Where engineering meets design.

Rent a 30 kg box, unmanned.

IXTAbox wanted to add a rental offer without diluting its premium positioning or stationing staff at every site. The stand had to hold 4-8 boxes, run fully self-service, stay secure, and install as modular ground- or wall-mounted units.

The hard constraint was the box itself - large, ~30 kg, awkward to lift, valuable enough to lock down, and dirty from sitting near the rear tyres. Talking through the requirements reframed two of them: unmanned became fully self-service daily use with light maintenance once or twice a month, and since the box is already weatherproof, an open stand could showcase it and cut cost.

Break the stand into sub-functions.

Following the Double Diamond, I split the stand into independent functions - lifting, locking, storage layout - and drew on self-service and everyday mechanisms: Kayakomat kayak stations, ski-rental lockers, overhead garage storage, ELFA shelving, and Igloohome smart locks. A Crazy 8 round generated directions; the strongest three moved on to 3D models.

Three concepts, one matrix.

Concept 1 - Open shelf, side access: ELFA-style adjustable sheet-metal arms with a rotating hook lock (needs a slot machined into every box) and an external hydraulic trolley to move the box. Concept 2 - Wardrobe / Murphy-bed: fully enclosed; the shelf-door itself lowers to car height on gas springs and the box mounts directly - no trolley, weather-protected. Concept 3 - Open shelf, front access: like Concept 1 but a hinged front door instead of the hook; still trolley-dependent.

A weighted decision matrix put Concept 2 first, Concept 3 a close second, and Concept 1 last. Two were strong enough to justify building - so both Concept 3 and Concept 2 went to full prototypes.

Open shelf, in stainless.

Concept 3, built in 3 mm stainless steel - laser-cut and bent. ELFA-style tab-and-slot arms lock onto the frame with riveted plates to resist tampering, and joints are kept minimal. It stacks two boxes vertically, with two stands sitting back-to-back; a welded stainless-tube front door is secured by an Igloohome smart lock and a slot that wraps the box handle.

Building it exposed tolerances that were too tight - friction hurt the experience - so it became the validated back-up, while its lessons (looser tolerances, a flipped base for better fitment) fed the next build.

The wardrobe, with gas-spring lift.

Concept 2 - the design selected to go to production. A tubular spaceframe is bolted to sheet-metal panels rather than welded, keeping cost down with laser-cut tubes held to tight tolerances. A pair of pull-type gas springs between the base and the wardrobe door carry the weight; the door holds the box on a buckle strap and swings on bearings.

Multiple gas-spring mounting holes let us tune spring force without redesigning the frame. A support leg doubles as the pull-down handle, adjustable feet level the stand on the forecourt's slope, and concrete ballast in the base keeps it planted.

Fabricated and assembled by hand in the workshop - spaceframe, panels, and lifting hardware.

In the field, unlocked by phone.

The production wardrobe unit installed on a fuel-station forecourt in Stockholm. Access is keyless: Igloohome smart locks issue a time-limited PIN to the renter's phone the moment they book - no Wi-Fi at the stand, no staff on site. (The booking portal - a Google Maps stand finder, payment, and lock integration - ran as a parallel software workstream; my focus was the stand.)

A brand to live up to, not a client to please.

This was a team brief for a design course, not a commissioned or sponsored project - worth being honest about that. We chose Clas Ohlson as the case-study brand: practical and accessible rather than luxury, but still properly designed. The exercise was to make a product that earns that reputation - nice, usable, and well-considered, without pretending to be a premium object. A kitchen scale felt like the right scope: everyday, unglamorous, and easy to get wrong.

Three pillars, all true at once.

We pulled Clas Ohlson's identity down to three pillars and used them as the decision rules for the whole project. Accessibility - it should feel easy and unintimidating to use. Inspiration - it should make an everyday task feel a little better, not merely functional. Expertise - the detailing should show real thought rather than decoration. The discipline was keeping all three true at once, instead of letting "accessible" become an excuse for the design to be dull.

A mood board, then a screen you can actually read.

We started with a mood board - clocks, watches, switches, scales, a lot of Braun - to settle a quiet, tactile material language before drawing anything. From there the sketching homed in on one idea worth keeping: an angled screen set into the front lip rather than flat on top, so the readout stays legible while you're standing over a bowl. Stainless steel for the top, a soft rounded-square footprint for the body.

The foam model caught what the screen couldn't show on paper.

We cut a foam study model to check the proportions in the hand - the fastest way to feel whether the rounded-square body actually reads as soft rather than bulky. It did, but it also made one problem obvious: at that scale the display was simply too small. Holding the model is what told us; the sketch never would have.

That fed straight into the 3D model shown above, where the display grew to a size you can read at a glance and the rest of the spec settled: a stainless-steel top, a moulded plastic base, a digital display, and smartphone connectivity for logging weights. The result keeps the soft footprint from the foam study but earns the "expertise" pillar in the detailing.

Cheap to make, light to ship.

In keeping with the accessible-but-considered brief, the manufacturing plan stays deliberately ordinary: an injection-moulded plastic base with a stamped stainless top - high-volume processes that keep the unit cost where a Clas Ohlson product needs to sit. The packaging follows the same logic: minimal printed cardboard, sized tight to the product, with the Clas Ohlson mark and recycling marks straight on the box.

Pluto, on the counter.

The final design is shown in render rather than as a built unit - the physical outcome would be a 3D-printed or CNC-milled model, so these are renders for now. They put Pluto where it belongs: a calm object on a worktop, the display doing its job mid-cook rather than competing with the kitchen around it.

A learning exercise that got out of hand.

This started as nothing more than a way to practice surfacing - the hard part of SolidWorks, where you're chasing smooth, continuous body panels rather than blocky solids. The Huracán was the obvious subject: I'd just seen one in the flesh, I'm a lifelong car nut, and its faceted, sharply creased bodywork is exactly the kind of shape that punishes sloppy surfaces. I pulled blueprints from the internet, dropped them in as reference planes, and built the body up panel by panel.

Surfaces first, details after.

The whole car was modeled from those reference blueprints - getting the proportions and the major surfaces right before adding the headlights, intakes, mirrors, wing and wheels. Then it went into SolidWorks Visualize for materials, lighting and environments, which is where it stopped feeling like a CAD file and started looking like a car.

In the studio.

Pulled into a dark studio scene, the surfacing shows: the way the reflections run cleanly down the bonnet, over the front fenders and into the aggressive intakes is the real test of whether the panels are good. The Y-shaped headlight signature was the most satisfying detail to get right.

The model was later featured on the official SolidWorks Instagram.

View on SolidWorks Instagram ↗