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This post took a wrong turn in Albuquerque and just arrived in the publishing queue, here's what we looked at *last* week:An industrial design classic: The Bic 4 Color Pen from 1970. Over five decades old, still selling in the millions. Nendo's wonderful Toru, an electric kettle for Alessi, perfectly reconciles gesture with form.Pentel'

This simple Tombo Hanger, by Japanese studio Drill Design, perfectly captures the spirit of Enzo Mari's Autoprogettazione.

While New York is known as "The City That Never Sleeps," Sibiu in Transylvania is known as "The City Where Houses Don't Sleep." There, the steeply-pitched roofs of the houses often feature, well, eyebrow dormers:Initially designed in the 15th century, these were created not for their visual effect, but to provide attic ventilation. It's an economical way to interrupt a roof with apertures, without having to frame labor- and material-intensive dormers with proper windows.Image: Martin Greslou, CC0

Visitors to the Nice Côte d'Azur Airport, and the Die Neue Sammlung design museum, will spy an unusual seating surface: This SurfBench, whose linked seat slats react to the sitter's motions. The bench was the diploma project of Kim André Lange, during his time as an Industrial Design student at G

How many types of holes do you see on a daily basis? British industrial designer Sebastian Bergne pays homage to his favorite types with this card set.

Swedish architect Gert Wingårdh designed this Kvarnhuset ("Mill House") in 2000, as a small vacation getaway. There's a highly unusual detail you can just about make out:The downspout is open on one side. It's simply a gutter that's been placed vertically. Wingårdh

One Canadian cultural export has been axe throwing. In the 2010s, Toronto's Backyard Axe Throwing League spurred interest in multiple countries, with bars and taverns setting up throwing lanes.For the most part, children were excluded from these events. But an unknown inventor came up with a clever design for a child-safe way to hurl edged weapons at a target.Edged or pointed projectiles pierce a target's fibers, and remain lodged through friction. To pierce cork with a dart, or wood with an axe, the edges must be sharp. The innovation here is to keep the projectiles dull, and make the target's fibers much easier to pierce, by making those fibers gigantic. Hence this toy set-up:

Proof that inspiration can come from anywhere.We take it for granted that chocolate bars are molded into segments, so that we can cleanly break off a portion. It's unknown who, precisely, came up with this early bit of UX design. But it was likely devised in an 18th-century French chocolate factory. Images of chocolate sold by French chocolatier Antoine Brutus Menier in the 1830s show that the bars are molded into six segments.

This would be difficult for Gen Z to picture, but in the days of landline phones, those were the key source of remote-person to at-home-person information sharing. It was common in the 20th century to have a dedicated memo pad next to the house's most prominent phone (ours was in the kitchen). Sometimes this was just a stack of paper, but there was also a product category in its own right:While those disappeared decades ago, in 2017

More unusual furniture from Thailand: This round table has a top that's divided into four quadrants. The base is actually four different legs, each attached to a quadrant above, which can be hinged downward onto that leg. This allows you to achieve some atypical configurations: