It’s Design Inspiration Friday and we are really inspired this week by Bernat Cuni from Barcelona, Spain (we think based on his website). I’m either inspired by a lot of espresso, or am just inspired to design some more. He did a 30 day challenge, we think just for himself because it doesn’t look like it’s for a client here. He designed a different espresso coffee cup per day. Additionally, he had it made in ceramic and printed them using Shapeways and iMateralise. They have a ceramic material so you can actually use these in your espresso machine to make your favorite drink.
Listen to the podcast here:
Design Inspiration – 30 Days of 3D Printed Espresso Cups
These designs are really cool and lot of fun, I really like them. They are different everyday and I love that, but I really like the concept which is what I really want to talk about today.
The concept of doing something like this, creating a different design every day, really challenges yourself. When you do something intense like that where you design the same thing again and again and again – Tom and I have done something like 650 office chairs in two and a half or three years – so when you get into that situation where you really have to work on something again and again and again, you get to the essence of what makes it great and what makes it perfect. Then you reach a point where you get to have fun with it, and that really shows here when you look at all these designs. Some of them are really whimsical and fun and some are really useful. It’s great to have a different challenge every day.
30 cups in 30 days makes for an impressive body of work.
It’s very impressive and it’s a good body of work. What it’s done here, is that he’s established that when it comes to designing things for 3D printing, he’s really got some great experience here and he’s quite a good designer. Whether you want really fine detail or if you’re looking for big broad, flowing concept, there’s designs that are all over the map. The thing that I like what he’s done on his website is that he says, “Hey this project can be open for collaboration – design one yourself.” He’s made his source files for the template for a basic espresso cup available in a couple of different formats, one’s a Rhino file, and one’s a 3DS Studio Max. He’s sharing what he’s learned and wanting others to have some fun with this and to experience it and 3D print for themselves, but reminding not to pour coffee in it if you’re using a RepRap style machine. That would be really ugly.
He does have on his website that he’s got a Shapeways shop where there is a link to buy it on Shapeways. I think that it’s really an interesting idea that he’s done this challenge, it’s like a way to promote your shop if you have one, but it also really puts in a great body of work. It forces you to work on that and do your project.
The one thing that’s a bit of a disappointment is that it’s clear he doesn’t have a client for this, he’s doing it for himself and to build his portfolio and to hone his skills, which that is wonderful. But, he wants to 3D print all the cups and prepare and exhibition, and he has a link where you can donate money to where you can help him accomplish that. Clearly no one is paying him to do this, and he’s not really making money doing this like we’ve heard from others: not many people are designing things for 3D printing as their day job.
That’s unfortunate, because he is obviously talented, so he should be getting paid and finding clients. That would be the really great thing if that starts to translate and starts to happen. I’m really perusing his Shapeways shop, and while I see somethings for sale, I actually don’t see the cups for sale even though they are being shown on the website. It makes me wonder if it ended up being totally not cost effective or totally safe to be 3D printed.
What I think would be a great application for this in the United States, I mean I know he is in Spain, but what if you teamed up with a company like Crate & Barrel who sells a lot of house wares for the kitchen? Maybe they sell something like an espresso maker, but what if you could do that and offer these designs in the store. Ask how many the customer wants, and order the number they want in any one of these wonderful designs and they will be 3D printed and shipped on demand to you.
We have a great mismatched collective set and it’s a bit eclectic at that, I think that would be really cool. Or even if you want all of them to match, you can print all of the same one if you’d like. It doesn’t really matter, it’s what the consumer wants, and that’s the whole point. The store doesn’t have to stock inventory on it, so I’d think it would be a win for everybody.
We hope that this project inspires you, just like it did for us. The idea of pushing your design to make you do fast iterations is really good practice in design. They do it in art, in drawing, it’s called gesture drawing and gets you down to the essence of what’s important. It gets you down to what’s the most interesting concept rather than getting caught up in structure and all that other stuff. After you get that structure set you just kind of iterate and really have some fun and really see what resonates. Then you share them with others and see what they think.
I think that’s why what he did was so great in providing that model of the espresso cup, you don’t have to reinvent that wheel. You can just go and play with the fun part of it, and get into that iteration part of it and just go with the creative flow. I was just looking at this one where the cup handle is actually inside the cup, that’s hilarious. I also like the one with the Eiffel tower sticking out of it, I think that one is pretty funny. There’s a lot of really cute ones, and this one looks like a golf ball which looks very sellable to me. A lot of these really bridge that gap from whimsical to sellable actually.
We hope this inspires your next weekend project. If you have any designs or designers you’d like for us to profile, please send us a message at info@hazzdesign or leave a comment below.
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