Hasta La Ideas

Text & photos by Robert Bye

I first envisioned initial concept for Hangen18 months ago, and since being featured on Core77 in February 2012, it has since gone through four major re-designs with over 100 development iterations, bringing the clotheshanger from concept to prototyping. I’m pleased to announce that it is now ready for manufacture.

Initially, Hangen was a simple problem-solving product created as part of design internship competition where I was asked to design an innovative hanger. During the lecture in which we received this brief, I immediately began sketching out quick ideas and within a few moments had a simple line drawing that I could see had potential. Taking this idea to an initial product render only took a few hours, and even though there were still many flaws in the design, the idea and function was clearly there.

At this point, I was lucky enough to have this design featured on Core77—since I was just a second year Bachelor’s student at the time, this gave me a huge boost in confidence and made me want to commit to working on the project further. However, due to time constraints and an extremely busy study schedule, I only managed to find time for to return the project six months later. Even so, this happened to be enough time for me to develop a love for the design aesthetic of Naoto Fukasawa, Yves Béhar, Sam Hecht and Kim Colin, and I wanted to try my hand at creating a product in a similar style. Taking the initial functionality and transforming it into a completely new design was a worthwhile experience, involving many sketches and quick computer illustrations to see what it would look like.

I uploaded this version to a number of design networks and after being the most viewed and liked design for a number of weeks—getting over 6000 views, receiving many comments and even having people contact me directly asking where to buy it—I realized that it might have some commercial potential. So the next step was to adapt the design for manufacture, which entailed countless CAD iterations: adding draft angles, changing injection points and developing the shape to suit the injection moulding process. Using the software Solidworks and Moldflow Synergy made the process easier, but it was still a time-consuming process. This was quite a learning process for me, as design students are generally encouraged to focus more on the idea than the nitty-gritty of manufacturing. Thankfully, since the shape of the hanger is quite simple, I only needed to make a few changes, and I encountered very few problems.

(more…)