Kitchen Scale
Composing working machines with found objects
2020
Studio project
Category: Product, Exploratory
Under the supervision of Hans Tan
(part of Forager Things exhibition)
(featured on Designdb)
How do we regain the lost empathy in the current consumer culture? Learning to construct an item from scratch with strict limitations helps us to care, understand and gain reverence for products again.
Despite its compositional nature and the undeniable component of luck, going around looking for parts during a dire pandemic puts the process into a wider perspective. This process of foraging and putting together materials is reflective of our adaptive nature and proves that everything can always be stripped down, redesigned and improved, even in a crisis. However, form is not to be underestimated in importance.
The Kitchen Scale is a mechanical weighing scale composed of common tools found in general stores in Singapore.
Kitchen Scale is composed of commonly found objects in the toolbox and in the kitchen, such as mandolins, a rolling pin, Tupperware, cable ties, bolts and nuts.
It can be easily calibrated and adjusted by the user by turning the top eye bolt. The measuring range of the scale can also be adjusted by replacing the spring with a tighter or looser one, and updating the weight indicator card accordingly.
With a handy instruction manual and all the right parts, the Kitchen Scale can be built by anyone who finds themselves in a zombie apocalypse (and in desperate need of a scale), has extra time to kill, or whose family owns a hardware store.
View the scale at work here!