(insert image of bench design)Our bench is 12 feet long, with a rotating piece at the left end that can be used as a table/desk to do work on, and can be flipped over to be used as a headrest to sleep on.
This project was really dependent on the engineering design cycle, similar to the solve a world problem project or the Rube Goldberg at the beginning of the year. My group and I started by thinking about bench designs and the locations that we would put it. We looked at successful benches from previous classes and creative bench designs online, and eventually picked a bench to loosely base ours off of. Then, I worked on designing a rough draft blueprint that had basic dimensions and the general idea of the bench to base our other, more detailed blueprints off of. It was really tricky for me to get the scale right to transfer the blueprint to an actual model made of cardboard because I made everything different sizes even if they took up the same amount of space on a sheet of graph paper (Basically my graphs scale was not accurate.) Once I got a good scale, my teammate began to make the model with cardboard, and my other teammate worked on a material list. During this, I made a 3d model with the same scale, and we were ready to present our piece of furniture at the open house.
Our bench design's key features
Materials- For the parts of the bench that we don't touch, like the bottom of the frame or support pieces, we used a pressure treated wood that lasts longer but has chemical risks, so we should not touch it. For the parts that we touch, we are using redwood, because it looks better and is better made for human contact.
Budgeting- We used the least materials possible, and we tried to make every piece of wood have multiple uses in order to make the bench as cost efficient as possible.
Usability- The benches main feature is that it can be used as a place to rest your head, and then can be flipped to be a desk to complete work. This provides great usability and function because it is very versatile and provides multiple options, weather its social or individual.