Based on our field trip experience, we identified some main problems:
One was the lack of awareness about the existence of banana fibre based products amongst consumers, that led to a limited market size. (Even some of us team members were unaware of it)
The next was that the cost of the banana fibre based products was too high for consumers to prefer it over cheaper, albeit a slightly lower quality of product.
When we discussed this problem with Anil Sir (during the question session of Dr K C Malhotra's talk) He asked the question as to why products made out of raw material that was a waste product and hence should be almost free were so expensive.
Based on our observations that we had seen in the field trip, we charted out the process flow of banana fibre extraction process.
So we realised that the high processing and machinery cost were contributing to the high cost of the final product. Hence we decided that our design challenge would be to work on creating cheaper process/machinery for extracting banana fibre.