Hasta La Ideas

Dezeen Watch Store: Pebble is the first watch by Danish design studio KiBiSi and is now available in four colours at Dezeen Watch Store.

Pebble is the result of a collaboration between Jacob Juul of Danish watch brand Bulbul and KiBiSi. The design includes a distinctive asymmetric face that was inspired by the smooth contours of the pebbles found on Scandinavian beaches.

“Jacob asked us ‘why are all watches round or square?’, KiBiSi’s head of design Lars Larsen told Dezeen, “and we decided to use this question as the starting point for the design.”

He continued: “When you look at the watch the asymmetry is not the first thing that catches your eye. The shape feels familiar and not radical – it’s ‘off’ in a balanced and delicate aesthetic way.”

The timepiece, almost two years in the making, places emphasis on high quality craftsmanship and includes a double-sided Italian leather strap. “We wanted to make the product the brand and focus more on the piece” Lars said. “The watch becomes a piece of contemporary jewellery.”

The dial is complemented by a minimal face and a unique injection-moulded silicone loop. “The loop functions as understated brand information but remains eye-catching,” Lars added. “A traditional leather loop tends to soften and break over time; this solution is long lasting and durable.”

Other features include a stainless-steel case topped with scratch resistant sapphire glass and a Ronda Swiss-made movement with a ten-year battery life.

Entrepreneur Jacob Juul launched Bulbul in Copenhagen this year. The brand name can be translated as nightingale in the Middle East and India, but can also refer to a small songbird with a distinctive mohawk.

Pebble is available at Dezeen Watch Store in four variations for £290.

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at Dezeen Watch Store appeared first on Dezeen.

Bart Veldhuizen, community manager at online 3D-printing service Shapeways, takes Dezeen on an exclusive behind-the-scenes tour of the company’s Eindhoven print facility for the final instalment in our series of movies about additive manufacturing.

Shapeways is a website where customers can upload a 3D model and get it printed out and shipped to their front door. It also provides an online marketplace where designers can sell their 3D-printed designs, which Shapeways prints out and delivers to order.

Veldhuizen gave us a tour of the company’s European headquarters in Eindhoven as part of our research for Print Shift, the magazine about 3D printing we launched earlier this year.

“Shapeways is the world’s leading 3D printing marketplace and community,” he says in the movie. “You can design anything, have it 3D-printed, share it, sell it, make it your business. We have 250,000 community members right now who are designing their own work and who are selling and buying on the website.”

One of the most popular products available on the website is a fully working model of a walking sculpture created by artist Theo Jansen, Veldhuizen says. Called Strandbeest, the intricate toy is printed in one go, without any assembly required. An optional propellor can also be printed separately and added to the model to make it wind-powered.

“It contains 75 moving parts and it will actually walk,” says Veldhuizen. “It’s wind-powered, you blow on the propeller and off it goes.”

Starting the tour, Veldhuizen takes us to a computer room, where incoming 3D files are processed and assessed.

“After you place an order, we need to check if a part is actually printable or not,” Veldhuizen explains. “That can mean several things. Will it survive the printing process? Will it survive shipping? All kinds of factors like that.”

Shapeways do not print out objects one at a time, as you might using a desktop 3D printer. Rather, multiple 3D objects are printed together in large trays.

“We try to plan our printers as efficiently as possible,” says Veldhuizen. “Sometimes we fit in 300-400 parts in one printer. The more we can fit in, the more efficiently we can produce, of course.”

Veldhuizen then takes us to one of the company’s printing rooms, where laser sintering machines print models out of white nylon powder.

“We deposit a fine layer of powder on the print bed, a laser sinters one cross-section at a time and then the process repeats,” explains Veldhuizen. “After the printing is done, we unpack the tray. We take the entire printed tray, we push it out of the box and we take it apart by hand.”

He continues: “Once the printer starts, it prints about one centimetre an hour. A medium-sized tray can take 24-36 hours to print. After that it’s still quite hot and will take the same amount of time to cool down. Only after that we can start unpacking it.”

For an extra cost, Shapeways can also polish and dye the 3D-printed models.

“For most of the materials that we use, we look to see how we can make it more interesting for designers or consumers,” says Veldhuizen. “In the case of nylon prints, we found that polishing it after printing will give a much more smooth feeling, much closer to injection-moulded plastic.”

Next, Veldhuizen takes us to a different print room, which produces what Shapeways calls “frosted ultra-detail” models. Here, multi-jet modelling machines print out highly detailed models by depositing fine layers of plastic resin, which are cured with a UV light.

“Ultra detail is a material that’s very highly detailed; we can print walls up to 0.1 millimetres thick,” says Veldhuizen. “It’s not powder-based, it’s a photo-acrylic and then we use a UV light to cure it. This is mainly used by designers who want to create miniature trains or miniature game models.”

