Process follows people.
Tent design is about people. How to shelter them from bugs and rain and the pain of carrying too much weight. How to integrate the sleeping experience with the wonder of the environment. How to hide the technical details and accentuate the aesthetic ones. At Tarptent, we design for the purpose of people.
TENT’GINEERING™
What we do involves what we call “probing the polyhedra” (and non-polyhedra). By that we mean looking at the mathematical world for what is proven mathematically and experientially to do the job. We look at prisms and pyramids, spheres and cylinders for inspiration and then push those forms into new aesthetic and structural expressions. We recurve them and change their mathematical DNA, searching for the best way to weather the storms, maximize the interior volumes, and minimize the weight. Using high performance computer aided design software we cycle from screen to sewn and back again searching for the best expression that lets you Sleep Anywhere™.
Usable Volume
A critical design goal for every tent we do is to maximize usable volume. By usable volume we mean space into which you can reasonably sit up, lie down, change clothes, and organize gear. Listed length, width, and height specifications mean little in the absence of understanding the tent geometry. Shallow sloping walls to ground cut off usable volume, steep slopes increase usable volume. Two tents with identical listed dimensions can have radically different usable volumes. Note how we use the PitchLoc ends in the Notch design to lift the effective height at the ends of the tent and dramatically increase usable floor length and volume without increasing the footprint—the space required for setup.