industrial designer animates the insides of everyday items in fantastical stop motion series

in ode to the things we throw away, industrial designer dina amin has created tinker friday, a playful series of short movies using stop motion animation that give life to the anatomy of everyday items. by dismantling them into a thousand pieces, dina creates stories featuring characters formed from the tiniest fragments.

a disposable camera transformed into a miniature DJ

images courtesy of dina amin

amin labels it tinker friday, because at the end of every week she gets to work on another product, totting up a total of 30 videos so far. unscrewing, cutting, and moulding the various parts, dina combines the old-school technique of stop-animation with similarly retro items. from alarm clocks to pocket cameras, cassette tapes to computer mice, each anatomy inspires a different story.

videos by dinaa amin

‘I love disassembling products to learn more about how they work, how all the pieces come together, it’s like a puzzle to me,’ amin explains. ‘it all started with just a casual exploration of parts and then I started rearranging the dismantled product pieces into new characters, objects and stories.’

a collaboration with artist, doro ottermann, transforming a match box and other bits of rubbish into a four-legged creature

‘most of the products you see are old broken products that others decided to throw away’, she continues. ‘we consume too many things to the point that we forgot the amount of work that was put into bringing even the tiniest pieces 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.’

little creature made out of hairdryer parts who refuses to straighten her hair

amin completed a BA in industrial design from malaysia, returning to her homeland, egypt, to find that she wasn’t keen on a huge part of the industry. ‘the part where we consume insane amount of resources and energy to design things that eventually people throw away,’ she states. in this realisation her love of taking apart products was born. see more of amin’s work below or go to instagram, vimeo and youtube, where amin posts all of the clips from tinker friday and sometimes the making of the work.

designboom has received this project from our ‘DIY submissions‘ feature, where we welcome our readers to submit their own work for publication. see more project submissions from our readers here.

edited by: kieron marchese | designboom