CAD render of the assembled desk tidy on a desk, a rounded body with a face under a vented conical hat

Desk tidy

Cable organizer / pen holder

Materials and Manufacturing, Imperial College London, 2026. Printed in PLA at 1:1.

Designed for additive manufacturing

  • A lot of round organic and complex shapes that would be harder to produce with other manufacturing techniques
  • The desk tidy is designed for upright fabrication: with a flat base for good bed adhesion and aligning most walls with the Z-axis to improve layer consistency and surface quality
CAD render of the desk tidy opened up, the body with its central winding column beside the separate vented hat

Main body

  • Everything has fillets to minimize stress concentrators and improving print reliability
  • Shelled parts to reduce filament use and print time
  • Features are mostly vertically aligned to avoid overhangs and eliminate the need for internal support material
  • Only the mouth requires supports to account for the overhang
Section view through the desk tidy showing the thin shelled walls and the hollow central column
Section view showing the ribbed central column that the hat fastens onto, and the cut-outs through the hat
  • The main body is designed as a single part
  • Internal structure that can be directly printed rather than needing additional assembly
  • Functional features are directly integrated: the center cylindre is for winding the cable but also fastening the top part to avoid additional parts or secondary manufacturing processes.

Hat part

  • Radial cut-outs designed for additive manufacturing: it would be hard to do with injection moulding for example (the material could have trouble flowing around)
  • It also saves filament
  • Using circular pattern to create the hat geometry
The sketch behind the hat, one curved slot repeated around the centre by a circular pattern
Top view of the finished hat, the curved cut-outs sweeping out from the central hole

Final physical build in different situations

The printed desk tidy open on a desk, a red cable wound around the central column inside the body
Wind up the cable inside
The desk tidy closed, a pen standing in the hole at the top of the hat and the cable ends coming out of the mouth
The hat turned the other way up on the body, its slots holding a pen, a highlighter and pipette tips
The hat can be oriented in two ways for multipurpose use
  • The hat snaps to the inner column using a 0.4 mm clearance
  • Grid inner fill to lower material use. It also prints quickly compared to more complex infills.
A4 engineering drawing of the desk tidy with front, side and isometric views, overall height 70 mm and hat diameter 97.45 mm
Desk tidy coursework. Units mm, scale 1:1, material PLA.