Cleveland — The Roto Made Local roadshow will continue at the Industrial Designers Society of America's annual conference in Detroit, Aug. 17-20.
Detroit will mark the third straight IDSA conference for Roto Made Local, an exhibit designed to promote the rotational molding process to designers. The effort is cosponsored by the Society of Plastics Engineers Rotational Molding Division and the Association of Rotational Molders.
Handling the booth again this year will be Tom Innis, president of mold maker Avantech Inc., and Stephen Zamprelli, vice president of product development at molder Formed Plastics Inc.
They outlined Roto Made Local during the SPE Rotational Molding Conference in Cleveland.
Innis said the exhibit has attracted more interest from industrial designers each year. Rotomolding remains a “relatively unknown, certainly underutilized and under-appreciated process,” he said.
“We want to help open that black box,” Innis said
Roto Made Local features visually exciting products aimed at capturing the imagination of designers, according to Zamprelli. “The products at IDSA need to have the ‘wow' factor. Everything at IDSA has the ‘wow,''' he said.
Zamprelli said that, this year in Detroit, the SPE Thermoforming Division will have its own booth at IDSA, including a parts competition.
Zamprelli said the rotomolding program wants to develop a rotomolding-dedicated Twitter feed for the IDSA conference, to promote the message to the social-media-loving design community.
Innis said Roto Made Local is part of an important, long-term effort to spread the word about rotational molding.
“What a great opportunity, because they don't know much about us,” Innis said. “But when we engage them in conversation you can see the wheels turning. So we need to sustain this effort to build some credibility.”
