ELISAVA – Furniture & Product Design
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Furniture & Product Design was the second of two studio courses I took at Elisava. It was a unique opportunity for me as Murray State, my home university, does not offer a similar course. During the first class, we were told to go to local flea markets and buy something relatively cheap and bring it next week for our first project. It was revealed that the items our class had bought were going to be swapped around and we had to create a product reinventing its use. I received a light switch. The tactility of it reminded me of a computer mouse, so I had the idea of turning it into a way of drawing, physically, with a “mouse.”
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The second project was a group project in which we were given an IKEA Ivar Chair to create anything we wanted with, as long as it still looked somewhat like an Ivar Chair. Me, Jaden, and Owen came up with the idea of creating a chair that played music, inspired by the many street musicians in Barcelona. Our goal was to create instruments that were very easily approachable and simple to pick up, not needing any musical experience to play. This was not only lowered the barrier to entry (and to be easier to design), but also gave the user(s) an easy way to enjoy the process of making music. The poster was designed by Jaden
This video was filmed and edited by me. It documents Owen’s journey outside Elisava to share the experience of the chair with classmates and strangers and includes a beat improvised by him and other users.
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This fully working kick drum was designed by me. I am not trained in engineering whatsoever, but somehow I made it work. Pressure really does wonders for my creativity.
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The DINAT Nomad Challenge was a project in pairs where we were tasked with defining a “nomad” (which was completely up to our discretion as long as we could justify it) and to create a product for them using cardboard as our primary material. Me and my partner Jake (who designed the poster) came up with the idea of a portable stool for a wandering teacher who needed to move around a lot and sit in areas without dragging a chair around. This design utilized the lightweight aspect of cardboard mixed with the surprising strength of cardboard fluting when glued in succession to create an extremely portable stool that held the weight of everyone we tested on.
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My Own Brief, our final project, gave me the opportunity to create any product for any company I wanted. I thought it’d be really interesting to combine two interests of mine, headphones and fashion, and created a proposal for Nike branded headphones (which surprisingly do not exist as of writing this in 2024). Since the release of the Apple AirPods Max, I have seen an uptick in popular fashion to utilize headphones an an accessory to outfits. Nowadays, everyone walks around with some sort of earbuds or headphones, either to block out the world around them or as a distraction for things such as working out or commuting. I could see Nike capitalizing on their strong branding and existing interest in pushing innovative design to create a piece of technology that is both functional and fashionable. I tried to take some inspiration from their sneakers as well as currently popular early 2000s aesthetic (think 90s Oakley sunglasses) to inform what they would look like.
