The Good Citizen

The good citizen jewelry collection is a work in progress. The idea of this collection started out from a work I designed for NEXT JENERATION Jewellery Talent Contest 2017.

The theme of the contest was Jewel and Function/Gioiello e Funzione, a personal interpretation of contemporary jewelry that becomes a useful object.

Inspiration & Concept

Strongly inspired by my daily commute to work in Shanghai, and observing the growing pattern behavior in our society of interacting more with our phone screens than with what is ahead to us, I decided to focus on this and make a jewel that could serve to observe both “realities”, the one in our screens and the one ahead of us.

This pattern not only alters our social behavior but also our body, we are adopting an uncomfortable and harmful position because we are sometimes absorved by our screens even when we walk or even worst when we are crossing roads.

What if we can face reality without quitting seeing your screen phones?

The idea was to create a necklace that also serve as glasses that help reading the screen of our phones without bending the neck and att the same time it improves your back posture. It has both aesthetical and functional usage.

The reflecting glasses are mainly inspired by the climber's glasses called “belay glasses” which serves one of the partners climbing (the one below) to watch the top without folding the head backward. But during my research, I found out another type of reflecting glasses called “lazy glasses” that are used to read once you are lying down in bed. I designed this jewel taking as reference these 2 typologies of glasses using the same system of reflection.

Prototype

My project was selected among the finalists of the contest, and I was asked to develop a functional prototype together with an Italian factory in Milan RossoCiliegia. The material used to make the necklace frame is acrylic, using laser cutting to cut the structure and a heat gun to bend the shape slightly. For the glasses, we used an existing pair of belay frames and we adapted them to fit the necklace.

Work in progress

Continuation of the collection is in process…