Small Office Sponge Holder and Box

This is a mini-sponge to use in my office. I have in my office a kettle, a french press and some mugs, and I make my coffee every day. My office is very close to bathrooms, but very far from the communal kitchen of the faculty, so I wanted to make a small sponge, a holder and a box to store the sponge in even when wet. I intended to make it easier to carry along with the mugs, french press etc. to wash them in the nearby bathroom.

• 3D-printer (I used Zortrax M300)
• Orange, 1.75mm ABS filament
• A quarter of standard kitchen sponge (roughly)

I modelled the attached files of a box and sponge holder.

The sponge holder is rather small and has two teeth to hold the sponge in between. There is also a comparatively large hole at the top to put your finger in and carry it along with the sponge box.

The box is designed to stand on its own, and has miniature holes on it, so that any remaining water can evaporate - to prevent moss. The lower part of it can hold the remaining water, so that it does not leak in my office drawer.

I created this design considering that I would roughly use one-fourth of your standard kitchen sponge (see image for guidance).

After that, you simply place it on the sponge holder, as seen in the images.

Then you can place the sponge into the box first with an angle, and then put the upper part of it in place.

The widening form in the middle of the sponge holder matches the dentation on the back of the sponge. This, matched with the material properties of the sponge (i.e. it pushes to the other side with holes of the box, and ensures that the box and holder are locked in place), enables carrying both the sponge holder and the box using the finger hole at top.

This open design project was done as part of the ID736 Open Design and Distributed Creativity course, at the Department of Industrial Design, Middle East Technical University, in the 2021-2022 Spring semester. The purpose was to carry out a small project to openly share online.