HCDE 451: 2.5D Tablet Holder Prototype
Introduction
For our third assignment in HCDE 451, we were challenged to design a tablet stand, cell phone holder, or prototyping frame under a few constraints:
- The prototype must must be cut from a single sheet of 18" x 24" chipboard
- It must not require any glue, tape, or other fastening materials to assemble and use
- It must be able to be dissembled into pieces that can be stored flat and transported (as in a backpack)
Beyond these requirements, the project was open-ended, though we were required to construct our design in Rhino 3D to print with a laser cutter and asked to test our design before the due date.
Description of Idea
Because I have a tablet at home which I often prop up on my desk for reading, I chose the tablet stand for my design project.
My idea was to build something sturdy which would allow a user to modulate how tilted the tablet was while keeping it secure in the stand.
To keep the tablet secure within the stand, I gave it a front lip and sides, meant to keep the tablet from toppling over sideways or forward if the table were disturbed. Since we were not allowed to use glue, the various pieces would hook into one another, similar to those on the box design we saw on makeabox.io in class.
Design Process
As someone without a lot of experience building 3D objects out of multiple parts, I found this particularly challenging to ideate on. I spent many days after we recieved the assignment scribbling down sketches which lacked proper perspective and then scrapping them. I also used a couple of cardboard boxes on prototypes, only to find that the cardboard was too flimsy for the majority of my design ideas against the weight of my tablet. By the time I was through with it, the cardboard was a mess of bent pieces, but my sketches below are slightly more presentable:
At first, most of my designs involved friction to keep things in place — the space for the tablet and the front of the design was meant to be tight enough to keep the tablet upright, for example — but because cardboard gets soft putting pressure against the same spot several times, this was nut successful. This is when I turned back to the notched box-edge design I referenced above to keep things in place.
Imagining the particle board would be thicker than it turned out to be, I came up with a design that would have a divet for the tablet and that the notched edges would keep everything in place as designed.
User Testing
My user test was rough, because as I’d anticipated shortly after my laser cutting, the particle board was too flimsy to hold up the weight of my tablet.
This was difficult simply for holding up the tablet but when we tried to navigate around different programs in the tablet the way a user normally would, the entire thing fell apart. The stand in the back actually bent in half before the test was over.
Both my tester and I agreed that though the design looked good at first glance, it was non-functional due to the flimsiness of thin particle-board.
Analysis
In practice, after I had cut everything out with the laser cutter, I found that the particle board was nearly as flimsy as the cardboard I’d used in my prototypes. Unfortunately, I did not have time to go back to the drawing board with my entire design, though I did go back to the CoMotion space and attempt to reprint the stand itself. Unfortunately, while transferring the design, I must have selected the wrong scale because the stand came out about half the size it was supposed to be, making it unusable for my class presentation.
Overall, while I think the reasoning I used to come up with my design was sound, I should have put more thought into the material and given myself more time to redesign if it was unsuccessful.
