AGORA
The Beautifully Green Bench
Summer 2018
5 weeks
Co-op with Iowa Prison Industries
Agora was a project in cooperation with Iowa Prison Industries (IPI) that focused on creating a product for a company from research all the way to manufacturing. Agora was a group effort of three and is currently in the process of production.
Iowa Prison Industries
IPI is a company focused on giving offenders within the Iowa prison system the opportunity to learn new skills and better themselves while serving their sentence. They are a non-profit that does not compete with the private industry. The company specializes in many different products such as road signs and furniture for schools, churches, or other non-profit organizations.
During the Summer of 2018 I was tasked with designing a new piece of furniture that used leftover aluminum from their road sign manufacturing. The product had to be able to be made within the facility and appeal to their customers.
Research
Research began by looking at the capabilities of IPI as a company including their current catalog, customers, as well as manufacturing capabilities. In order to get a sense of this we were given a tour of the facility and the ability to ask questions to the offenders working there. We had found a number of things that interested us most notable was their greenhouse that was growing a plethora of different species of plants used mostly to decorate the facility.
We then came back and started to look at different aspects of the design problem including:
How do company values play into the design
What type of furniture design would benefit the company
Where this design would be used and by who
After talking through and researching each of these aspects we had chosen a general direction as well as design criteria.
Ideation and Refinement
The initial ideation was a combination of working through ideas as well was researching different techniques when working with aluminum, attempting to find new solutions and forms that were capable of being made at the facility. After initial ideation we came across three areas we wanted to explore more, as seen above, these would help guide us through refinements, seeing what was viable.
Final Design
Tech Pack
To the left is the tech pack for AGORA it features a design that includes the option to add wood panels to the entirety of the bench. At the time IPI was not interested in the vertical garden end cap, so manufacturing documents for that are excluded from the tech pack.