Client & Team
- Spark Design & Innovation is a Dutch industrial design agency based in Rotterdam that helps companies create innovative products and solutions through their expertise in design thinking, engineering, and product development.
- Worked together with the innovation team.
- 2014
Project
The Center for Giftedness & Creativity, part of the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences, was established in 2010. The aim was to aid inventors and creatives to patent their ideas. After two years, the KFAS decided they wanted to do something with all those patents and asked a group of Dutch design agencies to bring some of them to life. Together with SpinnovBV, I was asked by the Dutch design agency Spark Design & Innovation to make a working prototype of a foldable road sign patent. The road sign should be appropriate for emergency services and two versions needed to be made: a stop sign and an arrow sign.
Scope
We were responsible for the electronics and the textile part of the road sign and Spark Design & Innovation for the casing.
Challenges
- Incorporated electronics and textiles using industrial equipment to enable large-scale production.
- The entire product should fit in a small box that can be stored in a car’s trunk.
- Should match the description in the existing patent.
- The arrow sign should be able to point either left or right.
Impact
The protype
- Invented a way to combine an industrial embroidery machine with conductive yarns to incorporate small PCBs
- Succesfull presentation of the prototype in Kuweit
- The end result is a roadsign that is very compact when folded and stored in its casing
- Can be unfolded and installed very quickly
- Has optimal visibility 24/7
- This was the most commercially viable option of the concepts made for this project.
Role
My focus was on the integration of the electronics and the textile
- Sourcing materials.
- Design of the textile part of the prototype.
- Getting access to an industrial embroidery machine and conduct tests.
- Write the patterns for the embroidery machine.
- Integration of the PCB’s with the conductive yarn.
- Construction of the textile part of the prototype.
