An Interview with Faith Apostolides

Faith Apostolodes is a mechanical engineering student at SUNY New Paltz with a background in construction, electrical work, and solar energy. She’s passionate about creating thoughtful solutions that meet manufacturing and end-user needs. Her “Vertex” shelf bracket is a culmination of these elements.

What is your background in design? What led you to our Annual Design Competition?

I'm Faith Apostolides. I'm graduating soon with a mechanical engineering degree. I hope to continue with my master's next year.



Tell us about your design. What was the inspiration behind it?

My design is the Vertex Shelf Bracket. It's a really simple design in that it's basically just a prism shape that can be mounted in multiple ways. The inspiration for the design was really just to take everything that I wanted in a shelf bracket as the person who would be installing it. Since I've been doing construction and electric work on the side for a few years now so, with that experience, I basically just knew what I would want in a bracket if I was using it, which is flexibility and being able to mount it multiple ways or have some wiggle room and finding a stud or being able to use extra screws where I need, and the shape lets me do that.



What was the process like, and can you explain your approach? How did you envision the concept-to-part pipeline, and how did you execute it?

The first thing I did was just a lot of research about other shelf brackets on the market to see if there were other products who were already solving the same problems. I also wanted to consider how easy it would be to manufacture. So, I tried to think of shapes that were axisymmetric and could unfold into a 2D shape so that could possibly be made from bending sheet metal. So basically, I just came up with a few shapes and started modeling in SOLIDWORKS and, from there just refined the aesthetics of it to fit into the rest of Mockett's products.

So, I had a decent amount of exposure to 3D modeling programs and the basics of product design, throughout school. But I did have to learn more about the rendering techniques for this project. I actually found out about this design competition through looking at your guys' products - your power grommets - for a personal project I'm working on, and just happened to see the competition at the bottom of the website.



What would your advice be for someone who's looking to submit but is hesitant about submitting?

It's a really great opportunity. And firstly, thanks to you guys at Mockett for keeping the competition going because it's a really special thing to be able to be open to new ideas from people and actually make it a reality. It's really awesome. So if anyone out there is thinking of submitting, there's nothing to lose by trying. And I think you might be pleasantly surprised.

Faith’s “Vertex” shelf offers distinguished design elements, techniques, and appeal that we strive to create at Mockett. That’s why we’re proud to have her among our 38th Annual Design Competition winners. Congratulations, Faith!