Kelvin (Sung-Ching) Chang just completed his MA in Product Design at the Birmingham Institute of Art & Design, and he chose to address the "boredom and pressure" of your average white-collar desk jockey with "REconstruction," a "concrete interactive accessory for office."REconstruction can transform the workers' emotion to more pleasant with some feedbacks from products. There are four products stapler, calculator, tape dispenser and pen holder which are designed like building in a kit. Therefore, workers could organise whole products of kit what they prefer on the base like people build their own city. Concrete is a perfect material to present architecture and urban feeling. In this project, it is contrast thinking between concrete products and users. They will feel cold and unexciting at first sight with concrete accessories and then after use, they would understand how interesting inside the products with interaction.
In other words, the uninviting material belies a different interactive twist behind each item. It's something like a quasi-brutalist subversion of Michael Roopenian's "Engrain" keyboard... or, alternately, a playful counterpart to Shmuel Linski's concrete speakers.
Where Philip de Los Reyes' "Drafting Tools" are still in the glossy render phase, the office supplies of "REconstruction" practically beg to be used. Details after the jump...
The stapler ("Making Your Mark") allows a user to select an emoticon-like face that is impressed on the paper along with the staple. This illustrates that whether the user is "sad or happy at that time," his or her temperament will disappear over time, "like [the] impression face mark."
The calculator ("Music You Created") records the order that the user has pressed the keys while crunching numbers. "After that, user just needs to push [the] play button and [the] calculator will play a song" based on his or her input.
The tape dispenser ("Reminding You to Take a Break") features a wheel that has "six symbols of break reminders on it," which spins like a wheel of fortune as the user pulls a strip of tape. An arrow indicates the break-time activity at hand.
The pen holder ("Create Surprise") is home to a small eraser-creature. Placing a pen in one of the slots will make the eraser jump out at random, Russian roulette-style.
Chang has more details about the forthcoming postgraduate exhibition at the BIAD on his site.
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