A casual but caring companion catered to combat your coffee or tea cup holding conundrums.

With this project I wanted to create a cup holder that would allow me to easily carry three separate drinks that would also be portable enough to fit in my small backpack.  This design challenge came about with how I often make trips near the University of Pittsburgh to buy bubble tea for myself and my two roommates.

The final project, features a hinge that allows for the components of the holder to flatten for portability.  The cup shaped components, cross tabs, and hinge encircling rings were laser-cut from 3mm frosted acrylic, while the handle was cut from colorless 3mm acrylic.  The main part of the hinge was cut from 6mm blue clear acrylic.  The design makes use of slotted tabs and snap features that were reinforced with acrylic glue.  Because the design of the hinge currently undercuts the projects ability to completely flatten, future efforts would be placed upon either resigning the hinge/hinge spacing, or resizing the three main components (handle, single, and double holders) to fit within each other in a single plane.

I began the process of designing this project through a series of concept sketches, paper prototypes, and scrap-cut prototypes.  Because I am new to working with acrylic, I found that the material was incredibly prone to breaking with implementation of snap fit features, leading to many broken prototypes.