The Silhouette
Four Pines Brewery and Saber Astronautics delivered the first brief to the Auxiliary Design School Cadets in Janurary 2015. This project was 4 weeks duration. Each cadet was to develop their own concept.
Four Pines created Vostok Stout, a beer for drinking in space. Saber Astronautics developed a mechanism that would enable the beer to come out of the bottle. Our brief was to design a bottle that was capable of meeting the strict space travel regulations (no glass, must be able to be irradiated) as well as appealing to the terrestrial bespoke boutique beer market.
My concept was drawn from aligning highly engineered space transport with the pride in craft and pure materials of the boutique beer maker. To this end I drew on the zietgiest and aesthetics of the space age seen in the 1960s.
Space travel itself is highly concerned with function. So, I looked to traditional beer bottle silhouettes using highly engineered materials.
The result was a bottle that was only 23 grams when empty, with the silhouette of a 220 gram traditional glass bottle. Because the concept quickly centred how a film-like material could be applied to a frame, I developed it through rapid modelling techniques, using foam board, balloons and later 3D printed forms and water.