Hasta La Ideas

About a year ago Union Wine Co. decided it needed to do a little rebranding. Ever since the Oregon-based company opened in 2005, it had embraced an unfussy approach to imbibing, but the company realized its message to consumers could be clearer. During a particularly electric brainstorming session earlier this year, it landed on a slogan, “pinkies down,” and a brave new method of delivery: wine in a can.

Ryan Harms, the owner of Union Wine Co., is a firm believer in the saying “it takes a lot of good beer to make good wine.” He likes the way a beer can feels in your hand and its portability, but he didn’t seriously think about canning wine until that rebranding meeting in June. He and his team talked about wanting their products to be accessible, both in the approachability of the varietals’ flavors and the ease with which one could grab a drink. They wanted to see their wines included on a backcountry skiing trip or packed for an exploration of Mount Hood. All of a sudden, the can seemed like a viable wine-delivery option.

But the company also had a difficult set of parameters to work within. Wine production is regulated, and wine can only be sold in certain size containers. At the same time, Harms felt very strongly about keeping it in a can that looked and felt like a beer can. That size, he thought, just felt so much more satisfying in the hand than the skinny cans in the energy drink world, which he didn’t have any emotional connection to. But the average 12-ounce beer can holds just under an amount that can be put on store shelves. If Union wants a beer can, those cans will actually have to hold 375 milliliters, or 12.68 ounces.

The packaging design for Union Wine’s products, including its wine-can prototype, is by Story Manufacturing Co. Can photos by Graham Hiemstra for Cool Hunting

Union Wine was also up against a problem of the wine itself, which often likes special treatment before being consumed. Some wines should be decanted to introduce more surface area to the air. Others are only at their best in a glass of a certain shape or at a pre-determined age.

Harms is half businessman and half winemaker, and he didn’t want the business idea to come at the expense of his craft. But he was also really tied to the everyday can. So he tailored the wine to suit the can instead of the other way around, discounting any varietal that wouldn’t do well there. “The types of wine in cans don’t need to be decanted or to age for five years to be accessible,” says Harms. “That would be a real disservice to put products like that in a can.” Wines that do better: “wines from the fresh and fruit-driven world, whether that’s white or red.”

(more…)

A close-up view of Laokoon’s new Enso lamp, made of the Hungarian company’s namesake material

In the Details is our weekly look at especially smart, innovative or unusual details of a new design.

When the designers of the Enso lamp start talking about how it evolved from Laokoon, the product’s chameleon-like material, the details become a little elusive. “What I wanted to express was actually the potential Laokoon represents,” says Lili Gulbert, the creative head and CEO of the Hungary-based company also called Laokoon. “I refused to close it into a definition and instead helped it find its own shape and explanation.”

If the explanation is a little squishy, perhaps it’s because the lamp is too. Enso undergoes morphological changes—twisting, arching, opening and wilting—when manipulated by the user. “You just have to experience it,” Gulbert says. “People are drawn to touching it. The material doesn’t have rules.”

It may not have rules, but it does have a structure. Indeed, Laokoon may be best understood not as a material per se, but as a system. Strips of other materials—such as plastic, wood, paper, or leather—are laced together using a proprietary system developed by the Hungarian textile and tapestry designer Zsuzsanna Szentirmai-Joly. “The shape is basically a matrix that can be applied in different—but, of course, not endless—material variations,” Szentirmai-Joly says.

Above and below: Some of Enso’s many possibly permutations

In the case of the Enso lamp, the designers used 80 two-inch-wide strips of transparent plastic. The strips are scalloped and layered with printed color before being laced together horizontally. When the pieces are linked, the strips slide over each other to strike a pose.

(more…)

In the Details is our weekly look at especially smart, innovative or unusual details of a new design.

When Slava Menn of the Fortified Bicycle Alliance decided to design a theft-proof bike light, he solicited ideas from as many bicycle enthusiasts, engineers and passersby as he could convince to offer an opinion. So when he was ready to put the light’s mettle to the test, once again he turned to the crowd.

One afternoon last year, Menn and his business partner, Tivan Amour, headed out to Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to invite passersby to walk away with their theft-resistant bike light. The team announced in poster board and Sharpie: “Free bike lights… if you can steal them.” Next to the light, Menn offered an array of bicycle light–busting tools: needle-nose pliers, an Allen wrench, lock wrenches and heavy-duty plumbing wrenches. If strangers could pry the light from the bike in two minutes (“No opportunistic thief will spend more than two minutes,” explains Menn), the light was theirs to keep.

Over the course of an hour and a half, 20 to 30 people faced off against the lock. Menn believes the location offered a strong set beta of testers. “It’s a tech-y, entrepreneurial community,” he says. “But it wasn’t until we got a bike-shop mechanic coming in that we got a little bit nervous.” Thanks to the early wisdom of the crowd, not a single light was stolen.

After launching the Defender last year, Fortified is working on two new lights called Aviator (left) and Afterburn.

(more…)

Photos © Jonathan Mauloubier (left) and Mario Gastinger

In the Details is our weekly look at one especially smart, innovative or unusual detail of a new design.

The German designer Stefan Diez has been working on the same chair, more or less, for seven years. His latest version, called Tune, was released this summer as a part of the exhibition Seven Studies, held at a furniture showroom in Munich. Compared to the first version of the chair, Tune is a little brighter and a little more bespoke. But the skeleton is the same. In fact, it’s those bones that gave the original chair its name.

Chassis was developed for the residential and office furniture company Wilkhahn starting in 2006. (It didn’t reach consumers until 2011.) “They have quite a reputation, and I was quite ambitious about trying something new,” says Diez. He aimed to build the chair from strong sheet-metal parts, and then wondered: Why couldn’t the manufacturing process match the materials? Diez consulted with automobile suppliers based in Germany and the Netherlands about using a modern car-manufacturing method for his chairs. They decided on space-frame technology, where 300 tons of pressure deep-draws a fine steel sheet used for the frame.

Diez (center) with prototypes of his new Tune chair, which is a reworking of his earlier Chassis design

(more…)

In the Details is our weekly look at one especially smart, innovative or unusual detail of a new design.

Daniel McLaughlin’s final project for London’s Royal College of Art, where he graduated with a master’s in innovation design engineering last spring, is a tribute both to his home country of New Zealand and to the good old-fashioned process of trial and error. McLaughlin embarked on the project without any real idea of what kind of product he was trying to make; his one starting point was that he wanted to find a way to utilize waste produced by New Zealand’s wool industry, one of the cornerstones of the country’s economy.

But what kind of product could he make out of wool waste? McLaughlin tried dunking the material in oil (to observe its natural hydroscopy); lighting it on fire (to watch it self-extinguish); and mixing it with wood glue and polyurethane resins to create rigid felt panels. The latter experiments were promising—what if, McLaughlin wondered, he could make the wool not just rigid but structural?—but they were obviously not environmentally friendly.

(more…)