Objects printed with cremation ashes
A method for producing objects by three-dimensional printing incorporating cremation ashes. What is protected is the process, not the piece, and that is the whole invention.
An urn can only say one thing, and it is not the thing you wanted to remember.
An urn is a container. It says that this person has died, and nothing else: a whole life compressed into a generic object that everyone recognises from two metres away. The approach was to move the emotion somewhere else. If the ashes can be incorporated into the printing material, the result no longer has to be a container: it can be a piece with a chosen shape, and that is where the object stops recalling the loss and starts recalling the person. What is protected is the method, not the piece, and that distinction is the whole invention: the catalogue has no limit because there is no catalogue. A well made standard piece already works, but the leap is in the personalised ones, the pieces that reproduce something anchored to a specific memory, an object that person used, a shape that only means something inside one family. Then grief stops being kept on a shelf and starts being something you can hold.
A process patent
What is registered is the manufacturing method, not the resulting object. That is why the scope does not run out: any piece made with that process falls inside it, and there is no need to register each new shape.
The catalogue is the beginning, not the end
Standard pieces solve the simple case and are what makes the business viable. But a catalogue piece is still a container with a better shape: the value appears when the piece is specific to that person.
Relocating the emotion
It is the declared aim of the project. An object anchored to a specific memory changes what you feel when you look at it, and that change is the difference between keeping ashes and keeping someone.
A piece being printed with the registered process