buttons
product
affordance
laser cutting
cad
overview
This project focuses heavily on affordance.
We were to design 3 buttons (push, pull, slide, rotate etc) to have good signifiers and affordance while fitting into a theme of choice.
I like simple and designed so.
My final product.
challenge
i) designing simple
I did not want to complicate things by coming up too abstract themes. I wanted to challenge myself to design as simple as possible, to force myself to put in enough rigour and time to explore what affordance truly meant.
ii) my theme
After weeks of prototyping and testing, I chose "cuboids".
To further challenge myself, I forced myself to keep the dimensions of the 3 cuboids the same while deliberately designing different part lines and orientations to signify different actions.
How might I signify different affordances through different part lines and orientations of 3 otherwise identical cuboids?
process
i) cad
At that point in time, physical prototyping felt like it took up a lot of time. We were to come up with 10-15 different prototypes each week.
To ensure that each prototype has a higher chance of working, I cadded my prototypes in Rhinoceros to better visualise the mechanisms before making them physically.
My digital prototypes.
ii) physical prototyping
Nothing beats physical prototyping still. Doing the physical prototype helped me iterate more fruitfully. I used materials like blue foam and MDF boards to create my prototypes.
A laser cutter was used to aid in the prototyping process.
outcome
To wrap it all up, my theme was cuboids and in line with my drive for simplicity, I went for a rustic aesthetic for my final product.
I casted the concrete myself and utilised CNC to ensure precision in each of my 3 buttons.
Syntactic Analysis.
Pragmatic Analysis.
Push.
Rotate.
-min.jpg)
Slide.
All in all, I loved the the rigour in this project. It was a constant struggle between doing what I wanted vs what was possible at that point in time.
I learned a lot and exposed myself to many new things like CNC and concrete casting.
Great takeaways.