artur becker
Inova Diamond

2015

Product design, geometric flatware designed to not tumble over. This was my first professional industrial design project, during an internship. I spent around four weeks working on it from loose concept to render-ready CAD model. It went on to be manufactured by the company that comissioned the project.

Futuristc,
floating
flatware

Inova Diamond is a flatware series designed for a large brazilian manufacturer. The Inova line bestows the feature of preventing the blade of the silverware from touching the surface beneath it. The Diamond models, thus, keep such feature while being reshaped with a completely different design language. The main goal of this project was to aid the manufacturer to position a simple, low cost polymer flatware as innovative and premium.

Designing the diamond

The geometric lines culminate in the diamond-shaped back of the grip. The reasoning behind choosing a mostly geometric, polygonal design language was to deviate from the previous Inova line, and most similar products for that matter, that employ curved, organic forms on the grips. It has a similar mass to its predecessor, not increasing manufacturing costs.

Organic doesn't necessarily mean "ergonomic", and vice-versa During the ideation phase, the main theoretical touchstone was brazilian ergonomist Itiro Iida's chapter on grips and small utensils, where it's pointed out that while geometrically shaped grips might not seem anatomical at first, they are well suited for longer handling periods with low force exertion, because they allow for multiple hand positions (more anatomically resembling grips, however, are better suited for shorter, higher force usage) [1]. A live example of such concept is the chair _ONE, by Konstantin Grcic.

The dimensions of faces (a) and (b) - the only in contact with the surface below - were finetuned through several rapid prototyping iterations, to find the optimal trade-off between stability and handling comfort.

Rapid prototyping

Prototyping was crucial to find a pleasant grip that still wouldn't tumble over The sequential iterations of the grip design (from top to bottom) were 3D printed in two halves, and had blades provided by the manufacturer attached to one end. The last one, in black, is an injection test. The prototypes were then brought to lunch at restaurants, to be tested.

Production

The manufactured product was showcased on the House and Gift Fair 2015, in São Paulo

Role and conclusion

Inova Diamond was the project at which I had the most independence as an intern at Grupo Criativo. It was the long of the design projects I took part during my internship (which ranged from food trays to etnography research of artisanal bakers). I believe it was so especially due to the incentive from coworkers, among them my supervisor, Gabriel Altenhofen, who had designed the previous Inova model, to see how far the design could be pushed and finetuned.

Eventhough the ideation and modelling were done mostly solo, input from the team was always present and taken into consideration (such as turning the diamond up, when originally it was upside down). To hand-off for manufacturing, Gabriel was responsible for finetuning the fillets on the six-edge vertex on the bottom side of the grip, that demanded special attention.

References

[1] ITIRO IIDA, Ergonomia: Projeto e Produção, 2005