Unpronounceable Designs: The Adventurer's Day Pack

I recently took an online class through Coursera.org, entitled Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society. This class looked at the design process through the lens of product development, focusing on the identification of unmet user needs (or in the shorthand of the course, our "Gap") and iterative design and development. For my class project, I decided to focus on a design I fiddled with a couple months beforehand and had set aside (which I had posted about over on Tumblr at the time). Homework for the class was submitted via maintaining a blog, so rather than creating a new one just for the class, I posted here... so this set of links also includes a couple things like basic drawing assignments, etc.

My Gap

A convincingly medieval-looking ergonomic backpack for carrying a day's worth of water & eating utensils, to be used in medieval fantasy Live Action Role Playing games. In the LARP community I belong to, we often have events where we are hiking for most of the day and have to carry our own supplies. Because our bags, etc. have to fit into the medieval setting, we often end up carrying much less water than we need, or have to keep our water jugs in simple tote bags that are uncomfortable to carry for a long period of time, or get left behind when we have to continue on unexpectedly. My project is intended to remedy that situation by providing a means to carry water that is comfortable for extended hands-free wear.