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It was two years ago that we first heard about Base Case, a startup that claimed to have wedged two 24" monitors into a rolling carry-on form factor. Back then it was just teaser images. But now the product's come to market, targeting traveling creatives and spreadsheet crunchers.

I'm really impressed with Brooklyn-based Craighill's focus on what I'll call pure industrial design. The firm has an uncanny ability to lock in on the actual user experience, including offline considerations, while confidently jettisoning the traditional ways those problems have been clumsily solved. They're not afraid to develop entirely new forms that solve problems in new ways, and their products meet a high visual style standard to boot.A great case in point is their Metrolog Ruler, designed as a tableside replacement of the beam caliper, while providing standard ruler functionality. (It doesn't have the reach of the beam caliper's jaws—you won't be taking the diameter of a thick dowel or rod, for instance—but it does mean you don't have a small, sharp tomahawk on your desk.)

This Flossr object, by Swedish industrial design firm SNRGY Studios, is a metal floss tool that's refillable. The idea is that rather than buying floss in plastic dispensers, or those one-off picks, you buy bare spools. (Within the sustainable-goods ecosystem, companies now exist that sell floss refills with paper cores.) There is a bit o

Nikolas Weinstein Studios' sculptures are immediately recognizable. Often composed of thousands of glass tubes, they are defined by fluidity and inspired by the architectural spaces they inhabit. That vision recently earned them a Guinness Book of World Records title for Mangrove, the world's largest glass tube installation. Soaring eight stories throughout the Solaire Resort atrium in Manila, Philippines, the sculpture weighs more than 13 metric tons and contains more than 16,000 individual glass tubes, all cut and woven by hand.The eight-story Mangrove glass tube installation in the

This startling ceramic object is actually a drip coffeemaker. With a glossy, tactile appeal, it speaks of low tech and high craft at the same time. It's also pretty form-follows-function: If the thick ceramic cylinders are the predetermined source material, you pretty much can't imagine this being shaped any other way.

Located at 72nd Street and Central Park West, the Dakota is the oldest luxury apartment building in New York City. The German Renaissance structure, which dates to the 1880s, was designed for a time when the wealthy had servants. They lived in the undesirable parts of the gables, up six or more flights of stairs.Image: Ajay Suresh, CC BY 2.0 In the 1960s, artist and furniture designer Ward Bennett purchased several of these maid's rooms, and renovated it into his own duplex apartment and studio.

The Kadoma City Library, outside of Osaka, Japan, was designed with a café-like vibe. The library's concept is "enjoying reading with coffee."Because beverages and books don't always go together, furniture designer Tatsuki Kokubo designed these for the space, minimizing the chance of accidents:

\From a distance, this might appear to be a Scandinavian Midcentury classic that you missed. But a closer look reveals something startling: What appears to be a gigantic slotted screw, the likes of which you'd never see fully exposed in that era.In fact the chair is modern, by Danish designer Anker Bak and Japanese manufacturer

China's Unitree produces both humanoid robots and dog-bots. Now they've scaled up the former, into something that a driver can climb inside (albeit quite awkwardly). They've just unveiled their GD-01, "the world's first production-ready manned mecha," the company says. It's both drive-able and autonomous (or at least remote-controllable). The demo video is straight-up weird. First off, they're branding it as a "civilian vehicle." Imagi

In the mid-20th century, when American carmakers were churning out convertibles, European manufacturers had a thriftier solution: The roll-back canvas roof. It was a much more economical way to provide an open-air experience. The Citroen 2CV and the Renault 4 offered them. Today Renault has revived the Renault 4 as an EV. And the Plein Sud ("Due South") version of the Renault 4 E-Tech, as it's called, has also brought back the canvas roof.