We finish the tour at Shapeways’ distribution centre, where the 3D-printed models are given a final quality control inspection before being shipped out to customers.

“After ordering, it takes between 2-3 weeks for an order to arrive at your home,” says Veldhuizen. “After printing, we check every part to make sure it’s printed to the right quality standards and if it passes it gets shipped out.”

See all our stories about 3D printing »

Find more information about Print Shift and see additional content here.

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3D-printing marketplace” appeared first on Dezeen.

This packaging for medicines changes over time to clearly show when its contents are no longer safe to use.

The proposal by designer Kanupriya Goel and biologist Gautam Goel addresses the problems of expiration dates wearing off, labels not being printed in a universal language, or text that’s too small to read.

The designers decided to tackle this issue after seeing their grandparents struggling to find and read expiration dates on different medications, but also believe their proposal could help in third world countries where the concept of medicines expiring is less well understood.

The packages and labels comprise several layers of a diffusible material, with information about the contents printed on the top layer and warning symbols hidden on the bottom.

Over a predetermined period, the ink on the lower layer bleeds through the material until it covers the surface with symbols that were chosen as universally recognised symbols of danger.

The timed process begins immediately when the medicine is packaged and is tamper-proof, reducing the likelihood of expired medicines being resold illegally.

Other intelligent pharmaceutical packaging projects on Dezeen include medicine packets named after symptoms rather than ingredients and a kit for distributing medicines to remote locations that’s shaped to squeeze in the gaps between Coca-Cola bottles.

See more stories about packaging »

Here’s some more information from the designers:

Self Expiring

Self Expiring is a packaging material for medicinal products that visually ‘self expires’ over a fixed period of time. This packaging will graphically display a ‘not fit for consumption’ message using universally accepted danger signs in regional languages. This solution will prevent illegal sales of expired medicines and fatalities arising from their consumption.

Consumption of expired medications can lead to prolonged illness, increased healthcare costs, and life-threatening situations. The current solution of imprinting the expiration date on medicinal packaging is ineffective for multiple reasons including non-universal choice of language (such as English), small and unreadable font type, and loss of information with usage or wear and tear. All of these issues can collectively lead to accidental consumption of expired medicines.

The proposed solution uses a packaging material that will visually ‘self expire’ over a designated time period. The packaging is composed of two layers of information: the foreground, which contains the medicine label, and the background, which carries a hidden expiration message. These are separated by multiple sheets of diffusible material through which the ink from the hidden message will seep through as time passes. This timing sequence will be initiated from the very point of packaging of the medication itself. It will prevent retailers from illegally selling expired medications for personal gains.

The choice of colour(s) and the design of the expiration pattern include universally accepted signs of danger. The ability of the packaging to alert a user visually takes a significant burden off the users. With this solution, the users would not have to struggle with reading fine print in a language they do not understand, or search for a printed expiration date around the packaging with limited visual capabilities and/or dexterity. This solution will prove to be more efficient and widely understood by the illiterate to prevent accidents and fatalities arising from the consumption of expired medicines.

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Kanupriya and Gautam Goel appeared first on Dezeen.

We’ve admired the 2013 Ford Atlas Concept truck since its debut at Detroit’s 2013 North American International Auto Show earlier this year. The Atlas makes a big statement about…

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Interview: ahead of the opening of a permanent exhibition of David Mellor’s street furniture, the British designer’s son Corin talks to Dezeen about cataloguing an important moment in British design and how his father approached designing traffic lights and cutlery in the same way (+ slideshow).

Best known for his cutlery designs, David Mellor also developed innovative street furniture in the 1950s and 1960s, including bus shelters, street lights, bollards and the traffic lights and pedestrian crossing boxes that are still used on Britain’s roads.

Corin Mellor says his father’s democratic approach to design was well-suited to street furniture, as well as to designing his popular kitchenware: “He was always keen on design not being elitist but being for the masses, and it’s the same with the street furniture.”

Mellor adds that the standard of their design is the reason for the products’ enduring appeal: “The fact that these products have been standing in parks and on the sides of the road for fifty years is testament to good design.”

On the site of the David Mellor Design Museum at Hathersage in the Peak District National Park, a mock up of a street incorporating Mellor’s designs has been built that Corin Mellor says is a tribute to his father’s vision “that he could change the street scene.”

The installation features several products designed for street furniture firm, Abacus, as well as the traffic light system for the Department of the Environment and a square post box commissioned by the Post Office, which was intended to make the process of collecting mail more efficient.

Outdoor seating and colourful rubbish bins also feature in Street Scene, which opens to the public on 8 September.

