When I hear the term industrial designer, images come to mind of cavernous warehouses or musky garages, spaces with everything covered in an equal-parts mixture of rust particles, dirt, and ash. Where, with every item you analyze, it gets harder to distinguish between tools, scraps, or pieces of other, larger pieces of art. The kind of ominous environment where everything dangerous is placed so precariously that if you were to trip on, say, a welder, the only certainty is that you would hit your head on something hard and sharp, with a good chance something would fall on top of you once you’ve grounded.
So when I walked into the home and studio of Nikkuu Design’s Melissa Moore and saw a living space composed of clean lines and simple color schemes, it became apparent that my preconceptions of industrial design were not only out the window, but had vanished down the block.
Born in D.C., Moore grew up with a passion for biology. As a child she built her own toys and games, dismantled household objects and reconstructed them to see how they worked. Biology and design aren’t as different as they might seem, said Moore–at the core they’re about exploring the intricacies of complex objects.
