Bottle
Oh-pener
A CNC BOTTLE OPENER
ABSTRACT: Designed to fit smoothly & comfortably into the palm of one’s hand. Oh-pener uses its mouth as a lever handle & nose as a fulcrum to open bottle caps- an attempt at abstraction- to obscure obvious function upon sight of the object.
Form & markings inspired by indigenous design – including the Rapa Nui’s Moai, Native American totem poles & West African scarification traditions.
An attempt at using precise contemporary tooling to pay homage to bespoke native design intelligence.
prompt & specs.
COURSE: ME 318 - Computer Aided Manufacturing
PROMPT: Starting with the 'seed' of SQUIRREL, use lateral thinking to design & fabricate a functional bottle opener.
inspiration.
After a sketching meander that included a date gone wrong because I couldn’t stop looking at the squirrels and reflections on the structural forces that enabled ubiquitous Enid Blyton books within my Zimbabwean elementary school – I landed on the idea of a mouth bottle opener.
Contemporary world events have also had me thinking of indigeneity and I wanted to pay homage to the intelligence of indigenous design. This led me to draw inspiration from West African scarification traditions, Native American totem poles and the Easter Island statues.
Armed with this thematic grounding, I began the engineering design process.
design process.
fabrication.
final product.
testing in Kariobangi
Kariobangi is a neighborhood in Nairobi, Kenya that is home to a large number of artisans. As an experiment, I worked with two Kenyan collaborators (Adam Yawe and Anthony Muisyo) to find artisans who would be open to recreate the bottle opener using local manufacturing processes at hand. Working with local 3D printing services and artisan sandcasters, we successfully recreated the multiple copies of the origical CNCed opener.
