Johnny’s Selected Seeds Salad Spinner
Johnny’s Selected Seeds tasked ELEVEN with designing a labor saving, low cost solution for small farmers to dry their salad greens after washing and before packaging. Designing around an existing prototype created by the team at Johnny’s Selected Seeds, we created mockups simulating the human factors and ergonomics of the product. This then informed the design phase, which was focused on using low cost, low volume materials and manufacturing processes.
Role: Designer
Team: Mike McDuffee, Phill Seagram, Marc Senger
Designed around the ubiquitous heavy duty plastic fish basket used by small scale farmers we tested various heights and angles to develop hardpoints for the end product.
We evaluated analogous products in used by the restaurant industry to see how they approached similar problems.
Concept 1
This concept was focused on creating a simple form that directs the worker towards the controls and handle. Additionally, the top down silhouette allows space for the motor and maintenance. This concept uses a sheet metal construction with flat stock parts to minimized upfront tooling costs.
Concept 2
This concept was focused on placing the motor in the center of the product in order to prevent balance issues when the motor is runing and there’s an uneven load in the fish bucket. Constructed with two simple molded or formed plastic buckets and bent tubing to rigidize the structure, this concept has low tooling cost and packs easily into a small footprint for shipping.
Concept 3
This concept was focused on creating simple rotationally symmetrical side panels that would allow easy maintenance, cleaning, and assembly. Using low cost vacuum forming with simple secondary operations for the plastic panels, this concept would also break down into a small size for shipping.
