Owl phone stand: 3D printing prototype

The reason I designed and built a phone stand for this assignment is that I SERIOUSLY NEED ONE. Before building it I always use the phone holder that is typically used in a car, which is ugly.

Again, like what happened in my laser-cut wolf project, I want to blend my favorite animal into the design, and I chose owl as my theme this time. I also want my design to be useful, beautiful and sturdy at the same time, adding a lot more difficulty to the design.

Design

As a start, with some online sources and my sketching skill, I sketched out an owl in illustrator and planned to make it a hollowed one, so that it’s easier to be identified when looking at.

The owl sketched out using illustrator

As I sketched it out I was planning in my head about the stand itself. Making a phone stand with adjustable angles might be beyond my capabilities. Thus I decided to do a phone stand with a 15 degrees angle.

Due to the complexity of my design and my so called “high standard”, I did everything in Rhino instead of sketching out the ideas ahead of time. But Rhino creates a good 3D space, the moment I understood how to use the basic functions, I could try all my ideas out here.

After a few iterations, I decided to split the phone stand into 3 components and start to print them out using the 3D printer.

The owl(left) Basement(middle) and phone stand(right)

And this is what it looks like when I print it out. And it took the printer 4 hours to finish all three components.

During printing(left). Yes, the color choice makes it look…. DIFFERENT (right)

Reflection

I actually showed off my phone stand a little bit among my families and friends, also in the critique session in class. Most feedbacks I got were positive comments on how cool this looks like from the appearance. However, a lot of them pointed out that the owl will fall off easily and I can make the rods on the sides longer.

Comments left by my classmates

Reflecting on this, I agree that I should have made the rods longer. The reason why the owl doesn’t stand is that the shape of the parts changed a little bit when I tried tearing it off from the basement.

Also I saw one of my peers using Solidworks to do this project. That software was indeed very difficult to install and only works in Windows, but it’s way easier to use than Rhino.