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Our friend Alberto Villarreal sent us details about their recent collaboration with Guadalajara's EOS México, a firm founded by brothers Mauricio and Sebastian Lara. Like many a clever design, "EOSkate" started with a mistake: the latter firm was preparing a book to commemorate a decade of their work when a printing error yield "several hundreds of (somehow) useless books."
Instead of merely recycling the flawed volumes, "the creative minds of the Lara brothers turned this 'error' into a design opportunity."They saw this as an excuse to recycle the books into art and design pieces and invited 11 designers/firms to create objects using the books as a raw material, and gave 6 to 10 books to each invitee.
Alberto Villarreal and his team at AGENT (the Mexico City-based firm he leads), started brainstorming about what to do with the books they got. [They] roughed out several ideas and ended up designing a skateboard made out of paper (from the book pages) mixed with resin.
Villarreal tells us,I saw this as an opportunity to experiment with materials—the book itself has so much color in the pages and this encouraged us to play up the graphic content, but when we started experimenting with the paper new things came up.
We didn't follow a logical A to B process. We didn't know what was going to be the outcome, but while experimenting and analyzing the properties of the paper, new ideas started to come out.
Initially we started by cutting and folding paper, creating gradients and patterns with the graphic content, [resulting in] tons of woven patterns.
[We] wanted to "freeze" the patterns, so we sunk the paper patterns in resin. Then voilá! The skateboard idea came out and we literally took a journey into it.
We made a mold from a wooden skateboard, with specific patterns to fit in the dimensions and size, following the curvatures of the skateboard mold. Then we made several prototypes until we achieved the right color gradient as well as the right amount of paper layers and resin.
Villarreal explains the process, highlighting mockups and samples of the prototypes that served as steps on the way to the final paper skateboard:
Creative Direction: Alberto Villarreal Design team: Isaac Smeke, Tom Pelzer, Felipe Castañeda Prototyping: AGENT & Manolo SerranÃa Photos: Isaac Smeke, EOS Mexico
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From Book to Board: "EOSkate" Paper Skateboard by AGENT
Sam
We did use clear sandpaper tape in some of the prototypes. That's the way to achieve grip and still show the graphics underneath, but some of the pictures don't show it.
We've been testing the prototypes and so far so good, except that in some impacts the resin+paper mix is more brittle than wood, of course.
Still some more testing (skating) to do.
Anyone?
-Alberto
Since it is mentionned in the video that the result is a bit heavier, it would be nice to see this process applied to longboards, perticularly racing boards, where weight is not as important as a traditionnal skateboard.
Cool project !
Except for this little doubt of mine, I still think you guys had a great idea! the concept is really good.
Bye!
PS: I'm sorry for my English, I guess I made some grammar mistakes, but I hope you understand, that's what really matters, isn't it? haha.