Modular Wooden Car Toy
This modular car toy provides endless amounts of play through its customization. This iteration of the toy comes with 3 pairs of body pieces, 3 sets of wheels in different sizes, and one universal construction base. The universal construction base allows for all parts of the toy to come together to form a moving vehicle. The body pieces slide onto the base using milled dovetail joints that run the full length of each piece. This gives the pieces a stopping point when they are sliding onto the base, indicating that they are pushed to the correct point. The wheels fit onto the axles on the base with pressure fitting. Brass tubes are fitted inside the base, housing the axles and giving them a surface to spin against that will create less friction than wood-on-wood contact. Stoppers keep the wheels at a set distance from the base, aligning the wheels on each side. All edges are rounded as a safety measure for children.
Industrial Drawstring Bag
This was my final project for a softgoods sewing class, where I had the freedom to choose what I would make. I found that although I enjoy the convenience of drawstring bags, I have a few issues with how they interact with the human body. Early on I decided that I would use large metal chain-links as the “strings” for the bag, because their weight and width would solve an issue that I had with drawstring bags slipping off of the shoulders. These attributes added a feeling of security to the bag. While at a hardware store, researching material options for the bag, I discovered the steel double clevis. I loved this part and decided that it had to be integrated into the bag. After some brainstorming, I came up with a skeletal system of metal, which had thinner cables acting as the “drawstring” closing mechanism for the bag, attaching to the chains via wire rope clips, with these chains ending with an attachment to each side of the double clevis. This system provides a centered weight to the drawstring bag, making it feel comfortable and secure even when it has only a few light items inside of it. The skeletal system also allows for the weakest materials, the duck cloth that makes up the “bag”, to be easily replaced as they wear out. The duck cloth can be cut open to remove the metal skeleton, and a new bag can easily be made around the same skeleton of connected metal parts. The values that I strove for with this bag were entirely of my own interest. The aesthetic choices of steel metals on durable black duck cloth as well as the placement of the wire rope clips exactly on where my collarbone is were made to best suit myself.
Air Cushion: Biomimicry Research Project
Getting into a car accident is a shocking and negative experience for anybody, which is only made worse by the costs that follow the collision. Preventing injury with an airbag deployment should not come with the consequence of having to pay hundreds of dollars, it should instead be a moment of relief. Through the design process of biomimicry, I set out to find a solution to our current model of single-use airbags. When airbags are set off, a charge triggers a small explosion which causes the bags to rapidly expand with gas. This is a single-use system, and the replacement of this system’s components after detonation is what consumers are paying for after a collision. My focus therefore was on finding a substitute for that exploding reaction.
In my research, I came across the spittlebug, a species that creates bubbles for shelter by secreting a liquid and pumping it with air using their own abdomen. The self-reliance of the spittlebug inspired me, what if the car itself could inflate the airbags?
Hole-less Colander
I wanted to create a design that I would genuinely use, and therefore I looked at problems that I have with kitchen appliances in my own experience. I remembered cleaning colanders with many holes, being annoyed that I felt the need to put the sponge into each hole of the colander to ensure that it was clean. The surface is complicated for quick and easy cleaning. I thought of ways to simplify the colander through the lens of modern design aesthetics to function without all the holes. This was also an attempt at redesigning in unconventional ways, a colander without holes? The essence of a colander is holes (A colander is defined as a perforated bowl). The colander consists of a rounded base component attached to a bowl component in 4 small spots. When contents are poured into the colander, water will find its way down the rounded base and through the slits that exist as gaps between the base and bowl. Food items are not small enough to fit through the slit. What is seen here is a prototype where the base has not been permanently fixed to the bowl, and wood is used for convenience. In a commercial rendition of this design, wood would likely not be used as it does not have the best relationship with water for long-term use.
Slip-Casting Molds
Documentation of plaster molds that I made throughout a slip-casting and mold-making class. Learning about mold-making was very beneficial to me as a designer because it granted me an understanding of product geometry for manufacturing. I culminated this learning with my most ambitious mold, a four-part mold of a standing vertical chain. Navigating the roundness of the chain-links was my biggest challenge, and I had to draw many diagrams to work out how to best create a mold that accurately reproduces my model.
