Enclosure

The assignment for this week was to create an enclosure for a specific item. Considering my theme is "double trouble", I thought it would be interesting to create something that is both a cause for trouble to have and a cause for trouble to not have. The first thing that came to mind was our beloved smartphone — having it with us at all times is cause for anxiety, stress and dependence. But not having it nowadays causes the same things. So I started with sketching ideas for an enclosure for a smartphone, one that would allow us to still charge it for example, but not to view the screen. But as I was sketching I realized this whole idea didn't really make sense; mainly because it's unnecessary but also because I kind of lost interest in doing it.

So I pivoted to a different idea — a coin bank. Having back problems, I always try to carry as little as possible in my backpack. I go as far as taking any coins I have in my wallet and storing them in a drawer at home. It feels like their worth is just not worth their weight. Anyway, the idea was to make an adult-piggy-bank-type-of-thing, where it's something that fits nicely on a console table or something like that, but is still fun to open and count how much cash we managed to accumulate.

I had a design in mind with a set of hidden elastic chords (as per my aesthetic theme) that allowed the object to be stretch-to-open and let all the coins fall out — once a few months when I attempt to count how much money I have in coins, I like taking the whole thing and just spilling it on the table / floor. I think when dealing with a literal pile of pennies, you basically just have to do it like that...

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The main challenge was figuring out how to hide the strings so they're invisible from the outside. The design I made consisted of 14 layers (I measured the dimensions of the elastic chord's knot and based the needed height on that, which works, but in retrospective the final product feels a little small...)

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It is not as stretchy as what I had in mind, and I think this is because the small holes in the middle layers are exactly to size (the string is 1/8" and they are too). The string barely went through the holes to begin with. I think this is causing too much friction so once the enclosure is stretched to open it doesn't really contract to close as I thought it would. I guess covering the inside of these holes with some smooth material could've helped too (something like silicon or some type of plastic that you can get in liquid form).