“The task is to create a storing device of your choice, to be mounted on the wall with maximum 3 screws. It should be packaged in a purpose made packaging and the materialbeing used must be wood grown and harvested in Sweden. “

THE TASK

Between the times you ski, weather you ski often or rarely, your skis have a tendency of ending up in a closet, in the attic or in the cellar.

In my opinion, they deserve a better arangement.

The average skier of today is more and more exploring the life outside the boundries of the pist. As a reaction to this, the average ski is changing its appearance. The waist of the skis are axpanding, while rocker and twin

tips are getting more and more common.

As a result of the bigger canvas and the influences from freeride skiing the skis are generally getting more grafical. So much that some consumers

choose their skis because of the grafical disposition of the skis.

There are a few alternatives for storing skis on the wall. The most common type is mounting skis bottom to bottom and letting the top tips rest on a pair of projecting rods. The problem is that the skis aren’t exposed top-up, where the grafic and the shape of the ski is shown. Also, skis with somewhat wider tips also have a tendency to turn their bot-tom parts away from eachother due to the compressing forces.

My idea was to create a simple skirack that reconnect ed to the sim-plicity of the mountains. One that displays the skis optimally, but that still would work, visually, as a product on it’s own. A skirack that allows the owner to display both the passion for skiing and the skis themselves.

I believe the skis are like the hanged up fixed-gear bike a sign of an active lifestyle. Regardless of degree of usage the user strives to dem-onstrate quality, taste, level of expertise and dedication. The mounting system of today just does not go hand in hand with those aspects.

The process started at the sketching table. After trying out a couple of shapes for the mounting device I picked up my pen and drew a pair of mountain tops, just to remind myself in what category of products I was working. Later on in the sketching process, those mountains would eventually serve the purpose of being the inspiration of the actuall design of the product. I wanted to create a mounting device where the skis weren’t what was to be mounted, but instead what was to be displayed. Therefore the bind-ings had to be the contact point with the tree. To make this, I had to cre-ate shelves for the bindings to rest upon. The skis had to rest safely, but I resented the idea to have a locking device to keep the skis mounted. I like the way they entice you to use them when they’re ready to take down at every moment. This led me into the idea of creating slits to be able to slide the skis in and out of the display. The Haute-Pic was eventually made out of three layers of wood, each layer make out of two layers of wood glued together to increase the sta-bility. The front and middle layers were made out of Oak to reconnect to the darker barren expression of the mountain. The back layer was made out of Ash and symbolizes the white mountain tops that work to stabilize the skis and to keep them straight. The layers were put together by using glue and two plugs on each layer. On earlier sketches the angles weren’t perpendicular and I had the idea to create a hook out of the bottom middle fart of the product to hang the ski poles. Both ideas were revised. To make the producting more suf-ficient and the packaging more manageable the angles had to be per-pendicular and I feared that the hook wouldn’t be strong enough.

My idea was to create a simple skirack that reconnect ed to the sim-plicity of the mountains. One that displays the skis optimally, but that still would work, visually, as a product on it’s own. A skirack that allows the owner to display both the passion for skiing and the skis themselves.

Scetches of revised ideas

Top left: The three layers of wood and the plugs before the assembling

Top right: Keyholes created to hide screws and holes when being mount-ed on the wall.

Left: Recess created on the middle layer in order to keep the skis straight while hanging.

Product glued and plugged together.

I believe the packaging should relate to the product itself, and it’s grafical profile.

Since I’ve been working a lot with triangles in both theproduct itself and in the logotype I intended to implement the geometric style in the packaging concept.

The whole product is made up of either 90 or 45 degree angles. Therefore two of these packages make a square when being placed bottom to

bottom. That makes them easy to store and stack.

In stores, due to the geometrical shape, the packages can either be stacked with a triangle as a base or vertically as a triangle facing the

consumer to fully emphatize on the shape.

MILTON RUNERHEIM Cyclic Design Project 2012

School of Industrial Design, Lund University

MSTR