Bump-less Coffee Table

So, today's design is another piece of furniture. The design comes from a question I asked myself. How would one make a coffee table that would be less likely to cause severe discomfort in the shin region if bumped into? Well, the first thing that came to mind was to surround it with foam rubber padding. This would be excessive, unless the pads had some other use. Well, you could divide it into sections, and then shape them to be used as seat cushions for sitting at the table Japanese style. Well, I played around with the idea for a while, and this is the result. There are six segments, with two different types. They could be used to make sitting cross legged more comfortable by raising the angle a bit, or to rest your knees on while kneeling.



This coffee table would make for a great Lego play table, since it contains pieces and prevents them from falling off the sides.



You can also put the pads onto the table upside down, which makes an interesting pattern.



I chose to construct it with Mahogany for the main surface, and oak for the legs. I changed the direction of the grain for the corner sections of the table to make it more interesting visually, and also to help indicate how to put the pads on. In designing this table, I learned the value of making things easily modifiable. When I changed the size of the table legs, everything updated fine, but when I went back to make a change in the contour of the pads, I ended up having to reassign and redo all kinds of stuff. It was pretty frustrating. Sometimes things like that just can't be helped, but I think I started to see how it could be planned for. You need to build things with the expectation that things will be changed down the road. I guess you would call that a flexible design. That kind of thing was easy to do it POV-Ray with the different coding constructs that help parameterize things, but in solid modeling, it gets a lot trickier. There is so much that is hidden, and below the surface. There are of course ways to explore and see how things were made, but it does take a little while. I have a feeling that once I have put in as much time with SolidWorks as I have with POV-Ray, I will be producing at least as elegant of source files.

Portfolio Pieces

In the week leading up to Christmas, I worked diligently to create a couple of product designs, which I then posted to my online portfolio at coroflot.com/metamere.

The first project was a chair design. I just doodled for a little while, and the "Lean-Back Chair" is what resulted after further development in SolidWorks. I was able to test the balance of this half-rocker chair to see whether it's behavior would be interesting to experience, and comfortable to sit in. You can read more descriptions and see more photos in my portfolio page for it.



The second was a design that I had thought up back in the late summer or early fall. I wanted to fully define and execute this idea, since it was a simple and complete one. I wanted a strong, sturdy utensil that could work just as well as a spoon or a fork. I wanted it to be able to stab a grape or meatbell, cut a piece of chicken, scoop ice cream, and scrape yogurt out of the corner of a cup. It had to be beautiful and comfortable to use. In creating this model, I figured out a lot about using surfaces, which will be very valuable in the long run. I also did some FEA (finite element analysis) to test it, and then modified the design a bit based on the results. Here is the portfolio page for this project.