Door Holder

Intention:

Take a second to imagine this: you get home to your apartment. You open your front door, and head to your room. You drop your bag, unload your pockets of all the things you've been carrying with you, and head back to the kitchen, closing your bedroom door on the way there. You realize your mistake, but with just enough time to spin around seeing your door close. You're locked out of your own room inside of your own apartment. This is what I am trying to avoid. This is my plight.

Sure I could leave my bedroom door open, but then my air conditioner made specifically to only cool a small room would be even less effective than it already is.

Research/Context:

I looked online to see if there were products out there that would achieve similar things. I wanted to be able to still close my door, but prevent the latching mechanism from working. Most of solutions i found were simple door stops you would fasten into the door frame to prevent it closing all the way. I need mine to be removable easily.

Process:

I knew I needed some time of elastic like force to grip the door, the issue would be determining how much I would be able to deform the print. I took measurements of my door to figure out the stretched shape the holder would be in when actually attached to my door. I sketched out those dimensions and figured that the only point of failure would be where the actual "hinge" points of the holder were. I figured that if I limit the distance enough, there would not be enough stress to actually break the holder's arms. I ended up with the decision that the minimum distance that the arms would be apart when not stretched was 1/3 the final size when they were stretched.

Reflection:

The main things I learned from this overall process is that there are many problems in the world that we generally never realize are problems until it is too late. The idea for my door holder didn't come to me until the day that I forgot to deadbolt my bedroom door, as I usually do, and closed it behind me which locked me out of my room for a number of hours.

One thing I would definitely do next time though is expand the two-day rule of 3D printing to be 1 week. You never know when a day long print job will suddenly pop up, cause the printer to go down for 12 hours and then restart. Although my print succeeded the first time, I may not be so lucky the next time.