Conceptual design: hanging box | zijianwang-portfolio

Conceptual design:

collapsible hanging box for outerwear storage

Our team was assigned to a design brief, which asked us to design a product or method for outerwear storage in lectures halls.

Refine the problem

After analyzing the brief, four of our team members all agreed that the brief should be refined to most degree because some codes given were either irrelevant to the design or unable to open online. A lot of metrics listed in the brief were baseless, thus, it required pre-refining work on the brief so that the design solutions would not be narrowed at those beginning stages. Each refined constraint and criteria was justified by both analytical and interpretative arguments, so that the feasible solutions could satisfy all the requirements in the refined brief.

The refined brief was the guidance for the posterior design solutions.

Idea generation and iteration

After refining the brief, we, as a team brainstormed and expanded all feasible solutions by functionally decomposing the design problem into sub-categories, which were how, where and what force as mentioned in idea generation process in the design report.

We kept expanding our solutions by expanding each category wide enough until all possible ways for outerwear storage were lay out. The solutions were narrowed and scoped by combining different ways from different categories, from which a list of feasible solutions were presented for further comparison and selection.

Take into action

During selecting process, we used various analysis tools including the Pugh Chart and Lotus Blossom Technique [4] to help us justify our decisions. Iteration of the design process took place a couple times during selection until the final design solution, which was the collapsible hanging box, was chosen. Thus, future construction of the prototype and presentation in kickstarter were implemented.