Through the weeks that I've been working on this project I've been narrowing the list of things I want to solve about grocery transport more and more. I had started out with a laundry list of things I wanted to tackle like portability, compactness, commute efficient, separating fragile and heavy groceries and more. Now I've gotten to a point where I can pinpoint exactly three things I want this trasport to function as: collapsible, lightweight, and taking weight off of the body. As I talked about in my previous blog post I was started to explore how I could appropriate the collapsing mechanism of an umbrella into a cart form. Here I begin to experiment with that idea. The sketches below capture my initial thought process.
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| Cart framework directly using the same mechanism as an umbrella. |
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| Moving away from the rectangle bag shape to a more triangular form for the sake for stability and ease of connecting the bag to the single cane framework. |
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| Exploring a more traditional umbrella shape with the framework supporting the bag externally |
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| Plan view of the bottom of the bag. This is the form I plan to more ahead with for now. The bottom sketch quickly illustrates how the support poles attach to the vertical cane. |
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| At first I tried to modify existing umbrellas to see if I could wrestle it into the form I wanted. |
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| And studying the how the inner mechanism functioned. |
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| The above three photos are my finished attempt at modifying an existing umbrella. Ultimately this approach was unsuccessful because the form was not as mallable as I had orginally thought and was hindering me from acchieveing the shape I wanted. |
This led me to experimenting with my own collapsing and expanding mechanism Above is a quick study of how the hardware functions.
Above is a more refined method of collapsing a bag using the hardware I designed. From this point I want to continue experimenting with the appropriation of umbrella design to create a shopping bag that is rapidly expanded and easily contracted.
