Daresay Phone Dock
Brief
This was a project for Daresay to design a phone dock for internal use by both developers and designers and a marketing project to give away to clients.
One of the team leads asked me to take one of his initial sketches and make a prototype.
The goal of the design was to prepare the product for large-scale manufacturing in case we wanted to produce more than what our 3D printer was capable of producing. The idea was to be able to have both an iPhone version of the dock as well as a USB type-c version.
Ideation
The task was to design a dock in the shape of the D in the Daresay logo. The idea was to have this as something you could give away as a marketing stunt where people would find it helpful and always be in the presence of the company logo.
The design of the dock is based on the letter "D" in the company logo. Having the vector file of the letter allowed me to ideate in Fusion 360, where I could play around with the internals and print prototypes to be tested around the office.
This method allowed me to change things as I was going, enabling me to quickly iterate on the design and adjust features to make a dock that both designers and developers at the office found useful and reliable.
Prototyping
Since the product's visual design was set at the beginning of the project, I got to prototype the usability and sizing of the dock. This meant figuring out where to place weights and how to route the charging cables. I found that the larger and heavier phones tended to fall over when interacted with. I solved this by extending the back of the D to allow more leverage.
I started this project by making a lot of prototypes. I started making lots of smaller pieces to save some printing time as I figured out the cable situation. I also went through various form studies to figure out the scale of the dock visually.
Explorational Renders
During the ideation stage, I got some initial feedback on details that people wanted to add to the dock. I ended up excluding them for manufacturing reasons, but it was still fun to explore them.
Final Product
The final product is a phone dock that is functional and works with the company's brand guidelines.
