Munny and Smorkin Labbit

These are so cool! Munnyworld are soft, super smooth vinyl figures that each have a blank canvas all ready for scribbling, piercing, posing, dressing up, sculpting into forms straight from your imagination. Some amazing examples can be found here and here.

Smorkin Labbits on the other hand is a collectables for all ages. It was created by Frank Kozik and produced by Kidrobot. It has been created in many sizes and guises, with several popular mini series as well as larger figures. Special editions include a rabbit made of metal. Kidrobot created many other vinyl figures to promote the nation from stopping smoking. Success occurred because of the product's quirkiness, originality and collectables idea.

Magma

The first time I stepped into this tiny wonder of a shop I remember thinking 'where do I look first?! There's so many amazing little gadgets and cute things in this place!' I scanned the shop at least 3 times to make sure I hadn't missed anything that had been tucked away behind something else. It was one of those shops where you instantly know you want to buy everything, or even the whole shop. Like Muji or Paperchase. Even the layout and furniture for the shop was specially designed to make browsing easier for the customers.

So what exactly is Magma? Well, it is a shop which sells clever, tasteful, original, not kitsch, reasonably priced products. Just nice simples ideas. It is a product shop, or design shop, or concept shop, or strange multi-purpose shop. Stock ranges from stationery and cards to home and fashion accessories, jewellery, games and toy, eco-products and all manner of design objects- basically, anything that bears the stamp of creativity and intelligence upon it. Products with creative ideas, that make simple things seem new again. Fresh spontaneous, at times surreal, or disarmingly simple, these are products conceived (rather than preconceived) by artists, designers and all kinds of creative people.

"We think that there is something extremely rich and dynamic in the notion that people. all kinds of people, from all kinds of backgrounds, are walking through our doors on a daily basis, looking for something, not always sure as to what they are looking for."

I instantly knew that I wanted to design something that would be sold in Magma. A product so innovative that it would attract the type of people who would go to Magma to buy it.

I think most of the people who go to Magma are design-driven people approximately age 14-35:

-either teenager who find the product cute.

-students looking for inspiration.

-designers looking for inspiration.

Initial Research

So, I've decided to go for my most crazy idea; inventing a product. I don't know whether this realistically is a good idea given the timeframe but I thought hey, it's my last project of the year, might as well be ambitious and if I find it really isn't working out I can always change my idea. But obviously because we had to hand in our learning agreement with our proposed idea in about 2 weeks time, I needed to figure out whether this route would b a viable one.

I began by writing down and sketching out the random ideas that immediately popped into my head. My mindset was to think of something that would be useful on a day to day basis, something that you have to do every day and think 'wouldn't it be so much easier if this product was like this!' of course I also recorded ideas that were just down right cool (ie. furry headphones- headphone muffs).

At this point I was looking at websites which sold really innovative designs of products to look for inspiration, some examples:

Magma

DesignTown

SmashingMagazine

W2Products

NotOnTheHighStreet

From this I came across this image and I thought, how cool.

"What appears to be two or three cups nestled within each other is actually only one cup. Stacked Cups are available in white and black, and come in a set of triple, double, and single size cups."

I started to think how cool it would be if cups had a magnetic mechanism which allowed one to stack numerous cups without worrying about them toppling over and falling to the floor. This would be especially useful after a huge dinner party when you had to clear the table; you would be manically juggling dirty plates and cutlery, how nice would it be if you didn't have to worry about the thought of breaking one of your very nicely design mug or cup?

Ok, so maybe I'm just going over my head with this awesome idea. After coming up with it I did then see this product which put me down slightly:

On some level I wished I didn't see these designs because they were a lot cooler than my idea, it almost blew my mind. Especially when all I could come up with to explain my idea was this:

I'm not even sure I myself understood how my idea worked after looking at this illustration. Oh the dream of wanting to design a product to be sold at Magma (the shop I worship), it all seemed to be slipping away from my fingertips. I even emailed the Magma team asking them about the people who visit their shop to get a feel for the target audience I'm dealing with:

Unfortunately they didn't reply to my email, sadface.