Archigrams
Apr 2014
Archigrams is a set of 10 whimsical and informative print designs of modern architecture's most iconic buildings. This idea of pairing simplified building drawings with their architectural descriptions came to me, while I was an architecture student at UCLA studying for my architecture history exams. I later revisited this idea and developed it into a design product to sell for my Entrepreneurial Design class at SVA. My hope is that it can serve as both an art collectible and quick and dirty learning tool.
Getting funded
To help fund production costs, I launched this project on Kickstarter in April 2014 and was able to raise more than 300% of my $3000 goal within 14 days. It was featured as Kickstarter's Project of the Day and on various design blogs and sites, including Fast Company, Architect Magazine, Flavorwire, UnBeige, Shortlist, AdWeek, IMadeThatand Architects and Artisans.
After spending my summer nights and weekends working to produce and package Archigrams (alongside a full-time internship!), I have since completed shipping to all my backers and launched an online shop at www.archigrams.com. In total, the whole process from concept development to product shipment took about 7-8 months. You can read about my successes and failures as a first-time design entrepreneur here.
Design process
Prior to arriving at my final idea of Archigrams, I explored various directions and prototypes. This included tangram building blocks that come together to make famous buildings, tangram magnets, and colorful flashcards - all of which I shared publicly with architects, architecture students and the general public to gauge interest and gather feedback.
Prototype 1: Educational flashcards of different buildings. People loved the designs, but hated the idea of "flashcards." They expressed interest in more tactile ways of learning i.e. blocks.
Protoype 3: I iterated on the material, using acrylic and a laser cutter. The material felt a lot better and feedback from this was that it’d be nice to have a feeling of pieces sticking together.
Prototype 2: Based off feedback, I explored foam core tangram pieces that assemble to form the buildings illustrated in the flashcard. People found it more fun, but wanted more weight in the pieces.
Prototype 4: To get that stick feeling, I tried out magnetic tangram pieces. People loved this prototype the most. However, given how hard it’d be to produce, I decided to pivot back to my initial idea of prints.
Prototype 5: Prints with info in the back. I decided to revisit my first idea, after realizing I would not have the resources or time to fully develop my block idea within my class' deadlines. The challenge after that was figuring how to reframe my concept in a more appealing way. It turns out that the idea of presenting architecture history in bite-sized pieces was successful, so long as they're not labeled as "flashcards" or prescribed with any specific use case.