Research & Concept

It was a bit difficult for me to think of simple items that could be incorporated with a sense of playfulness with its function. As I was thinking of what object to use, the two objects that I thought about was a door stop and a wall hook. I still haven’t made a final decision yet for which item to add playfulness to, but I am debating between these two. These two objects are very simple to use by looking at it and understanding its function. Wall hooks are made to use by hanging items against the wall, whether it be clothes, appliances, and so on. A door stop has a simple function of preventing a door closing by itself by inserting a door stop at the bottom of the door. These objects are used everyday at all locations. Although they might look simple and easy to use, I thought it would be a good chance to add a sense of playfulness to these two items.

As you can see at the images below, for the door stop, I thought about three different ways to add playfulness to a door stop. The normal dimensions of a door stop is usually a height of 1.5 inches, length of 5 inches, and a width of 2 inches. I plan to keep those dimensions the same to keep the functionality of the door stop as it is, but add a sort of playfulness to it. The three ideas I have thought of was a person pushing against the doorstop, a person pushing backwards against the doorstop, and a person on top of the door stop holding a stop sign. These indicate that the person attached to the door stop is preventing the door from closing in some sort of way. I think adding these elements will add a sort of playfulness for a simple door stop. The image below the door stop is the wall hook. I thought about three different ways to add an element of playfulness to a wall hook. The first concept is a simple wall mount, but with a finger acting as the hook to hold the item. The next concept is a wall hook but shaped as a cat. The tail of the cat will act as the hook, holding onto the objects. The last concept I thought about was an elephant. The shape of the wall hook would be a figure of an elephant, and the trunk of the elephant would act as a hook to fulfill the function of the wall hook. I still have not decided what my dimensions for the wall hook will be, since the three concepts that I have thought about for the wall hook would be different than the others.

Iterations

This past week I decided to choose to add playfulness to a doorstop instead of a wall hook. I believe that many people have added playfulness to a wall hook already, and I think that adding playfulness to a door stop would be creative. For my first print, I decided to go exactly as I planned on my sketches. As you can see the model below, this was my first draft of the model. I decided to make the length of the doorstop 127mm, width of 50mm, and a height of 38mm. I also incorporated a stick figure acting as it is pushing and stopping the doorstop, preventing the door from closing. The stick figure pushing and preventing the door to close is my playfulness to an everyday object. However after my first print, it didn’t print as I hoped. The door stop itself printed as it is, but the stick figure itself had a bit of an issue. It was able to print the head and the two arms. However, the bottom half of the stick figure did not print correctly. I believe this is because I may have made a mistake on my measurements and the structure of the stick figure itself. Due to an inconvenience, I was not able to make another print. I also learned that the wedge on Tinkercad is not evenly sized. As I printed the door stop, I could tell that the lip of the door stop wasn’t a straight line. It looked as if it was around 175 degrees instead of a straight 180.

For my next prints, I plan to make the door stop itself a big larger. It does fulfill its purpose of preventing the door from closing, but the size is a bit too small. I also plan to make sure the doorstop dimensions are evenly measured and does not look slightly angled. I also plan to make some edits of the entire model on Shapr3D. I want to make my stick figure look more realistic, as well as more smooth than it was before. I want to emphasize the stick figures details, and make it easy to know that the stick figure is acting as like a door stop and preventing the door from closing. Below are some edits I have done to my model. I plan to make the height of my model to be 50mm, a length of 150mm, and a width of 50mm, so it would be more stable of stopping a door from closing. I also changed the model of my stick figure, putting its back against the door stop, another way to interact of how it is preventing the door from stopping.

Final Print

This was my final print for my everyday object with added playfulness. This process was very interesting. The very first doorstop I had printed was a bit smaller from before, so I decided to expand the dimensions of my doorstop. Before it was about 127mm in length, the new final model is now 181mm including the stick figure attached to it. The width from the first model was about 50mm and a height of 38mm. The new final model now has a width of 53mm and a height of 50mm. These changes have made the function of the doorstop much better than before. I had many trail and errors throughout printing this model. Most of my prints from before never really printed perfectly. There was always some sort of issue with the print. The images below are the results of my final print.

From before the prints weren’t printing correctly. Sometimes the bottom of the doorstop wouldn’t print to the bottom of the adhesion, making it look lopsided. The main problem was the stick figure attached to the doorstop. I had printed four different models from before, and the stick figure would always be an issue when printing. The stick figure wouldn’t be printed. Sometimes the bottom half of the body wouldn’t print and there would be filament around it, as you can see above from my first prints before a while ago. Throughout these four different prints, it is always the stick figure that wouldn’t print correctly. I have used Tinkercad with making these stick figures and I figured that was the problem. Whether it be the shapes not forming correctly, or grouping correctly. In the end I decided to use the Shapr3D app on the iPad. I figure that if I were to hand sketch my own 3D stick figure it would print much cleaner and easier. The image below is what I have made in Shapr3D.

The figure of this stick figure looked much better and well constructed as it was before in Tinkercad. I then uploaded this model onto Tinkercad and grouped it with my doorstop. I also added a small stop sign on top of the doorstop to give it the detail and definition of the purpose of the doorstop, preventing the door from closing. I then finally printed this model and it came out just the way it looks. I’m glad that in the end I have fixed my mistakes and issues and that the print worked out great. This was a fun project to do and throughout my experiences I am starting to get used to the methods of 3D printing when using both Tinkercad and Shapr3D. You can find and download my model here on Thingiverse.