Inspired by my walk to the Berkeley BART station past both a bar and a bakery, I combined the visual and olfactory experiences of smoking and freshly baked pastries to create a cigarette-pierced bun. The original blueberry and cream cheese bun brings up associations of pleasure, a pick-me-up, a smile, warmth, and family. However, the soot covered bun brings up associations of confusion, questions, and a suggestion of darker themes. The combination brings up associations of waste, deliberate or accidental harm or loss of value, carelessness.
My initial thoughts was to leverage this association as an anti-smoking strategy: replacing ash trays with ones that reminded the smoker of objects that smoking would be damaging e.g. taste (ask tray would look like a pastry or pasta), health (tray would resemble a clock or lungs), earth (plant, animal). But probing deeper, the smoker is often aware of those costs. However, the benefits of smoking still outweighs those costs. So the design must eliminate the value of the routine of lighting a cigarette and smoking.
1) The cigarette is designed for a slow burn, allowing the user to enjoy the ritual for several minutes. An instantaneous flammable cigarette that burns into ash in 2 seconds would fundamentally change the experience of smoking and provide no time for enjoying the smoke. 2) We would replace the value of a cigarette by replacing the tobacco leaves with a firecracker or with a marshmallow. This provides the user the same routine of lighting an object but either ends with a light show or tasty treat. 3) Exploring a haptic analysis of the cigarette paper, the current texture is clean, familiar (paper), almost natural. We can bring on associations of combustion, ignition, smoke fumes, industry, and cold steel by replacing the paper with a metal tubing. Even the consequent heating of the metal and burning of the lips can be a useful haptic association. 4) What value do cigarettes provide for the user? Relieving an addiction to nicotine, an opportunity to break from their problems and routine. We take away that value by reminding users that smoking generates more problems. We design a cigarette that melts and drips paint as it is smoked. However, paint stains has a metaphor of childhood accidents and minimizes the severity of smoking to that of an inconvenience. More extreme would use corrosive acid. 4) In order to strengthen the association of cigarette smoke to toxicity and use the metaphor of the color green, we design cigarette smoke to be green rather than the more benign gray color.
The cigarette has been really well designed. From the visual (small, efficient) to haptic to cultural associations, the smoking industry created a product that delivers value with very few obstacles. How can we decrease that value or create a worse user experience?