This project presents a vision of how New Zealand could work smarter to capitalise on a lucrative global trade opportunity, by offering an alternative to the current logistics and transportation infrastructure of refrigerated exports.

With the aid of a world-first Free-Trade Agreement, New Zealand frozen lamb exports to China are rapidly growing. However, the current transportation and logistical systems used to export this product were developed over 37 years ago. With significant growth in the Chinese market, these systems are now inefficient and outdated. New systems and new infrastructures need to be developed to accommodate the needs of the new, lucrative Chinese market.

I did not intend to make small improvements to the existing system but rather re-consider and develop a vision of the future. The system I designed comprises a flat-pack refrigerated shipping container system with integrated internal packing modules. The flat-pack design of the container increases space efficiency when transporting empty and improves security when transporting export product. Internal packing modules divide and organise the cargo in manageable units which eliminate ergonomic issues and decrease the risk of injury while also increasing product safety and quality assurance.

This project has taken a cross-disciplinary design approach and offers an entirely new perspectives on the role and scope of some New Zealand industrial design thinking beyond the usual refining of status quo practices and their responding design objects. It revisits the motivations and goals of core design practices, by scoping a larger, longer-term outlook. This also addresses the issues of identifying New Zealand’s uniqueness in delivery well above other successful global producers with regards to value, quality, and safety of our primary export produce. The design addresses some of the issues that global trade may have if current demand increases.

This is the beginning of a new way of thinking about the operation of the global transportation trade, which I hope will start a conversation of developing future transportation systems with an ethos of smarter shipping. This industry has previously be entirely untouched from a design overview perspective and I believe with others contributing to the research and development, New Zealand will continue to have and maintain a pivotal role in the global trade of export meat products.