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Design :: Day 005

A bit of Housekeeping

From Daily UI to Design

So this is the fifth day I’m doing the 100 Days of Design Challenge. If you’ve been following my progress, you might have noticed that I changed ‘Daily UI’ to ‘Design’. I feel that this would be a better reflection of what I’m trying to achieve with the Challenge.

While the Daily UI Challenges were fun, I felt that not all of them were the kind of content that I am looking for every day. Don’t get me wrong, I think the team behind it had done an amazing job to package a curated list of UI challenge every day for 100 days – no small feat!

But I felt that on some days, I have a different idea of what would work best for me considering factors like the time I have, what I’m currently inspired with, and whether I have something interesting to show, to give some examples.

Which leads me to take a more open ended approach to the Challenge by allowing myself the choice to pick any Challenge to work on that day or work on a Daily UI Challenge that I have yet to attempt. I felt that this is a better use of my time.

Time

Sometimes life gets in the way. The 100 Days of X Challenge was intended to be a daily challenge (weekends excluded). I felt that it would be healthier and more productive for me to do it as and when I’m able to. This means that things like family, friends, work, rest, and exercise takes precedence over it.

I suppose this means that I would need more discipline to do it as it’s easier to fall off after a day or two of skipping it. However, I think it’s better to do that than to churn out 100 days of non-stop content just to hit an arbitrary goal.

I don’t feel that I should design for design’s sake, much less limit myself to just UI. Instead I feel that I should be exploring design for 100 days and find things that could hook me in to a design-related topic which I could also write about.

And with that, let’s talk about today’s topic.

Hanger Hook

I have a problem at home which I think many others can relate.

If you hang something using a hanger on your cupboard, you’re probably hanging it off the handle. If, like mine, your cupboard comes with double doors that open in the center, this means that only one of the handles can be used as using the other one will cause the hanger to fall off when you open the cupboard. Familiar problem? Just me?

I decided to address it once and for all when I got a 3D printer.

Ideation

I began by doing sketches for possible designs – at the back of a napkin, no less.

Satisfied with the design I had, I used SketchUp to create a 3D model of it.

I picked SketchUp for several reasons:

  • My 3ds Max license is tied to my status as a student. As I had graduated a long time ago, it had long since expired.
  • Compared to Blender, it is much faster to work on although the basic version lacks the advanced features that Blender has, features that I didn’t really need for this simple design.
  • It is free.

Modeling and Printing

I iterated on several designs, making improvements such as filleting the edges and adjusting the thickness of several faces. My goals here were to

  • Minimize sharp edges; which can potentially injure someone or damage the cupboard
  • Create something simple to design and relatively quick to print
  • Able to hold the weight of the heaviest apparel I have, and then some
  • Not interfere with the regular usage of the cupboard

I printed a few early versions, threw them away after realizing that they didn’t meet my safety standards or were not what I expected them to be. Sometimes, it was because the printer needed recalibrating and went awry after an hour – pains of using a 3D printer.

This is one of the designs that I settled on initially.

While it addressed the 4 goals I had for it, it didn’t stand the test of time. I broke it after a few days. Same thing happened to a second one I printed.

Back to the drawing board.

After studying the design and addressing the flaws, I came up with this.

And this is how it looks like in use.

Conclusion

So far this design had been reliable. I only broke one because I developed a bad habit of pulling the item off the hanger without removing it from the hook first. It broke at the top joint. Kinda expected that it broke there seeing that I am not able to thicken the top edge due to the tiny clearance.

That remains the weakest part of this hook, but it’s a weakness I can live with seeing that it doesn’t happen with regular (and careful) use and replacing it is quick (I can get another one printed in under 3 hours) and cheap. Another thing I can also consider is to have a higher infill for the design. This will increase the amount of filament used and printing time, but it might make for a stronger hook.

Here’s how I addressed the goals I set:

Minimize sharp edges; which can potentially injure someone or damage the cupboard

  • I filleted or chamfered most of the edges. None of the outward facing edges are sharp. I’ve also decided to go for rounded edges where I could.
  • About damaging the cupboard, I could go with rubber liners to pad the faces that comes in contact with the cupboard. It did leave scratches at certain contact points, but it’s something I can live with.

Create something simple to design and relatively quick to print

  • In the world of 3D printing, a 3 hour print is considered a decent print time. I’d file that under ‘relatively quick to print’. I think the design is also simple as I’ve removed additional fluff that I feel doesn’t serve the purpose of the hook, reducing it to just the components needed for the intended use.

Able to hold the weight of the heaviest apparel I have, and then some

  • I stress tested with a denim jacket, several shirts, and a small backpack. It seems to hold up pretty well. I suppose if I did the math I could calculate its absolute maximum load but I don’t think that’s necessary.

Not interfere with the regular usage of the cupboard

  • A problem I had was the top of the hook catching on the bottom of the door on top of it. This was solved by making it just slightly thinner.
  • The other issues were down to adjusting the dimensions so that it sat comfortably on the cupboard door.

It had been several months since I’ve started using them and I would say that I’m pretty satisfied with the results.