ProdMod ™

I was fortunate enough to attend this interview by Kim Hastreiter, Editor of Paper magazine, held at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum tonight. I missed the first 15 minutes of the interview but the rest was well worth the $10 admission fee (member discount). I am going to paraphrase some highlights from the interview and include some of his quotes. Bear with me I am not a journalist, I am just giving you some tidbits from my experience tonight.

Update: This interview was video taped by the museum. The video should be available on their site in about 2 weeks.

If you don’t know who Ingo Maurer is you can check out his website and if you are in the NYC area you can go to the Cooper-Hewitt Museum and check out his exhibit.

He is a designer who emigrated from Germany in the 60s, worked as a freelance designer in NY and SF and then settles in Munich and has created award winning designs ever since his first called “Bulb”. You can learn more about his history on his website in the TEAM section. It is interesting to see how he started with only one product making it in his basement in a one-man workshop and now has a big company with 36 or more employees.

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Sometimes I take things apart but don’t have much written about them.

Here is a Nerf Buzzsaw Ball Shooter. It is something I picked up after I got the Zoom-O ball launcher. I wanted to have a motorized launcher in the shape of a gun. This Buzzsaw had all I needed except a motor. Maybe someone out there will find a way to add a motor to the wheel and get it to work. Until then I’ll just post these series of photos showing the product inside and out.

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Here are some results of my test of the Zoom-O Catch and Fire motorized ball launcher gun from Blip, Inc.

If you are looking for a quick intro on this toy you can go here.

In this post I comment on Comfort, Noise, and Shooting. Then I talk about everything I’d like to change about this toy in Modification Notes.

Comfort:

It is so uncomfortable to hold and shoot. It has too much weight in the front which you end up supporting with you index finger. Meanwhile you can barely get the rest of your hand around the second fat trigger. Even when you pull the second trigger it only moves slightly. My hand cramped up in a few minutes. If I had trouble with it I can’t imagine how a 6 yr old would manage.

In the sequence of photos above you’ll see my ring finger squeezes the bottom trigger first, then my index and middle squeezes the top trigger.

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