Resubmission: Project One: Bio-Inspiration

>Initial Research
Went to see how might improve upon my previous concept for electronic storage solution by looking into trends, and habits of users. With a little research involved and the seemingly discouraging thought that most people don't worry about strong their electronics. More are concerned with cables, wires and electrical wire mess. I've continued to look at how biology cells may inspire storage design. Soon I've realised that biological cells are difficult to mimic their nature of work. Due to all their carry out functions are synthetic, organic and microscopic. Which I've decided to move on to work on another concept.

Nautilus Shell. It has a very interesting form. Originally I thought this inspiration could be used to bind and store electronic cables and wires. Though there may be a bio-morphic inspiration, I couldn't see the bio-mimmicry aspect from this design.

Next station. The research into indoor gardening. Thoughtfully I believed the frog species could be an inspiration. Some species collect and store their fertilised eggs in the parent's cavity of the mouth to protect them from predators. Or, the a particular frog specie that carries the eggs on their adhesive-membranous back. However, bio-mimicking this specialty of the frog is proving difficult to conjure a concept. Especially with the adhesive substance and the only physical material that came to mind was velcro.

 This particular bird nesting was interesting by Tailor Birds. Where they sew a couple of fibrous leaves together with Silk, Wool or Plant Fibre.

 The exploration of bird storing behaviours has led the research to food-hoarding animals.
I was particularly interested in passerines, specifically chickadees and tits, jays and nutcrackers and nuthatches. Which are all hoarding food animals and store the nutrients in places like crevices in trees, rock, under stones, holes, etc.
While function of these birds are behavioural and involves physical action, and coming up with a workable solution is quite difficult.

Moving away from storing electronics and cables, gardening and plants to something that requires much more user interaction. I find that designing a solution for storing items away for a of period time, something electronics, does not have frequent interaction between the user and the storage product.
So I move away from these concepts and went into looking at storage designs that require frequent interaction between user and product, such as perishable and non-perishable food, ingredients, nutrient, water and beverage.

I had to find a particular household issue that people may have with storage of these kinds of things. At home, the kitchen that my family use, the kitchen bench top, cabinets and, shelves contain many different kinds of spices. The large amount of spice products which are used by five household users, it becomes time consuming and frustration to search for a desired ingredient from the large cluster of mix from the cabinet. It doesn't help when there is minimal lighting and often the user have to bend down, forward, or in a kneeling position to reach further for items all the way behind other bottles.

These are pods located in their plants. The left image is the lotus 'cup' bearing edible seeds. The physical arrangement and form, and the biological function of storing the seeds were an inspiration to my current design for Spice storage.

>Concept exploration

Initial Frog concept for Plant Pot

Scribbles of concepts, wire/cable storage

Refine sketch stackable pot plant

Frog-like pot plant

Scribbles

Flying-fox/Bat wing, storage pouch for cables

>Model development 

>Hero Shot

>Technical Annotation

>Rationale

Lotus Nelumbo nucifera

The bio-inspiration of this nature is the way how the Lotus stores its seeds.  The seed is also classified as fruit in literature and is an edible diet for many national cultures.

Each pod has a cavity to carry it in place. The ‘cup’ provides the cluster arrangement and holds all its seeds in one plant.

The cavity-storage of this plant provided me an idea how household items could be stored. Especially with spice bottles that can take up kitchen spaces of bench tops, cabinets and drawers. Because of users’ behaviour and attitude of storing spice ingredients in the kitchen, the spices can be misplaced and become difficult to find, and also when storage of spices increases they would take up a lot of kitchen space.

As the storing trends of spices are usually on bench tops or inside storing compartments. Areas like the wall, vertical spaces and the space underneath overhead cabinet are not being used.

Therefore, my design concept addresses this issue and attempts to create a solution and change the way how people store their spice ingredients in the kitchen.

The concept allows the user to easily ‘push’ and ‘pull’ the refillable spice (plastic) bottles from the (rubber) cavity.

Because everybody have different ideas about how they store objects or placing things (back to original place), the rubber cavity will hold onto the tip of the bottle from any angle, as the cavity is a circular, which is similar to the way how lotus pods are kept in place at the lotus cup.

The cavity is a flexible material, as it is made of rubber, and rubber provides the friction force to keep the spice bottle in place not letting it fall to the ground.

The other inspiration of the spice storage is this plant highlighted in the image below. It has an interesting nature in how it sprouts pods from its stem.

The arrangement of the spice storage was influenced by the biology nature of this plant. The arrangement is linear, and it provided a benefit of placing the solution at the wall, or under overhead storage.

As the storage form is linear with the firm grip hold onto the bottles, the orientation of the rubber holder can be placed vertically or horizontally along any surfaces of the kitchen. 

The concept design has a cradle-to-cradle system. As recyclable materials are used such as recyclable rubber from old wheel-tyres; and recyclable polypropylene. 

The storage design is meant to address the issue over-storing of spice ingredients in medium-to-high density homes. By freeing up cabinet, bench top and drawer storing space by allocating storage of spice bottles in vertical wall spaces and under overhead wall-cabinets.