Offering a discrete, portable and rechargable lighting alternative is Lumio, a book-shaped lamp now on Kickstarter. Inspired by the idea of a modular home that could fold flat for transportation, the lamp is designed to adapt to a multitude of environments with its accordion-like structure. As the cover is…
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After gaining good blog traction, the Orp bicycle horn (which we wrote up here) recently surpassed its Kickstarter target of $90,000, and is on the way to 100 large. We’re following it up here not only to inform you of the funding success, but to illustrate how well Kickstarter can be wielded by a veteran industrial designer with a popular product idea.
Tory Orzeck and his team have continued updating the Orp’s project page, showing the process shots we love to see, along with updated renderings and diagrams that provide the quiet assurance that these guys know what they’re doing. We dug seeing things like what appears to be a 3D-printed mold used to cast silicone models for testing, and copious shots of them working out the kinks of their “engineering mule.”
I don’t know how accurately it measures creative output, but the Sharpener Jar is definitely a practical alternative to the underground artisanal pencil sharpening movement. So it should come as no surprise that designer, entrepreneur, teacher and sometime Core-toonist / Sketch-notetaker Craighton Berman (a.k.a. Fueled by Coffee) has nearly quadrupled his $2,500 Kickstarter goal in just four days.
Every day professional “creatives” spend their waking hours sketching, writing, doodling, brainstorming, drawing, and scribbling on paper—hoping that their next amazing idea will eventually appear. This process fuels a unique angst in the modern-day artist; they spend most of their time merely thinking about what to make with nothing physical to show other than a pile of sketches. Can you get credit for creative effort without showing an end product? How is your boss going to know that you spent most of the day working and not just surfing Tumblr? How can you prove to your clients that your rates are justified despite the absence of actual finished work? Can creative output really be measured?
As in the Dux Inkwell sharpener, an extant glass vessel takes on a new purpose as a reservoir for pencil shavings, underscoring the ritualistic appeal of paring down a stick of wood and graphite.
On the other hand, unlike the Cuppow, Berman has opted to include the jar (and lid and threaded ring) with the sharpener, which surely adds a bit of unnecessary shipping/packaging expense to the product. Hence, the $39 pricetag for a single Sharpener Jar—assuming that the 32 remaining “first editions” at $34 will sell out shortly. (Still, it could be worse: $210 worse.)
We’d love to see these letterform pencils IRL…
Driven to design a set of items that together form something greater than their individual parts, LA-based designer David Okum introduces The Made Collection. Now on Kickstarter, the handmade home and office accessories blend beautiful, mid-century modern-inspired aesthetics with contemporary crafting techniques. Aside from the solid aluminum trivet, the…
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Determined to bring the quality of wood-fired pizza home without having to invest in the pricey and cumbersome options that filled the market, Kristian Tapaninaho created the prototype for Uuni, an affordable, wood-burning oven that was small enough to keep in the kitchen. About the size of a suitcase…
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Portland-based industrial designer Tory Orzeck has careers at both GE Plastics and Nike under his belt. He also founded his own ID firm, Fuse, which has done projects for the likes of Herman Miller and Gerber. But for his latest project, Orp, Orzeck is turning to Kickstarter to create a safety device for cyclists.
In 2007, a young cyclist and art student was killed in Orzeck’s home base of Portland. She was in the blind spot of a cement truck, stopped at a red light. As the light turned green and both began to move, the truck made a right turn, towards the cyclist, who was crushed and killed.
That got Orzeck thinking about the problem of bicyclists’ relative invisibility on the road, and what he could design to solve that. But thinking outside of the box, he realized increasing visibility was only part of the solution; he ought to incorporate sound—loud, high-decibel sound—to alert a motorist to a cyclist’s presence in the event of an emergency.
Here’s Orzeck himself explaining his resultant design solution, the Orp:
At press time the Orp had clocked $38,000 out of a $90,000 target, with 27 days left to pledge. Get in on it here.
I must admit that the startup Designed by m mostly struck me for its cheeky take on Apple’s brand identity, appropriating the design cues (including the font Myriad Pro) with a wink and a nod for their website and, to a lesser extent, Kickstarter campaign. In any case, the AL13 aluminum iPhone bumper is a go, handily doubling its $20,000 goal in a week, and it doesn’t take an aerospace engineer to see why: it’s sleek, lightweight, easy to install and, above all, thinner than its competitors in the bumper category.
Of course, if the AL13 isn’t minimal enough for you, we covered a couple of ultraminimal cases about a month ago. Although Alex Karp didn’t reach his funding goal via Kickstarter, the campaign apparently received enough publicity to attract outside investors, who have offered to bankroll Bummpies. mod-3, on the other hand, has surpassed their goal for the Radius case by over 50% as of press time, with five days to go.
Spotted this week at the CES trade show in Las Vegas, Good Night Lamp is a project that aims to bring people together through a neighborhood of networked lamps. The concept is simple: each large lamp is paired with a smaller one, which can be given to friends and…
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Product News: the Pebble smartwatch, the project that raised the most money ever on crowd-funding platform Kickstarter, has gone into mass production and is set to begin shipping on 23 January.
Pebble Technology CEO Eric Migicovsky made the announcement yesterday in a press conference at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which was broadcast to the project’s backers via a live stream that you can watch here.
“We’ll be manufacturing at the top rate of 15,000 Pebbles per week,” he said, meaning it will take six to eight weeks to ship products to the project’s backers, after which the company will begin fulfilling pre-orders placed via their website.
New features announced include a magnetometer for compass-like functions and ambient light sensors, plus an accelerometer so the back-light can be activated by tapping or flicking the wrist.
The Pebble smartwatch syncs with an iPhone or Android device, allowing users to wirelessly operate the phone and alerting them to incoming calls, text messages, emails and push notifications from apps. It can also tell the time.
The production version has a 32 millimeter LCD screen with a monochrome, back-lit e-paper display covered by a polycarbonate lens. The interface is controlled by buttons on the sides, with “up”, “select” and “down” functions on the right and the “back” button on the left.
It’s waterproof enough to wear swimming thanks to a magnetic charger that means there are no holes in the case and it runs for seven days on one charge. It comes in red, white, black, orange and grey, and the polyurethane strap can be interchanged with any standard watch strap.
In May 2012, Pebble became the most funded Kickstarter project of all time and raised $10,266,845 from 68,929 people in just over one month. The product was originally meant to ship in September 2012, but the company blamed the missed deadline on the unexpectedly high numbers they had to produce after the funding campaign’s runaway success.
Interest in watches that sync with phones has been growing, with rumours speculating that Apple may be working on a smartwatch and products like the LunaTik for converting an iPod into a watch already on the market. See all our stories about watches.
Another product launch that’s been attracting a lot of attention at the Consumer Electroncs Show, which continues until tomorrow, is a fork for dieters that vibrates when you eat too much or too fast.
The post Kickstarter record-breaking Pebble
smartwatch goes into production appeared first on Dezeen.
While we've seen a variety of solutions to carrying a cumbersome bike lock, like Levi's commuter series, the task is most often a bit of a struggle. Enter the InterLock, an integrated seat post bike lock. Currently on Kickstarter, the device replaces your standard seat post, giving you 40"…
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