CragMag was designed in a third-year studio course within the University of Colorado Boulder’s Environmental Products of Design (EPOD) curriculum. The coursework is focused entirely on designing products to be sold at a booth as part of Firefly Handmade Market, an artisan holiday market in various cities around Colorado. The class’ booth is named EPOP, a play on words combining EPOD and Pop-up.

Designing for EPOP provides us as students with an exceptionally appealing series of challenges:

1. Market Evaluation - This project required us to holistically consider the public’s interests rather than focusing on a narrow prompt or client. However, to hold successful sales, we designed around questions such as: What are the interests of people in Boulder? What design trends can we see around existing locally-made products? What markets seem oversaturated? Which demographics does it make most sense to target? Most importantly, what makes a good gift?

2. Sustainable Focus - All groups were encouraged to incorporate diverted materials into their designs wherever possible. However, we quickly learned that sourcing and reprocessing most climbing equipment was unrealistic within our timeline. The true challenge lay in selecting materials that were workable enough to function, yet distinct enough to still tell a story.