A Wooden Camera might make you think of those educational baby gadgets but this one is a bit more advanced. Olympus just announced their three dimensional compression molding process for wooden materials at the Photokina show.
Accordingly, the processed wooden material has the feel and grain pattern of natural wood and proves to be harder than engineering plastics such as ABS and polycarbonate resins. If this process works out well we might have ourselves an interesting alternative for electronic products casings - nothing wrong with a bit of variation in a product world that is dominated by hard plastics.
via YouTube: Photokina 2006: Olympus wood casing
Aart van Bezooijen is a Dutch optimist and motivator for materials in design. He lives and works in Hamburg where he founded Material Stories (2005) to inspire and enable the best use of materials to make design more competitive, creative and sustainable.
2011 he explored sustainable solutions from around the world during the "It's Not Easy Being Green" project with graphic designer Paula Raché. He co-organized the Materials Café exhibitions at the Hannover Messe in Germany, the world's leading trade fair for industrial technology. Since 2012, he works as Professor for Material and Technology Transfer at the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle growing a new materials library.
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Wooden Camera
This has a potential to be quite the disruptive change, think of how many items we use that waste plastic, like water bottles, that are never recycled and never biodegrade.
Wood, biodegrades. It is natural. This has some real potential, and for a camera manufacturer, Olympus (if this innovation is for real) has the potential of leaving the camera market and dominating manufacturing processes for all products!
Rishi
http://gumpdesign.blogspot.com
Wood you believe that?
Wood are the chances?