Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Vote for my Idea for Quirky

Remember Design-A-Day? By this time last year it was in full effect. So what happened to all those projects? Well as you my diligent readers know, some have been submitted to design competitions and others to Design awards. But what about the rest? With a little tightening up of the original sketches Quirky might be the best place for them.

Here is a link to the Quirky post for the first submit ed, please vote for it: http://www.quirky.com/ideations/208497?sc=true


A tiered container gardening system that uses trickle down watering to share nutrients and a hydroponic water reservoir for the roots.

Monday, April 9, 2012

Submission for FastCoDesign/Porsche 911 Next Design Challenge

Stealing design elements from any of the Porsche 911 line is a pleasure. There are so many beautiful versions of this prestigious automobile. But my favorite is the 1980s 930 Porsche 911 Turbo wide-body. The “whale tail”! The car I grew up riding to school in.

Using design elements from this car I created a LED Porsche Desk Lamp, made with brushed metal and overmolded rubber. I tried to capture the basic lines of the beefy rear wheel-well and black stone guard detail from the rocker panel and wheel-well for the base of the lamp, along with the sloped hood and rubber bumpers. The lower pivoting arm of the lamp is my whale tail and the upper arm is a reflection of the Porsche roofline and the windshield rake. Plus I added a little 911 wheel detail to the pivoting elbow between the arms.

While creating this design I thought about the speed and quality of Porsche, taking into consideration the timelessness of Porsche design. I tried to capture that feeling in the overall design presence of this desk lamp. I wanted to make it feel like it would rocket off your desk, but last forever as a testament to craftsmanship and good design.

Let there be the speed of light!




Submission for DWR/Dwell Live/Work Contest

Rockin' Stool finalized:
Create a beautiful but functional exercise chair for home or office use

While working on several new furniture concepts it was brought to my attention that the current design for exercise office chairs was very unappealing. Most look like they were thrown together with an ugly frame and a basic exercise ball.

I began researching what was on the market trying to find one applying version of these core strengthening office or home chairs. I did not.
Then I began sketching trying to rethink the best way to approach this. The first attempt was splitting the ball in 2 and using 1 half for the seating and 1 half back portion of the chair. This still had a very unappealing look and didn’t target the core enough. The next design was simply adding a back to the current exercise ball. But it was the 3rd version that I struck on a simple elegant way to solve the problem. Just add a rounded base to stool. This will make the user engage there core while working while (hopefully) maintaining good posture due to the lack of the back support.

I set out to design a chair or sitting product that engaged the core while still being a beautiful piece of home or office furniture