Project 1: Sheet Material

Sheet Material: Clear acrylic sheets
Target Market: Modern family
Object: Fruit Bowl
Name of product: Skyfruit Bowl
Cost of manufacturing: $ 28.95

The concept of the fruit bowl came from an ordinary “Powerade” bottle where it got handgrip for its user to handle the bottle, it was a very comfortable design, which I looked at more bottles with these kind of design. And I was looking at the design of the bottles and start converting it as the basic idea of the design, which I realize the shape of the handgrip is similar to a skeleton shape, and skeleton shape has become my direction of the design.

After knowing that is the direction of my design, I did further research on skeleton styles and cultures, and by researching, most of the skeleton style culture came from Ancient Egypt, and the first inspiration came from mummy, it gave me the idea of using strips to go around an objects. One of the Egyptian objects I researched is the fireplace bowl, it used strips of metal to hold the fire together, the negative spaces it created allows the lights from fire go through, increasing the brightness of it, which I would like the idea of using negative spaces to my design, as it can visually look lighter.

As I research more on Egyptian container styles, the torch designs really caught my attention, and I shifted my focus of research from Egyptian to different cultures of torch, and came up with the ancient Roman time, which I also found the torches are designed to have negative spaces to create greater brightness. So I design concept sketches based on the ideas from the researches, and designed a series of rings as the container base.

Now coming to joining the rings together, I did further researches on ancient containers, which I particularly focused on the Chinese cultures, because I got attracted by the design and the strong feeling the Chinese design has given me. Most of the designs have the elements of Chinese dragon, and I would like to add it to my design. And I realize the dragon might be too aggressive for a family, so I have smoothen my design and came out with the final product.