Ergonomic easel

A foldable, lightweight, storage-integrated easel designed for artists and students who move

The sitting easel is one of the most common tools in any art studio or design school — and one of the least improved. This project started with a simple observation: art and design students carry their easels between classes, studios, and homes constantly, yet the standard studio easel is heavy, bulky, has nowhere to put anything, and is designed as if it never moves.

The brief was to redesign it from the user's perspective — not the studio's.

An ergonomically designed sitting easel in lightweight pine wood. Foldable legs with angle adjustment, a drawing board that tilts across five positions, and an integrated front tray for stationary and tools. When folded, it's flat enough to sit alongside a portfolio in a standard bag.

The design resolves all four original problems — portability through the folding mechanism, ergonomics through angle adjustment, storage through the integrated tray, and aesthetics through the material choice. Pine wood is warm, honest, and visually at home in a creative studio in a way that painted metal never is.

What I'd do differently: I'd prototype the folding mechanism physically before finalising the design. The sketched geometry works on paper, but a physical model would reveal friction points and hinge placement more quickly than any amount of drawing.