Marie Kondo |
Doug Dietz |
Marie Kondo is a Japanese organizing consultant and author who is best known for her organizational method known as KonMari. It consists of holding one’s belongings and deciding if they “spark joy” and having a designated place for those items. Her method is in part inspired by the Shinto religion which focuses on the energy or divine spirit of items. She encourages clutter-free closets and drawers. She also recommends using boxes inside of drawers to store things in order to keep items together by category. I was inspired by her methods of organization such as using separators inside of drawers. I also used her ideas of keeping things organized by category by having removable containers to store fabric for seasonal fabrics. I also added a feature similar to a filing cabinet in order to sort fabric by color, type and pattern.
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Doug Dietz is an American designer who redesigned MRI scanners to make them less intimidating for children. He met with many children in order to better understand what they found scary when getting an MRI. Dietz created rooms with child friendly themes and added aromatherapy to calm their nerves. Some of these themes included a pirate ship, campsite and outdoor scenes. Typically 80% of children would need to be sedated during an MRI, but with Dietz’s design this percentage decreased greatly. I was inspired by Doug Dietz’s empathetic approach to his design. I wanted to make sure that my design was focused on the needs of the person I was designing my desk for.
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When beginning to create mock up models for my desk design I started by creating a model very similar to my original sketch. Once I had created that model I found multiple problems I wanted to address so I created more sketches brainstorming solutions to these problems. One issue I had was with the shelves. I wanted them to be effective storage places, but if someone needed to get something from the back they may disrupt items stored near the front. To fix this I created a sketch in which both the front and sides of the shelves on the desk were left open. Another issues I had with the desk was that the overhead part could cause a shadow and block someones view of their project. To fix this I brainstormed two ideas. One idea was to implement some sort of see through top to let light through and the second idea was to have a desk light attached to the top.
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Model #1 When it came to creating the first test model for my project I used pieces of cardboard and hot glue to put them together. Through making it I found many aspects of my design that needed to be fixed that I hadn't thought of before when it was drawn out in 2D. One of these problems is that the shelves were very deep and it seems like it would be hard to store and access things on them because of this. I thought that in my next model I could try to make them more shallow for better storage. Another problem I found was that the overhead piece caused the desk to be very dark. I felt that this would not create a good environment for its purpose of sewing because sewing is very precise and it would cause it to be too dark to see what you're doing. I brainstormed some ideas for ways I could fix this issue such as creating some sort of hole in the top to let light in or by having a small light in the top of the desk.
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Model #2 When creating the second model I used colored paper and tape. I found it was much harder to work with these materials than the cardboard because the paper easily warped, but it still allowed me to get a better vision of my piece in the end. Through this model I attempted to fix some of the issues I had with the previous one. One problem I tried to fix was the deepness of the shelves. Even though I made them less deep it still seemed like items stored in them would be too hard to access. This made me think of the idea to possibly have some sort of holes on the sides of the shelves so you could reach for things easier. Another issue I tried to solve was the lighting inside the desk. I used my idea of having a hole in the top which ended up letting much more light in. Though this solution did work I still wanted to test out using a light in a future model. This could allow me to compare them to see which is a better solution.
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Model #3 When creating my third model I decided it would be beneficial to only model the part of the desk I was specifically having struggles with in order to be able to focus on it rather than other parts of the desk I had already had mostly figured out. In my previous models my two largest issues have been the accessibility of the side shelves and the lighting. I was already able to test one of my solutions to the lighting in my second model and because I did not have access to the materials needed to test out of other strategy to fixing this issue (some sort of small light) at the time of making a model I decided to focus in on the issue with the shelves. My main solution for fixing the shelves was to create a cutout in the side of the shelves. This would allow for the user to reach items stored in the back of the shelves without disrupting the items in the front.
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Final Model For my final model I decided to use wood. I started by cutting out many pieces of wood. I then used wood glue to put these pieces together to create the desk. I then spray pained the desk black to make the model look more cleaned up. I used styrofoam
board to create objects that would be stored on the desk. |
Similarities
-Incorporated drawer separators similar to Marie Kondo -Organized things by category like Marie Kondo -Designed with empathy similar to Doug Dietz Differences -Marie Kondo main focus is on sharing methods rather than creating items. |