In the Spring of 2020, our class was assigned to 3D print a wearable tool. I chose to develop a ring that I call the Piston Ring. It's a ring that holds your workout supplemental powder for you so that you don't have to carry your entire container with you. In addition to designing a functional product, we also had to create a brand for said product.
This was a dramatic shot I took of the ring with some weightlifting equipment in the background. I also added the IS logo to the top left to make it recognizable as part of a brand. The challenge of making a small object, like a ring, be the center of attention in a gym was difficult, but I figured a foreground shot would do the trick. I found that placing the ring front and center made it too difficult to recognize the setting. Additionally, I found that blurring the background helped bring attention to the ring and make people look twice at the advertisement.
This was an A.E.I.O.U analysis of the product that I performed. It helped me to further grasp how I should market the Piston Ring.
These are some of the preliminary sketches I did of the Piston Ring. In addition, there are a few of my various other designs mixed in, not all of which fulfill the same function as the Piston Ring.
These were some of the original 3D models that I created in the process of developing the Piston Ring. I printed all three of these designs, but each of the first two had their own unique problems. The first design was certainly the most complex and interesting, but I found that making a mixing ball into a piece of wearable jewelry had a slew of problems. In addition, printing designs like it at smaller sizes would ruin the fidelity of the model. Moving on from that idea, I began iterating designs for rings that store workout powder. The second design had three major issues: the container was to big to look good when put on a finger, the ring portion itself was too thin to resist the torsion of people pulling on it when trying to unscrew the cap (and it even broke!), and the lid was too thin for people to grasp with their fingers. Plus, with the threading on the inside, powder could easily get stuck and ruing the tolerance. My final design fixed all of these issues, but required more tolerance than its larger counterpart.
This was a poster designed to show the function of the piston ring in instructional format.
This last image was a poster I created to summarize all of the branding details. I decided to make a brand that took the term "body-BUILDING" quite literally, with a central theme of industrial production. I decided to call the brand "Industrial Strength Fitness" and dubbed the ring I had created "The Piston Ring" both because if fit the theme and because the ring somewhat resembled a piston from a car engine.
