Container for unused and expired drugs
One more project I did during my studies at Belgrade Polytechnics. It was a semester project during my last few months of studies there. Together with a few classmates, I was invited to join a project run by a couple of professors. It was a joint project for 3 departments - environment protection, graphic design and industrial design. Students from those departments would work on the project, each in their own field, in presenting the research and solutions of the project.
You might wonder what was the project. Did you know that there's a law in Serbia that says that all pharmacies must have special containers for storage of unused drugs so they can be later transported and destroyed in an eco-friendly manner? Those containers should be easily accessible to people so they can put their expired or unused drugs inside. In 2011 when we did this project almost no one knew about the law and only one pharmacy had a container. The law was already in practice for about 2 years! Even today I don't think anything's changed!
Anyway, the task of a few of us from the industrial design department was to design several proposals for the containers. The one you can see is mine. I thought about a wall-mounted solution as the law allows it as an option, but decided to go with a larger one that could store many more drugs. Having an exoskeleton frame makes it more practical when mopping the floor and even when the container is to be emptied as you only remove the locked box, not the whole thing. Oh yea, the container box must be locked and it must have a hole on top so the drugs can be put in. Since different drugs might get mixed inside and can possibly cause a chemical reaction, each of the boxes must be first placed into a plastic bag and then put into the container. As you can see, quite a lot of things to think about when designing something that seems simple!
You might wonder what was the project. Did you know that there's a law in Serbia that says that all pharmacies must have special containers for storage of unused drugs so they can be later transported and destroyed in an eco-friendly manner? Those containers should be easily accessible to people so they can put their expired or unused drugs inside. In 2011 when we did this project almost no one knew about the law and only one pharmacy had a container. The law was already in practice for about 2 years! Even today I don't think anything's changed!
Anyway, the task of a few of us from the industrial design department was to design several proposals for the containers. The one you can see is mine. I thought about a wall-mounted solution as the law allows it as an option, but decided to go with a larger one that could store many more drugs. Having an exoskeleton frame makes it more practical when mopping the floor and even when the container is to be emptied as you only remove the locked box, not the whole thing. Oh yea, the container box must be locked and it must have a hole on top so the drugs can be put in. Since different drugs might get mixed inside and can possibly cause a chemical reaction, each of the boxes must be first placed into a plastic bag and then put into the container. As you can see, quite a lot of things to think about when designing something that seems simple!
