DCI has collaborated with global designers and global companies through various projects. For this project, we collaborated with Kokuyo, a specialist stationery maker in Japan, to design a tape dispenser and it continued nearly a year.

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Kokuyo is a company that suggests the transition of innovative ideas. The idea comes from the ‘user’s perspective’ or detection of very fine details in the product category of stationery. The design of Kokuyo should not be ‘just’ beautiful. Kokuyo’s design is a function-oriented design that focuses on users, or 100% focus on considerations on usability. We needed come up with a novel idea to solve the problem of weight and size, an attitude for designed desktop stationery and very detailed usability while performing the role of large-sized tape dispenser enough.

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OCTOMARU that proposed by BDCI, is a product with ‘WOW’ factor that was not seen in the conventional tape dispensers. The naming of OCTOMARU derived from the function, as it is a compound of Japanese word OKU(置く, to put) + TOMARU (止まる, to stop), which means it stops when you put (on a table). Also, it’s reminiscent of ‘Octopus’. With this one-year project, we were able to experience design’s R&D in depth for the first time through numerous prototyping and refinement.