MOOOI
2022 Milan Design Week Exhibit
Challenge
Moooi came to IDEO looking to create an exhibit for the Milan Design Week, the largest furniture fair in the world, that might provoke the audience to imagine a world where the primary function of design is to inspire joy.
Outcome
The result was a whimsical emotive macaroni shaped robot named Piro that danced and blew scented smoke ring kisses at people that stopped to say hello.
Four of the Piros on display at the center of the MOOOI exhibit at the Milan Design Week. The fluid movement of the robots gave them human like characteristics and visitors could not help but anthropomorphize them.
These were some of the early experiments that we did in developing the smoke ring blowing mechanism. The left is a vape pen that we hacked to created water vapor and the right is a speaker diaphragm that we used create the air impulse needed to generate the smoke rings.
This is a GIF of the first prototype robot that I built for the project. My colleague Niko Vladimirov created a custom plug in for Blender in order to animate and program the movement of the robot.
This was the smoke ring chamber of the first functional prototype. You can see the hacked vape pen connected to a small cooling fan that provides the necessary water vapor. The solenoid at the top of the unit provides the impulse to the diaphragm for shooting the smoke rings.
