Keyholder

Intention

I lose my keys in my own apartment way too often. Since I don't have a consistent place to put it or hang my keys, I often place it wherever is convenient at the time. However, this also means that it gets buried beneath other items all the time. Losing these were also making me leave my apartment later than planned because I couldn't find my keys to lock my door. 

Research + Context

I looked at other keyholders on the market. A lot of them were fun, but I wanted something that was lightweight enough to post on my fridge. Most of them were made of wood and used nails to adhere to the wall. Mine has the same use case as other keyholders in the market, using cut out shapes as the fob and then fitted into the holder itself. 

Aesthetic + Inspiration

Process + Procedure

Most keyholders I've had in the past were purely functional and lacked personality. When I was researching, there were a few that were fun and played around with the visual form of a keyholder, but nothing I personally wanted to purchase. 

By customizing my keyholder, I was able to customize it to be a better representation of myself and interests. I love the peace sign because it's something thrown up by most cultures to communicate a sense of playfulness. For the bottom, I wanted symbols that represented my interest and passion for design. I wanted simple shapes that were distinct groups but had the potential to create interesting patterns when layered on top of one another. 

To create my sketch, I simply drew out the components separately and then moved to Fusion to create my model. Creating the "x" to fit perfectly into the extruded rectangle is not perfect at present even though I went through an iteration and printed it twice. The width of the crosses are exactly the same size or the intersection is just right, while the ends of the "x" are too short. For this, I'd redesign it such that I create two separate rectangles instead of importing the icon as an SVG file. 

Sketches

Reflection

This is the first time I've worked with physical objects and modeling them in Fusion. I learned a lot about thinking about specific measurements and requirements to make items fit together, as well as how thickness and cut greatly affect how a physical object 

I would definitely work on even more specified measurements in the future so that the shapes in my object would fit just right. The amount of friction and space the inset shape holds isn't as close to the shapes' outline as it could be.

Photos