Deployable Coat Rack
The classic coat rack was an essential part of home decor. Coat racks are disappearing and its design has not progressed in many years. The following is an customization coat rack that is playful and is designed to hold up to 15 items. The design uses a shutter hinge mechanism that deploys from one to five hooks so that the user can have numerous hooks to hold their item(s).
The inspiration was to develop a coat rack that can transform it's shape or hooks to suit the needs of the user. Initially explore ideas of adjustability, folding mechanism, and evolving from one form to another the create a new user cycle for hanging a jacket up.
The final function explored was the idea that the user chooses the amount of hooks they will need to hang up their items. The mechanism of the coat rack was inspired by how camera shutter deploys with hinges, disk leafs, and rotating movement.
The mechanism was tested using SolidWorks Motion feature. Adding a 'motor' to the smaller hinge demonstrates that the hinge system will react from each and expand the leaves of the model. Soft models were also developed to test size and 1:1 scale scale limitations.
The final results is a gear control coat rack system. The hooks will deploy with the help of gears rotating with the user turning the mechanism with just their finger tips spinning a dial. The gears in a system push and pulls on the arms and transform the arms which are extruded to the coat hook to provide the user to choose from 1 to 5 hooks to hang up their items.