Who will we be? What will we need? How will we live? What will design offer?
“Between 2015 and 2050, the proportion of the world’s population over 60 years will nearly double from 12% to 22%.” — World Health Organization
Led by Tutor Sam Hecht and completed by first-year students of ECAL Master Product Design with input from the senior-lab, this project presents a range of objects designed for Horgenglarus that cater to the growing population of elderly users. The aim of these objects is to challenge the stereotypes associated with this frequently medicalised category, while leveraging Horgenglarus’s extensive expertise in wood-based craftsmanship.
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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
In a context where domestic space is being reduced and reconfigured, living sometimes becomes a temporary act. Places are passed through rather than settled in, and the question is no longer so much one of layout as of presence. Inspired by the archetype of the mezzanine, Péninsule takes the form of a mobile structure the size of a bed. Set within a room, it acts as a habitable frame, delimited without being enclosed, introducing domestic depth where there was previously only an available surface. Conceived as a place of rest, retreat, and appropriation, it combines a bed, a daybed, and a folding desk, as well as mobile elements such as shelves, hooks, and curtains, modulating light, movement, and presence. Without offering formal modularity, the object provides an open support for everyday uses and movements. Péninsule is thus defined less by what it can be transformed into than by the way it is used.
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.