Tent Project

Tents are confusing. Don't deny it, because you know they are. Why? That's the question the drives me into this project. Why does a tent need to be confusing? You should be able set it up and be chilling in your habitation within ten minutes.

So I started thinking. When I was little, I had a tent that would bend up and fit into a bag. It required no set up and the most difficult part of the process was putting the tent away. Starting from that point, it can become difficult to expand the idea. The tent itself wasn't sturdy. The poles that would hold it up were far to weak to withstand a night outdoors, so I was stuck. I don't know much about materials, in fact, figuring out what materials to use is still something that I find problems with now. That was the first block I had, so I decided to change the approach that I had. I was still looking at a tent through the old fashion idea of what a tent is. I took a step back and started to approach this like a designer. 

First I looked at what would be the easiest way to make a shelter. Legos. Legos inspired this whole project because they're easy. A three year old child can create a house out of legos. I translated that into the image of a tent and ended up with three boards that clicked together and created a pyramid. Immediately I encountered problems. Large boards aren't portable and even with conservative material usage, they'd be heavy. But that didn't stop me. The idea of pieces that just clicked together would work. So then I took a look at actual tents again. Fabric and poles are what normal tents are made out of, so I found my solution there. Rather than build a tent, the fabric and poles would build the triangular boards, which would then be assembled into a tent. Using the same materials as a normal tent meant that you had the same ease of portability. The best thing about modern-day tents is their portability, so my tent would have that same advantage in addition to it's ease of assembly. 

I spent a variety of days playing around with proportions with paper.

And on google sketchup 

Now I've reached the most difficult part so far of the project, and that's physically creating it. 

Connection is the hardest part. How will the fabric connect to the poles? How will the boards that are made connect with each other? These are the questions that I'm facing now.

In addition, I'm using other design idea I've been reading about to finish this project. For example, color coded poles. Using similar colors to signify what goes together means that the confusion of what pole is used for what goes away, and many of the poles are interchangeable because two of the three walls are the exactly the same.