No more tangles

For project 2, I chose to design a reusable headphone holder. Having often wrestled with tangled headphones myself, I hoped to create something that I could potentially use every day in order to respond to what seems like a pretty universal challenge for music listeners.

Through in-store/online research, it became clear that cord management is a concern for many products - extension cords, hoses, fishing line, shoes, vacuum cleaners, climbing rope & headphones, of course. 

Here are a few of the clever headphone specific solutions I found: 

    

   

Some existing designs, including for example the retractable headphones and winding plastic casing, required materials/mechanisms out of my reach for the scope of this project. But the silicon solutions were helpful illustrations of some of the features that I could try to incorporate into my design.

Several non-earphone related items also caught my eye. Here are three of them in particular placed beside the sketch model prototypes that they inspired:

Donut shaped extension cord holder --> Donut shaped headphone holder?  

a simple frame for coiling

a pouch to encase a hand-wrapped cord

In drawing up these rough prototypes, there were a few parameters that tried to meet in each design. The headphone holder should be: 

1. Able to stay attached to the headphones/music player while in use

2. Easily detachable, allowing the cord to be stored separately from player

3. Lightweight

4. Allow for ease of coiling/uncoiling of cord

5. Simple aesthetic, matching that of the apple products that I might attach it to

I decided to go ahead with the simplest design - a tube that would encircle the cord, with hook-like attachments around which to coil the headphones when not in use.

Finding the right materials (a very thin, but sturdy plastic tube) was a bit of a challenge, so I had to improvise with these electrical spacers and cable clamps (adventures in home depot...)

Given that no glues I had bonded to these pieces (even Krazy glue...crazy), I ended up connecting the spacers and attaching the clamps with white electrical tape to make this final prototype: 

   

If I were to create future iterations of this design, I'd try to substantially reduce the width of the tubing, so that it could fit more snuggly around the cord. I'm happy with the simplicity of the design, but the holder is a bit more cumbersome than I'd like given its size.

Happy Columbus Day!