{"id":27506,"date":"2013-10-14T15:17:21","date_gmt":"2013-10-14T19:17:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uncommongoods.pro\/?p=27506"},"modified":"2018-01-04T11:41:41","modified_gmt":"2018-01-04T16:41:41","slug":"thomas-art-tableless-dining","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.pro\/blog\/2013\/thomas-art-tableless-dining\/","title":{"rendered":"Thomas Both & The Art of Tableless Dining"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Thomas<\/a>Mix and mingling at cocktail parties, couch lounging on movie night, and eating Sunday breakfast in bed just got a whole lot easier with Thomas Both\u2019s Ooma Bowl<\/a> design. \u201cIt struck me that all the plateware we use is designed for tables, yet often we eat without a table. \u00a0So my point of view was to design something that is suited for eating without one, and to do it in an elegant way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thomas earned his BS in Engineering at Harvey Mudd College and shortly after worked as a mechanical engineer for three years. \u00a0Yet as a person who was a bit more right-minded, Thomas recognized that he held a creative heart, and wanted to finally wear it on his sleeve. He was admitted to Design School at Stanford University, which paved his way to teaching innovative designs at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design<\/a>. \u201cNow, I work much more as a designer than an engineer, but\u00a0both\u00a0play a part.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Thomas<\/a>Observing small living spaces was how Thomas\u2019 inspiration behind the Ooma Bowl came about. After speaking to people living in small apartments he was inspired by the idea of tableless dining. Thomas realized that most non-table plateware lacked a level of elegance, such as bad TV dinner trays or strange party plates. Soon, he turned these discussions and observations into a real life design solution.<\/p>\n

\"oomabowl<\/a>Thomas believes that a strong perspective helps design a unique product. \u00a0He didn\u2019t want to just make a cool looking bowl; he wanted the design to be tied in with a direct purpose.\u00a0In the early stages of designing the bowl, a friend of Thomas\u2019 broke his leg and was stuck in the hospital for a quite a while. Because the Ooma Bowl was \u201ca bowl that\u2019s designed to be held\u201d without the use of a table, Thomas took this opportunity to have his bedridden friend become one of his first experimental guinea\u00a0pigs. \u201cI called him up. While\u00a0everyone else was checking if he was okay and visiting him, I asked him if he\u2019d test out my prototypes. He liked the feeling of being locked into the bowl, not holding it but the bowl holding you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thomas brought his designs to the next level of actual production. At first, he had no experience with ceramics. \u201cExcept maybe in grade school messing around with clay. It was a dining design project that just so happened to end up in a ceramic piece.\u201d\u00a0He had to learn about slip casting, working with clay, glazing, and firing all at once. After rough prototype after rough prototype, including failed plastic forming attempts, Thomas finally made the first buck out of REN shape into two pieces. \u201cOne side on a lathe, and the other just sort of by eye and feel.\u201d He then glued the sides\u2019 backs together and made adjustments. The next iteration he worked on was stacking and getting a nice feel in the hand, which was much more work than he ever anticipated.<\/p>\n

\"thomasboth2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"thomasboth3\"<\/a>Once the design was perfected into its brilliant form, Thomas found a manufacturer in Los Angeles, but just as it was a difficult process to design the perfect bowl, it was probably an even more nerve racking time to manage the products. \u201cSelling and managing production, storage, sales, and shipping is a lot of work. I had way too many boxes in our living room for a long time. That part wasn’t so much fun for me; it was more of an on-going nuisance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet, after only a short hiatus, Thomas is proud to see that the Ooma Bowl sought its way back out into the world, licensed, and it\u2019s now an exclusive item on the UncommonGoods site. Sarah Stenseng<\/a>, our Senior Product Development Associate who attended Stanford with Thomas, worked with him to get the Ooma Bowls back into production. Thomas says, \u201cThe Ooma bowl would probably still be sitting on the sidelines if it wasn\u2019t for UncommonGoods.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"thomasboth4\"<\/a>\u00a0Thomas\u2019 advice for designers who are producing a product from just a simple idea is to\u00a0\u201cget engaged and excited about how people do things and how they think within a certain domain , and pay attention. \u00a0Opportunities will emerge. \u00a0Then you have to try things. \u00a0Make stuff. \u00a0It can be crappy, you\u2019re just working on the concept.\u00a0Work your way to a product idea that you’re excited about and other people love. \u00a0Then you can bring more refinement to it and move toward manufacturing.”<\/p>\n

\"Thomas<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Designer and engineer, Thomas Both, brought his idea of tableless dining for small living spaces to life. This is the story of the Ooma Bowl. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":73,"featured_media":27510,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[743],"tags":[37,223,506,66,254,1276],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27506"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/73"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27506"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27506\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64688,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27506\/revisions\/64688"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncommongoods.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}