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PUF Metered Dose Inhaler

PUF Metered Dose Inhaler

Kelly Custer
July 29, 2017
2 Comments

PUF is a metered dose inhaler concept designed to offer users a product they are proud to own. This ergo focused, refillable inhaler promotes proper use, while providing a sustainable alternative to today's disposable inhalers. With its compact form and eye-catching color options, PUF is a transformative asthma accessory.



The project was thought up by two brothers at the design studio, Creative Session, as a community design challenge. The goal of the challenge was to bring attention and creative energy to rethinking today's asthma inhaler.

I wanted to design an inhaler that an asthmatic would be proud to own and use. That focused my sights on thinking of the inhaler as a modern, intuitive, accessory. I wanted the user to flaunt their inhaler, just as they would their shiny new Iphone.

Letting the user's personality shine through, meant offering the product in multiple colorways. The colors I chose all stem from chemical elements- copper, aluminum, and cobalt. While these color options are vibrant and flashy, they still are cohesive with the overall product family, maintaining a level of sophistication.


At the beginning of a project, my ideas pour in fast so I like to work with pen and paper. This simple medium allows me to scribble any and every idea that comes to my head. I let the ideas flood out as rough sketches, thumbnails, or doodles... whatever it takes to note the thought.

I revisit these brainstorm pages and begin selecting and editing down my ideas into the strongest concepts. From there, I'll stay with pen and paper, but I'll begin developing my ideas into concepts with more refined line work. At this stage, I try to work through every aspect of each concept on paper.

Once I am confident that have thought through each concept fully, I use my pen sketches as reference, and I move into Photoshop to create sketch renderings of the concept in full. I illustrate each concept on one page using views to describe every functionality and aesthetic. These sketch renders become my guide as I move into CAD.

With the concept pages in hand, I move into CAD. For this project, I modeled PUF in Rhino. I used my orthographic sketches as a starting point to ensure that I maintain the same proportions that I was happy with in the sketch phases. Once I locked in the proportions, I focused on functionality/mechanisms, and then moved onto aesthetics.

Once I had the finished CAD model, I imported the data into Keyshot and began exploring both CMF options and views. I built up the rendering scene and then mapped out the best views to tell the product's story.

Last but not least, I created an animation for the aspects of the design that were hard to explain in still images. I also used Keyshot for this animation.






The PUF Inhaler project was very well received and I learned an enormous amount from the process.

Above all else, I learned to push myself. I am so familiar with design projects that are focused on a tight budget, endless constraints, and rushed timelines that I found myself focusing only on product solutions that were feasible and practical. With this being a community based project, I found a huge amount of value in being able to see how other designers were handling the very same assignment. The other inhaler concepts that I gravitated to the most were very forward thinking and quite abstract. This pushed me to try new techniques and let go of merely seeking a practical design solution. I was very happy with the result.

Kelly Custer

Knoxville, TN

2 comments on “PUF Metered Dose Inhaler”

  1. This is amazing and as an asthmatic, I would pick this over my plastic inhaler in a heartbeat.
    I realize the focus of the project was to make it look more modern and pleasing, but this would also address the large issue of plastic waste. I hate the canisters aren’t prescribed by themselves and instead have to have a whole new inhaler each time (despite the fact that the canisters are easily removed from the inhaler).
    I hope this actually goes into production some day.

  2. Interesting. You mentioned "refillable." How is it refilled~ is the canister itself refillable and then pressurized somehow by the device?

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