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Industrial Design News | april 2008 |
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Bloom My Buddy
Beautiful concept from Holland. Niels van Eijk and Miriam van der Lubbe come with the Bloom My Buddy, a new vase concept, made of high quality plastics. It exists of three parts, that all have their own water reservoir.
Magnetic curtains
An intelligent idea. These curtains designed by Florian Kräutli incorporate magnets in its inner structure which allows you to shape it into any form.
Shoe Wheel
A strange, but apparently very succesful product. The Shoe Wheel can carry 30 pairs of shoes and has an adjustable rotation speed. The price? For 70 dollars you are the new proud owner. And the product seems to be a sales success: with the introduction it was totally sold out.
IKEA train
The well knows furniture giant now supplies the furniture in a Japanese underground train as well, in order to get you into the right shopping atmosphere. Although nicely odd, the question is if everyone in Japan is waiting for this.
Nested Bunk Bed
Tsai Design Studio’s Nested Bunk Bed can unpack itself into several other dolls. The length of the beds increases to allow each bed to be nested under each other, leaving some storage space on the side of the beds. When fully extended, the bed system can sleep 20 children in a tight space of 50m2, as well as providing play space when the beds are retracted. Four sets of the bed system were placed into an Aids Orphanage in Wellington, near Cape Town, South Africa.
Progress?
As products evolve, they make our lives better...right?
Creativity and strategy
Creativity is very important in the design process, but not a guarantee for a succesful new designed product. Analyses and strategy forming are just as well as important in order to get a good product. Ideas need to be formed about emotional attraction, technology, intellectual property, marketing, distribution, promotion, production and sustainability. Choices and solutions are made partly on the basis of testing, analysis and study of available data and partly on creative thoughts, experiences and coincidental connections.
A product foremost needs to be able to fullfill the functions that it is designed for. A product can be designed with attractive forms and shapes, but if it does not do what the user expects the product to do, then the lofe for its design will disappear and it becomes a source of frustration. Especially here, when it comes to finding the right design and forms, as well as designing and engineering a functional and usable product, a design firm can act as an intermediating party: applying technologies for unexpected industries, using experience with other products, combining technologies and integrate them in new forms. In such way innovation happens, partly in a creative way in forming, design and solutions, partly in an analytical way with applications of technology and product strategy. That is what we call strategic creativity.
Materials
Arboform is an interesting material. It is both wood and a polymer, so regular molding techniques can be applied. The raw material is lignin, which is second only to cellulose as the most abundant natural polymer. Lignin is a by-product of the pulp industry and the volume arising worldwide is about 50 million tonnes per year.
Mixing lignin with natural fibres and some natural additive produces a fibre composite that can be processed at raised temperatures and, just like a synthetic thermoplastic material, can be made into mouldings, plates or slabs on conventional plastics processing machines. So this allows products such as computer, television or mobile phone casings to be made from "wood". For more information, see www.tecnaro.de
Company news
Bluelarix Designworks received a new order from Homburg Machinehandel. From the Draincleaner a concept design was made already, but now also the further detailed design, engineering and prototype building will be done.
The CrossMate is a simple, innovative and patented measuring device for the construction industry and mainly for concrete drilling companies. At the moment we are looking for and talking to parties that wish to produce and put this product in a big scale on the market.
Recently we succesfully tested a first proto of the Tensio+, an electronic measuring device for the paperindustry, executed by a major producer of machines for the paperindustry. A final prototype is being worked on now and will be shown on an exhibition in Stockholm by the end of may.
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