Commitment

 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.

 Cart framework directly using the same mechanism as an umbrella. 

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. 

Exploring a more traditional umbrella shape with the framework supporting the bag externally

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. 

At first I tried to modify existing umbrellas to see if I could wrestle it into the form I wanted.   

And studying the how the inner mechanism functioned.

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.