“EZ Air Dry”

I finished another fun Coursera project: “EZ Air Dry”, a solution for hang-to-dry a fair amount of clothes in limited space.

Some design topics come from the designer’s need, and this project was right the case: I have some delicate blouses that I don’t want to use dryer or hang everywhere in my small room.Thus, I urgently needed something that filled the gap between my need and the reality.

In this Course, “Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society”, Professor Karl T. Ulrich taught us to close the gap by following this design process (image by Prof. Ulrich): First, sense the gap and define the problem; Second, explore design options with iterations; and finally, select the plan that satisfies user needs, have good design and can maximize profit.

My design starts with some rough ideas – I wanted the solution to be easy-to-use/move, strong enough for many clothes and flexible for different cloth types. I put together my ideas into this sketch below:

After this, I gathered some more needs from my friends, and this is my user need decomposition:

And then I had some design options for my hang-to-dry solutions:

I selected option A, G after considering features & costs, and built them with PVC pipes:

Then what about using them for real? Not bad :) I brought them to my office and my colleagues offered my lots of advice for my prototypes.

I combined these two prototypes and here is my alpha prototype:

In my beta (final) prototype, I added one more stick in the middle to make the prototype more stable, and to increase room for small items, such as socks.

And this is my final work you saw on the very top of this post:)

I completed this project, but I do know there are many more and better design options for this topic, and I will keep working hard to do better!