Dispatches: One Fork to Rule them All

Outside Podcast

Sports, Wilderness

4.4 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 30 October 2018

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this first episode of a new series exploring how gear gets made, we investigate the origin of arguably the most refined fork in history. When designer Owen Mesdag was a graduate student in the late-1990s, he fell in love with a particularly clever spoon. Engineered by outdoor brand MSR, it doubled as a stove repair tool. Mesdag was enamored with it and he thought, I want to make a matching fork. And how hard could that be, really? A fork is a fairly simple tool. Except Owen’s fork didn’t just have to be good, it had to be perfect. His obsessive attention to detail meant that he kept going back to do more testing, taking more trips to Asia, and redesigning the fork again and again, because it was never quite right. Producer Alex Ward has this story explaining why the business end of a fork tells us a great deal about the tireless designers who make our favorite things.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode of the Outside Podcast is brought to you by Adidas, and the all new line of Terex outdoor gear.
0:06.0	I think it is the best kept secret that Adidas has also an outdoor department.
0:12.0	This is Christian Zwinger, outdoor design director at Adidas,
0:16.0	and a man with a fairly substantial cold.
0:18.0	You hear my voice is a little bit, is a little bit dark.
0:22.0	But we're going to talk with them anyway because a few years ago
0:25.1	Adidas started a big push to make their outdoor department a lot more friendly to
0:28.9	the outdoors. Cut down on wasted material, cut down on water usage during the manufacturing process.
0:35.0	And they did.
0:36.0	But Adidas is also making more fundamental changes.
0:39.0	They're changing the design of their shoes
0:41.0	to make them less resource intensive to produce.
0:44.0	And that is changing the aesthetic and it looks very intuitive.
0:49.0	So you're looking at the product and you have already the feeling,
0:52.0	okay, that is different to everything I've seen before.
0:55.6	The first thing they did on the running and hiking shoes was refine the placement of the
0:59.2	reinforcements and abrasion resistance.
1:02.0	Some of those choices were to cut down on weight, but they also made the shoes last longer.
1:06.0	Make a product that has a longer lifespan or a longer life cycle.
1:11.0	It is already environmental friendly.
1:14.0	The second thing they did was they started looking closely at which colors they may choose
1:18.1	in.
	...

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