This is the Tobacco Tent. The purpose of this tent was to adapt the standardisation of tobacco and cigarette packing and impose it onto a tent in order to create awareness about tent waste and the impact it can have on the environment. The tent uses ironic photographs of different festival campsite scenarios and comical captions in order to make the campaign and product appear more light-hearted. The tent also uses a classic Wedge Frame style as this triangular shape holds the perfect geometry to print the tobacco packaging graphic onto. This style of tent is simplistic to repair and doesn’t use too high of a variety of materials to produce, as well as taking few manufacturing processes to construct. The reduction in variety of materials and manufacturing processes will lower the impact that the product has on the environment and in turn make the tent more sustainable. This tent is based off of the dimension of a three-man tent but will hold two adults comfortably with room to spare, maybe for luggage and other essentials. Tobacco packaging has been standardised in the UK since 2016.The standardisation of tobacco packaging has not since directly impacted the number of smokers within the UK but has instead caused controversy and sparked many conversations amongst smokers, causing them to ask one another how the new packaging makes them feel about their addiction. My aim with this design was to create a topic of conversation within the campsite, around the tent, amongst festival goers in the hopes that their moral perceptions would lead them to take their tents home or dispose of them correctly. The humour behind the graphics will hopefully leave festival goers to feel better about the challenge they’re being posed with of not wasting their tent, instead of making them feel guilty and as if they are to blame for the destruction leaving that their tent behind could cause.

Within this image, we can see the opening of the tent. To gain access to the tent, I wanted to keep it as simplistic as possible yet also ensure that the user felt that their belongings were going to be safe while they left the campsite to go and explore the festival. The product uses a zip as apposed to Velcro, rope or buttons/toggles. Using a zip ensures that the tent is closed fully, meaning it’s harder to enter for someone passing by; it is also makes it harder for people to see in through cracks or folds in the fabric giving the user more of a sense of security; the zip additionally adds another level of weather proofing, both with wind and rain and lastly reduces the risk of rodents and animals breaking into the tent. On the opposing hand, a zip is much harder to replace once broken compared to a toggle, button or piece of string/rope. Plus, zips tend to partly be manufactured from plastic, therefore, once it has broken, the elements can only go to landfill.

In this image, we see the product formed into what is known as a tent circle, an area created by the user to signify a where a group of people are staying over a weekend. Here we can see elements of the tent such as parts of its fly sheet and guide ropes. With this tent, there are two coverings; one fabric layer that covers the frame and another that goes over the top of the tent in an A shape in order to give it another layer of water proofing, essentially acting like a gutter system. The fly sheet is manufactured from polyester with a polyurethane coating. Polyester is not only recyclable, making the tent more sustainable, but can also be printed onto through a screen-printing process, making it possible to apply the tobacco styled graphic. Adding the polyurethane coat gives the product weatherproofing qualities, ensuring the user stays dry, but does not affect the product’s ability to be recycled. As well as the fly sheet, we can also see the guide ropes in this image. I decided upon using Marlow, Blue Ocean Dockline for this portion of the design. Typically used by fisherman, the marine rope is undeniably strong, ensuring its quality, extending the tents over all product life; however, this rope is also produced from 100% recycled plastic bottles, increasing the tents strong stand point on promoting sustainable living. The yarn is a part of a closed loop product cycle, therefore, once broken and thrown away, it returns to a material manufacturer to be produced into a new product and reused once again.

In this final image we can see a skeleton CAD drawing of the tent alongside the dimension of the product. The sizing of the tent is based off of dimensions of a three-man tent as made apparent previously, yet many may only use the tent for two adults and save space for other belongings that the user may wish to bring along to the festival weekend. Both the height and angled shape of the tent does not allow much room for the user to manoeuvre around the product, therefore meaning they may not want to stay within the structure when socialising, hence I have shown how a tent circle may be formed with the product in previous images. This may be something to reconsider if and when designing a new tent. Alongside this, we can additionally see the pegs that the guide ropes would be pinned to the floor with. These pegs would be produced from Nuatan, a bioplastic material. This element of the design would be manufactured using either a two-part mould or could instead be 3D printed to form its shape. Due to the 3D printing nature of the pegs, it is possible that, if the component were to break, the user would be able to request a new part on site if the festival opted to buy a 3D printer. Being able to replace parts of the tent through this method would extend the overall product life of the tent, hence making it more sustainable. The material also leaves behind no microplastics within the surrounding soil and if kept in the correct conditions, has a material life of between 1 and 50 years.