the short

For one of my mechanical engineering classes at Stanford, ME 101 - Visual Thinking, we were tasked with designing something that addressed a pet peeve. I decided to design a chair that has built in storage space, as I both enjoy designing furniture/sculptural pieces and dislike placing my bag on the ground. Though this project was relatively small in scale, I found it very rewarding to design a product from idea to marketing. For a more detailed process description, visit the SafeSeat's website!

ideating

As with all designs, I began by sketching a number of iterations of chairs. This phase also included a good amount of market research - in both dual-use chairs and modern chair aesthetics - so that I could decide how I wanted to position my product in both form and function.

prototyping

A step emphasized within the class, I created a prototype of the chair in order to better understand its proportions and the ways it would bend under applied weight.

finalizing design

In the finalizing stage, I created a number of detailed illustrations, including ones with exact measurements in order to fit lounge chair ergonomics. This also included smaller graphics used to display different materials for the chair, as a selling point was its relative customizability.

promoting

The final step in this project was creating an online portfolio in order to best promote our products. I decided to keep the website relatively simple, sticking with clean line work and colors that echoed the chair's materials. In laying out the website, I tried to let the graphics speak for themselves and provide text as a secondary reference. I believe that if visual representations are good enough, they often convey more information than text can.