During my time at Carbon, I had the pleasure of collaborating with Osprey — a leading brand in the outdoors market. I worked directly with their founder Mike Pfotenhauer to reimagine what the next-generation of outdoor backpacks would look like.

Mike came to us curious about 3D printing and its role in outdoor gear from a performance, comfort, and sustainability perspective. He wanted to understand how moving beyond traditional manufacturing towards computational design and digital manufacturing could usher in a new generation of gear.

As a Product Design Engineer with a focus on soft goods, I was responsible for conceiving and demonstrating how we could leverage 3D printed elastomeric lattice structures to create a better pack and help scale it to production. After a few in-person design sprints and working sessions the pandemic hit. We were forced to collaborate remotely over zoom with partners across the globe from the US to Europe to Asia.

The entire process using Carbon DLS took about one year with only six months for us to iterate on the design, enabling Osprey to take this product to market rapidly. What emerged was a collection of two backpacks that utilize materials and technologies that had never made their way into outdoor bags before.

Leading that ingredient list is a 3D-Printed Fitscape Lumbar support that I designed. The lumbar functions like a foam to provide cushion support but is computationally tuned with a conformal, zonal, Voronoi lattice while adding ventilation for breathability plus an anti-slip texture that keeps your pack in place.

Osprey UNLTD packs are available for sale here.