naoiymdesign
Furniture
2024
Essentially, users don’t need the shelves themselves, but something to put things on. People want to listen to music, not the player itself. So, the acrylic shelf unit interacts with the user through its functionality and unique appearance, attracting their interest and presenting the value of the product itself.
In order to stimulate the user’s curiosity, the potential of the material beyond our expectations was drowned out and it was used effectively in the product. Kerfing is a laser cutting technique to make hard material flexible often used for woodworking. It was discovered that it also works for acrylics and that it makes acrylics stronger. When an object of a certain weight was put on an acrylic sheet, it immediately snapped, but the one with kerfing became more flexible and did not snap even if the acrylic sheet was bent into a curve beyond a certain angle. After this discovery, a variety of kerfing patterns was tested on acrylic with different thicknesses more than 20 times.
The strange look of the acrylic shelving unit makes the user consider what to put or display on it. This consideration would turn into a negotiation between the user and the product and users are going to be much more conscious of the product. Even though the instruction manual says the maximum load capacity, users would still be careful about what to put on the swinging shelf tops because both the material and the shelf don’t behave in the way acrylic and regular shelves behave as expected.
20mm acrylic sheets
5mm acrylic sheets
20mm diameter mild steel tubes
Maximum load capacity: 7kg per shelf
Assembling/Flat packaging