Introduction
Hello! My name is Alex Hope, and I was in product design, PD-6 to be exact, during the school year 2022 – 2023. During my time in the class, I made, designed, and planned to make a very unique toothbrush holder with some designs I came up with on it. In this blog, I will explain how I progressed in the making of the toothbrush holder, how I may have improved, what helped me complete this more efficiently and finish not too overdue, suggestions, and more.
Ideas into design concepts
So for product design, we were first introduced to a program called Fusion that seemed at first to me like maybe a 3D model making program or maybe a design maker or something like that. After we worked on it a lot in class, we soon got to a big project, which involved working on Fusion to create a lamp or any product you could imagine as long as it was allowed and made of wood. We also got to make our own designs for the product. So for the start, I thought about what I might want. I wasn’t sure if I had really any problems, but then I remembered that I only brushed my teeth once a day, which was really bad, but at least I didn’t get any cavities so far. I felt like that once a day needed to change, and so I thought, what better way to get better at brushing your teeth than making it fun? I then brainstormed, and thought up a first design. The design included an open top wooden box with a hole right horizontally through the middle with little wooden panels above and below it to protect the toothbrush supposed to go right through the middle through the hole. For the sides of the inside for this first design, I planned to put maybe toothpaste and floss there, hopefully not squishing the toothbrush because the barriers protecting it. When I showed the design to our teacher, Ms. Kim, she suggested a better design and drew an example model of what my toothbrush holder could be, which looked a lot more organized and harder and more normal. She also said I should think of designs that represented me to go on my toothbrush holder. These new thoughts inspired me to brainstorm up new and better designs to go on it.
In this picture (above left “Remember to Floss” one), we have one side of my slightly better design, which shows 2 holes going through the bottom left side diagonal to each other to take up less space going to the side. I chose to do this for the design because of how there was a little divider in the middle of the inside of the design that restricted the toothbrush from going through, because the toothbrush can’t go through a little wooden vertical line. I then came up with some nice other designs, one that represented me, and the other relating to organizing. After we figured out some measurements and designs and stuff, we got to make paper models. When I finished my paper model, I felt a bit proud to see that it turned out sort of the way I wanted it to be, an open top box with some holes in the side, a divider in the middle to keep toothpaste on one side, and a platform to hold floss. I still saw some small mistakes/things that could be improved, though. For one problem I found, it involved the measurements of a platform designed to hold floss from the divider to sort of the front.
Over at the near top of the image, I had to bring the divider in the middle (the one not pointing up in the picture) a bit to the side because the platform I wanted to hold the floss looked like it was not long enough. So next, we got to work with Fusion, which allowed for more accurate measurements and better prototypes, as these ones were made of cardboard. The changes I made here weren’t that much, but I still had to recreate the designs and parts in Fusion and get them worked through using Lightburn, another software that told the laser cutters how to cut my prototype pieces. Going back on track, the changes I made, of course, involved making the platform for my floss longer, but I also chose to make the holes for the toothbrushes to go through be next to each other instead of diagonal because making the floss platform bigger freed up some extra space, so I decided, why not?
Now, the problems didn’t end end here, as there was a slight problem when I showed my prototype to the teacher. I should mention now that we connected the pieces in the product with fingers, which are like if you had your hands with your fingers sticking out individually and locking your hands together sort of with them when bringing them together sort of in between and on top of each other, but just made of the material we used in either the prototype or final product. So, mentioning fingers, the problem I had for this prototype was that while the cardboard pieces’ height was 3 millimeters, the fingers’ width was 5 millimeters, which made the fingers go just a bit over each other. I spent some time getting the width right for this, and I sent another prototype in. For this one, my product pieces, finger length and everything was fine, just that the laser cutting was done a wrong way. My designs appeared backwards, upside down, and some appearing on wrong panels. After some time, I heard that it was just a little error and that everything for my project was probably ok, so I sent it in for laser cutting the final product.
After I got the wood panels that were cut out, I saw that the designs were on the right sides and in the way they were meant to be. After that, I got ready to assemble the product. Instead of using tape, like for the prototypes, we used wood glue, a very strong glue that worked on wood, for the final product. The wood glue was trickling off the sides, so I had to quickly use a tissue to wipe it off before it hardened. After I finished getting the product set up, it was time to color it! I got some special markers that looked really nice to draw with for the coloring and got out my coloring plans. I colored the designs carefully and even used gold color for some letters!
At the end, my product looked a lot like the way I wanted it to be, just that I ran out of tissues to wipe the wood glue away and there were small wood glue drip marks. I didn’t finish before the assigned time, like most of the class I think didn’t either, though, but my product still looked and could probably function the way I wanted it to and I felt proud of myself. After that, I went right into writing a blog for an assignment, the same words you are reading right now.
