PowerStep Pruner and Lopper

Tacaruna or the taming of the jungle

Tacaruna was designed to become a milestone in modern landscape gardening: when Edmundo Cavanellas and Oscar Niemeyer, an architect and pupil of Le Corbusier, met with Roberto Burle Marx in the Brazilian Pedro Do Rio in 1959, they commissioned him to create a true showpiece of a garden. And the landscape designer Roberto Burle Marx managed to really baffle them with his design: Tacaruna merges the geometric and almost sculptural arrangement of flower beds in a highly impressive manner with the giant trees of a "tamed" jungle. The design of the PowerStep pruner and lopper, with its form and function, allows the user to be similarly imaginative when working on their garden designs, because it lends the cutting of bush and tree boughs a new feeling of lightness. The design centres on an advanced cutting mechanism that automatically recognises the thickness of branches and then cuts them in several steps: thin branches are cut like twigs in a single step just like with "normal" pruners. When trying to cut thicker branches, however, the tools's PowerStep technology is automatically activated as soon as its handles are opened wider. How many of the three possible cutting steps are needed in order to cut a particular branch is determined in a highly intelligent and interactive manner, because as soon as the handles of the lopper open, the number of steps to accomplish the task shows up on the display. Thus it is not necessary to set the cutter manually -- the garden tool "thinks along" so to speak and, in combination with the ergonomically optimised shape of the otherwise light pruner and lopper, makes the workload considerably easier on the gardener -- through the tool's intelligent design, taming the private "garden jungle" turns into a functional and formal experience.

Winner red dot award: product design 2009
red dot: best of the best
http://en.red-dot.org/2775.html?&cHash=5e450a6f56bb0b7d43423f48ac022283&a...

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• 2009
• 06
• 2206