Hasta La Ideas

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pIf you’re a a href=”http://www.karimrashid.com/”Karim/a fan, a bottled water decrier, or have been closely watching the internet for the past week or so, you’ve probably seen a href=”http://www.waterbobble.com/”Bobble/a, the brand new, self-filtering water container designed by Rashid for Move Collective./p

pAt the Home and Housewares Show (happening now in Chicago), we caught up with founder Richard Smiedt and Karim Rashid at their very first Bobble booth, where guests swarmed for autographed giveaways (yes, we got one). Both took some time out to tell us Bobble’s story. /p

pKarim, above, discusses the product from a design and use perspective, pointing out just how much plastic we can really save, and how he’s been using Bobble in his own travels. /p

div style=”align: right;”img src=”http://www.core77.com/blog/images/2010/03/bobble-object.jpg” width=”468″ height=”397″ alt=”bobble-object.jpg”//div

pemBobble, in pink./em/p

pRichard, who came to the US from Australia after working for 20 years in product development at design-centric housewares companies like Casabella, Bodum and Breville, described the Bobble story in depth: with the particular goal of reducing water bottle usage, he and his team unearthed a very buried patent for a bottle-mountable filter; this incredible system had been used in only one crude product thus far. /p

pSo now it begins to simplify: as Smiedt put it, they had “found the shell of something quite interesting that had absolutely no design.” No design? Hire a designer. Which designer? Karim Rashid, who, as is his way, developed an immediately recognizable form./pa href=”http://www.core77.com/blog/events/home_and_housewares_show_2010_karim_rashid_bobble__16171.asp”(more…)/a
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