A bookshelf not that much stylish

Instead of making a stylish bookshlef, I was more looking into the user's behavior that how do they move, storage and assort books at home.

The two basic elements for this bookshelf are boards and boxes. The bookshelf is designed to be assembled in any way that users like, and it grows as users' book collection.

A bookshelf not just for one room

Considering the practical facts at home, people storage reading materials at different places, users can divide this bookshelf into serval parts for putting on the dining table, underneath the sofa table, beside of the bed, children's room or bathroom.

The structure

The boxes and boards simply connected by the spiles, the thickness of the board is 40mm, the volume of the box is 290x255x350 mm, which can contain 8 copies of 450 pages book or 30 magzines.

About users

The target user group is 25-40 years old couples living in a small dwelling-size apartment. We did 4 weeks research at user's home, shopping mall and local manufactory. We got some interesting points such as move-in move-out issues, separate storage VS limited spaces, the fast growing quantity of the stuffs VS high price storage furnitures.

All these points made me thinking about how to design a flexible shelf which is easy assembling, good for sorting and could be sold as separate parts according to the user's need, meanwhile, using 30-40mm thick boards to keep a good sense of quality.

The workshop in Sendai, Japan

After 4 weeks research in Dalian, China, I got opportunity to join one week workshop in Sendai, Japan. All of us from different schools shared the research materials and the insight of storage furniture design. We went deep into studying the manufacturing, local shopping mall observing, brainstroming, prototyping and learning Japanese culture and manners.

Technical process

Modeling in Rhino3D
Rendering in CINEMA4D
Full-scale model by IRIS OHYAMA
2007—2008