Monday, December 05, 2016

Things They Should Invent: computer program to automatically design custom-made organizers

There are all kinds of organizer-type products out there that purport to help you organize your clutter by putting it into compartments.  The problem I always find is that the compartments are never a good fit for my clutter.  For example, a drawer organizer might divide your drawer into nine tidy compartments, but I always end up in a situation where the contents of the drawer can logically be sorted into seven categories, one of which is too big for a single compartment, plus about 20% of the contents of the drawer are the wrong size or shape for any of the compartments.

As I've blogged about before, I own a beautiful wooden jewellery box full of tidy, velvet-lined compartments for organizing jewellery, and a significant portion of my jewellery doesn't fit in there because the shapes and sizes of the compartments don't correspond with the shapes and sizes of the jewellery. #FirstWorldProblems

It occurred to me that with 3D printing, people could make organizers that fit the actual stuff they're organizing.  I googled around the idea, and found that such a thing does in fact exist, except you have to input into a program the exact dimensions of the organizer you want to print.  For someone like me who's terrible at organizing tangible objects, that's very near impossible.

But that gave me an idea: what if you could input the dimensions of the items you want to organize and the space you want to organize them in, and a computer program would design the optimal organizer for you?

You could also input leeway for expansion, so the organizer will be able to hold items you might acquire in the future.  (In other words, your jewellery organizer would allow you the option of acquiring more jewellery in the future, as opposed to being 100% full and your whole system is stymied when you get another pair of earrings.)

Advanced option: you take a photo of all the items you need to organize and the space you need to organize them in, with some baseline reference item in the photo for scale, and the computer measures everything itself and designs the organizer automatically.

1 comment:

Lorraine said...

Sounds nifty. I wonder whether SWAR schema would be useful for that sort of algorithm.