Rift
A handheld vacuum cleaner designed with a memetic approach
After years of studying Industrial Design Engineering and applying a similar method of design on many projects, the elective course Memetic Product Design offered a different approach: to design an ordinary home appliance for a very specific target group, using the ‘memes’ associated with this target group.
I designed a dustbuster for a target group dubbed ‘farmcore’ in the book Exactitudes by Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek. Through a series of steps a shape of vacuum cleaner was distilled, after which a visually representative prototype was constructed.
Starting with the Farmcore exactitude, interviews were held with people that fit the target group or know others who do. From the information of the original image and this contextual information, three collages were made: a cultural collage, about the people and their lifestyle; An emotive collage, about the character and ‘feel’ of this target group; And a memetic collage, about the ‘memes’ (forms, colors, materials) associated with the target group.
Following the target group study, the memes associated with this group were to be abstracted into a rotationally symmetrical shape. After a thorough exploration of the effect of using different profiles, one shape was perfected, partially based on the headstock of a guitar with some details also derived from the collages. This shape was milled from foam and 3d-printed in a much smaller scale for the next step in the memetic design process.
Using these physical parts ‘accidental assemblies’ were made using random household items and parts, until something interesting emerged that looked like a vacuum cleaner and would fit this target group. Once satisfied, the assembly was streamlined in a conventional concept design. A 3d model was made of the best looking concept, which was 3d-printed, assembled, sanded, polished and painted to yield a visual prototype as close as possible to the intended mass-produced product.
