Over the summer of 2018 I came up with a really cool idea for a pair of glasses. I was interested in "voluntary featuritis" - a term I coined to mean the consumer's choice of how much they (over)use a product and cram more and more into it. Kind of like the choice of downloading apps on phones. But I wanted to see what that would look like for a pair of sunglasses - interesting because sunglasses are already accessories and could already be seen as a use case of "voluntary featuritis" in everyday dress as a fashion piece.
I drew in my design notebook a sketch of a pair of glasses with piercing holes that closely matched where you could pierce your ear. I recently learned a lot about ear piercings and was amazed at the different types of piercings one could have - and encouraged to find a way to use the piercings one owns when they aren't in one's ears. How do you wear a piercing without placing it in the designated piercing-hole? Answer: pierce something else.
My sunglasses had the locations of many of the common ear piercings - lobe, conch, helix, bridge, etc... and I drew up a sketch that abstracted the curvature and folding of an ear to match a frame design.
I started with paper prototypes to get a feel for the glasses. I cut up some cardboard making the basic frame shape and exploring different arm designs. Then, I took to CAD to design and render the glasses, and build stl's for printing. I used Rhino because I wanted practice with the software using it for surfacing, and because my solidworks license from school had expired sadly. I tried in my CAD to design printed-on hinges because the goal was to use no fasteners for the project. In fact, if I had to use fasteners I wanted them to be piercings as well (!).
I printed out a first model and it was unfortunately too long in the arms, but the frames themselves seemed to work pretty well. I had some trouble with tolerances in the printer and thus didn't get amazing fits for all the piercings, but edited that for round two.
I rendered the new pair and the proportions fit much better! Now all that's left is to split the frames and incorporate thermoformed plastic lenses, or glass lenses if I can find them or afford them! I also played around with the renders and made some really pretty earrings on the glasses that made me very happy with the prospects of these glasses.
