We had the distinct pleasure to interview award winning designer about their original and creative design work. is an award-winning creative designer, that makes our world a better place with their original works.
("") answered Design Interview ("DI") questions about their award-winning work . Interview questions prepared by Frank Scott.
: It all happened meanwhile watching “Big Bang Theory” series, an episode where main characters let a mixture of water and corn flour dance and shake on a plastic film applied to a subwoofer. When facing surface deformation as a topic, I suddenly realized I should have applied non-Newtonian fluidodynamics principle with a more comprehensive approach.
: BlobHertz aims at stopping time in a song's music fragment, to allow every person to literaly puts his hands on the sound itself.
: This award will definetely spread out my project all over the world. My aim is at partnering with majors companies willing to add my fully customizable product into their catalog.
: It took several months to complete BlobHertz, due to experiments, tests, revisions to fluid mixture, 3D handcrafting, as well as prototypes with CNC cutter.
: BlobHertz is an academic project developed during the “Shape Theory” class held by Prof. Massimo Ciafrei at ISIA of Rome.
: I would be more than glad to sell this product concept to companies willing to launch BlobHertz as a luxury and interior design product.
: I grew up surrounded by music, people playing music around me, and I myself played different music instruments. Such a background seldom influences my design concept towards music topics. As for BlobHertz, I've always been excited by enabling a subwoofer to give tangibility to sounds, through its mechanic vibrations, as if a sound was a form of matter.
: Part of my work has been supervised by Prof. Massimo Ciafrei, as well as Prof. Lorena Luzzi for what concerns prototying, and Prof. Enzo Agnello for photo shooting.
: Main end customer is people fond of music, willing to personalize their houses's interior design with such a unique product.
: Actually BlobHertz born as a unique and standalone product, and I've always tried not to be influenced by any other project.
: BlobHertz acronym merges two neat concepts: “blob” refers to semi-liquid aspect of Non-Newtonian fluids, meanwhile “Hertz” represents frequency unit that characterizes every wave and in particular music sounds.
: At preliminary stage I used water and corn flour to mix up the fluid. Then I started to get in touch with the fluid behaviour when excited with different subwoofer frequencies. Captured phots were the input for rendering a 3d model realistic enough to real shapes of the liquid. After a brief post processing with Rhinoceros, a small chalk block has been molded with a CNC cutter.
: The main peculiarity of BlobHertz is to implement a very simple behaviour with very interesting and novel results. The fact that we can change material enables many different applications and outputs.
: Experimental activities have been jointly conducted with my friend Giuliano Casu, whom devoted to material supplying and space allocation for testing.
: BlobHertz exploits a physics principle: a Non-Newtonian fluid (aka amorphous fluid) is a liquid whose viscosity changes according to the strength of the applied shear stress. In this casa, shear stress is produced by subwoofer's vibrations. Using a CNC cutter allowed me to realize a protype which should have been almost impossible otherwise.
: I enrolled this internal competition to challenge myself with such a wide designer community and to increase my project's visibility.
: BlobHertz allowed me to learn how to realize and put in practice very theoretical principles through design.
