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At first blush this Toyota Award, by Japanese industrial designer Tokujin Yoshioka, is mystifying. What is the form meant to represent? Is it arbitrary? Yoshioka is, after all, described as a contemporary artist as much as a designer.

Industrial designer Octavio Barrera hails from Spain's Canary Islands, where this project was executed. Barrera was hired to design a full complement of furniture—benches, tables, shelves, etc.—for the offices of the Rayuela Association, a community organization in Tenerife.To keep things affordable, Barrera designed everything out of plywood, all with straight cuts and unfinished edges. These pieces would be too lightweight to reliably stand on their own. Thus for ballast he specified Canary Island concrete block, the region's version of CMUs, which are made using local volcanic rock:

Here's a good piece of UX design, for challenging outdoor situations. Nestout's portable power banks have waterproof caps for the ports, as many outdoor products do. But those caps only work when they're plugged in. The assumption has always been that you've got the cap on when it's raining out.But what if you need to charge, and can't get under cover? For that situation, the Japanese outdoor brand has designed this water-resistant CAP-1. You push your charging cable's business end through a silicone gasket, plug in, then screw the entire thing shut on the powerbank's threaded neck.

We will tell you in a moment, but first we would like to encourage you to enter the 2026 Core77 Design Awards, the final deadline is tomorrow night, Friday March 27th. You've done the design work, now get the recognition. This prestigious competition celebrates excellence in design across various disciplines, recognizing innovative projects from professionals AND students alike. Don't miss your chance to showcase your work on a global stage and gain industry recognition: Enter Now.- - - - - - - - - The

These unusual-looking Aluflex chairs were designed in 1951, by Swiss industrial designer Armin Wirth.

This inventive piece of furniture is by The New Raw, a Rotterdam-based design studio pushing the boundaries of robotic-arm 3D-printed furniture. Called the X Bench Swing, it's a two-person alternating-direction rocking chair.

This Tempo chess clock is by L.A.-based industrial designer Mike Jacobs. It channels the spirit of both vintage Braun and modern-day Teenage Engineering. It's rare to see an object that's both slick and playful, but Jacobs pulls it off. The se

If you'd like to design bikes for a living, you can go to ID school, and adapt the assignments accordingly. But if you'd like dedicated instruction, there's actually a Tokyo College of Cycle Design. The only school in Asia dedicated to bicycle design, they offer two-, three- and four-year design programs.

W.steps is the Swedish company that makes that compact telescoping ladder (previously known as Telesteps). Ladders are known danger points on jobsites, so "safety is built right into the design," the company writes. "Our Safe Locking system uses bright red indicator tabs so you can instantly see when each rung is securely locked."

Do people care how their furniture is made? They might, if you showed them. A recent exhibition put on by Proof of Concept, a design platform that explores production methods, revealed the prototyping process behind David Irwin's Baleen Lounge Chair. It shows the public the unfamiliar-to-them stage where you have to manually create affordable stand-ins for industrial processes in order to produce an initial, well, proof of concept.