Keen Home’s Arbor faceplate — Mathematics, Lasers and Designing Like Nature
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The road to a customer-ready Arbor faceplate has been longer than we’d hoped, but we’re getting ready to produce. Lesson: working with wood can be challenging — thanks for sticking with us.
Design has always played a central role at Keen Home. Sometimes good design means blending in, but sometimes it means standing out. With a product as unassuming as a vent, we needed a design that could do both. That’s why we wanted to offer early customers something special. Arbor is a striking faceplate that boldly calls attention to the uniqueness of the technology underneath.
The tech behind the look
Getting this design ready took some cutting edge design and manufacturing technology. Here’s the story of how we did it.
Design — Patterns in nature
The first challenge was to create an organic feeling pattern that both provided sufficient ventilation. Through rigorous testing in our dedicated test home, we figured out some basic design rules. There needs to be a minimum perforation and total cross-sectional of negative space for efficient airflow.
Once the minimum airflow guidelines were established, we looked to nature for inspiration. The repeated cellular pattern of a leaf is a theme that can be found throughout nature. Although it can look random up close, these patterns follow a set of rules just like our faceplates.
Math can be used to create a pattern from a set of rules. It might seem counterintuitive, but life follows a mathematical pattern to create the myriad patterns we see in nature. In creating Arbor, we used a mathematical pattern called a Voronoi diagram to create a varied cellular structure that follows our ventilation rules while coming together in a shape reminiscent of a leaf.
