The Challenge

Due to the pandemic, many people worked from home. This means, going out less often to buy food groceries, or buy the stuff you need online via online delivery services, this means that there were a lot more deliveries, which has led to a lot of packages being stolen. One of our team member’s package was stolen just a week before this project started, that gave us an idea to make something that can help us reduce these porch pirates stealing our packages.

Ideation Phase

For this class project we had to “hack” a box and make anything out of it. Our team had a few ideas, but we ended up on the “Porch pirate prevention box”, or as we call it “Porch Private” since it keeps our packages private from the pirates. In this phase of the project, we had so many ideas written up that it was almost an impossible build, if which we decided to make, would not have been cost effective at all. So we decided to discard out a lot of our ideas like “Having a camera inside the box. Or Making the box out of metal”. Actually that metal idea would have been good, but we needed it to be cost effective, and something stealth looking, so it doesn’t attract any attention.

Iteration

The group brainstormed and came up with new ideas that could help us make the delivery box more secure and more covert so that it gets missed by someone who's not looking for it. The process of forming the final design went like this:
 
Once the Initial sketch was complete, we made the design into Illustrator. The design looked like this:

And then we re-iterated it to be less complex, and we replaced the four compartments to be  just 2 compartments. Because we thought if you order food, you won’t let it sit there for a whole day, so why should we make 2 compartments for food alone. And same for the package, once you get it delivered, you will be notified by your delivery company. So we removed the 2 compartments for the Package as well. Then we made a design which looked like this:

But then we thought that it won’t be that stealth looking if we just made a big box that sits on the porch. So then we modified it again to look like a bench. This bench will have every feature that the previous box had for example, remote lock with battery hidden, will still be nailed to the ground, and will have insulating materiel inside. But it also has some improvements, like a different kind of foamy insulating materiel, which will be softer and better than the bubble wrap, since it is also waterproof, and it is also as cheap as the bubble wrap. And it obviously has better stealth design, which help us disguise this delivery box as a bench. So the final look of this bench will be:

Next Steps

When we displayed our product on the presentation, people liked it. They also understood the reason we were making this product, as we had a few people in class that stated their packages were also stolen from their porch. If the group agreed, we were planning to make a prototype of the design and try to pitch it to a company that would have helped in creation and distribution of these porch private benches.