I started prototyping the shelf by created a scaled version of the shelf so that I could understand visually how everything would fit together and what I need to do for the shelf itself. I also wanted to test to see if the tolerance on the hooks were enough, but it was hard to judge when I couldn't quite get all the stray pieces of plastic from the inside of the shelf. Overall, everything seemed to fit well together and it was on to printing full scale pieces.
I printed out one of the hooks at full scale to see how big it would be and how strong it would be. I hooked it onto my backpack and it seemed to hold on pretty well without breaking, but in hindsight I should have made the shelf before to see if the hook would fall off once weight was put on the hook. I realized that for a lot of the things I wanted to put the hook on, it would require me to scale down the width of each hook so that things could hang down properly on them.