How does this product solve my initial problem: My initial problem was that tools with sharp tips like scissors and knives need its carrier to hold it on its tip or hold it upwards to ensure that it won’t hurt other people around while walking, yet this safety measure is easy to forget about, especially at schools (design or art class). Therefore, I decided to make a scissor sheath to help protect its carrier and the people around; meanwhile, it can also help maintain the cleanness of the scissor.

A skill I learned: An important skill I learned is hand sewing.  As far as I could remember, I’ve never actually hand sew anything before, yet I do believe that it is an important skill to possess. In this project, I needed it to connected the two pieces of leather together, so I asked the teacher in the sewing station to teach me this skill.

My most important decision in this project: I think my most important decision in this project was deciding to do hand sewing instead of using the sewing machine. The first time I try to make sew my two-piece of leather together I used the sewing machine to do it. It ended up in a failure because my pieces of leather are too small and curved for it. The next time I decided to hand sew the pieces. Even though it was much slower than the sewing machine, but it was a success.

In this Product Design unit, we were asked to design a handheld smell detector and make a prototype of our design (the prototype will be mostly made out of foam and cardboard). To get inspiration for our smell detector design I searched up images of different handheld objects. I got inspired by the design of the temperature gun and the Ophone—which is a device that enables smell messaging. I took a few parts—that inspired me—from each design and added these ideas into my design, such as the idea of the display screen on the back of the temperature gun and the opening on the top part of the Ophone—which I believe is where the smells get in/out of the device. In addition, my favorite part of my smell detector is its handle. As shown in the above photos, the handle is designed to be in a curved shape so it will be more comfortable to grip on.
How it works:
In the photos that are attached to the post, you may notice that there’s a switch on the side of the handle. Sliding the switch downwards will turn on the device; it will then suck the smell in. The smell will first go through the opening on the top of the device—so it would be captured inside the detector. Thereafter, it will be detected and identified. When you turn on the display screen by pressing the black button, a signal will be sent from the detector to the display screen. It will display a picture of the smell that has been identified and provides the user some information about the smell.

For our first Product design unit, we were asked to create a lightbox that had a scenery of a place/landscape that is special or important to us but didn’t get the chance to visit because of COVID. We first searched up images of three different places that are special to us and chose one of them for our lightbox design. I chose to feature the landscape of an island of Maldives—which we were planning to visit again. I split the image into five layers, ranging from the background (sky), palm trees & bushes, wooden houses, the beach, and seawater.

I learned and developed various skills in this project including the skills I learned using Adobe Illustrator, using acrylic paint & masking tape, and separating an image into layers, etc. I developed numerous skills that had to do with using the Adobe Illustrator, since I’ve never used it before; which includes but does not limited to changing the color of the outlines of icons/shapes, creating shapes and adjusting their sizes, as well as turning solid icons into lines through a quick process of image tracing and expand. To make our lightbox layers, we found icons from a website called Noun Project and learned how to join icons together to make out the features of our lightbox layers.

My biggest obstacle was adjusting the size of the palm tree icons that I selected. At first, I chose a really realistic palm tree icon that I favored, and they looked perfectly fine with the bushes icons until I realized that the trunks of the trees were too thin; meaning that there’s a big chance that they will break apart.  I tried to adjust the width of the tree trunks, but it doesn’t work since they are already connected and grouped with the bushes. As result, I deleted and re-did the entire layer, which surprisingly didn’t take me much time to do so. I picked another palm tree icon that has a wider tree trunk and repeated the steps I did last time, which gave me the final product in the above photos.

Something I’d like to change about my lightbox is that I would make my second layer higher (the palm trees and bushes) or make the palm trees bigger so that there wouldn’t be so much “blank” space in the upper part of my lightbox. Since I joined these icons with a rectangle I can simply change the height of the rectangle to make it happen.

Overall, I think my lightbox was a success because it turned out to look pretty similar to the actual image I chose. The LED light behind the palm trees and the orange acrylic paint in the back made it look relatively like a real sunset—when the lights are switched on. The sizes of my lightbox layers are also just right to make out the image and are all able to fit inside the box.