Product Design: Kia Utzon-Frank creates products with true innovation

Date
10 October 2013

Kia Utzon-Frank designs products with the kind of genuine innovation that makes life easier, energy more efficient and rooms more beautiful. The designer recently graduated from the RCA with an MA in goldsmithing, silversmithing, metalwork and jewellery and a whole host of transferrable skills that have seen her move seamlessly from jewellery design to products, describing herself as “a goldsmith that can’t escape my sculptural and architectural heritage”.

Need proof? Her most recent creation is The Louver Twisting Comb, a mechanism which uses a transverse bar module to rotate strips of flexible material between two slits to create a single surface, and can be used to control light, air and liquids. Most straightforwardly it operates as a sleek and effective blind or room-divider, but Kia is also experimenting with future applications of the mechanism to control wind in sailboat sails and farming. You see? Innovation! I told you so.

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Kia Utzon-Frank: The Louver Twisting Comb

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Kia Utzon-Frank: The Louver Twisting Comb

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Kia Utzon-Frank: The Louver Twisting Comb

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Kia Utzon-Frank: The Louver Twisting Comb

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Kia Utzon-Frank: The Louver Twisting Comb

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Kia Utzon-Frank: The Louver Twisting Comb

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Kia Utzon-Frank: The Louver Twisting Comb

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About the Author

Maisie Skidmore

Maisie joined It’s Nice That fresh out of university in the summer of 2013 as an intern before joining full time as an Assistant Editor. Maisie left It’s Nice That in July 2015.

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