One of my woodworking mentors frequently says that to design and build furniture you need to be able to draw it. This is particularly the case if you find it challenging to conceive of how designs work in three dimensions, especially if they have moving parts.
2/ My wife is a therapist specializing in grief. Since spring of 2020 her sessions have been by zoom. For her birthday last year I made her a small table/bench specially designed for conducting therapy sessions by zoom. 
3/ But she now needed one that could be put away between sessions. Since there’s really not enough space to have another piece of furniture. So for her birthday this year I wanted to design one that was collapsible and could be stored. This turned out to be very challenging.
4/ As I said above, figuring out how the pieces move together and interact was very challenging for me. Three dimensions is harder than two. And movement in three dimensions even more so.
5/ The joinery itself turned out to be pretty simple. But thinking through the design and keeping in my head how the different measurements interacted with each other was not. Not for me. It was fascinating though how drawing the different pieces made it possible reason it out.
Not sure how these got disconnected but here’s the rest of the thread
https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/1489711564311695365
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