Growth in skills
Over the course of the project, I have improved and ended up doing much more than I would’ve thought I could do. One time, when there was a small mistake that required a lot of manual fixing in Fusion, I tried to fix it in as soon as I could and worked a lot at home too to try and fix the measurements. Over here, I could’ve chosen to have the entire product have thicker wood, which might’ve been be too heavy, but at least would be an easy fix, or I could’ve fixed the problem using a lot of time. I ended up picking the harder one, which in the end, probably paid off, because at least I now don’t have to worry about the product being too heavy for the suction cups it will have on the sides to make it hang on the wall. Overall, at the end of the project, I learned lots of different tools and skills for Fusion, LightBurn making designs and panels, planning, and assembling my project. Lots of these skills, as written in OneNote, are for Fusion, and include the view cube, sketch, rectangle, circle, spline, mirror, offset, circular pattern, rectangular pattern, moving, copy and pasting, breaking, highlighting, extend, centerline, polygon, zoom fit, scale, explode text, text, bridging, and drawing an isometric model thing on paper, which also taught me how to use a special ruler. My isometric drawings were a bit messy and inaccurate at first, but with the special ruler and knowledge how to use it, my lines were much more clean, thin, good looking, and accurate (each angle is 120 degrees, which is hard to get normally). Now for these following pictures, I will describe some of the problems I faced during the making of the project (they could be repeats from before, but this could see if you were paying attention).
My design for my project at first was an open box with supports on the sides so it wouldn’t fall over, but the teacher suggested thatI use a suction cup because it would be better and I also think now that it would’ve been a challenge to get designs on the project sides with all those supports in the way. So that was an improvement for the design, and it also taught me that sometimes, the simple solution is the better solution. For my first prototype, I made a paper model using measurements I measured out on multiple pieces of paper. After it was done, it seemed nice and the way I wanted it to be so far, except that a platform wasn’t the right size, so I changed that for my next prototype.
For the second one (this picture was of the third one because I couldn’t find the second, but they are very similar, just a little laser cutting error for one and wrong measurements for the other), I chose to fix that platform problem and let the two holes in the sides be next to each other because the platform thing freed space. The other problem for the second one was that the thickness of the material was going to be 3mm to make it lighter, but the length for the fingers were 5mm, which was too long. I fixed both of these, even though it took a lot of time, but it paid off in the end when no fingers randomly stuck out.
For the final product, I used the same file as the third one, and the laser cutting went correctly this time, so the pieces turned out ok. I had no problems except for me squeezing the wood glue tube too hard when the wood glue finally got to the tip, which led to lots of wood glue dripping and rolling down the sides of my project, so I remembered that it hardened fast, so I quickly walked over and got some tissues to wipe it off before it ruined my designs. I was mostly successful, but there were still some glue marks. 
In the end though, my designs were almost always the same, as you might see if you look at the right side of this probably low quality picture I took of my first plans. So, for my designs, nothing really changed for them, just that the removal of the wooden supports idea allowed for them.
Reflecting and sharing
So, at the end of the project, I felt good about myself for finishing the project not too overdue and how I made it look like a very unique toothbrush holder. Over the course of the project, it involved hours of work in class, flex time, and at home, which came to show that the project involved a lot of working and staying on task. One tip for you if you are coming into product design this year or are new to it, is that you should use your time wisely and use a lot of it, and most importantly, do NOT game in class. I recommend this because you might get in trouble, and it spends up some of the many hours you might want to use working on your project, and I know this idea of working hours at home on work a bit well thanks to the big project we did in class and this blog I am doing right now at home, so whatever you do, use your time wisely. Speaking of using your time wisely, if I could redo product design from the beginning, I would want to put a lot of work into the big project pretty soon after it starts, because after I finished my project during this year, it was like a week or two after it already ended. And finally, one suggestion for our teacher we had this year, Ms. Kim, or any other teacher really reading this, maybe you could set the deadline for the big project a little bit later, because our class, judging from seeing the progress chart sometimes in class, didn’t really finish our projects on time. Maybe other years have been more efficient, but this is just a little suggestion.
Ok, so I don’t really have anything more to say anymore, and now I can finally get some sleep. This is Alex Hope, PD-6, seventh grade, in the school year 2022 – 2023, signing off. Good luck to you whether you are a student, teacher, parent or anyone. Thank you for taking the time to read my blog I spent a lot of time on. Bye!
(I’m not sure why it looks all pixelated and stuff but that’s what I got)
