Steam Mouse Iron
First-year Qiting Fang created the Steam Mouse iron. She initially looked at the form of curvilinear and planar volumes before function was given to the product. Qiting worked through many iterations and landed on this wonderful redesign of a widely used home good.
The Steam Mouse is a redesigned iron that has a curved handle
with a removable auxiliary handle allowing people to use smoothly.
Design Process
The design process started with many sketches, but was later refined through 3D sketches using found materials such as wire and balder clay. After Qiting took her physical prototype and made a 3D model in Rhino. This model was primarily developed as a study in physical form rather than initial functionality. Qiting started with planar and curvilinear volumes and arranged them with dominant and subdominant elements.
The function began to emerge after the first sketch prototype when considering the way it would be held. Observing how people moved the prototype forward and backward, a hand-held product with mobility at its core became obvious. The product was further refined through the exploration of how it would form to people's hand, leading to the creation of features focused on hand movements.
Challenges
According to Qiting, the most challenging portion of the product development was in transferring the 3D sketches to a real product, how to attribute functionality to the volumes, line, and plane from the original sketch. With these in mind, the handle design of the Steam Mouse has undergone repeated improvements.