Miswak-chic?

By: Ehsaan Mesghali

Leen Sadder is a graduate student at the School of Visual Arts (SVA). For her 3D design class she was instructed to redesign the concept of the first object she threw away after class was dismissed. Little did she know, the toothpaste she threw away would lead to quite the eruption on the blogosphere.

Leen’s research eventually led her to reconsider the use of toothpaste and the toothbrush for that matter. She decided to focus on the reinvention of the miswak (a common oral hygiene tool used in the Middle East) and see its potential introduction as a competitor to the standard practices of oral hygiene in the western world.

There are some benefits to using a miswak as a replacement to the common toothbrush and toothpaste, some highlighted in various treatments of the project include biodegradability, the organic nature of the product and its potential portability resulting in all day oral hygiene, not just morning and night. With that said Leen also had to provide solutions to the current problems facing repeated miswak use.

It’s currently common to bite off the outer layer of the twig to reveal the bristles within and simply chop off the used bristles when they’re used. Leen felt these methods wouldn’t sit too well with a western audience therefore she devised a cap that both twirls down the twig removing the outer later and also chops off old bristles similar to a cigar cutter. Leen also put together an entire branding package and marketing campaign for the potential product.

Dozens of blogs picked up the project, including power blogs like Treehugger and Gizmodo just to name a few. The commentary on these sites is often quite entertaining (and in internet fashion often times flat out rude). Some commentary is memorable:

“A beautifully clever and elegant idea. I’ve often thought about how poorly designed our teeth are for our modern day use that we need to maintain them with toothbrush and toothpaste. However, I don’t like it when designs such as these are proposed as sustainable solutions. How long would it be before we begin to hear about Miswak deforestation?”

Another common theme was the slight hypocrisy of claiming a sustainable agenda with trigger words like biodegradable but then encasing the product in a not so sustainable plastic tube:

“If the traditional product is so good as it is, it does beg the question of why we would want to wrap it in plastic. One answer, of course, is that for the miswak to compete with mainstream toothbrushes in much of the world, it needs to sit alongside those toothbrushes in the store—so packaging that sits well on the shelf and can be accepted by existing retail infrastructure is central to any market expansion.”

We commend Leen for taking a stab at this project with a critical eye and adding something to the design discussion. Projects that don’t make noise are rarely interesting.