Soft Vase
Made from silicon-coated felt, the vase can be folded to hold flowers and unrolled to store flat in a drawerWatch the Soft Vase Video
It’s not that Anna Mandelkau and Carey Jones are against the sparkly crystal vases most of us see stacked on our Granny’s shelf. It’s that the partners at Scribble Product Design prefer alternative thinking. For this project, the duo looked at taking everyday household objects and keeping their function, but rejigging them into whimsical designs more suited for the small spaces Mandelkau and Carey are accustomed to living in.
“Our living spaces are becoming more constrained, and that asks for new possibilities,” says Mandelkau, who has lived in shoebox-sized apartments as far away as Barcelona, where a crystal vase would take up valuable storage real estate.
Enter the Soft Vase. When unrolled, it’s a flat piece of felt lined in silicon shaped like a slanted rectangle. The bendy material can be folded like origami into a watertight container to display a small bouquet. The owner has creative licence to keep the folds simple or to switch them up into
a different design each time they have a fistful of Gerber daisies to display.
While the Soft Vase is funky and functional the way it is, the always-curious Mandelkau and Jones are still playing around with its design to see what other nifty tricks they can make it do.
“We’re not done with it,” says Mandelkau. It’s not an answer or a solution to the problem of living in a cramped space, but rather it’s a possibility of things to come.
Both Mandelkau and Jones, who are recent graduates of the University of Calgary’s masters of environmental design program in industrial design, plan to continue to explore the possibilities of creating fun, interactive household items for small spaces. “The beauty of this job is that what you make can be anything at anytime,” says Mandelkau.
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