Zenbooth
Finding Zen in the Office that Isn’t.
Role: Industrial Designer
Zenbooth is a Berkeley California-based company that designs and manufactures personal privacy booths for offices across the United States and Canada. I was hired as an industrial designer to refine the company’s flagship Comfort Booth, research user needs and technology to create design briesf, and execute from concept to sketches, from ideation to iteration, from CAD to prototype, and from manufacturing toolpathing to factory implementation and quality assurance.
The Modular Booth System
The Earlier models of Zenbooth’s products were made with high-quality Maple Euro-ply plywood because of its natural aesthetic of maple veneer and end-grain as well as for its rigidity and strength. In order to scale the design into larger booth products, we endeavored to implement more cost-effective material while maintaining the value and quality of our products.
While conducting rigorous materials research, we discovered that using composite fiber boards greatly reduced sound wave transmission into the booths due to the material’s inherent randomized internal composition. To accommodate its less rigid structure we iterated through designs until we had smaller, more cost-effective panels that were easier for the user to handle and assemble.
“The World Is Our Sketch pad”
I constantly sketch through my thoughts and emphatically encouraged the team to join the process.
Innovative Design, Manufacturing and Assembly.
Each individual panel was fastened together with interlocking dowels to maximize ease of manufacture and user assembly.
I acted as creative director and designer for several instruction manuals to demonstrate the assembly of our products:
Each panel consists of maple-veneered fiber board sheets and horizontal cuts of MDF that double as both spacers for sound insulation and structural support. Interlocking plastic dowels, combined with pre-glued wooden dowels fasten the panels together.
The design requires holes to be created during CNC manufacturing to insure precision and consistency during the later production assembly. These steps guarantee the uniformity of the panels that allow them to be used modularly and ultimately to be scaled into larger booth assemblies.
Early Concept Prototyping
These photos show the first 1/2 scale concept that I cobbled together with scrap wood and a sheet of recycled PET I found lying around the design lab. The rough proof of concept launched the project forward into what would become the Modular Booth System.
After refining our models, the team compiled the CAD toolpathing for the CNC. We created the first full scale prototype out of raw Fiber Board to test the structure’s ability to withstand the weight of a 60 pound door swinging from it. The results exceeded our expectations and encouraged the progress and further development of the modular booth.
Moving forward with the prototyping and refining phase, the design team began to configure the modular booth panels into larger booth configurations. As we processed into the larger, more complex builds, we were able to discover more areas for improvement and opportunity. This process allowed us to design, test, refine, and guarantee that we would be solving smaller issues before they could scale into even larger problems.
