Hasta La Ideas

The ‘clever material swap’ gets to be a bit trendy in the industrial design game after awhile. We usually have trouble to finding projects that both employ a new material intelligently (and with good intent) but don’t immediately fall into ‘can’t-believe-its-a-cement-lamp’ category. Likewise, as far as bandwagons go, 3D printing doesn’t seem to be slowing down in the slightest with projects like the 3Doodle pen and 3D photo booths. But while we all wait for either 3D printed houses or organs, we have to ask: when are all the innovative 3D printed consumer products going to catch up?

Upon perusing our sister portfolio site Coroflot, we came across the portfolio of Marc Levinson, the chief executive officer of Protos Eyewear. Protos boasts that their line of 3D printed eyewear is both consumer grade and yields “striking designs that are impossible to make through standard manufacturing methods.”

Levinson deals with some pretty solid applications for 3D printing market-ready products. Originally considered to be a technique primarily for prototyping, many companies are looking to 3D print directly to market. Levinson’s 3D printed frames for San Francisco-based Protos Eyewear are a great example of manufacturing process informing aesthetics. We’re particularly fond of the Hal Pixel frames, perhaps a not-so-subtle nod to the digital age.

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Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg famously embarked on a mission to only eat meat that he’d killed himself—an achievable goal when you’re a dot-com millionaire and have the resources to set up the logistics. Brooklyn-based designer Martina Fugazzotto, however, is a woman of more humble means who set a slightly different quest for herself: She would grow her own food. First on a balcony, then in a concrete backyard in Brooklyn.

Though she’s a designer, Coroflotter Fugazzoto is one of our brethren in Graphics/Web/Digital rather than Industrial; that being the case, she doesn’t have that closet some of us ID’ers have to keep physical objects we’ve worked on. And though she enjoys her 2D design work, “At the end of the day, there’s nothing that physically exists that I’ve made,” she explains.

Feeling that void led her to start a garden, where she could exchange physical toil for the reward of bringing something three-dimensional into existence. “I needed something more tangible, something that was so much more real in the world,” she says. Working out of a tiny concrete plot behind her Brooklyn building, Fugazzotto soon branched out (pun! Sweet!) from houseplants into vegetables.

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Many a young design student has searched for a way to manufacture the feeling sentimentality in object design—it’s a great moment when you buy a product and build a special type of inherent knowledge of its quirks and inter workings. In the Color Wheel Timepiece, ID Student Scott Albertson of Carnegie Mellon has attempted to shake up the traditional use of a watch and challenge the user to build their own understanding via color rather than a traditional analog face.

Alberstein says of the timepiece:

The type of watch one wears can tell a great deal about someone. In order to build a personal relationship with this watch I decided to represent the passage of time through color. If used regularly, the user will develop associations between time and color patterns. Eventually, the user could tell the time based on what colors are shown.

Don’t get me wrong; the color wheel clock is a poetic idea. In use, you realize analog clocks might be slipping into object nostalgia territory, replaced by ever-present digital displays. If 20-somethings do use analog displays- they tend to be by way of screens. While the IPhone seems a pretty good stand in for watch, timer, alarm… the list goes on, it’s good to see someone tackle the wrist watch – one of designer’s greatest fetish items. We’ve seen a few variations on color watch faces (The Ziiiro Gravity and Proton lines come to mind), and Alberstein’s Color Wheel Timepiece is a nicely resolved challenge to the archetype.

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Joe Warren’s QMB, or Quad Micro Bar, is nifty way to seat four in a temporary setting. Washington-based industrial designer Warren observed that “bars and chairs are cumbersome, space-consuming assemblies that take up extra space when they are not in use,” and set out to design a piece of furniture whose footprint was shrinkable.

The QMB is made from natural growth forest products and uses non-polluting dyes, retaining that American Northwest healthy-living vibe. And while I’m not sure about the price point from a consumer perspective—Warren’s aiming for $700 a pop on Kickstarter—I could see a bunch of these rolling off of a catering truck for on-site events.

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Dana Ramler is a Vancouver-based designer with a knack for unconventional design combinations. Speaking the language of industrial, fashion, interactive and media design simultaneously; her projects and collaborations hit that sweet spot between thought-provoking conceptual design and the intelligent products for market.

Bio Circuit is a vest that provides a form of bio feedback using data from the wearer’s heart rate to determine what “sounds” they hear through the speaker embedded in the collar of the garment. The wearer places the heart rate monitor around the ribcage, resting against the skin and close to the heart. An MP3 audio player embedded in the vest plays the audio track related to that specific heart rate. The audio tracks are soundscapes mixed from a range of ambient sounds.

Bio Circuit was created at Emily Carr University by Industrial Design student Dana Ramler, and MAA student Holly Schmidt.

While the Biocircuit probably won’t be hitting the market anytime soon, Ramler’s work in technical running accessories for lulumon athletica definitely deserves a look as well. They almost make running in sub-zero temperatures sound appealing… almost.

Check out more on Ramler’s Coroflot page for everything from inflatable belts to an interactive nest

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