Packaging for a Tennis Ball
The task of bionics classes (2nd year of studies) was making a package for a tennis ball. The design process was accompanied by a series of strict rules. The first one was the size of the sheet from - 300x300 mm. The second - packaging cutout could not be symmetrical. It only allowed bending on the curve (bends couldn’t be straight and perpendicular). It was necessary to use the entire sheet of paper, but only cuts and folds were allowed.
In this project I did not presuppose anything. The shape and the style of this packaging is the result of the process of working (experiment) with a paper - after learning its properties and understanding its limitations. The Colour of the paper I used is gray because in this taskt the colour wasn,t the most important thing
The first thing I did, when I saw the untouched piece of paper and placed a tennis ball on it, was squeezing the paper around the ball. After several attempts it emerged a quite interesting shape, which became the prototype of the final packaging. I used a limited number of tools to create the packaging. One of them was a pencil - used to draw a significant bends from a tangle of irrelevant bends to the next sheet of paper , the second one pen without ink to do scoring. I created about 200 prototypes and each subsequent one was an improved version of the previous one.
Thanks to this project, I learned that paper is unusual, interesting but also difficult material. When you observe the way that material behaves, you know what mistakes you made, you know what makes the paper ‘hurt’. I also learned that in order to to design in some material, you need to know its properties, but you can learn about them via manual experiments, rather than reading about them.