Grate Knife
Less mess, more finesse.
Human Factors Designer -Individual Project
Completed: October 2024
Project Length: 2 weeks
Project Brief: Use the 3D printer to combine 2 tools to improve an experience in one of the following locations.
Hospital room
Entryway of an apartment
Kitchen
Classroom
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Cooking often involves switching between a knife and a grater, creating extra mess and requiring multiple tools. Challenges include:
Extra cleanup from needing two separate items.
Time lost switching between tools.
Devise a way to combine functions without compromising usability.
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Research & Concept Development:
Inspired by commonly used kitchen tools, I identified an overlap in their anatomy and functionality, envisioning a design that merges them without sacrificing usability of each tool individually.Prototyping & Iteration:
Initial designs focused on creating a durable blade, followed by refining the grater holes for efficiency.
User testing and feedback helped address structural concerns, like ensuring the grater doesn’t interfere with the knife’s performance.
Multiple test prints were used to refine dimensions, with a rotary tool used for final adjustments.
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A dual-purpose kitchen tool designed to simplify food prep:
Knife Functionality: A sharp edge for slicing and dicing ingredients.
Grater Surface: Microplane holes integrated into the base of the blade for grating garlic, zesting citrus, and more.
Streamlined Design: 3D-printed with a solid infill for structural integrity and smooth assembly in three pieces.
Feedback & Reflection
User Testing & Feedback
Core functionality: Successfully combined a knife and grater into one dual-purpose tool without compromising the performance of either
Structural integrity: Testing surfaced early concerns about the grater surface interfering with the blade, which informed several rounds of dimensional refinement
Suggested improvements: Add a safety guard or detachable microplane for safer, more versatile use, and widen and thin the grating holes to improve speed and ease of cleaning
Reflection
I began this project by thinking of tools that I often use in my life, especially tools that I often use at the same time. Then I started thinking of a way to combine them. The basic shapes and anatomy of these tools are very similar making the combination plan fairly simple. The goal was to streamline this process into one convenient, multifunctional tool.
At first, I was focused on making sure the knife element was sharp and durable, but then thought I also needed to balance that with the functionality of the microplane. There were structural issues I hadn't originally anticipated, like ensuring the grater surface didn’t interfere with the blade of the knife.
Feedback was critical in suggesting different techniques to sharpen the edge to turn it into a blade and proposing hole size adjustments. In future variations of the prototype metal may act as a more practical material over standard PLA. Testing different 3D-printed models helped me adjust the dimensions and fits as well as experiment with different sharpening and hole punching techniques. After many rounds of trial and error I ended up using a rotary to finalize the prototype.