Just like the common monobloc chairs, these monobloc brushes are made as one cohesive unit of a plastic material. They are a result of material and cultural study made as my graduation project at the Industrial Design Department in Shenkar.
Focusing on such an arbitrary object for a graduation project came from realizing that there is a lot to learn from this small product. Simply put— every brush in the world has a handle and bristles. It’s the combination between them that tell us how, when and by whom it was made.
The process kicked off with reading subject related books, meeting a local brush maker and making brushes the traditional way (folding groups of bristles into pre-cut holes in a piece of wood). I than looked for more efficient ways of making a brush and somewhere in the process I felt that using industrially made plastic hair (Polypropylene) for traditional brush making techniques is odd. Looking for a way to fully industrialize the process, I started forming groups of PP bristles by pressing them in a toaster which led to develope a new way of making the product. By using molds compounded by both heat conducting and insulating parts, I could thermoform plastic hairs and create integral handles.
I designed the shapes in a back and forth experimentation between studying natural flow of the PP hair groups and sculpting similar archetypes in Polyurethane foam. The process resulted in a new way of making brushes in CNC milled aluminium & SikaBlock molds.
