Fruit bowls have an unavoidable annoyance– not flies and rotten fruit, those would be avoidable if your diet was better. No, it’s that the bowl is never the right size. Either your fruit is sad and lonely in a too-large bowl, or it’s falling out. It’s the kind of existential nightmare that can only be properly illustrated by a late-night infomercial. [Simone Giertz] has a solution to the problem: a shape-changing fruit bowl.
See, it was one thing to make a bowl that could change shape. That was easy, [Simone] had multiple working prototypes. There are probably many ways to do it, but we like [Simone]’s use of an iris mechanism in a flat base to allow radial expansion of the walls. The problem was that [Simone] has that whole designer thing going on, and needs the bowl to be not only functional, but aesthetically pleasing. Oh, and it would be nice if expanding the bowl didn’t create escape routes for smaller fruits, but that got solved many prototypes before it got pretty.
It’s neat to see her design process. Using 3D printing and CNC machining for prototyping is very familiar to Hackaday, but lets be honest — for our own projects, it’s pretty common to stop at “functional”. Watching [Simone] struggle to balance aesthetics with design-for-manufacturing makes for an interesting 15 minutes, if nothing else. Plus she gives us our inspirational quote of the day: “As much as I feel like I’m walking in circles, I know that product development is a spiral”. Something to keep in mind next time it seems like you’re going around the drain in your own projects. Just be warned, she does have a bit of a potty mouth.
We’ve featured [Simone]’s design decisions here, if you’re interested in seeing how she goes the rest of the way from project to product. We’re pretty sure her face-slapping-alarm clock never made it into the SkyMall catalog, though.
