AutoWed Wedding Machine by Concept Shed from Conceptshed on Vimeo.

By Alice Vincent, Wired UK

It’s always nice when bonkers design concepts become a reality. Like a parking meter vending machine that will “marry” you and your buddies for jokes.

Concept Shed’s AutoWed Wedding Machine offers just that. This meticulously built 2.5 metre tall creation started out as a joke until an American museum commissioned the Cornwall-based creative team to make it a reality.

AutoWed inventor Sam Lanyon explains to Wired.co.uk: “About a year and a half ago we were playing around with an idea about the bastardisation of a traditional wedding by crossing it with a parking meter. We stuck it into the sketchbook and it just sat there as an idea.”

Marvin’s Marvellous Mechanical Museum in Detroit, in the US, liked that idea. Thus, over 300 bespoke parts, made from materials ranging from plywood towaterjet-cut aluminium detailing were gathered and the Cadillac-pink love machine was born.

As the video above shows, the AutoWed machine mimics the ceremony used to unite couples in matrimony to produce a beautifully printed, if totally unofficial, certificate for a dollar or UK pound. Following the insertion of your spare change, you can enter the details of you and your partner or best-friend-forever on a fancy steampunk-inspired keyboard and enjoy the robotic voice reading out your respective names. In true vending machine style, the AutoWed also pops out a pair of rings in plastic eggs to complete the faux ceremony.

Lanyon has been amazed by the impact the super-cute machine has had. “Within three days of linking it on the website we’ve had 34 pages of Google results about it. It’s quite crazy.”

Indeed, such is the interest in bringing more AutoWed machines to a bar near you, Concept Shed is simplifying it for more profitable fun for the venues which choose to install it: “We’re going to be designing a simplified version. This one looks great but the custom-built keyboard and other details means that it’s quite expensive. So we’re producing a cut-down version for other bars to appreciate the payback.”

We don’t envisage any serious happily-ever-afters romances as a result of the AutoWed machine, but Concept Shed are pleased with the fact it exists: “It’s just a fun vending machine. We come up with crazy ideas and it’s great to be able to have the opportunity to make them.”