We focused on how much of a hassle it is to bring groceries home and decided to invent something that would make it easier to carry heavy groceries from your car to your house. Taking special notice of our own grocery-carrying routines, we found a few issues: not only are groceries heavy, but they also take multiple trips to bring them all in.
When brainstorming solutions to our grocery problem, we came up with a multitude of possible inventions: a pulley system to transport groceries from your door to your fridge, a cart with a bring-your-own basket system doubling as fridge organization, a backpack that you could attach grocery bags to. While all of these ideas were plausible, we struggled to find one that inspired us and was different enough from existing inventions to expand on.
After playing around with a lot of these different prototypes, we spoke to our school librarian to get feedback on our ideas. She was very concerned with the physical strain of carrying groceries going up her doorstep. So, we got to work on designing a cart that would be able to move up stairs. One of our ideas was a cart that would be able to lift itself up the stairs using the power of your own footsteps. We also thought of a Jacob’s ladder kind of idea where we would have boxes moving on top of one another to move up the stairs. Then we got more simple and thought of just motorizing our wheels to make stair climbing a bit easier for the person.
We realized that we had shifted away from our main problem and we had to prioritize which aspects of the whole grocery shopping experience we really wanted to work on.
We decided to go back to our main focus of finding a way to easily transport grocery bags from your car to your house. We brought in a foldable laundry hamper to prototype a foldable cart you could store in your trunk but it could not sustain the weight of the groceries and we had to leave that behind. Then we finally looked at the structure of an upside down umbrella and we got inspired. The way the umbrella can transform from a compact structure with rods to a curved hollow shape caught our eye. We were trying to find a way to hold all the groceries in a single umbrella bin so we added two more layers. This structure led to the lotus flower shape that makes our cart so attractive. Finally we had completed the Popper Shopper.
