Foldable Desk

Caitlin Simmons

In our class we were assigned to find a way to make dorm rooms more efficient. Dorm rooms are very crowded with little space to do your homework and study for tests. We decided to reinvent the typical dorm room desk. We decided that in order to create the most space, we should make a portable desk. Many college students enjoy studying outside, so having a portable desk that they can take anywhere is ideal. We also planned on having storage inside the desk for materials such as laptops, pencils, paper, etc. Our main precedent for this project was a murphy desk. The murphy desk is placed permanently on to the wall and then folds out to a desk. We wanted our desk to do this but throughout the year we decided we didn't like this idea. First, we made a desk out of cardboard and hot glue with fragile wooden sticks that were used to keep the legs steady on our project. Our first set of legs were made out of wood with hot glue on the end to make the legs not slide on the ground. These legs were very unstable, partly because there were three legs placed badly with no sturdy materials. While the majority of our project was relatively easy to create, the type of legs we needed continued to give us problems during the course. We thought about using tripod legs but they were too bulky and wouldn't be comfortable on anyones' back. We ended up with strong wooden legs that folded and had magnets that stuck to the bottom of our desk.