Art can take bizarre forms is evident from what Dina Amin, an industrial designer, does. If you’re wondering why the first letter of her first name is not capitalized, it’s because she has issues with capital ‘Ds’!
An expert in stop-motion technology, Amin dismantles consumer products, such as hair dryers, Walkman, cameras, cellphones and displays its various components of plastic, metal, rubber and much else, by ‘exploding’ them and putting them together again via stop-motion animation.
Amin, who resides in Cairo, Egypt, finds these products in the city’s Friday scrap market. She uses them all, whether they’re in working condition or not. So, what’s her point in doing this? On her website she explains, “…we consume too many things to the point that we forgot the amount of work that was put into bringing even the tiniest of things! We rarely see what’s inside each product thus treat it as one whole part; not as a plastic cover, with buttons, vibrator motor, mic and so on. This makes it easier to throw things away, one thing goes waste and not many.”
Using stop-motion animation and displaying what all is inside a product is her way of showing people what all they’re throwing along with the product. Just to make her point, she spent the entire year of 2016 in taking products that people decided to throw away.
Amin completed her BA in Industrial Design from Malaysia, after which she returned to her homeland, Egypt. The insane consumption of huge amounts of resources and energy in designing gadgets that people simply throw away after they’ve outlived their utility is a colossal waste of these resources.
It isn’t surprising that Amin left industrial design to become a full-time stop-motion animator. However, product design remains her greatest passion.
Dina Amin: Website | Instagram
