The Hook line

Dieter Rams claims a good design must be innovative, useful, aesthetic, understandable, honest, unobtrusive, long lived, environmentally friendly. I believe that my concepts cover the majority of this list in their designs.

In regards to the aesthetic I believe all of them but #6 would be pleasing to the eye while #3 is my favorite as it fits my personal aesthetic. I believe all of them would be understandable meaning as they all have a clear purpose and I do feel like all but #5 have simple installations that are easy to understand and are honest. The most innovative design would be #2 as the one piece is meant to squeeze down to ensure that whatever is hung up is held in place. The material used to create the pieces would determine if I was environmentally friendly as well as none of them have lots of extra pieces that would need a lot of extra material to create. I think if they are unobtrusive or not truly depends on what someone sees as obstructive. If it is regarding size I believe #6 could be obtrusive. If it is complexity #3, #5 and #6 are possibly obtrusive. In regards to being long lived I have a hard time determining that as does long lived mean the product itself lasts for a long time or is the general design timeless? I suppose that is up to the interpretation of whoever is viewing it. 

The following image is of the collective ranking of my designs from both my peers and my own evaluations.

These are scores given individually:

My top contender (The Wings #3):

Individual ranking: 14

Peer ranking: 17.75

Second contender (Paws #5):

Individual ranking: 15

Peer ranking: 17

Third contender (The Circle #4):

Individual ranking: 14

Peer ranking: 17

Fourth contender (Round #1):

Individual ranking: 14

Peer ranking: 16.75

Fifth contender (Multi #6):

Individual ranking: 13

Peer ranking: 16.75

Sixth contender (The Squeeze #2):

Individual ranking: 13

Peer ranking: 15

I have personally decided to go forward with "The wings" this was my choice even before my peer reviews but it is good to know that they unknowingly support my decision. My main reason to choose this design is because I enjoyed it aesthetically and I do believe it is able to function not only as a coat hook but also a hook for keychains and smaller objects. I also believe this design can be easily altered to change it's function (possibly changing the sizes and positions of hooks) while still keeping the atheistic consistent. 

This is my progress so far. It is pretty basic and still needing some more details as well as cleaning the edges (which I forgot how to do) I also have to close off the bottom still and add holes for mounting.     

The Final Design

While I kept my design pretty simple, even sliming down the number of hooks after it being suggested , I felt like the bottom straight edges of the wings were too much of a contrast from the rest of the shapes which were nearly completely rounded. I added the little half circles on the bottom to not only round out the design (literally and figurately). I also believed that the hook overall needed more details without it looking clustered. So the bottom detail was very important to me aesthetically. I needed some assistance to recall certain functions and how to properly form my shape but in the end I am very proud of what I created and would use it in my own room. I do believe though I need to keep getting more familiar with the controls in rhino to bring all of my ideas to fruition. One thing I can continue to work on is making objects outside of my own atheistic so try other concepts that I would otherwise avoid but that is a pretty big task for myself so it may take a lot of time before I can go through with that.

One major struggle I have is that when I placed my design in the Prusa slicing software a portion of my shapes were separated from the main group on one side and I am unsure about how to fix that mistake so I will leave it in for now till I have figured out how to fix my issue. 

I’ve fixed it!