Drilling Lab

Drilling Lab

Design company: Drilling Lab
Designer: Lu-wei Chen
Country: Taiwan

The main spirit of Drilling Lab is to emphasize the pursuit of simple and plain “authenticity” without pretense. The Clamp Collection is to preserve the original texture by designers to convey the history, material, and existence through traditional processing equipments.

The packaging is designed to transmit the spirit of products. Drilling Lab has re-assessed the paper timber, the most commonly used as the main material on wrap. However, it can be a more direct way to show the true nature of paper. The packaging items include screws, hex key and other objects, which are crucial conceptual design individually, therefore, being able to see every correlation of each object in the same time while revealing for uses is important which could help them understand the purpose of their designs. This concept was inspired by the spread-out toolset, utilizing cardboard holes stacked together to build the main packaging body, so that different thickness items can be fitted perfectly onto cardboard, providing solid protection.

Common chipboards was chosen as materials, containing a high proportion of recycled pulp of gray cardboards. They fit suitably with the original spirit of the brand, simple and plain. Like the natural wood piled up in general without formal set, it strengthens the cardboards’ own characteristics, eliminating the artificial shape creations. To process and print, designer has stuck to the spirit of the products continually, specially with fairly traditional letterpress printing and roll-type (die cutting) production. Traditional printing methods have some advances of natural textures comparing to digital printing, trying to tell stories of these declining methods of themselves.

The units were fixed with a rubber band, which allows each unit to separate easily. Moreover, it can be recycled briefly, the direct approach with a pure nature.

The black rubber band utilized is the recycled bicycle inner tubes, which are more durable and have unique shapes (every single one is cut by hand) compared to ready-made rubber band. It reflects the strict details are considered overall by designers, even an unimportant rubber band is significant.