Monday, January 19, 2015

Solving a problem at the Optometrist

"Have a seat and remove your glasses."

"Aaaaand... where should I put them?"

The thing about doctor's offices is they often give me plenty of time to come up with solutions to trivial problems like "where do I put my glasses?" I'm sitting in that chair attached to something that could conceivably be used to pilot a star craft and wondering if there wasn't some way I could attach something to it to hang my glasses on. Next thing I'm grabbing a piece of paper to measure the circumference of the pole and browsing yeggi to see what glasses holding solutions I could cannibalize for this project.

Fortunately the folks at Esplin Eye Center in Spanish Fork, Utah were cool with the idea and entertained me as I iterated the design. In the end it took 3 major iterations.

The first one I used part of paloamalo's design which worked but was a little bit bulkier than I desired but it told me I had the pole size right. I followed that up with a design inspired by glasses holders I saw in the office. I looked at them, went home, created the design from what I saw without looking at it, tried it, tweaked it, tried it again, then took it to the office and realized I was missing the pole up the middle which made the design possible, printed just that part to add to the existing design, glued it in place and tried it out and it worked. Then I incorporated the pole, make the whole thing use less material overall, and added my brand to it. (Never forget the brand, people.)

The final design looks and works really good. Now I'm considering how I should make these available to other offices. I wonder if there's an optometrist message board I can advertise these on?

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