CHINDOGU
CHINDOGU J A PA N 1 9 9 5
The planets formed. The Earth cooled. Creatures emerged and one of them started playing with rocks and sticks. That creature made spears, he crafted shovels, he turned pelts into cloth. Then, he got fancy. He built the solar-powered flashlight and the combination table napkin/necktie. Not exactly useful, but somehow not altogether useless. He created inventions that didn’t quite work, but were nonetheless fun. Chindogu was born.
Not entirely usefull but also not entirely useless. Chindogu products are comments on society created in Japan since the mid 90’s. They poke fun at the ‘over-designed’ society we live in, implying that everything that needs to be invented has been invented. On this collaborative brief, we have researched the ethos of Chindogu and used it to give a rationale for us to produce comments on society that we wanted to visualise. Our project words were ‘Gravity’ and ‘Crack’. We combined our words and came up with mini briefs. This Chindogu product book is part of our ‘Overlapping Contradictions’ project that we wrote for ourselves. One concentration stemmed from ‘cracks in societal norms and needs’ and the other related to the ‘gravity’ of an objects purpose. These avenues specifically gave further reason to subvert, expose and illuminate problems we intended to find. Admittedly, our initial intention was to produce gimicky products. We actually ended up finding problems and solutions that we realised were unheard of and our outcomes solved problems rather than simply subverted objects. We roughly sketched and quickly protoyped between fourty and fifty ideas and narrowed down to the three that we deemed had most commercial application. The final decisions also had the widest audience to appeal to.
We found a problem. Traditional glue sticks are rounded, cylindrical with rounded edges. But every time you try and place glue on the corners of a page you have to twist, turn and angle the gluestick to reach the edges. We created a square gluestick named Glubix. The name relates to a ‘quick fix’ and an adhesive product branding. We have 3D designed and printed a cuboid gluestick which would cover the corners of anything accurately in glue. Our societal comment is that everything always needs improving. Socio-cultural pressures leads us to re-design, re-think and re-imagine everyday objects, to give us ease and make us lazier. We have found a small issue that we think could have a big commercial application. Nowadays we have concluded that innovation in product design, for graphic design agencies atleast, is about improving and combining existing technologies. We feel that this product fits well in this collaborative era we have entered. Simple, effective, and not entirely useful but definitely not entirely useless.
Inkeeping with our finding that society needs faster and more effective ways of using everyday products we have produced the ‘Slap-On-Fashion’ range. The problem we are adressing is the lack of ease in putting on a belt or watch, because the buckles taking up valuable seconds of your getting ready routine. We bought magnetic stripping and attached belt buckles and watch faces to mock up our range. The intention of the products is that you can ‘slap’ on the belt or watch as a quick fashion accesories without the fuss of fastening a buckle. The ‘real-world’ application of this could be put in context at catwalk shows and in theatre, where quick outfit changes are apparent. The design of the pieces are black and sleek, inkeeping with the modern fashion trends in the latter of this decade. They are inspired by the Flexi-ruler and magnetic festival/ concert wristbands that have been used in the last five years. We thought, why has somebody not applied that thinking to fashion? With people seemingly having less and less time to get ready in the morning and more pressure on looking good than ever before we have concluded that, given some design tweaks, this idea would sell and solve a problem that people didn’t even realise they face each morning.
STEVE JOBS 2002
Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works.
Doppio means tray in Latvian. We thought it was an appropriate product name, it sounds quite playful but could serve a realistic purpose. As smokers, we both agreed this product could serve a genuine purpose, and prevent smokers from throwing butts away and littering. The design is subtle, and integrated within a standard coffee cup so the smoker does not feel alienated or ‘on show’ whilst smoking. If we are all going to continue smoking we may as well make it more socially acceptable and cleaner. Obviously the market for this product is a niche one, but this directly follows the Chindogu design ethic of “not entirely usefull but also not entirely useless”.
HINDO
We found that the combination of a coffee and a cigarette is commonplace in a daily routine. Coffee is a known energy stimulant and the cigarette is supposedly a relaxant. The two already have correlations with eachother. They almost cancel eachother out. We have simply highlighted this relationship.