Snat Shelter
Prototyping a new idea for an outdoors shelter.
For a month-long school program about Outdoor Experience Design in Vancouver, my team designed an outdoor sleep shelter system called 'Snat'- 'Shelter, not a tent'. Snat seeks to combine the rugged simplicity of tarp shelters, the curated design of tents, and the communal potential of hammocks in an attractive, compact format. Over the course of the month we worked on it, Snat rapidly evolved through multiple low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototypes. Our final product design used a simple, folded triangular profile that was anchored to a tree at one point like a hammock, and staked to the ground at two other points like a tent. A window was added to see outside. The key features of Snat ended up being the potential for modular attachments (enhanced rainfly, bug net, vestibule), the potential for 'snat communities' (2+ shelters projecting from the same tree, like petals of a flower), and the proven ability for 'suspended rolling' (rolling the shelter up using the tree as an anchorage point; simplifying break-down and allowing for one person to easily clean and pack the shelter.)
I also designed a logo and simple instructional app for the product.