After the Herman Miller RED Orbiter project, we had this idea about a way to better the Ready To Assemble / IKEA idea. I mean, who really wants to spend the time building furniture if you don’t have to? How cool would it be if you could still flat pack that piece of furniture,but then its already assemble and all you need to do is “pose it” and then just lock it down? It would be not only flat packable but also transforming and poseable into different postures. We thought it would be really cool and started with a chair- the Arma Chair like “armature” – get it?! Clever, right?
DIY Plumbing in the house of the future.
GE Plastics built a conceptual house utilizing the thermoplastics and their latest thinking in terms of sustainability. GE was way ahead of the game back in the 90’s. They knew thermoplastics could be recycled and reused. Their plan was to have manufacturers use engineering grade thermoplastic in applications that required virgin materials like food and medical and then cascade down into automotive , then finally into building and construction where they could live for a longer period of time before obsolescence
One virgin application FUSE principal Tory worked on straight out of school was this blow molded plumbing panel dubbed the Aquaduct. The idea was this panel replaced all the measuring and cutting of copper. Quick fit connectors would be used so plumbing this sort of common sink installation job could be a snap!
This was a proactive project providing a solution to the problem of bike parking since most bike have lost kickstands. The problem is you lean your bike against paint damaging poles and then your bike suffers more than cosmetic damage. We got this into Wired magazine and sold into REI. The rubber manufacturer who was pressing BIKEBARK bought the product a few months after we premiered at Interbike.
Hybrids are the future.
Furilla had some moderate success in that it was optioned by toy maker and purveyor Kid Robot. FUSE principal, Tory Orzeck, has this ongoing chicken love and had this idea for a line of toys based on the offspring of 4 legged mammals getting together with chickens. Of course, single eyed creatures are also close to heart. This would result in these bipedal animals he dubbed BIPETS. He pitched the idea to KidRobot but got a big “Meh”.
A Multitool That Takes Selfies
With our experience in designing tools and knives for GERBER we end up dreaming of versions of these products all the time. Most of them are not so great, but some are so simple and good they need to be realized. The multi-tool tripod was one of them. We put our noses to the grind stone and created a series of sketches, a wooden model and a presentation that could show how this new product would be appealing to a demographic new to the multi-tool world. This demographic included women and urbanites more familiar with Instagram than deer hunting. We presented and GERBER said “ME WANT” or the equivalent for a big corporation. FUSE did not do the industrial design but we do own the IP.
We were awarded the utility patent in 2014.
WAGONS HO!
The G0G0 Transporter was an internal FUSE science project seeking to solve 2 problems: 1. What’s the most ecologically friendly way to take advantage of Portland’s 20 minute neighborhood concept? And 2., what happens to the expensive strollers that children certainly grow out of ?
Answer number 1 is the wagon. With a wagon you can haul almost anything while on foot. That is :a 50 lb bag of dogfood, groceries, kids, even a large potted plant.
The question then became “is a wagon enough?” Would other people share this wagon love? So we thought more, and I had colleagues that were about to become parents and his or her colleagues would pitch in and buy them a really cool expensive stroller. This got me thinking about what happens to these strollers beyond being used for a younger sibling. No one wants a pooped-on, barfed-on second hand stroller or at least there did not seem to be a robust used stroller market. So, what if the stroller could be built more like a roof rack system where you could evolve the product to transform it into some-thing or things more useful once the child gets out of infancy?
This turned into the GoGo Transporter System whereby adding or subtracting components, you can make a variety of wheeled products.
A New Way to Make Shoes
Prior to founding FUSE, Tory worked as an industrial designer within Nike’s Advanced Product Engineering Group or APE. On of the projects was to hunt for new opportunities within the Basketball category. Tory was in a small team that included former Ford Engineer, John Tawney. Tory and John had a dual agenda: Of couse we wanted to uncover a great opportunity for Nike Basketball, but they also wanted to reduce the labor it takes to build a pair of basketball shoes. The team presented a handfull of good ideas including this one that was titled as “Game Day”. The idea was to make a super lightweight shoe that would allow players to practice all week in their heavier training shoes and then jump higher and run faster on Game Day with these lighter kicks. We built the first prototype shoes out of molded EVA only. No heavy outsole, so the shoes were feather light.
The shoes were great but had a too short life span so John put a 4 way stretch fabric skin around the pre-molded form and compressed it. It was amazing. Super light and super strong. A true composite. At a review their boss asked Tory what the technology was called and Tory spouted “FOAMPOSITE”. The name stuck.
Beyond the advantages for better fit, visually Foamposite afforded designers the ability to play with form and really sculpt their products.
Soon after, the project headed to Nike’s Taiwan R and D facility for commercialization. The team there traded compression molding for pour-in- place molding using liquid polyurethane. John and Tory are both on the patent.
Air Morphous
The Footscape was designed around an anatomically correct foot form, not the normal Last. A Last is the form shoes are built on and they are part anatomy and part art. This project was initiated by FUSE principal, Toren Orzeck, while in Nike’s Advance Product Engineering group. Birkenstocks were coming back into the mainstream so building an anatomical correct foot form seemed like a good idea.
A neutral runner with laces running down the lateral side of the shoe. The design of the upper enhances comfort by moving the laces away from the superficial tendons and arteries that run on the peak of the dorsal side of the foot. Instead the Footscape puts them on the lateral side. This eliminates the point loads caused by the laces. Not only is the shoe more comfortable, but it is also is visually different telling the running consumer there is something going on.
This shoe has gained “classic” status and is still made in a variety of materials and colorways in Nike’s Sportswear line. Alot has been written about the Footscape and here’s one article:
https://www.sneakerfreaker.com/features/all-time-greatest/all-time-greatest-nike-air-footscapes/
Big thanks to Sneaker Freaker for some of the images in this post.
Sitting Is The New Smoking
This project was born within FUSE during the time when became widely recognized that standing was better than sitting. This period saw the advent of work surfaces that raised and lowered. These were expensive desks and the other thing is it’s hard to love a desk or at least want to spend big money on a desk. We know you can make a desk from an inexpensive door and sawhorses and most importantly you can put the desk up high to support standing. What is needed is a chair that can support this posture. Even better would be a chair that can go from traditional task height to stool height, maybe even allowing a worker to perch or lean against that chair. Easily done with locking a few casters!
Also, for the facilities managers who must purchase chairs for an organization the Crane chair supports all the work surface heights a facility may have.
We submitted this design to premiere office seating manufacturer Herman Miller (HM) and they picked up on it, flew our principal to HQ and launched a project to build a prototype. The project hit a snag when the HM design manager went on maternity leave but this led to our participation in multiple projects at HM.
THUMBELIEVABLE
When we built Orp, the super smal really cool bike horn/ bike light, we built it to be Remote Ready. Meaning: make a small wired switch that cold be placed under thumb that could go wherever the rider wanted. This simple product makes the Orp experience that much better as you never need to lift a hand to actuate either of Orp’s horn sounds. The REMORP uses a slick dual action switch. Press lightly on REMORP’s bulbous swelling to fire Orp’s loud sound and then press a little harder to fire Orp’s 96dB loud sound. The other cool thing about the REMORP is it provided an update to the Orp product line that worked for all Orps and Orp owners. It’s super neat and you should go to Orpland.com to get one… now!
