Hasta La Ideas

The wonderful Susan Orlean has a piece in the New Yorker about raising chickens…and RCA industrial design students show up in the the third act:

Recently, I spoke to Johannes Paul, one of the founders of Omlet, the British company that makes the Eglu. Paul was not initially a chicken person. He and the other three Omlet founders were industrial-design students at the Royal College of Art, in London, facing the paralyzing prospect of their thesis project in 2004. They were supposed to reconsider an ordinary object, and one of their mothers, who kept chickens, suggested designing a better chicken house. Commercially available coops, like homemade ones, were built of wood, which is hard to clean, hard to keep dry, and hard to seal well for insulation. “Plastic really is fantastic,” Paul said. “Using the kind of rotational molding that we do means it has inherent insulation, and it’s seamless, and it can be made in saturated colors.” For the first time, a chicken house could look and feel modern In fact, when the Eglu was first displayed a lot of people thought it was a new product from Apple.

But did you notice that hyphen in there? Love those New Yorker style police! (Says our trusted counsel: “I can’t imagine the magazine would edit to “…were French-literature students…”

(The full article, “The It Bird” isn’t yet on The New Yorker site. Just snatch a copy from your friend.)

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