DD2000 - Objects of Design - The Good

Egg cartons were originally invented by a newspaperman called Joseph Coyle in British Columbia in 1911 to solve an ongoing dispute between a hotel owner and the farmer who supplied him with eggs, most of which were broken, every day. Successfully, Coyle designed and developed a structurally secure carton which not only safely housed the eggs and prevented them from rocking around during transport, but also firmly and easily stacked up on each other.

Coyle developed these cartons out of paper and made them by hand for years until he developed machinery and eventually mass-produced the Coyle Egg Safety cartons that are now sold worldwide.

I chose this object because I feel that it is something that it is worldwide, well known and something that most people would take for granted. They are very simple in design in that there are small little holes to house each egg a child would understand that the eggs, objects of similar size to the holes, will fit firmly within.

Looking further into the shape of the carton are the struts that stick up in the centre of each group of 4 eggs separating them apart from each other and further preventing them from knocking around and breaking. Although these struts then also help stack the cartons as the struts are hollow, and were the cartoons to be stacked the struts would fit into the hollow struts of the carton above it. Finally, evidence of how well the egg carton was designed can be seen by how little the design has changed in over a century.