We recently published a smart street furniture solution in the form of billboards that perform helpful functions. At this year’s Milan Furniture Fair, Zaha Hadid launched a wavy bench with street furniture brand Lab23, and Konstantin Grcic has created a modular outdoor seating system based on Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Chair.

See all our stories about street furniture »
See our street furniture Pinterest board »

Here’s a transcript of Corin Mellor’s conversation with Alyn Griffiths from Dezeen:

Alyn Griffiths: What was the idea behind the Street Scene?

Corin Mellor: I suppose I felt it was an important part of British design history and, although we’ve got a few exhibits dotted around, I wanted to group it together and display it as it would be in a street.

Alyn Griffiths: What does the installation look like?

Corin Mellor: It’s basically laid out in a line, like a street, but made from beautiful York paving. It’s about 30 metres long and people walk from the car park through the street scene past the shop to the design museum.

Alyn Griffiths: How did you choose which pieces to put on display?

Corin Mellor: I really put in what I think are the key pieces – the ones that were the most used in the country. I left out a few that I knew he was never really happy with and just tried not to overdo it: three types of bollard is enough for anybody!

Alyn Griffiths: How did your father first get involved in designing street furniture?

Corin Mellor: He studied at the Royal College of Art and then he went on a sabbatical to the British School in Rome and was rather taken with the lovely ornate lampposts in the Borghese Gardens so he started designing a new lamppost while he was over there. I think he had a vision that he could change the street scene and I know it came from this sabbatical in Rome.

Alyn Griffiths: That’s a bold vision for someone who was still a student at the time.

Corin Mellor: It is. Whether he thought he’d achieve it I don’t know but I know that was his idea. And when he got back he literally drove around with rolled up pieces of paper trying to get manufacturers to take on his idea. He finally came across this firm in Derby called Abacus who were willing to give it a go and from then on most of his work was for Abacus, including the bus stop and the bollards; virtually all of it was through them.

Alyn Griffiths: The design of the street lights for Abacus was quite radical at the time – can you explain why?

Corin Mellor: It was about getting the most out of new materials. It replaced ornate cast iron Victorian lampposts with tubular steel, which had just emerged and marked the change to modernism and truth to materials.

Alyn Griffiths: The traffic lights are probably the most recognisable product displayed in the Street Scene. What was your father trying to achieve with the design?

Corin Mellor: I think he was trying to simplify it, to make it a coherent and easy system to use for both the motorist and the pedestrian. He wanted to do that through the choice of materials and a very simple but effective design. I think if it was very stylised it would have changed since then but it is difficult to date it; it’s just there, like the British motorway signs.

Alyn Griffiths: The design of the square pillar box was a clever reinterpretation of an established archetype – what was so revolutionary about it?

Corin Mellor: The materials, square shape and the clever internal mechanism were all revolutionary but all had a definite purpose. The square pillar boxes were made from sheet steel so were efficient to produce and maintain. One of the requirements of the project was to allow easier and more efficient collection and the new square shape created internal space for special mechanism. There is clearance inside for a hook, lever and hinged floor. The postman attaches his bag, pulls the lever and a chute is formed sliding the letters into the bag. The design actually reduced collection times by half.

Alyn Griffiths: How does this design encapsulate your father’s vision for improving even the most familiar products?

Corin Mellor: As with my father’s other designs, the use of materials influenced the visual look of the design. His vision wasn’t about change for change’s sake but perhaps a belief that some things could simply be done better.

Alyn Griffiths: Was he disappointed that public opinion scuppered its widespread implementation?

Corin Mellor: The new design wasn’t scuppered totally (many thousands were installed and some examples remain in use to this day) but some members of the public had a problem with any changes to a familiar design. Having said that, he was disappointed that the design was never rolled out completely as it was, by any measure, an improvement.

Alyn Griffiths: It’s amazing that he was able to work across such vastly different scales – from cutlery to street furniture.

Corin Mellor: Yes, I suppose he had the same vision with the smaller scale things, that everybody should be eating with decent cutlery. He was always keen on design not being elitist but being for the masses, and it’s the same with the street furniture. Good design for everybody – everybody should be able to sit on a modern park bench. It’s the same process, whether you’re doing something that’s six inches long or sixty feet long, it’s about getting the best out of the materials.

Alyn Griffiths: Do you think the street furniture your father designed has endured well?

Corin Mellor: I think so. They’re starting to disappear now as there is much more contemporary street furniture around and it’s getting a lot better, but the fact that these products have been standing in parks and on the sides of the road for fifty years is testament to good design.

Alyn Griffiths: Did he draw satisfaction from the public’s response to these products?

Corin Mellor: I think so. His interest in design would always just move on to the next project and he would never tell anyone he designed them but I’m sure it must have given him pleasure all the time, driving around and stopping at the traffic lights.

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for 50 years is testament to good design” appeared first on Dezeen.