Hex Shelf:
Moving from place to place a lot, nomads need quick, easy ways to create a personalized space. I prototyped and then fabricated a modular, hexagon shelving system to address this need. Why hexagonal? Turns out that after the circle, the hexagon is the most efficient shape (i.e. the highest contained area to perimeter ratio; there's a reason bee honeycombs are hexagonal). This system lets the nomad create a useful, visually interesting storage system.
I fabricated two full-size models of the idea.
Of course, we live a rectilinear world, not a hexagonal one. Pickup trucks, U-hauls, moving dollies - the dominant moving paradigm is rectangular. While the Hex shelves might look cool in your living room, they don't interface very well with traditional moving.
You see my solution to the problem: the shelves unhinge and flip inside out. Hex becomes rectangle. The horizontal shelf becomes the box bottom. A nice benefit of this feature is that now the surface you want to keep looking nice is on the inside during transport, thereby protected from the usual moving scrapes and scratches.
Hex becomes rectangle.
Onward...