Including the Ostrich Pillow and Convertible Napping Desk from Studio NL, workers today have never had it so good when it comes to escaping their pesky coworkers for a few minutes or to gently whisk themselves away to a brief happy place before attempting another complicated CAD maneuver.
Now another kid on the block wants to bring that sense of escape to the office environment in the form of ‘The Nutshell’.
Designed by NYC’s School of Visual Arts student Eden Lew, The Nutshell aims to reduce stress and provide “a kind of respite from urban life.”
While The Nutshell will be called genius by some and ridiculous by others, perhaps what’s more fascinating than the end product itself is the brief from which it was created out of.
For the SVA-NYC course ‘Affirming Artifacts‘—a course that “rapidly moves students from products to services to platforms”—students were asked to “redesign the next thing they threw out” within 7 weeks.
Starting with his discarded sandwich wrapper, Lew took inspiration from the collapsible form and prototyped his way into the pod-formed Nutshell with the goal of creating an enterprise centered around reducing stress and increasing the quality of productive breaks in the office environment.
“The “Lunch sack” was prototyped and tested as an isolation pod for people to eat lunch inside. The next iteration of the sack simplified the pod, and by creating folds and stays, became a collapsible, and wearable, device.”
In coming full-circle with the course’s goal of designing ‘platforms’ rather than ‘products’, Lew launched not one but two variations of The Nutshell (the other being a darker ‘blackout’ environment called ‘Nutshell Blackout’), a plush headphone helmet called Headshell and finally, a concept for a service platform called Nutshell Labs (with an accompanying app, no less) that offers meditation workshops for companies and organizations interested in increased productivity and satisfaction from their employees.
Check out more of Lew’s impressive student portfolio over at EdenLew.com.
