Product design & engineering — est. in a borrowed garage

We design the parts
you never see fail.

OSSATURE is a product design & engineering studio. We take hardware from napkin sketch to tooling-ready — and we obsess over the skeleton, not the skin.

Load 01

The practice

Most studios decorate. We load-test — every seam, every hinge, every gesture a hand will make ten thousand times.

OSSATURE works at the layer beneath the surface: the frame, the fastener, the thermal path, the tolerances nobody photographs. Products that survive real hands, real drops, real years.

Small team, deep bench. Designers who can read a FEA plot, engineers who argue about radius fillets. One roof in Rotterdam, partners on two factory floors.

  • Industrial design form, CMF, ergonomics
  • Mechanical engineering enclosures, mechanisms, FEA
  • DFM & sourcing tooling, vendor liaison
  • Prototype lab CNC, SLA, bench testing
Inside the OSSATURE prototype lab: engineers around a machined aluminium housing on a workbench, warm task lighting, tools and calipers on a pegboard behind.
The lab, Rotterdam — where sketches get stress-tested
Load 02

Recent weight-bearing work

A rugged handheld field instrument with an oversized knurled grip, photographed on wet concrete in dramatic side light. Instrument · 2 yrs

Fieldstone — geology probe

A handheld soil analyser rebuilt around a single die-cast spine. Fewer parts, better grip, survivable at −20°C. Shipped with a partner factory in Eindhoven.
A minimalist modular shelving system of powder-coated steel ribs holding ceramic objects, in a sunlit studio with long shadows. Furniture · 1 yr

Ribcage shelving

Flat-packed steel ribs that assemble without a single screw. Load-rated, tool-free, and honest about being a skeleton.
A disassembled medical infusion pump laid out in a precise exploded grid on grey paper, components casting soft shadows, top-down view. Medical · 3 yrs

Drip — infusion pump redesign

Reduced a ward-cluttered pump to one hand-cleanable assembly. Clinician-tested in three simulated wards before a single mould was cut.
Load 03

How we carry it

  1. Weight it

    Two weeks of teardown, user shadowing and constraint mapping. We leave with the real problem, not the briefed one.

  2. Skeleton first

    Structure, mechanism and thermal layout before any styling. Ugly-early is our love language.

  3. Skin with intent

    Form follows the frame. Every visible surface earns its place — or gets machined away.

  4. Break it, repeat

    Bench tests, drop towers, gloved-hand studies. We break ten so your users break zero.

  5. Hand over the bones

    Tooling-ready CAD, drawings, vendor introductions. You own everything, including our mistakes, documented.

Load 04

The crew

The OSSATURE team of eight standing in their workshop beside a large steel frame prototype, candid and unposed, late afternoon light through factory windows.

Eight people, one CNC, an unreasonable number of clamps.

We stayed deliberately small. Every project gets a designer and an engineer in the same room from day one — no handoffs, no telephone game. Illustrative example of a typical engagement: one principal designer, one mechanical engineer, one prototype technician, twenty weeks.

Illustrative — team composition varies per project