By Rain Noe - Sep 27

Wonderful Furniture and Object Designs from Anna Lindgren and Sofia Lagerkvist

Eyes on Front

Anna Lindgren and Sofia Lagerkvist are the design duo behind Front, the Stockholm-based Swedish design group. The fresh, innovative work they do makes it hard to click away from their portfolio. Check out, for instance, this clever coatrack they did for Materia: Or this beautiful Water Steps faucet for Axor:

By Rain Noe - Sep 19

Bombs Explode in New York, New Jersey. Here's the Contraption Designed to Safely Contain Them

The Total Containment Vessel is "an inside-out diving vessel"

On Saturday night a homemade bomb detonated on the sidewalk in Manhattan's Chelsea district, injuring 29 passersby. Investigating police subsequently located a second bomb just four blocks away. Consisting of a pressure cooker connected to a cell phone that served as a timer, and presumably filled with the same ball

By Rain Noe - Sep 16

Conan's Hilarious AirPods Commercial

Mean-spirited but funny

We don't want to spoil this if you haven't already seen it:

By Kat Bauman - Sep 14

Move Over Standing Desk: NiceBalls are the New Cure for Work Stress and Late Capitalism

Stress relief balls. Yep.

Finally, finally, they've made a pair of prosthetic balls for your desk. Why? Because you can't telecommute from your truck, and exposing your workspace to exposed pink lumps is great for de-stressing. Maybe you're exhausted by the creative industry grind, fed up with chaotic freelance juggling, or just stressed out

By Rain Noe - Sep 09

Hilarious Fidget Cube Becomes Kickstarter Smash

With functionless buttons, dials, clickers, switches, etc. it's tactile for the sake of being tactile

Of all the things you could design that would be smash hits, here's one that most wouldn't have thought of. The Fidget Cube is an object that does nothing--in the same way that Seinfeld was a show about nothing. Yet they both deliver satisfying mini-experiences: It's hard to tell

By Rain Noe - Sep 05

The Cuddle Mattress: Slotted For Your Pleasure

Plenty of places to stick those pesky limbs

This is innovative but kind of hilarious. The $1,400-$1,800 Cuddle Mattress has slots running across it crosswise, providing a space for errant limbs to go, both with and without a partner: Stomach-sleeper? Here's a handy place to tuck those pesky toes: I'd be curious to try this out, though I

By Rain Noe - Aug 29

At the Airport Security Line, Remove Your Buckle, Not the Belt

Flybelt is hoping their detachable belt buckles will catch on

It's strange to think terrorism has influenced the design of luggage, yet it undeniably has. Frequent fliers seek out bags with pockets allowing for quick laptop egress and ingress, and external pockets for dumping keys and change into, making the airport security line a bit easier. At some airports

By Rain Noe - Aug 25

Special Effects Artist Creates Batman Costume Containing 23 Functional Gadgets

When cosplay gets you into the Guinness Book of World Records

Julian Checkley is master "special creature effects" fabricator for the film industry, and recently decided to make something to put regular cosplayers to shame: A convincing Batman suit that contains 23 functioning gadgets, like a gaunlet-mounted display linked to a magnetic throwable tracking device, flashbang grenades, a wrist-mounted gas dispenser

By Rain Noe - Aug 17

Harvard Publishes Massive, Free Bauhaus Archive Online!

Did you know Marcel Breuer once designed dorm furniture?!?

When the Nazis took power in the 1930s, Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius wisely, and daringly, escaped to America. Gropius, along with protégé Marcel Breuer, landed teaching gigs at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Harvard subsequently amassed, with Gropius' help, a massive collection of "more than 30,000 [Bauhaus-related] objects, from

By Kat Bauman - Aug 15

This Creepy Walking Skull Is The Roomba We Deserve

An inspiring example of how nerds are the best at everything

If you enjoyed the recently covered spooky strandbeest bicycle, or the futuristic-graphic tattoo gun arm, you might love this creepy dude. The SkullWalker 2.0 is what I hope every in-home robot will look like within my lifetime. While a stained, moving skull with spidery mechanical legs might not be for

By Rain Noe - Aug 12

Can You Guess What This DIY Contraption is For?

Turn it over in your head

Time to put those design thinking caps on. Before you scroll down to the bottom for the answer, let's take a close look at this thing's physical features, to see if you can deduce why they're there. Here's the "front:" We see three wheels in the middle--why wheels?

By Rain Noe - Aug 09

When Splines Were Physical Objects

This is how they used to make curves, back when "cad" meant "jerk"

CAD jockeys among you have a clear idea of what a spline is. However, you may not realize that splines were once physical things. Before CAD and large-format printing, when draftsmen needed to lay out full-sized curves, this is how they did it:

By Rain Noe - Aug 02

Inventor Creates Self-Balancing Stick, We Dream Up the Perfect Application

Mike Rouleau, you are going to be rich

Roboticist Mike Rouleau has constructed, apparently for no reason other than that he can, a self-balancing stick. Observe: Rouleau calls it a Dual Axis Reaction Wheel Inverted Pendulum. To explain, self-balancing, inverted pendulums are a "thing" among a subset of roboticists and tinkerers, but they typically operate like Segways, where

By Kat Bauman - Jul 13

Blunt Talk About The Rio 2016 Olympic Torch

Has #vapelife gone too far?

