Wave

Wave came out of an unusual group brief: ship ten different deliverables a week, for ten weeks. The deliverables compounded - each week built on the last - so the final object wasn't designed up front but accumulated, the culmination of a semester's range of work across electronics, woodworking, audio and product design.

Most of the semester was spent in materials rather than on screen - testing wood samples, CNC-machining, 3D-printing internal components - alongside research into sound and speaker design. We were learning the acoustics and the fabrication at the same time, and the build emerged from those weeks rather than preceding them.

We started from a broken pair of Edifier desktop speakers. The drivers were salvageable; the housings weren't - so the project became one of repair and rehousing rather than building from nothing. We rebuilt the desktop drivers into a custom enclosure, CNC'd from solid wood and finished by hand, with the internal components 3D-printed and machined to fit. Wood was a deliberate choice as much as an aesthetic one: a rigid, solid cabinet limits the unwanted resonance a flimsy housing introduces, so it suits the driver as well as the eye.

The result is a working desktop speaker - salvaged drivers in a hand-finished wooden body - built to sit on the same desk as Mantis. Two objects from the same instinct: keep what works, rebuild the rest.