Hasta La Ideas

This is a great example of the kind of thorough design thinking we hope to see more of in future. Lately designer Kam Leang has been getting a lot of blog love for his “Renkasa” umbrella concept, but mostly quick mentions with a couple of beauty shots that fail to convey the depth of Leang’s thinking. Let’s take a closer look.

First conceived of two years ago when he was a student at Tokyo’s Tama Art Institute, the “Renkasa” was initially formulated to solve a problem Leang noticed: Umbrellas were frequently ending up as garbage, whether through breakage or negligence.

When Leang looked more closely at the problem, he found it was worse for the environment than initially thought: The average umbrella required five different materials broken into more than 75 individual components, all of which were installed in an essentially permanent way. In other words, you couldn’t unscrew part of a broken umbrella and use that part to complete another umbrella. So once one component failed, the entire thing was garbage.

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