The Swiss technology company Punkt. invites three leading schools (Design Academy Eindhoven, ECAL, Royal College of Art) to design an e-bike, which expresses the brand’s philosophy of “taming technology”. ECAL Master Product Design students present e-CAL 1020, a plug-and-play electrical engine, which transforms your personal bicycle into an e-bike.
The Punkt. Urban Mobility Project is an educational collaboration between Punkt. and three leading design schools: ECAL (Lausanne), RCA (London) and Design Academy (Eindhoven). The brief: create a personal transportation product that innovates in both style and function, specific to the needs and opportunities found in the cities where the students are studying.
Travelling in Lausanne means short distances but steep hills. This retro-fit motor harvests downhill braking energy that would otherwise be wasted as heat, and stores it ready to send back to the wheel the moment it is needed.
Under the guidance of Thilo Alex Brunner, Head of the programme, ECAL Master Product Design students created e-CAL 1020, a plug and play electrical engine which transforms your bicycle into an e-bike. It is solely recharged by human effort using a generator similar to KERS (Kinetic Energy Recovery System), a technology used in Formula 1.
MA PRODUCT DESIGN
by Adam Friedrich
Airy is a research project that explores the use of air as a primary resource. It uses inflatable structures to protect valuable devices during travel. The design employs contemporary materials and pays particular attention to detail to offer relevant, everyday solutions for safeguarding increasingly fragile and valuable electronic devices.
MA PRODUCT DESIGN
by Alicia Stricker
Folly approaches the craft of beaded embroidery from a product design perspective. It explores the value of tactility above the visual aspects that the technique is traditionally valued for. Consequently, the project manifested as something that is experienced by the body - a sofa. Scaling up the traditionally small beads and applying principles of beaded embroidery in the development of a textile sofa cover allowed for the sofa to transcend its classic typology, creating a three-dimensional surface with a biological sculptural presence - an object that breaks the mould of what we expect of something as familiar as a sofa and begs to be experienced through touch.
MA PRODUCT DESIGN
by Brice Tempier
Due to limited housing capacity in urban areas, more people are living in small dwellings. At the same time, renting has become a common form of housing in many countries, including among adults. These conditions, sometimes marked by instability, frequent moves, and a feeling of not truly belonging to the place where one lives, led the designer to reflect on our relationship with domestic space, its temporary nature, and the difficulty of making it one’s own. This project takes the form of a small, mobile structure, the size of a bed, conceived as a personal spatial frame within a room. Péninsule is a dense and flexible living space, a micro-architecture open to appropriation.
MA PRODUCT DESIGN
by Carl Johan Jacobsen
In the U.K new court ruling threatens trans-people while the US government is doing a full assault on trans and female bodies. Hardwear is a collection of wearable objects offering a sense of protection in urban environments, as a response to a growing tendency of hostility towards the body. Hard surfaces become flexible armor, protective shields transform into high heels. Whether to preserve personal space on public transport or to create cognitive distance Hardwear aims to create a sense of security. By using hard materials, the feeling of being safe inside a car is transformed to the outside resulting in a line of wearable objects made for for everyday resistance. Drawn on protection typologies from sportswear, Hardwear is made of 100% recycled plastic with 3D printed elements.
MA PRODUCT DESIGN
by Cedric Zimmerman
DUCTUS is investigating how tangential fans can be reinterpreted in combination with spiral ducts, which are normally used in industrial HVAC systems, in a modular, energy-efficient ceiling ventilation system. The galvanised sheet metal is perforated locally using a specially developed laser manufacturing process and then processed into spiral ducts in an industrial standard procedure with almost no material loss. These ducts serve both as air ducts and as a supporting structure for the fan unit. The system, manufactured in collaboration with the Lausanne-based company Air Ventil, generates a wide, quiet air flow while also adding architectural accents.