Creative Sparks: From Ikea to In-House Design

This week, I visited Ikea for project inspiration and picked up a few plants for our studio. The greenery adds a vibrant touch, contrasting beautifully with our primary black-and-white color scheme. The plants we found are perfect—ideal sizes and stunning green leaves. Now, it's time to select some stylish vases. But wait—why not design our own? Sometimes, we forget to flex our creative muscles.

Many people believe creativity is an innate trait. While some, like artists, may have natural talent, my experience shows that creativity is a process. You gather information, mix in some wild ideas, add references (from your mind or online), and voilà—you have concepts ready for testing. It's like life: you either succeed or learn, adjust, and try again until you have a final design. 3D printing and CAD are perfect tools for testing ideas cost-effectively and efficiently.

But let’s not focus solely on 3D printing. At Ikea, we saw various processes and materials like aluminum spinning, injection molding, and ceramics. Thinking about ceramics took me back to my undergraduate days, about 12 years ago, when I attempted to make a cup. I recall my classmates competing to create the perfect cylinder. Some took safer routes with straight shapes, but most were unsuccessful—even after curing and painting. That seemingly innocuous material defeated us.

Reflecting on those days, I realize that today, we can quickly create straight or curved shapes with or without textures in different colors, even without advanced CAD skills. The most incredible part is that we can replicate these designs infinitely with a file that can be reproduced anywhere in the world using 3D printing.

Below are some of our attempts at making vases with 3D printing in our Bambu lab. We still need to tweak a few things and have some new ideas. Let’s see how it goes. Maybe we’ll send one to you as a Christmas gift at the end of the year.

This is Alex, and this is Dip’s newsletter/blog post. We bring you news, technology trends, and random subjects we find interesting. If you have any topic suggestions, please let us know. “Dip” stands for “Design in Progress,” reflecting our belief that design is a never-ending journey. We love solving problems with creative solutions, always striving to improve and evolve.

Have a great week. Cheers!