Tag: Inspiration

Here's what we looked at this week:Alessandro Stabile's beautiful Areo Chair for Kristalia: The Thonet No. 14 of our time? David Chipperfield Design's plywood bathtub for Agape.A clever add-on spout for camping vessels.

This wonderful, utilitarian design from the 1950s was made by a company called Blue Seal. It's a handy portable lamp that can be used on a desk, or clamped to a surface. The reflector seals against the underside of the base, like a clamshell, protected the bulb within during transit. It's made of aluminum, and this particular version has had its original finish stripped off.

This 06 Sidetable is by German industrial design firm Momentum Studio. To create it, minimal cuts were made in a 5mm aluminum sheet:A major focus during the development was the efficient nesting of the laser-cut parts. We managed to use 96% of the raw material area for the final product, leaving only 4% off-cuts. This minimal-waste approach not only saves valuable resources but also allows us to offer a fair price while keeping the entire production strictly "Made in Germany".

Jeff and Brandon Serle are engineers from the cleanroom industry. Cleanrooms are used for the manufacture of pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, medical devices and aerospace parts, where the environment needs to be pristine. Even the slotted heads in fasteners must be fastidiously cleaned, lest they capture any dust.The Serle brothers thus invented Flush Fasteners. Here's what the heads look like: So where does the driver go? You're not gonna believe this:

Industrial designer Luisa Ruge has worked for Steelcase and Whirlpool, but ultimately gravitated towards her true passion: Animal-centered design. "My journey into animal-centered design began not with theory, but with lived experience at Bergin College of Canine Studies," she writes. "I chose to start with service dogs because of the deep, interdependent bond they share with their human partners—trusting your life to an "animal" is one of the most profound relationships we can witness."I wanted to understand how animals perceive, learn, and respond. What I discovered was transformative: everything we feel travels down the leash. Dogs don't respond to wh

Even climbing walls can be made beautiful, as demonstrated by climbing wall architecture, design and engineering company ICP. The Australian firm's "volumes," which are distributed globally, are designed to be easy for general contractors to install, while being easy on the eyes.

The design of the Barbican Estates, London's residential Brutalist masterpiece, was finalized in 1959. Many of the apartments had bathrooms where the toilet was in its own little room, separated from the sink and bathtub. (This is an arrangement you often see in Japan.) But in the 1960s, as construction began, the housing codes changed. Any room that contained a toilet now had to have its own sink. As-designed, there was simply no room to add a conventional sink to the separate toilet rooms. It fell to German architect Michael Hohmann to solve the problem.Hohmann collaborated with Twyfords, a British sink manufacturer, and their in-house designer Munroe Blair on a radical design that would fit within th

Daniel Hubert, a 3D designer who posts his .stl files on Printables, may be a genius. At a hardware store, he encountered sets of security bits (for driving tamper-proof fasteners) in both black and silver. Where we see specialty bits, Hubert saw chess pieces:

Butterfly effect: Among the things that currently aren't getting shipped through the Strait of Hormuz is naphtha, a crude oil derivative that's used in colored inks. As a result Calbee, the Frito-Lay of Japan, has announced they're switching their chip packaging to black and white. "This measure is intended to help maintain a stable supply of products," the company writes, noting that the color change "will not affect product quality." (Which means, I guess, that they don't actually use the colored ink in the chips themselves.)Tragically, the change also means t

There's something really charming about these chunky, sort of art-totem Miorita furniture pieces. It's also shocking that they're made out of gigantic pieces of old-growth Oak, which are scarce in America; but DEOS Architecture, the firm that created the pieces, is based in Moldova. Romania still has large tracts of old-growth forest, with some stands reportedly being 300-400 years old. So these pieces appeal to me partially for the primitive, designer-as-child form, and primarily out of raw material envy.