Your Very Own Mobile ThinkTank — for the Road or the Office

A pioneer in coating products that transform ordinary surfaces into writable ones, IdeaPaint came up with, well, a new idea: What if we took brainstorming and collaboration on the road, literally? “For years, our customers have been telling us they need something to complement our dry-erase paint, to have options throughout their space that were both beautiful and functional,” explains Jeff Avallon, vice president of business development for IdeaPaint.

Making the decision to move beyond paints and coatings, the manufacturer tapped Primo Orpilla, cofounder of Studio O+A (the 2016 National Design Award recipient for interior design, incidentally) to collaborate on not only mobile furniture, but also a mobile trailer that could be carted anywhere ideas may strike.

Dubbed ThinkTank Mobile, the resulting tricked-out unit is a customized version of Happier Camper’s retro-mod trailers with a comfy and adaptive interior designed by Orpilla and writable surfaces made possible with IdeaPaint’s products. The trailer can really be towed on roads, but it can also sit stationary within a larger office interior as a fun meeting space. One would expect nothing less from the design firm that’s shaped innovative workplaces for such companies as Uber, Cisco, Yelp and other high-profile, but confidential, clients in Silicon Valley.

In addition to ThinkTank Mobile, Orpilla created two furniture pieces for IdeaPaint in collaboration with Brooklyn multidisciplinary design-build firm Uhuru. Pivot is a mobile whiteboard when vertically oriented; tilted into the horizontal position, the board becomes a bar-height tabletop. Measuring 42 inches wide by 72 inches high/long, the board comes in birch ply with a clear writable coat or magnetic metallic with a white coat and is supported by hand-turned white-oak legs. Meanwhile, Hive is a second mobile whiteboard that stays in a fixed upright position for writing-board purposes only. It comes in the same finishes as Pivot and can be completed with glides or casters.