The brief was to design a bicycle or scooter helmet that could become much smaller when it wasn't being worn. I had to work with only two flat non metallic materials, one rigid and one flexible, so the interesting part was figuring out how the structure could change between a protective shape and a compact one. The goal was to reduce the stored volume by up to 50 percent without adding unnecessary parts.
I started with paper and card models to understand how the segmented volume could fold. Full scale tests on a mannequin head helped me work out the coverage, the hinge positions and how the pieces needed to move together. The final material combination became cork for the rigid panels and rubber for the flexible connections.
The final helmet has two states: open for use and flat for carrying. The segmented cork panels create the protective volume while the flexible layer lets the whole thing collapse without extra parts. I liked the challenge because the material constraint wasn't something to work around afterwards. It shaped the entire solution from the beginning.
