Close

PROTOTYPE

A project log for Wall Mounted Headphone Stand

A write up on my design process for an entry into the Linus Tech Tips and SilverStone Headphone Stand Design Contest

taibhse-designsTAIBHSE DESIGNS 06/10/2015 at 14:110 Comments

An important part of design is prototyping, this phase I love because I get to make my design or idea a reality, this phase is used to evaluate the design, identify issues and go back and fix them.



This was drawn up during the design phase but for this project in particular, design and prototype occurred near side by side given the simplicity of what was being created. I started by figuring out how far the bar must be from the wall in order to hold up the headphones without them getting stuck, second was deciding on the bars overall diameter, though the bar will not be round, instead a rounded triangular shape.



Prototyping started with creating templates from the cad files, seen here on screen before they got printed out at 1:1 scale.



Cardboard is among the easiest and cheapest materials to prototype with, I had a few empty shoe boxes laying around so I decided to recycle some of the material for this project rather than throw it all out.



The idea was to quickly prototype the scale and rough dimensions of the design, to do that I printed out a template of each part. Above carbon paper can be seen, using this the templates were transferred to the cardboard.



The templates were cut out using using the Stanley knife also pictured previously.



After the templates were cut out, they were hot glued together to form the overall three dimensional shape.



I only prototyped two segments of the overall bar, Only the profile shape was prototyped, The method in which they were joined was not prototyped, the aim of this prototyping phase was only to test the scale of the design and ensure it was suitable. Here I used cut outs of the cross section of the bar, joined them together using 100mm lengths of bent cardboard. next was skinning, wrapping this up with a sheet of thin paper.



Above can be seen the finished parts, the bar segments have been skinned and the arms have a square back plate.



The final prototype assembled.



I taped the prototype to my door and started putting headphones onto it to see how well they held.



While the prototype is pretty scrappy, it showed the design worked, its close to the wall and doesn't stick out too far, minimising the risk of someone walking into it, there is still enough of a gap to allow large pairs of headphones to be held. The orientation allows the design of all the headphones to be showed off. Overall no changes to the design were required due to careful planning and foresight when creating this design.


Discussions