The problem with mattresses and the RMIT alum who’s trying to solve it

RMIT alum Maximillian O’Brien doesn’t shy away from solving tough problems, so when he noticed just how many mattresses were lying on the roadside, he took matters into his inventive hands.

Every year, 1.8 million mattresses are discarded in Australia¹. With intertwined coils and copious amounts of adhesive, mattresses are difficult and expensive to recycle. Although organisations in most states are tackling the problem, the issue of creating fully recyclable mattresses is not getting nearly as much attention.

RMIT design alum Maximillian saw an opportunity to design an award-winning mattress called Flow that would not only be comfortable, but easy to dissemble at the end of use.

“I could see quite clearly that end of life was just not in the design process at all, so I knew if I changed that one thing, then a lot of positive change could happen,” he said.

Person making a bed with striped sheets, next to a mattress labeled 'Flow', with a modern lamp and open laptop on the floor.

Finding the right fit

A high school teacher in his home country of New Zealand spotted Maximillian’s talent for product design and suggested he study overseas. It led him to the Diploma of Product Design at RMIT where the hands-on learning proved to have huge appeal for the young designer.

“You were able to live in the workshop basically and learn a lot more CAD (computer-aided design),” he said.

“It was kind of like entry into the hard skills that you need to know.”

After finishing the diploma, Maximillian began the Bachelor of Industrial Design (Honours) with the Flow mattress being his honours project.

Maximillian’s innovation and hard work was recognised with the Dean’s Award and Design Excellence Award at RMIT.

Collaboration key to design

A fascination with sleep inspired Maximillian to take a closer look at the mattress industry. He took a tour of a mattress manufacturer in New Zealand before consulting with the Australian Bedding Stewardship Council to discover the real pain points with recycling.

“I understood from the get-go that [while] I have a good knowledge of industrial design and a great knowledge of design in general, when you want to make a project of large impact, you are often going to areas that are not your field of expertise,” he said.

“Someone else's perspective needed to be gained in all the areas that I was going to investigate, so I needed to talk to the experts.”

Among the many mattress specialists he consulted, Maximillian said one of the most helpful was the team at Soft Landing in Victoria, Australia's largest mattress recycler.

“Every day they're waking up and dealing with the fact that these mattresses are not designed to be recycled, and then they go ahead and try and recycle them,” he said.

“So there was a lot of juicy design work that opened up through that.”

Diverting landfill

The visible problem of mattress recycling was a driving factor for Maximillian’s quest to design a product that could be part of a circular economy.

“I could see roadside mattresses scattered all over the streets and I was just like, how does this happen?” he said.

“Why is this happening and how can we solve this? It’s a huge problem.”

Using one material, rather than multiple materials, was the key to unlocking a more streamlined way of using a mattress and then recycling it. This led Maximillian to investigate a 3D printed foam material designed in Chicago, but it was a polymer material made by a company in Osaka, Japan that he settled on using for Flow.

“I ended up getting it shipped to Australia and doing a whole bunch of testing with it and a big block of this material,” he said.

“It was nice to sleep on, which I did, but it was a little bit more rigid than I thought. So I ended up figuring out how to design the inner mono material with isolated compression, meaning that all the different parts of the mattress compress individually. It means that your sleep is more comfortable.”

The Flow mattress is sealed with chain stitching, which Maximillian noticed on a bag of jasmine rice when he was cooking a green curry with his roommate.

“I looked it up on YouTube, figured out how to do it and then ordered the machine that stitches that bag the following night, and that is what I used to contain the outer casing.”

Maximillian’s innovation and hard work was recognised with the Dean’s Award and Design Excellence Award at RMIT. He was also a finalist for the Graduate of the Year Awards and earned himself a spot in the top 20 finalists for the James Dyson Award, which recognises the best inventions by young design engineers.

In the future, Maximillian’s sights are set on finalising the patent process for Flow and also commercialising the mattress so it’s readily available to consumers.

Story: Kate Jones

Sources

¹Australian Bedding Stewardship Council

Explore more

You may also be interested in...

Four RMIT alum designing solutions for better futures 

Meet the innovative, design-led thinkers who are working towards better outcomes in justice, global peace, education and indigenous affairs.

The mushroom-powered business putting the plastic industry on notice

Innovative ways of using mycelium (AKA the root structure of fungus) is rapidly taking off and this RMIT alum hopes the compostable alternative will soon replace plastic packaging.

Creativity, community and social impact in Cambodia

RMIT alum, artist and NGO director Anya Minko carries creativity, global experience and purpose in everything she does.

Acknowledgement of Country

RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business - Artwork 'Sentient' by Hollie Johnson, Gunaikurnai and Monero Ngarigo.

More information