Here are the most interesting new materials I’ve come across this year, smart or modern, I don’t care they’re so cool!! I want to build a garden installation out of air concrete, I crave having a thermotile shower and don’t get me started on neon tea bags… If materials designers and engineers keep this going […]

We have quite a quandary here don’t we? We all want to be more environmentally friendly but we also need to buy things like food, clothes, furniture and stuff to keep us clean. If you’ve read my posts on packaging design you’ll see that any company wanting it’s product to be successful, whatever it is, […]

I just thought I’d put together a collection of some of the cool things I’ve come across on looking into mechanisms and structures, it might be a bit disjointed but hopefully it’ll provide some inspiration The self balancing bookshelf: What a conversation starter, I think when I move next I might just have to make […]

This was so fiddly to make!! Spaghetti does not submit gracefully to being made into a bridge, anyway here’s pics of the bridge in construction: I’ve worked out that my final bridge was made out of approximately 176 strands of spaghetti, if my bridge is to hold as much as each individual strand can hold it should support […]

  During a design and tech class at the school I worked at last year I was introduced to ‘The Story of Stuff’. Anne Leonard was curious as to what happens when we design, make, transport, buy, use and finally throw away stuff. It was a brilliant medium to get the class of Year 8s talking about […]

If a structure is going to be strong it needs support struts, the square bellow did not take much effort to break: Now if you add an extra strut… …it becomes much stronger, this is called triangulation. The bridge structure I’ve chosen are a selection of methods of using triangulation. Now for the bridge structures, I’m […]

First things first, how much weight can a single strand of spaghetti take? To make sure that all my tests are fair I’ll be adding the weight in small increments and waiting 10 seconds between each to make sure that it is actually taking the weight. I’ll also be performing each test 5 times to […]

As part of my structures investigations I’ve decided to have a go at the spaghetti bridge challenge. Sound odd doesn’t it It involves making a bridge structure out of nothing but spaghetti and hot melt glue following a list of task parameters. The official spaghetti bridge world championships has a very stringent set of rules […]

You have different packaging for different products, you wouldn’t put headache pills in a crisp packet for example. Packaging has to be fit for purpose, to get the manufacturers new big thing into your hands intact and with enough info that you know what to do (and not to do) with it. It’s also there to […]

This is a little bit of research I did last semester, as I’m continuing it my investigations on this site I thought I’d move it over :)  Packaging is used in just about every aspect of our lives, you can’t really get away from it, even if you try! It’s used to protect products in […]