FreezyFlip

1 of 4 students, January - March 2022

Challenge

The client owns traditional, plastic ice cube trays and uses these on a daily basis. He was continually frustrated with the manual effort required to remove the cubes from the tray and sought a solution that automatically and effortlessly dispenses ice cubes. The constraints from this design was to dispense without the use of electricity, as ice tray machines do.

Skills

Technical: Metal shearing/bending/cutting, rapid prototyping, user and performance testing, user observation/journey mapping.

Outcome

The team and I created an automatic, self dispensing ice tray that dispenses 6 ice cubes at a time. The tray is double-sided and follows a simple process: fill the top cubes with water, place in freezer and let freeze, flip the product over, fill the alternative side with hot water, and let the frozen cubes from the other side fall out with ease.

This solution was particularly innovative, as it leveraged the heat from water (which was required to make ice cubes) to solve the challenge of ice-tray dispensing.

The image on the right is a graphic I created to communicate and summarize our product’s innovative solution.

Process Highlight

This was my first experience communicating technical, engineering concepts to a client. Since my freshman year, synthesizing engineering information and communicating this in a digestible manner has become my superpower. When designing the FreezyFlip poster presented to our client, I decided to translate the process into 3 steps: freeze, flip, fill & dispense. Often times, the best form of communication is observation, but observation isn’t always possible. I learned to leverage visuals one might see from observation in order to communicate my message.

Project Learnings

About myself as a teammate:

  • Celebrate and get behind ideas that aren’t your own. The final concept was not my idea, though it was wildly innovative and well thought-out. Northwestern is full of smart students, and listening to new ideas openly is essential.

  • Lean into your strengths! Often, students harp on their weaknesses, but I recognized that bringing value to the table through your strengths outputs far more valuable results.

  • Micromanaging kills team cohesion. Give teammates room to breathe, create, and execute on their own before checking in.