Tag: Design

Eating fast food while sitting in your car is kind of sad, but I still do it. When you're in the middle of nowhere and starving, it's often the only option, with ubiquitous burger joints having COVID-closed dining areas and offering drive-thru only.Unsurprisingly, there's a category of objects designed to ease in-car dining. For starters, this plastic object mates the shape of your cupholder with a French fry container:

My college roommate's dad had an unusual and high-paying job: He was blessed with an extraordinary sense of smell, and worked for a major whiskey manufacturer in quality control. His job was to travel to various plants, and use his nose to confirm that each blend would taste exactly like the same blends made at the other plants.Because his nose was his moneymaker, each night he'd suck warm salt water from a Dixie cup up each nostril and spit it out of his mouth. (My roommate told me he'd grown up accustomed to the awful "HHHKKKKK" sound of his dad doing this each night.) Because of this daily salt water regimen, he hadn't had a cold in over 20 years!This invention might've given my roommate's dad a run for his money:

Automotive finishing expert Takahiko Izawa runs Rohan Izawa Art Design, a car customizer with peerless techniques. Izawa spent over ten years perfecting "IZ METAL," a type of metal paint that he can spray onto a car and actually engrave into.Other finishers can do similar things on small parts of a car, like side mirrors and door handles, that can be chromed and subsequently engraved; however, Izawa eschews this method because it produces a finish that breaks down under UV over time. Izawa's IZ METAL technique, in contrast, not only retains its original finish over time, but al

Local Motors, the company that introduced the radical concept of what they called the "co-creation design" of small-batch automobiles, with royalites paid to the designers, has gone out of business.Two years before the emergence of Quirky, a product development platform that also championed co-creation design, Local Motors set up shop in 2007 and began building an online community of designers and design fans. Members submitted automotive designs for the community to vote on for development, and by 2008 they'd chosen their first model: The Rally Fighter, designed by Sangho Kim, who was then a student at Art Center.

This has me pretty conflicted. I love a cleverly designed tool, and this one clearly fits the bill, but I am questioning what we are doing as a society that creates the need for this tool.The HydroFlask Flex Strap Customizer was designed to allow you to easily remove the strap on your HydroFlask and replace it with one of a different color. Here's how it works, and you'll see why I call it clever:

This strange Japanese amusement device walks the line between innovative and creepy. The Punirines Touchable Digital Pet is, like the original Tamagotchi……a digital pet trapped inside an electronic case. But there's a finger-sized hole in the Punirines' case, so you can insert a digit and "pet" your Punirines. An animation of your finger appears on-screen, and you feel a texture—described as "squishy" in the product copy below—on your fingertip.

German inventor Michael Linden has designed a storage system that it's impossible to outgrow. Called Tavar, it's an easy-to-assemble modular system of panels and connectors that allows you to build an infinite number of rectilinear configurations, and you can integrate doors and drawers too.

Alba is a Portugese manufacturer of cast iron wood stoves. Although they offer traditional models, like this Metafire Stove…They also have two rather radical departures from the form, by designer Francisco Providência:R2D2 Stove

Mechanical engineer Amy Qian purchased a cabinet-style SawStop table saw, which was loaded into her Honda Element on a pallet by a forklift at the store. When she got home, she then had to figure out how to get the 400-pound unit safely out of the vehicle—by herself.Qian's clever solution utilizes the built environment, two elements she fabricated herself, two tools she had lying around, and some 2x4s:

Carson Terry, a metal fabricator who goes by the handle Hossly, doesn't mind switching to wood for an interesting project. Mechanical engineer Amy Qian of AmyisMakingStuff designed a simple sofa unit that quickly extends into a bed and is designed to fit inside a Honda Element, and Terry built it: