KKDU Plum Bike Trailer and Rack

Melbourne startup KKDU Plum has just unveiled their brand new website, in which their very clever Bike Trailer and Rack are showcased.

Charlwood Design recently had the pleasure of working with startup KKDU Plum to develop what we think is the best bike trailer on the market today. This is a great example of someone identifying a solution and doing something about it- and a great inspiration for someone planning to dive into the scary world of the startups!

Founders Astrid and Haydn Sharratt came knocking on our big blue door about 2 years ago with a dream of developing a combined bike trailer and shopping trolley. The initial brief was a bike trailer that could carry all your "stuff"- and easily detach to be taken into the supermarket/shopping centre/market/beach/park/etc. Easy, no?

A page from the first concept presentation.

Well, as with most product development stories, there were plenty of hurdles. First issue was nailing the aesthetics. The "pram" aesthetic was briefly explored- and just as quickly abandoned. Plastic wheels were dismissed very early on. And rolled tubular steel was favoured over aluminum extrusion, to provide a more traditional look. It was very quickly established that this trailer needed to look perfectly at home being pulled behind something like a Pashley, or wandering the aisles of Prahran Market.

An early prototype. As with many projects, we find Water-Knifed Plywood to be a great method of creating mock-ups.

Ergonomically speaking, the trailer needed to not only suit all bike sizes; but also all users. The solution was an incredibly easy to adjust handle that also doubles as the hitching location. The handle rotates up and down to suit a variety of heights of both users and bikes, and connects to a very neat little hitch hanging off the custom bike rack. This also allows for a push or pull configuration when removed from the bike. The rack itself has a multitude of length and height adjust-ability to fit onto most adult bikes, and is an amazing product in its own right.

Head over to the new website to have a look at all the other features. From there you can register your interest and keep up to date with release dates and more.

kkduplum.bike

Premiers Design Awards 2014

Good Design Australia and the Victorian Government recently announced the 38 finalists across six categories for the 2014 Premier’s Design Awards.

Charlwood Design is pleased that two of our designs have been selected as finalists within the Product category, with the Elevare Shower Step and Classical Fingers being nominated. There are only nine finalists in total, which made the announcement even sweeter! We look forward to the Awards Presentation Ceremony in September this year.

The news of the Premiers Design Award finalists follows on from our recent award at the Good Design Australia Awards held in Sydney earlier this year, in which Classical Fingers took home a Good Design Award. Additionally, Classical Fingers was also selected as part of the prestigious Powerhouse Museum selection, where it will be added to the permanent collection of Australian Industrial Design and exhibited in "Success and Innovation" gallery for one year.

We want to congratulate and thank our clients Elevare and Cloudbreak Music for allowing us the opportunity to develop these amazing products. Be sure to check out both the Elevare Shower Step and Classical Fingers websites for more information on each product.

Plastics Innovation Award 2013

The Charlwood Design team was delighted to win the BASF Plastics Innovation Award for the Mittstrom Urine Test Device on 18th September, at the PlastixANZ Plastics Industry Awards 2013.

Mittstrom is an innovative device for the hygienic collection of midstream urine for analysis. It is a low-cost, fully biodegradable corn-starch saddle into which a standard pathology collection jar is placed. Initial urine is diverted from the jar by a thin membrane which dissolves over 3 seconds allowing the midstream urine to flow into the collection vial. Once finished the user simply removes the filled jar and flushes the device down the toilet. This innovative product has been granted patents internationally. Charlwood Design created the simple solution to the problem, using the unique (Plantic) material and tested it for performance.

Paul Charlwood said "this really shows how design can create a new business opportunity through innovative application of materials and insight to the end user’s needs."

Ideas that could change your life - Charlwood Design's concept for a better future for Melbourne

Charlwood Design's Director, Paul Charlwood was recently featured in an article in The Age Melbourne Magazine showcasing innovative design research for the future of Melbourne.

What is it? Commonwealth Avenue - a conceptual design for Kings Way that would create a shared transport route for trams, cars, bikes and pedestrians and incorporate water and solar energy collection.
Who's doing it? Charlwood Design - who created the 2006 Melbourne Commonwealth Games Queen's baton - came up with the concept as an internal exercise to try and add beauty and function to a major traffic feeder into the city. The team wanted to bring different modes of transport - bicycles, cars, trams and pedestrians - together in a sustainable way. "It's a reflection of Dandenong Road and the avenue down there," says Paul Charlwood. "I always loved the old overhead tram poles that are Victorian structures in their own right." The joint carriageway would be better than Copenhagen-style lanes "that are an afterthought", he says. "Kings Way is crying out for something to be done and this could be a great example - making a feature out of the overhead tram poles so they are more elegant and then the water and solar collection are the sustainability side. They could feed down to street plantings or parks nearby."
Could it work? With government backing, Charlwood believes construction could start within a couple of years. "It's already starting to look more logical and contemporary. As we start to swing out of the GFC," he says, "sustainability issues will come back onto the agenda."

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/lifestyle/ideas-that-could-change-your-life-20130312-2fxo6.html#ixzz2ODktjs7w

More on the project: http://charlwood.com.au/sustainability/commonwealth-ave-concept.aspx

2012 Melbourne Design Award Winners

The Charlwood Design team was thrilled to win a 2012 Melbourne Design award for the best product design - business and technology category for our design of the Sydney Opera House's new stage management desks.

The stage management desk controls everything to do with the performance at the venues in the Sydney Opera House in both the front and back of house. The six existing units were well past their use by date and needed to be replaced with a state of the art design to serve for the next 20 years.

This is the second Melbourne design award Charlwood has won, having previously been awarded best consumer product for the catch-all broom design for Oates in 2010.

Insight from Richard Seymour - Seymour Powell

Some of Charlwood Design's team had the pleasure of meeting Richard Seymour, founder of leading UK industrial design consultancy Seymour Powell a few years ago when he spoke at the AGIdeas conference.

He was recently asked on what he thinks the big game-changers will be in industrial design in the next two to five years. His thoughts were really insightful:

“There’s a storm coming. The design world as we know it is separating into the Polymaths and the Guilds. The Polymaths are the broad-bandwidth thinkers who can see across cultural and technical boundaries to find meaning in new future combinations…and the Guilds, the specialist capabilities that can facilitate those ideas once they have been envisioned.
The designer as we know it is already an endangered species. What is a service and what is a product in the 21st Century is up for grabs. Where does the Product end and the Metaproduct begin? How many ‘services’ as we know them today are going to have to migrate to ‘this side of the glass’ and articulate themselves through physical metaphors of their virtual self? Is NEST an object, a service or part of a synthetic-aperture radar gathering big data for the highest bidder? I guess it depends who you are and what your agenda is.
The next five years may witness the most important shift in consumption patterns we’ve seen for centuries. Buckle-up Dorothy, you’re going to have to be on your toes. And if you’re going to continue to call yourself a designer, better work out what that means….”

This is Your Life Cycle

 

Exploring life cycle assessment and eco-design for young design students.

Charlwood Design was the first Australian design studio to join the Designers Accord which rallies for the integration of sustainable design principles in all practice and production. Paul Charlwood drew on this model when he established the Design for the Environment Partnership between the Design Institute of Australia , Sustainability Victoria and RMIT’s Centre for Design. This partnership led to the software tool Greenfly to assist designers with eco-design strategies and the environmental impact of their products.

AGIdeas - Advantage Business Breakfast Insights

Charlwood Design enjoyed some valuable insights from this year's AGIdeas advantage business breakfast.

The focus at this year's event was creating value for your business through design innovation. The work and thoughts of the speakers was incredibly inspiring and highlighted the breadth in which design can have a positive impact on a company's success. We thought we would share a brief summary of some our favorite insights from the event from an industrial designer's perspective.

Göran Roos - a global expert in intellectual capital science, manufacturing innovation and strategy MC'd the event. He set the overarching theme across all the speakers - that design can be a positive contributor to all aspects of a business's operations and success, as long as companies don’t simplify design as styling or art. He stated that the objective of design is to generate and achieve behavioral change; change that is desirable for the user, beneficial to the supplier and positively impacts other stakeholders.

Roos' thoughts on Apple's design objective were interesting, highlighting that they didn't necessarily  invent new technology but rather redesign the delivery of their product so everyone in the "eco system" benefits. Clearly Apple benefits but also the app developer and the telco carrying the data.

Mauro Porcini, Chief Design Officer, 3M echoed this view. He spoke of a new social scenario where consumers today are much more difficult to categorise and understand and this has had resulted in companies, like 3M, needing to fulfill the an emotional desire in the user as well as complete a functional task.
He spoke about the emotional flow in the life of the product that spans 3 phases. The initial visceral relation when viewing the product before purchase, the interactive relationship withe product and the expressive relation - the act of sharing the product and your impression of it with others.

