The team behind the great Moment Lenses is back on Kickstarter for the funding of their latest product, the Moment Case. At the time of writing, the project is well beyond the original $100,000 goal and has pledged almost $520,000 with still eight days to go. I’m not surprised: the Moment Case looks fantastic, and I think its quality and good design are immediately apparent. The Kickstarter page for the project explains the various features of the Moment Case, and the design/engineering process in detail, but if you want to have an even deeper look at the long design research and process from the very first stages to the finished prototypes, don’t miss Designing The Moment Case: The Good, the Bad, and the Work Most People Don’t Show on Core77, written by Erik Hedberg from the Moment team. This accessory deserves to be backed if only for the meticulous approach and hard work this small team has carried out over months.

A few favourite quotes:

With this project we stumbled on a few insights we never would have prioritized without doing this work:

• Speed is all that matters with mobile. Despite people’s ability level, taking a great picture quickly was more important than anything else.
• People get tired of digging into their pocket to find their phone. We found this action loses the nostalgia of taking pictures.
• Without adventure, most people don’t have the creative ability to take great pictures. Every time the scenery and subject were new, people took better pictures.

We’ve never designed a phone case before. When we started looking into doing one, we realized that people take tons of pictures with their phones, but they don’t think of them as cameras — they think of them as phones. We love the vintage quality and novelty of traditional cameras, and wanted to pay homage to that. We wanted to recreate that pride people take in wearing a beautiful Leica around their neck. So we set out to make a case that turns your phone into a camera.

The design process is a beautiful thing because it’s never the same for every project. It’s actually quite similar to riding down a mountain or surfing a wave. You start out knowing what you want to do, but once you get riding you might hit a bump, you might suddenly change direction, or you might even make the best turn of your life and become enlightened for a small second. You also eat shit sometimes. When that happens you have to learn from it, get back up and try again.