Fall Design Projects 2024
Carrying Devices

I was able to team up with fellow designer, Malcolm McGraw to work on this project. We were tasked with re-designing a carrying device that better fit the needs of Whitman College students. The definition of “carrying device” was left up to our interpretation. This meant we had a lot of different avenues to approach the design problem or how we would even start thinking about what questions to ask.

At this point in our project we wanted to define the problem. What is wrong with carrying devices now? Why do we need to redesign something, how can our design be better than what is already out there? We had some ideas already floating around but we wanted to understand what the public thought about their carrying devices.


Malcolm and I developed a series of interview questions that would help us define what a carrying device is, as well as the needs of our user base. After we had our questions finalized we found friends and peers to gain insight on what our design needed to be. This process was quite illuminating and surprisingly enjoyable. It was interesting to see what my friends thought a carrying device was. We wanted to keep it broad as well to see what things our peers gravitated to.

After our interviews we reached the ideation stage. We looked at our interview transcripts and compared notes in order to do a downloading session using white boards from the HCD lab. What we found was that people want something that is compact, stylish, comfortable, with plenty of storage space. People were tired of clunky bags and constantly changing bags for different situations. So we set out to make a versatile bag for several situations a Whitman College student might encounter.


At this point we had established that we wanted to design a bag and we knew what features people might want in said bag. We revisited one of Malcolm’s early ideas: a bag that transforms from a crossbody bag to a tote bag. This idea seemed to meet the need of versatility and style. Our next problem to solve was the functionality of the bag transformation.


At this stage we used physical materials like cloth, glue, staples, and velcro to develop a miniature version of our idea. This helped us visualize how our bag would transform from tote to crossbody. We were also using this model to gain feedback from our user base. We took the prototype with us to conduct peer interviews. Many people had positive interactions with the prototype, but there were multiple comments which helped us edit the functionality of the bag. With these helpful comments we embarked on our final design.


Malcolm and I used fabric from the HCD lab and the sewing machine to construct our final bag design. Using these tools was satisfying after thinking conceptually for most of the process. I was looking to Malcolm for guidance during this process since he had conceptualized the idea. This being said I was able to add a considerable amount of functional elements to the design. I made cardboard fasteners that function to tighten and loosen the straps of bag as well as connect them to the body of the bag. Together we were able to develop our design into a functional object.

Thanks to Malcolm I finally learned how to use a sewing machine. I had never used a sewing machine before, but I was able to sew the pockets and straps onto the bag, which was really gratifying.


Now that we had our physical design, we were ready to present. We synthesized the whole process down to a few slides. When it was time to present we took turns talking about the design process.