Working On The Design

The first step after having defined that my product cannot produce toxins through melting the plastic, I had to figure out a manufacturing process that would ensure this wouldn’t happen. My initial idea was to sandwich plastic pieces between two sheets of acrylics. The limitation with that is it would only be usable for flat surfaces, like table tops. My second and favoured idea was to bind pieces of plastic together with some sort of medium like resin. This would ensure plastic still being the main focus, while not restricting the types of shapes that I can make.

After establishing, that I will make a range of design-focused products that will not harm the environment through their manufacturing process, I then had to think about the actual products and their design. I was really intrigued by Dean Brown’s feedback from Guru’s day, about creating a range of different high-quality products that all vary in product type, rather than creating the same product with a different design.

He suggested to mainly focus on a coffee table and then select objects that can be found near such a table. This really related to my design approach, since I had already looked into possibly creating some sort of table. My second product will be a plant pot because I like the contrast between the harmful plastic and the green environment of a plant. My third product took a bit longer to define, but I ended up selecting a picture frame. Commonly found in the living room setting, frames are used to display fond memories, thus create a great additional product for my range.

Once that was established, I played around with the design, prototyping it on paper and in Illustrator. These sketches can be seen below

My next steps is to further enhance the design and to actually make three dimensional prototypes.