Bear With Me

I have gone back to the design board for the week. I know, this sounds crazy but after talking with a professor and some other designers I realized that my concept was severely overshadowing the function of my tools, in particular, the roasting stick. I had fallen victim to the norm of a two pronged fork being the best solution to the challenge of connecting a stick to a hot dog or marshmallow. In addition to this, my plan for hand tapping each tool seemed like more work than it was worth, so I began designing another way of holding the stick and came up with these models:

 

While some of these models seem similar or wacky, they enabled me to get closer to finding a better solution for my tools. Yes, I will be ordering some business cards with my designs on them to give out at the show (since my postcards wont apply to the design much anymore) but my product will be more sound in the long run.

I took some of these models and went on to mold them in a oven-hardening poly clay to get a better sense of how the tool would function once it was made into a real product and I came out with these models:

From these models I deduced that the first two forms were the most successful. I now have to determine which of these two I should move forward with. The plan for either model is to allow the tool to be fastened to sticks of some varying size. Therefore, the holders may get smaller like a cone so that the tool gets tighter on the stick the further it is pushed down.

Once I create detailed sketches incorporating this attachment scheme to my 3 tools, I will model them on Rhino and move to a 3d printer as opposed to my early plan of creating molds. The reasoning here is mostly to save time and get the same result. My project is an exploration with iterations of my product, it is s though I am selling the idea a whole lot more than the actual product. Thus, I will 3d print the forms (at least 3 sets would be great) and them cover them in a thin layer of my material so they look to spec at the final show. It was hard for me at first to realize that these models are just that, models, and that going through the pain and time of creating and casting using molds would drag me down when instead I should be focusing on creating a sound design.

So as I said before, bear with me and I will keep this timeline updated with my progress. What I am holding nearest to me now is the goal to leave consumers thinking "That is so simple, so obvious, why doesn't this exist?"