Tag: Inspiration

Here's what we looked at this week:Starlink's new D2C capability can deliver broadband directly to your phone—anywhere. Ronon Bouroullec's Ancora tables give concrete a new look.Experimental kinetic furniture design: Aaron Preyer's Blooming project.

What does it say about our product landscape, when a charging cable lands over $600,000 on Kickstarter because it's guaranteed to last? I can see the allure, as we've all gotten so used to cheap crap that breaks. Swiss company Rolling Square says if you buy their inCharge Life cable, what you're really purchasing is a "lifetime right to own a cable," which makes me a bit queasy—there was a time, though not in this century, that most things were built that way.

This reminds me so much of ID school, when last-minute disaster would strike in the studio.Here we see the Fabrication Workshop, a 7,000-square-foot facility at SUNY Buffalo's School of Architecture and Planning.Students taking the Structures III course investigate structural members as design elements themselves, and build their projects in the Fabrication Workshop in teams.Student Team Group 04 had an unlucky break this week, with their Tensioned Sheet project: They were attempting to c

The XTAPE1 is a newfangled tape measure that uses both tape and lasers. Produced by Chinese manufacturer Mileseey, its designers made an interesting UX choice: While the screen can display the measurement values numerically, as you'd expect… …you can also opt to see a slightly magnified digital representation of the physical tape:

In the 1980s, Japanese toymakers invented the transforming robots that we, in the west, know as Transformers. Here in the 2020s, industrial designer (and former toy designer) Takamitsu Ikoma has designed a scooter inspired by the Transformers. Called the Icoma Tatamel Bike, it's an electric scooter that folds down to the size of a rolling carry-on.

I know this looks like Photoshop manipulation, but these are the actual dimensions of the NIUMM, an electric microcar. Produced by NIU Technologies, a Chinese scooter manufacturer, the vehicle marks the company's push into four-wheeled vehicles. The NIUMM runs off of up to four removable lithium-ion battery

This strange-looking object is the HebeFix, by German fastener manufacturer Eurotec.It mates with a bolt, which locks into place with ball bearings.

This Airlock Dust Port Adapter for DeWalt miter saws is by Ruvim Kubsky, an Ohio-based carpenter. Kubsky 3D-prints tool accessories to make his day job easier. It consists of a simple elbow, a locking mechanism, and a notched fin that perfectly accepts the handle of a 5-gallon bucket.

George Wilkins and Will McCallum run George & Willy, a New-Zealand-based signage design studio. Originally specializing in signage for restaurants and cafes, the firm has branched out into café furniture. Here's their Wall Mounted Café Table:

In a business built on expertise—deep, domain-specific knowledge of product development—the rise of AI challenges some of our most fundamental assumptions. If expertise is suddenly more widely accessible and automated, we must ask: How do we, as experts, continue to differentiate ourselves? How do we evolve in a world where information and insights are no longer scarce but instantly retrievable?Scott Thielman - CTO and Co-Founder of Product Creation StudioThat was the starting point for me. I began asking my team: How are we using these tools? What's