ENCLOSURECORE Concept 1: Input

AC

What first made you interested in working on this project? 

LM

We knew our studio and AIR COMPANY speak the same language, so we’ve always known that we would be super excited to work on anything with you all. But the sheer opportunity to make [something for] a piece of machinery that we see as a key component in solving the climate crisis and part of diversifying our solutions just felt like such a perfect opportunity for us. We focus on regenerative design and working on climate crisis issues and solutions, so it felt like a perfect opportunity. 

AC

We couldn’t agree more. When you consider the AIRMADE System an object, what aspect stands out to you the most? 

BM

The ability [of] the system to be modular and change is so interesting, given it speaks to the fluidity of the process and the inputs through the outputs. I think it’s pretty interesting that it can flex, which only further emphasizes how the technology can be implemented to the climate crisis in a broad way. It’s not just one fixed thing. That’s really cool.

AC

Walk us through the conceptual enclosure you have created. 

LM

We created a modular—we’ll call it soft structure—that can flex with whichever size of machine someone is putting into their space. The concept was that we were bringing the feedstock back into the product itself, so it’s inflated and filled with air. We wanted the story—because it’s such a complex unit—we wanted it to be very simple and tell a story that’s easy to grasp. CO₂ goes in, and a useful substance comes out. 

BM

We’re calling our concept “It Begins With Air,” bringing it back to home base.

AC

What made you want to focus on the feedstock of CO₂ for the enclosure? 

BM

Our studio is rooted in the world of regenerative design and helping break down complex climate issues. It’s not only a passion of ours, but we find it’s a necessity to communicate these complex ideas through storytelling. So, focusing on the input in our enclosure concept—it became a simple hero of sorts because it acts as that emotive but succinct message around one of the many values your technology offers. 

What was also really exciting for us was playing with that tension that air as a medium brought in. Your [technology] can look very heavy, complicated and even intimidating to the unknowing, but the idea of air or buoyancy and lightness is all in contrast to that. Aside from the narrative and telling the story of your system, it also acted as this opposing force physically and emotively against the [technology] as it’s presented today. 

AC

So, with that idea, where do you begin? How do you ideate on bringing something invisible like CO₂ to life? 

LM

We wanted it to have movement, so that was where we began: asking ourselves, how can we make something that makes you want to take a deep breath? How could we create something that moves slightly and feels alive in a way that you’re entering a room, and the machine might not look like it’s doing anything on the inside, but it has aliveness to it? It has life. From there, we ideated on different types of shutter movements, trying to understand if we [wanted] it to move when someone passed by it. Were we going to create something that was opened or closed by a person? [We] landed somewhere that was a bit more, we’ll say, stagnant to a degree, but you have what Baillie calls ‘the ambient movement.’

We sketched over and over and over again until we landed where we are now, but the concepts have always been soft. We started in a soft place and ended in a soft place, probably because we wanted it to feel approachable and accessible. We felt like machines are often rigid and feel as though they’re in one place forever and not agile or flexible. By bringing in soft elements, we figured we could bring in everything we were trying to accomplish.

AC

It’s a great approach to technology, which can typically, to your point, feel rigid or cold. What systems did you use to bring the enclosure to life?

BM

There is tons of digital work that’s happening nowadays, but we’re really tactile in our studio. In conjunction with digital exploration of form and concept, we rolled up our sleeves and [made] a 3D representation of the model, both as a tool for us to look to understand form and presence and use it in our concept development [to drape] things over it, hold things next to it. For us, having that physical side of our concepting is always so helpful to allow us to explore concepts in ways that we wouldn’t think about if we were just looking at our screen all day. 

AC

Do you create a physical object for every project you work on?

LM

We always start in sketch. It might be on an iPad, but Baillie and I are always Post-It note sketching. In order for us to work on anything, we have to understand something from all sides, and we do that by sketching and building. We don’t usually build a full thing when we’re working—we’ll build a moment or an experiment with materials, and that’s generally where we’ll begin.  

BM

There’s a back and forth at some point in the process where we might go somewhere digitally and then sketch over that. We’re big whiteboard users, and there’s never a moment where our whiteboards aren’t full of something.

AC

We’ve talked about fashion a bit during the process of creating this concept. Tell us a bit about what made you take that route.

LM

I come from the fashion world [and] fashion is where we pull a lot of our inspiration. It tends to be where materials are experimented with first; it has less rules involved, so grabbing inspiration from how clothing functions is more of a freeing space to take inspiration from. Most projects we work on, we approach from a space where we don’t want anything to be permanent. Nothing that is constructed that we work on should be made in a way that can’t be taken apart or broken down at the end of its life.

For this one in particular, we were really inspired by some of the things happening on the Spring/Summer 2024 runways with lots of pleats and movement of garments. Knowing that we wanted to bring this to life with something soft, we were pulling from high-end fashion for inspiration, but we were also pulling from things that are more utilitarian, like life preservers and life vests. 

In our design, there are moments that feel like jewelry, like the hardware components you pull down on. That’s actually the way that the covers we created and the machine itself are married together with this hook system. We could have just done any old grommet, and it would’ve been fine, but we wanted it to feel like a high-end touchpoint that felt unique and custom, so we were inspired to have almost a jewelry moment, which is also from fashion. 

AC

If people take away only one thing from this project, what would you hope that would be?

BM

I hope that when people see this concept, they know that we brought the technology story back to its core, that it begins with air. Because that was so much of the driver and such a critical part of the AIRMADE System, we really hope that that comes through.