Ruler Redesign
Inspired by my everyday experience in drawing, my project is a concise and thoroughly examined redesign of a ruler. By slightly change the structure of ruler, the new ruler can prevent people from smudging the image when drawing lines.
Problem
A ruler is an essential tool for drawing lines for technical architectural drawings. However, using rulers to draw lines (especially when applied with pens which are easy to leak such as technical pens)often lead to inky marks and smudged drawings. How can we solve this problem?
Paper deforms, bottom of the ruler touches the ink
The canvas will be smudged when moving the ruler.
The canvas will be smudged when moving the ruler.
Paper doesn’t deform, perpendicular surface of the ruler touches the ink
Hold the pen not vertically to draw more accurate lines, and hold the pen at an angle.
Hold the pen in different angles, and build the 3D model respectively
Summary:
Technical pen, pen, pencil, and ball-pen are shown above. For a technical pen, the ink part is too short that only the ink part will touch the ruler, and will easily smudge the drawing. But for a ball-pen, the tip part in long enough to prevent the ink part to touch the ruler, and thus makes it less possible to smudge the drawing.
Brainstorm
Turn the ruler upside down. Gap under the rule may lead to sight line deviation. Scale is on the upper surface of the ruler, may result in inaccurate reading
No fulcrum at nib, shaky and unstable. Sightline deviation may lead to failure to drawing specific lines.The gap between ruler and paper lead to inaccurate reading.
Concept
Remove the part that will contact ink, and extend the vertical plane for more stable supporting.
Keypoint
When the vertical plane is too short, the pen will shake.
When the vertical plane is too long, it can affect vision and accuracy.
Testing & Modify
Adding transparent tape to change shape of ruler
Testing:
For a more concise study, detailed size changing experiments need to be conducted in <=1mm scale because all the components are tiny and precise. To do so, I plan to change the size little by little by, because it was the best way I tested to change the shape of the ruler while maintaining the readability of the scale.
At last, after the tests, the design shown above can successful prevent the canvas from being smudged when drawing lines with a ruler.
What I learned
Sometimes we do not need high technology to solve the problems in designs. Instead, looking into the problems to find the real reasons and then looking for the most suitable methods to solve them may be more efficient. The design is not only about a concept. The design is also about trying the ideas out. This project about redesigning ruler deepened my understanding of practicing, testing and feasibility study.