The iconic leaf of the sugar maple tree has graced Canada's flag for over fifty years and provided its sweet sap to Canadians since the 1700s when aboriginal people collected it during spring. Of the 150 known species of maple, ten are native to North America: Sugar, Black, Silver, Bigleaf, Red, Mountain, Striped, Douglas, Vine, and the Manitoba.

• Materials: PLA, surgical steel
• Manufacturing process: 3D printing
• Height: 42mm
• Width: 52mm
• Weight: 3g

Our Process

The process of manufacturing a 3D printed object is reliant on the form and function of the object and which printing equipment you are using. For an artistic or a “looks like prototype” typically more expensive high resolution printers that use a powder or liquid resin are used and do not have as many design limitations or steps as a “works like prototype” or functional product, which use more common plastics and must be designed for a more demanding lifestyle.

Inspiration to Sketches:

We have long been fascinated by the wonders of nature on our travels into micro and macro worlds. Some of these travels are mathematical, some are biological, and some are rooted in physics and chemistry. And each time we come back to our lab inspired. As designers informed by nature, we always bridge the beautiful – the art of design, and the good – the ethics of design, with the true – the science of design to come up with our ideas.

Sketch to Prototype:

When we have several paper sketches or digital sketches the next step is to start working out design details. We do this by asking design questions such as how long should this piece be? Which biological structure and shape should we embrace for highest optimization? How can we push the technology and our equipment with a new form? And many more. We answer these questions by drawing from our design and science experience, creating prototypes to test ideas – designing 3D printed products make prototyping easy as it’s quick and “cheap” to iterate – wearing and being rough on prototype earrings to find design and manufacture failures, and sharing our prototype designs with others for feedback. The key during this phase is to continually ask and answer questions while producing a near endless number of iterations – some of our prototypes have over two dozen iterations and counting.

Prototype to Product:

During this phase we continue to produce iterations of our prototype, only the focus is not as much on form development as on minimizing material use and optimizing every strand that makes up the design, so every time it’s printed we get consistent amazing results out of the equipment. We also start producing tooling to create non-printable parts of our designs and start designing packaging that includes information on the inspiration behind the design – organism and natural phenomenons are amongst our favourites. We then add the product to our Ecotonos store.

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Product to Meaning:

Once we have perfected the design and manufacturing process, we release it to the world and hope that its unique design will join the collection of your most favourite things. We believe in science and art being one and think it is time to unite them through design.