OrDu storage
Portable, modular, storage
What to do with all this stuff?
As time has pushed on, so have our priorities and practices. More and more people live ‘on the go’ and as the advantage of digital information has grown, the need to carry books, paper, and other rectangular, more prismatic shapes has dwindled, especially for creators. In other words, there is less need to carry a sketchpad and more need to have well organized equipment storage. The average backpack, in its bare essentials, is a sack with straps. However, this offers no support for small, organic shaped items like markers, stencils, chargers, hard drives, PC mice, and so on. These objects are key to a lot of creative individual’s practices; from the student, to the professional. It is time to build a versatile product that better caters to creatives’ needs
Encourage adaptable use
Promote creativity
Create structured organization
A Full Process Book Can be viewed here
The Goals
Research
One of (if not the most) commonplace product for creative individuals is the tacklebox-turned art supplies product. Something even more commonplace with these products is creative individual’s active disdain towards it. The product leaves no room to adapt or grow and does not allow the user to create a positive emotional attachment to the storage or what they are storing.
These Suck
Seeing Bigger Solutions
Looking at larger scale storage was a great help in learning about smart and well structured storage. Priorities, such as pre determined positions for certain items and the ability to expand/adapt, were clear strengths and fairly easy to transition into a smaller and more portable product. Another great strength was the fact that these predetermined positions for equipment led to a longer lasting product and a better bond with said product. A more difficult concept to transfer was the less-compact nature of organizational systems, like the one seen to the right, into something highly portable. Giving space to everything is convenient, but can lead to a lot of bloat. There had to be a balance.
Learning and Prototyping
Multiple prototypes and pieces were made for not only the base but the storage containers themselves. Below is the list of key changes. Base:
-Less and bigger holes were done to make it easier to place modules on the base as well as making it less likely that pegs would snap off and that the containers could stand on their own if necessary.
-A fillet was added to the bottom of the base to make easier to pick up and move
-the back was made more square in order to differentiate proper positions
-Containers were made rectangular as any other shape would minimize internal space
-Inner containers designed to fit in the outer containers were developed to further allow modularity and accessibility.
-A height of 7inches/177.8 mm was chosen as that a container holds the average unsharpened pencil
Exploratory Sketching
Over 30 pages of sketches were done to figure out the full design due to how many little pieces were implemented into each section of the product from the base, the containers and the cover. It was really important for all of these to stand on their own and work well together.
Easy slip off cover for access to base organizer
Multiple Container options for varying tools