We had the distinct pleasure to interview award winning designer Roberto Maurizio Paura about their original and creative Coating design work. Roberto Maurizio Paura is an award-winning industrial designer, that makes our world a better place with their original coating works.
Roberto Maurizio Paura ("RMP") answered Design Interview ("DI") questions about their award-winning work BlobHertz Coating. Interview questions prepared by Frank Scott.
RMP : 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.
RMP : BlobHertz aims at stopping time in a song's music fragment, to allow every person to literaly puts his hands on the sound itself.
RMP : 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.
RMP : It took several months to complete BlobHertz, due to experiments, tests, revisions to fluid mixture, 3D handcrafting, as well as prototypes with CNC cutter.
RMP : BlobHertz is an academic project developed during the “Shape Theory” class held by Prof. Massimo Ciafrei at ISIA of Rome.
RMP : I would be more than glad to sell this product concept to companies willing to launch BlobHertz as a luxury and interior design product.
RMP : 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.
RMP : 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.
RMP : Main end customer is people fond of music, willing to personalize their houses's interior design with such a unique product.
RMP : Actually BlobHertz born as a unique and standalone product, and I've always tried not to be influenced by any other project.
RMP : 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.
RMP : 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.
RMP : 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.
RMP : Experimental activities have been jointly conducted with my friend Giuliano Casu, whom devoted to material supplying and space allocation for testing.
RMP : 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.
RMP : I enrolled this internal competition to challenge myself with such a wide designer community and to increase my project's visibility.
RMP : BlobHertz allowed me to learn how to realize and put in practice very theoretical principles through design.
