Modular Book Mounts

Overview

The client for this project is L. Fedynyszyn, a conservator at Victoria University's E.J Pratt Library located at the University of Toronto. The client wants the team to design a better solution to display books in their exhibitions. Currently, books are mostly displayed using custom-made book mounts using mat board or corrugated plastic sheets. These book mounts are not usually reusable as each book has various needs, and it is difficult to use the same mount for different books. The client believes the current system is wasteful, unsustainable, and time and energy- inefficient. Furthermore, the current book mounts on the market are too expensive and not very adjustable.

To address the need for an adjustable, reusable book mount system, the team will design a customizable book mount system that will be able to support a variety of different book sizes, with the main function of the design being able to safely display a book at a variety of opening angles and positions. By scoping comparable books to a common size and having the design be adjustable within a range from that size, the team will be able to accommodate a large variety of books without worrying about extreme cases that might not be used often. In this case, compatible books can have a length of 17.5 to 27.5cm, a width of 12 to 21 cm, and a spine size of 0.3 to 5 cm.

The book mount will have the function of holding the book in various positions, which requires secondary functions of adaptable spine support and modifiable opening and elevation angles. During idea generation, the team generated over 50 different concepts, using several rounds of multivoting to reduce the list of ideas to 20. Feasibility checks further reduced the number of ideas to 17. These 17 ideas were narrowed down further ....