Making a Toiletry Bag

Brent Wong
Nov 3 · 4 min read

HCDE 451 Process Blog | By: Brent Wong

Design Challenge

Design and create a simple pouch or bag or other fabric construction.

Design Requirements

  • Must be made of some kind of flexible fabric or material
  • Must use a sewing machine to connect and assemble the component parts of your design
  • Must use some sort of fastening mechanism as part of the design (velcro, drawstring, zipper, etc.)

Design

Going into this project the biggest constraint for me was my inexperience with sewing. Knowing that my skills were severely lacking I had to carefully consider what I was going to make. To start the design process I started by sketching out a few different objects that I thought were plausible for my level of expertise. The three objects I considered making were:

  • A toiletry bag
  • A drawstring bag
  • A tote bag

After considering what would be the easiest to make as well as what I might actually use I landed on the toiletry bag.

Sketches of my ideas

The next step in the design process was to practice and prototype. During this phase I created multiple prototypes for my design, with each iteration getting progressively better than the previous one. I started out with a muslin prototype; a small, cheap version just to get a sense of how it might look. Once I was confident with my sewing abilities I transitioned into working with higher quality fabrics and started adopting more advanced sewing techniques.

Iterations of my toiletry bag (first iteration on the left and final on the right).

As you can see my second version was a bit more refined. I cleaned up the stitching and decided to add a lining along the inside to add some aesthetics. To be completely clear, I could’ve easily attached velcro around the edges and called it good, but I knew I could take my project one step further. So that’s exactly what I did, on my final iteration I added a zipper to create a fully functioning toiletry bag.

Analysis

Even though I was more than happy with how my bag turned out, it was time to take it into a critique session and get feedback. To my satisfaction many people had only nice things to say and were pleased with how it turned out. One person even commented that my bag “looked store bought.” People also liked the use of the zipper because it’s easier to open and more secure than other fastening tools like buttons or velcro. All in all, everyone seemed to embrace the bag that I had made and left me no feedback for how I could make it better; suggesting that my design was highly effective.

Critique Comments

Reflection

Overall I really enjoyed this assignment. I thought it was a fun challenge to learn how to sew and although it was a bit frustrating at times, I also found it to be quite therapeutic. Personally, I’m not sure if sewing will be a practical prototyping technique for me, especially in my career as a UX designer. However, that being said I think it’s definitely a useful skill to know how to do. One thing I really appreciate was getting an extension for this assignment. It gave me as well as everyone else plenty of time to learn how to use the sewing machines so that we could actually produce meaningful work. One thing that I would be interested in learning more about are the different stitching techniques, how they are used, and under what circumstances.

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