easyl
a three-way, open-rear loudspeaker for contract listening bars
EasyL is a convertible piece of furniture that lets young painters work in small domestic spaces. By merging a work table, a vertical drawing board and an easel into a single structure, it builds a complete creative station with a minimal footprint, and folds away just as easily when it isn't needed.
For creatives living in compact flats, painting at home means facing a recurring set of problems: it demands space, specialist equipment and the constant management of materials. Faced with all this, most simply end up working on the floor. EasyL brings these functions together in one compact unit, giving painters a dedicated place to create without sacrificing the little room they have to live.
Student Term Project - Group project
Team: Alessandro Basiaco, Giuliano Bertoli, Simone Mainetti, Paolo Massacci, Andrea Rocca, Vanessa Zucchi Politecnico di Milano - Industrial Design (BSc) Location: Milan, Italy Duration: 4 months 2020
Supervised by: Beatrice Villari, Marco Ajovalasit, Bryan Sabin
My contribution: preliminary research and ideation, 3D modeling, engineering, Rendering
01
process
The Brief - Minimum Millennials
The project began from an open brief: design furniture for the "Minimum Millennials" - young adults between 20 and 40 who live in small, dense urban homes and have to make every square metre count.
User Research
To root the concept in real behaviour rather than assumptions, we opened with a research phase:
Interviews & field data - first-hand insight into how people actually live in tight spaces: their habits, their spatial limits and their everyday routines.
Personas & user journeys - building representative profiles and mapping their daily scenarios to surface the hidden friction points and functional needs of small-space living.
Narrowing the Target
From those personas, one group stood out for its very specific, under-served needs: young artists and fine-arts students. They need proper surfaces to draw and paint on, yet often live in the most space-constrained homes of all. Two friction points defined the problem:
Dedicated work surfaces — adjustable, multi-angle drawing areas that don't permanently eat into limited floor space.
Chasing the light — because good natural light is essential to painting, these users constantly move around their homes to follow the sun through the day.
Together, these turned mobility, compactness and spatial versatility into the core drivers of the design.
How might we give young artists a dedicated space, without asking them to give up the little space they have to live in?
Ideation & Concept Exploration
With the requirements set, we ran a broad ideation phase, sketching quickly across very different furniture typologies, from multifunctional storage cabinets to ultra-compact, wall-mounted workstations, to map the full range of possible directions before committing to one.
Physical Prototyping
To pressure-test the mechanics, we moved off paper early and into physical, scaled models. Building them by hand let us feel the transformations directly, testing folding gestures, structural stability and footprint at each configuration, and settle the mechanism before locking in the full-scale design.
02
final design
EasyL is a transformable, mobile workstation for young artists in micro-apartments. It combines a drawing easel and a working desk in one compact body, letting the user follow the light around the room while keeping the floor as free as possible. Pull-out legs and a click-lock mechanism let it move between three configurations: easel, desk and compact storage.
Easel Mode
In easel mode the main surface sits at a 5° tilt: enough to support a natural painting posture while drawing the centre of gravity inward for extra stability. An adjustable clamp-on support holds canvases of different sizes and lets the user reset the height in seconds.
Desk Mode
To become a desk, the surface pivots on integrated pins and bearings until it locks flat and horizontal. Legs concealed under the panel fold out to carry the far edge, giving a stable, everyday surface for study and work.
Integrated Mobility
Wheels are built directly into the base. Tip the unit back and it rolls across the room like a wheeled suitcase, so following the light or clearing the space entirely, takes no effort at all.
Compact & Storage Mode
The surface runs on two vertical linear guides, so it can slide down into a low, compact profile when it isn't in use. Spring-loaded pins built into the frame lock it securely at two set heights, lowered for storage, raised for easel work.
