This morphing hard drive enclosure is by Antonin Odin, done as an Industrial Design student at France's ENSCI. People increasingly want more visibility over their data, more taste in the objects they live with, and more function from both. ZO is a 12 TB personal server that gives storage a body. Empty, it's a plain aluminium tube. As it fills up, its fins slide out one by one, one millimetre for every 400 GB. Switched off, it keeps its shape: it shows what it holds. It's built to live on a shelf, rather than hide in a rack. An almost ritual object that makes what we entrust to the machine visible and precious. Every part is wire-cut by EDM from a single block of aluminium. The wire, thinner than a hair, separates the rings without removing visible material: closed, the object looks solid, its seams nearly invisible. That process is what lets the fins slide into one another like a telescope.

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