3D printing ⁕ form exploration ⁕ ergonomics
Pill Pill Box
Playful pill organizer with morning & evening compartments for each day of the week.
“redefining the pill organizer for the modern era & promoting wellness through thoughtful designs.” - MakerWorld
Client: personal project for BambuLab Makerworld contest
Focus: design for 3D printing, ergonomics/UX, form development
Completed: designed & manufactured in about a week in February 2024
Design Goals
Design for Manufacturing:
3d printing
A design suited to being entirely manufactured with a 3D printer. No additional parts, adhesives, fasteners, etc. required post printing - only assembly of the parts.
Intuitive User experience
Can the user easily identify the day or the week and the morning vs evening pill compartments? Is it clear how to open the compartments to access the pills?
Playful form giving
Harness the freedom provided by 3D printing as a manufacturing process. What forms can be explored without the usual cost barriers involved in mass producing a low revenue, high volume utilitarian plastic product like your typical pill organizer.
Process
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Lid Design
The early lid designs required support on both the top & bottom. This led to a lot of issues with surface quality & pushed further refinement.
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Fine Tuning Tolerances
Each iteration involved fine tuning tolerances for the sliding mechanism & experimenting with recessed vs flush top surfaces.
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Icon Development
Dialing in the scale & depth of the icons for consistent print quality (with snuggle support from my best helper - Ruth).
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Printing the Lids
Early layers of the lids on the Bambu x1 Carbon.
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Understanding the Lid Design
The oval in the center of the lids keeps them from sliding past the "open" position in either direction. The raised areas on each end require slight pressure when opening to ensure the lids stay securely closed.
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Ta-da!
A fully functional prototype! No support to remove, no sanding & no other post-processing. Ready to pop off the build plate & assemble.
User experience
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Does the week start on Monday in your mind? Perhaps Sunday? Fully removable lids allow you to decide which day your week begins with!
The power of 3D printing means endless color variations and combinations are at your finger tips. -
The combination of the transferred texture from the print plate, the debossed icons, and the chamfered edges provides ample grip to slide the lids open and closed.
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The core driving form for the Pill Pill Box was, unsurprisingly, a pill. The pill is a very prevalent form in many different areas of current product design. So - how fitting to apply it to a vessel actually intended to contain pills!
DFM Considerations
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Intentional curvature and overhangs resulted in a design that can be printed with no support, thus producing close to no waste.
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Spacing on print bed layout optimized for by object printing. This allows for all parts to be printed on one plate with different colors, but without constant filament color switches (which isn’t time or material efficient).
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Fine tuned layer heights create the most time efficient, but still quality prints. Detailed and areas with the most mechanical stress are printed with much smaller layers, with the rest still nice and zippy.
Winning design
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Selected for the Third Place Prize out of 500 entries.
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“Your exceptional skills and creativity have impressed the judges, and your design has been selected as the best among all the entries.
Keep up the amazing work, and we look forward to seeing more of your exceptional designs in the future!”
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Printed over 1500 times and counting in the first month of being made publicly available for free on MakerWorld.
As of November 2025, this model has over 10,700 successful prints, and an average rating of 4.7 starts from 850+ reviews.