Sunday, March 25, 2012

Bio-Inspired Can/tins storage

Rationale


This project is to develop a bio-inspired domestic storage for medium to high density living. For this task, I've decided to do a can storage that is inspired by the behaviour of elephant's trunk. Looking at the trends of house pantry especially in small apartments, people tend to store their cans everywhere or hidden inside the drawer and often they forget where they put their food cans until it become outdated.

So my solution to this problem is this rack which enables people to store their food cans in a more organized ways. The rack itself is naturally quite flexible for people to use, people can stick it to the wall, let the rack stand by itself, or even put it in any angle that suits the space better. This feature is mimetically follows the muscle flexibility of the trunk as the trunk itself can be directed to all angles just as this storage. This can storage also follows elephant's trunk's natural strong feature. This cans storage can be used either to make the cans visible and more organized to store, it also suits well for minimizing space for can storage. The cans itself can be stacked up and it won’t fall off because this rack is very steady because of the feature at the tip (which also mimically the trunk's tip).  This feature is inspired by the elephant's behaviour of picking up many branches by binding it using its trunk without it falling off.

The design itself is simple and yet aesthetically appealing which also follows my design philosophy. The inspiration of animal's behaviour such as elephant and its trunk feature has successfully helped me designing this storage and also understanding how we as designers can learn from nature's system to produce very useful products.

My only improvements would be playing around more with the features, and improve its features with more functionality which will improve customer's satisfactions and pleasure with the product, though it means more research and time to do it. 




Sunday, March 11, 2012

The 11th Hour

Video Link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGylCNIKttg&feature=youtu.be

The 11th Hour is a very insightful video of how world has deteriorating for the past few centuries and how badly the effect of human practice towards nature. The video has provided different opinions and views, the true facts that supported by scientific research and it shows that there is a huge link between nature and human being.

The video also commented on how we as human tend to think that we are superior and have the right to exploit nature whatever we want it. However, we forget that we are actually part of nature and we can't live without nature around us. The person supports this idea by saying that even in our body, there are millions of other living creatures and organisms that support our body mechanism. so Simply saying, we are indeed part of nature and each nature organisms can't be superior to each other.

Sadly though, People nowadays have become so materialistic and consumerist. All they think is about themselves and money that they can gain. They always trust Economists and that's why they don't think about other views except gain profits. Nature has become the victim of this exploitation of human getting profits.

Another sad facts, is the idea of deforestation and over exploitation that has been existed in America, Europe and Asia. In fact, 99.99% of all species has become extinct and over fifty thousand species also become extinct each year. which i believe it's the result of over exploitation. People over exploit nature in amount that is bigger than what they need, and it's ironic how they throw away the exceed resources back to nature but of course in an unacceptable conditions.

It's a pity if we realize that whatever human do in the world ad towards nature will in fact affect us back. For instance, deforestation will leads to drought and drought will cause death to animals and plants which are also our sources of foods and will then impacts us as we will get hungry and die eventually if there is not enough water and food resources. 

This video has even encourage designers to explore on nature and produce products that is responsible towards nature. We as designers have to consider the consequences on each design we explore on. So it's very essential for us to always design sustainable products using sustainable materials and stops the cradle to grave concepts. 

Nature is a great teacher of design, not that we destroy nature but we should look at nature to inspire us. Well of course it's not easy to solve this big problem that have been already been done for years, but we should stop this and not letting this problem continue to happen. As consumers, vote for sustainable products eventhough it's a bit more expensive. Our life is more precious and pray more attention on what you buys!