One of our favourite quotes of the day came from Mauro when he said "listen to your customers, but don't believe them..." A great expression of the value of design research, in particular the value of observing how the user interacts with your product and it's features, which is often different to how they would describe it in a design brief. Our team is a firm believer in quality research and often employ ethnographic and participatory design research techniques as part of our design process.

Finally Mauro's definition of "design strategy" was interesting, because it was different to how many conventional companies define it. Design strategy is a business strategy that leverages design. It is not just a consistent look for the brand, but rather a valuable business asset. To achieve this design needs to be ingrained into the culture of the company. Design led companies learn, they adjust but they don’t compromise.

AGideas Business Breakfast Snapshot - Image courtesy of http://www.typ3d.com/

AGIdeas inspiration - Johannes Kuhnen

Charlwood Design's latest team member Dean Benstead was particularly inspired by Australian Silversmith Johannes Kuhnen at this year's AGIdeas event.

Johannes Kuhnen from the Australian National University, Gold and Silver smithing department, spoke passionately about the importance and benefits of materiality in design. Developing jewellery, vessels and spectacles like art forms.  He spoke about his short attention span with one design (laughing), he will only work on a design if there is a great opportunity to improve or develop the function and form.

He uses inspiring traditional techniques for production of such quality and timeless designed pieces. Bending, twisting, cutting and forming, Kuhnen’s design and making process just makes you want to get some metal and head to the workshop.  His constantly evolving spectacle designs show an amazing amount of problem solving, material use and technique. They are like art forms. He spoke about the love of fabricating short runs and not making thousands of his designs. A passion for the bespoke and personality within a product for an individual user.

Manipulating different metals, with chemical treatment, bending techniques and fine fixings are the key to his highly aesthetic pieces. His use of anodised aluminium allows such vibrant colours and designs. This vibrancy in his work is what stands out and highlights the traditional metal smith techniques and materials. His minimalist approach to the spectacle design is seen with arms that are created with one bend, yet highly detailed fine joints and hinges just look amazing. We love the detail (tiny bolts, tension wires, o-rings, amazing hinges and fine lens holders) in the glasses and would love a custom designed pair.

 

Spectacle Design - Johannes Kuhnen

Inspiring Industrial Design - CNC milled, honeycomb surfboard

We loved reading about this honeycomb surfboard project by Kiwi Mike Grobelny. He also has an interesting philosophy behind the project, redesigning the production process and removing the toxic materials associated with traditional surfboard manufacture. Also a great timelapse video of the process.

Via Core77
http://cargocollective.com/mikegrobelny/

Digitial Fabrication Inspiration - Tom Dixon at the Milan Furniture Fair

In collaboration with machine fabricators Trumpf, Tom Dixon did a live demonstration of the Stamp chair and Stamp lamp being fabricated on-site at this years Milan Furniture Fair. The studio has been really inspired by this process which allows product design's to be created and sold directly to the end user off the machine without the need for tooling.

Charlwood Design - in-house rapid prototyping

Charlwood Design's in-house FDM rapid prototyper in action. We offer this as a service for all our clients and it has become a valuable part of our design process.

Charlwood Design takes out International Design Award

Charlwood Design has been awarded in the International Design awards competition for their design of the 321 Water - Personal Water Filtration Bottle. Based in the USA, the International Design Awards (IDA) exist to celebrate the world’s most visionary designers, discover new and emerging talent, and promote the appreciation of design worldwide. Charlwood Design was awarded alongside international design teams from 65 nations including Samsung, Fuse Project and RKS.

“We are thrilled to see our design gaining international praise and I am very proud of all the work our studio put into the product, from invention of the plunger filter through to the elegant design in production.” Charlwood Design CEO, Paul Charlwood says.

Charlwood design in Hollywood

The 321 water bottle - invented and designed by Charlwood Design has been recently spotted in the hunger games. Its the water bottle of choice for characters in the main control room and was undoubtedly chosen because the futuristic design. It was a real thrill to see our work featured in such a massive Hollywood blockbuster and a testament to the quality of the design.

Charlwood Designer wins Graduate of the year

 

Dean Benstead, the most recent addition to the Charlwood Design team has recently been awarded the 2011 Graduate of the year award by the Design Institute of Australia. Dean's incredible talents were clearly evident to us when we snapped him as a graduate designer with us at the start of the year.

We will be featuring his major university project - the 02 Persuit air powered motorcycle in the future.

Well done Dean!