could be used as potential brand names for my product. Any of these combinations could of have served very well as the name for the traditional branding exploration, but I ended up choosing the one that sounded the most appetizing to me: Opoda, which originates from the word “Arthropoda,” the scientific animal phylum classification for insects. View video version of process here.
