February 2019
The NYUAD Advanced Manufacturing Workshop supported students, faculty, and staff with the technical expertise and facilities needed for product development. With growing foot traffic and manufacturing capabilities, the space needed a better way to receive and process feedback from the people it served. My first project as a volunteer was to design and manufacture a suggestion and incident report box.
Concept
Greeting people who enter the space, the box reflects the space’s ethos of iteration, precision, and function. The structure allows for card storage, ergonomic writing space, and restricted internal access. Extraneous elements were reduced through several rounds of research and iteration, producing the stripped-down aesthetic of a late-stage prototype.
Process
My initial design failed. As an onboarding project, the first version of the box suffered from my desire to learn as many tools as possible. Using a 3D printer, waterjet cutter, and laser cutter, I ended up with an clunky box that did not close. When I took a step back and focused on the essential functions of the box, the design simplified, and I was able to produce the whole box with laser-cut plywood joinery and a few magnets. Of course, not a week had gone by when another volunteer with a background in computer science asked, “Why not use a QR code instead?”
