Project 5, Group time

For our 5th project we were told to form a group that we would then complete project 5 with.  The group I am in consists of four women who all focused on jewelry in their earlier assignments.  Two of us focused on rings while the other two focused on necklaces (myself included).  Originally our group was debating which of our items we should design our kiosk around.  Because this project is more comprehensive than the others, and we have a little more experience on what sort of objects illicit the strongest design concepts, choosing the object took much more time than when I initially selected my object at the beginning of the semester.  For a while we focused on doing some sort of ring, and were debating weather to build a kiosk around Eliana's South American gold ring, Wenquing's clock ring, or an entirely new ring, such as a black Camile ring I had at home.  After giving it a lot of thought, conversation, and design brainstorming though, we decided to head in an entirely different direction, we decided to design a kiosk around a watch.  But not just any watch, a sports watch.  However, none of us owned a sports watch, strictly speaking, and Eric informed us we must actually own the object we are designing around.  Thus we ended up selecting my Breitling watch by defacto, as I was the only person in our group wearing a watch, and it loosely fit our sporting requirement.  Breitling is a high-end sporting watch, specifically targeting diving and aviation, but it is marketed as a high end sport watch, suitable for many activities.  It has a higher price point, somewhere in the $3,000-$10,000 dollar range depending on which watch you purchase.  Below is a photo of my watch, so you can get a visual idea of what our group is working with.

As you can see, this isn't the typical sports watch.  It looks closer to a Rolex than a Timex, which means that as designers we have the challenge of creating a high end kiosk/booth that speaks to the specific audience that would potentially purchase this watch.  As a design also we have to focus on sporty/active audience, who are willing to make an expensive purchase on a sport's branded watch.  So our group really tried to nail down a specific active audience, and we vacillated between the diving community and the aviation audience.  At one point we even discussed incorporating both in our kiosk design, but that concept was weak and was easily seen as such when we started sketching out our ideas of incorporating air and water, or planes and scuba tanks, they were just too far apart to make a high end design concept.  So then we focused on just aviation and then the ideas started flowing.

Final Model for Project 4

Shelving system with scaled boxes, and bookends, Scale for this model is 3" = 1'-0"

View From Top of Shelf

Book End

Scaled Box, each one of these little Boxes took me 2 hours to make, yikes!! There were 18 total.

The final of the finished display system for my packaging for my necklace.  After a struggle with size and proportion, I finally settled on the design below.  The overall height of the shelving unit if 5 feet tall and just under 3 feet wide, more like 2.7 feet to be exact.  I fit the length of the unit to the exact size of three of my scaled boxes sitting next to each other (in the center shelf).  The height of each shelf also corresponds to the height of the boxes.  I decided however to make each shelf height equal, because I thought with only three shelves uneven spacing looked really awkward, especially with the space below the first shelf and the floor, a necessary space when you consider how high the overall system is and how far you want to bend down to reach the first shelf.