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Industrial designers Irina Kozlovskaya and Aaron Tsui founded Vim & Vigor Design in 2009 after graduating from RISD. For a young studio their work is pretty advanced, especially where materials are concerned. They made the Barnes & Noble NOOK Tablet and all its accompanying gadgetry, like the silicone reading light, stylus, stand and collection of covers. But for all their high-tech design work, they’ve grown nostalgic for the “countless hours” they spent in RISD’s metal shop, so they decided to create a product that pays “homage to the vanishing art of hand-spinning metal.”
Metal spinning is a bit like using a pottery wheel. Each cup or bowl starts from a spinning piece of metal that’s shaped with a lathe. The technique is age-old, but Kozlovskaya and Tsui had a chance to visit a metal shop during college and witness the process firsthand. In their latest product, the SF (Spin and Fold) Lamp, they incorporated the craft of metal spinning into a flat piece of metal that’s spun into one of three patterns – obtuse, acute or intermediate – but to keep the lamp mass produceable the handmade aspect ends there. Once the flat metal piece is painted in either silver/white or black/bronze, it’s folded along a perforated line and then shaped according to size of the piece of metal it was made from, ranging from very skinny to wide.
Quotes via fastcodesign
