Tag: Inspiration

This amusingly overproduced Day Display is by New-Zealand-based Stupid Engineering. "Made of precision milled and bent 2mm aluminium, the Day Display is a Stupid solution to a stupid problem."

This X Deck is a dedicated DJ console made of stainless steel and brass. Though it looks like a piece of 1970s Italian Modernism, it was actually designed present-day by NYC-Paris-based design studio Slash Objects.

Philips has released a dual-sided 24" monitor, intended for business or hospitality environments. The company says the arrangement offers "unmatched convenience" and allows for "seamless collaboration." The idea is that it can be used to share information during face-to-face meetings. However, I think the concept is inherently flawed, from an ergonomic perspective. The entire point of a face-to-face meeting is, well, to see the other person's face. And when we look at screens,

It's pleasing to see a veteran industrial designer practicing the art of reduction. This Monza shelf bracket, by British ID'er Michael Marriott, uses the barest amount of material possible to fulfill its mission: The packaging, too, is quite minimal.

It takes guts for a designer to re-imagine something as basic as a table. But Stuttgart-based industrial designer Fengfan Yang has done just that, in collaboration with Danish furniture brand +Halle.

Since taking over as Chief Creative Officer of Audi, automotive designer Massimo Frascella has made his goal clear: "Making our brand truly distinctive once again," he explains. "We want to shape a brand capable of inspiring desire and creating cultural impact."Frascella—who has put in shifts at Bertone, Ford, Kia and Jaguar Land Rover, where he was formerly Design Director—says that the Audi TT made a strong impression on him. "In 1998, when the first Audi TT arrived at a dealership in Turin, I took a day off work to just look at the car in peace. I was there for hours, looking at the car from every angle, touching every surface. The staff probably thought I was crazy. But for me, the TT was more than just a car. It was a message: you don't need to shout to be heard. You don't need excess to make a statement. You just need clarity. And, more importantly, the courage to follow it."

Here's what we looked at this week:From Japan, a sexy matte black sledge.The Japanese matte black tool trend came from the L.A. car scene.Nifty hardware: These quick-release pins.

Multitool blades are expensive, and tradespeople can extend their lives by resharpening them. We've looked at Jim Dimond's Tiger's Teeth invention, designed for the task, as well as the SharpTool, a drill-based solution from the Netherlands.

French industrial designer Johannes Faure-Brac knows furniture; he grew up in his father's woodworking shop in the French Alps, building traditional furniture. But after gaining two degrees in ID and working in the furniture industry, he found its practices wasteful. "It had become inefficient to produce, store, transport [furniture]," he writes. "A cumbersome, expensive, energy-intensive system."Ever more volume, containers, logistics costs, and wasted energy. To compensate, the industry has cut back on materials and sacrificed quality, comfort, and design. Ultimately, users pay the price for this logic, which impoverishes the object, its use, and the experience [of it]."Faure-Brac spent six years researching and developing an alternative type of furniture. "The goal was not to lighten the furniture at all costs, but to rethink its

This unusual Kael Walnut Folding Chair is by a no-history company called Esspur. While it doesn't appear to be high-quality, the folding design is certainly in