The official torch design for the Rio 2016 Olympic Games is here and it's… pretty lit. Maybe more so than usual. The winning design was conceived by homegrown designers Chelles & Hayashi of São Paulo, chosen from a field of 76 contending Brazilian firms. While it wasn't the only

By Rain Noe - Jul 06

How That "Ambiguous Cylinder" Illusion Works

Any industrial designer should be able to figure this out instantly

You have to wonder what the medal looks like for winning a "Best Illusion of the Year" award. Assuming they give them out, Meiji University engineering professor Kokichi Sugihara now has one after placing second in 2016's competition, held by the science-promoting Neural Correlate Society. Sugihara's submission was more interesting

By Rain Noe - Jul 05

A Creatively Patriotic Way to Upcycle Baseball Bats

America's favorite ash time

Those of us in America will see a lot of U.S. flags today, most of them fabric, which require maintenance. But an Ohio-based gent named Brooks Hazelbaker produces no-maintenance flags that are meant to hang on a wall, and won't be flapping in the breeze. That's because they're constructed out

By Rain Noe - Jun 24

The British Library Has Made Three Centuries of Copyright-Free Images Available for Download

There's more than a million, and they're all free

The thing about books is that they're not very much good when they're closed and wedged into a shelf. At the same time, no sensible curator would let you put your grubby little mitts on a 250-year-old treasure. So, starting in 2013, the British Library began scanning thousands of books

By Rain Noe - Jun 21

Learn to Make Your Bed the Military Way

..and why you should make yours every morning

As we mentioned in the post on the failed self-making bed, men and women who've been in the military tend to keep the bed-making habit after they've served. Why is that? How, exactly, are they trained to make their beds, and in what manner? To find out we both dug

By Rain Noe - Jun 07

More "Uncomfortable" Product Designs

Architect Katerina Kamprani takes the p*ss out of industrial designers

It's been a few years since architect Katerina Kamprani debuted her "Uncomfortable" product design series, but thankfully the project is ongoing. To refresh your memory, Kamprani "decided to create and design [a line of products] for all the wrong reasons. Vindictive and nasty? Or a helpful study of everyday objects?"

By Rain Noe - May 31

The Herman Miller Clock You Don't Know

Gilbert Rohde's glass-and-metal 1933 design was way ahead of its time

You all know the George Nelson clock designed for Herman Miller. (If you don't, look at the photo below, then get out of my classroom.) Nelson's 1949 design has become so iconic that if we were playing Industrial Design Pictionary, and you had to make your partner say "Herman Miller

By Rain Noe - May 27

Kick-Ass Cuckoo Clocks

Pedro Mealha's modernist take on the classic German timepiece

When you think of cuckoo clocks, if you think of them at all, you probably don't think of minimalism and style. But London-based industrial designer Pedro Mealha does, and produces some rather modernist variants like his model B83: The bird makes its appearance via the small hole at top right:

By Rain Noe - May 10

Mind-Bending, Magnet-Integrating Rube Goldberg Machine

Just when you think you've seen it all in Rube Goldberg machines, someone ups the game with a bit of unexpected creativity. A YouTuber called Kaplamino has incorporated magnets into his set-ups, resulting in some mind-bending kinetic action: That "Magnets and Marbles" video appears to be new territory for Kaplamino,

By Rain Noe - May 10

A Removable Wall Hook, Yea or Nay?

Overdesign, or are we missing the point?

The amount of retailers selling those brass key hooks indicates they're popular. The utility of having something you can quickly hook and unhook, and their classic appeal, is obvious. Is there a modern-day equivalent? A startup company called Dango Products thinks so. Their Loop Hook is a CNC-milled piece of

By Rain Noe - May 05

Finally: A Well-Designed, Attractive, Height-Adjustable, Portable Fold-Flat Laptop Stand with Good UX

Industrial designer Matt Cramsie has checked all of the boxes

Laptop stands on the market generally come in two varieties: Fixed-height… …and height-adjustable. While some of the fixed-height ones are handsome, the problem with them is obvious: We're all different heights and require eyelines at different levels. The issue with the adjustable-height models is the inelegance/fiddliness of their mechanisms. Industrial

By nick foster - Apr 25

The Dawn of a Modern Mechanical Era

You sit on a chair in a kitchen. In front of you on the table is a black, glossy cube. The cube is about the size of your hand and vividly reflects its environment. Sharp edges meet at sharp corners. There are no visible means of manufacture, no split lines,

By Rain Noe - Apr 21

A Brief History of Women on U.S. $20 Bill Designs

The Harriet Tubman $20 is on the way. Here's what came before

This week the U.S. Treasury Department has announced that Harriet Tubman will be featured on the next generation of $20 bills. Countless news articles have already covered the social implications, so we'll turn our attention to the aesthetics. First off: How awful is the Photoshop job being circulated by the

By Rain Noe - Apr 19

Brass Key Hook Madness

For a small, bent piece of metal, it's awfully popular

There are a rash of companies selling these handsome brass key hooks. A sort of low-tech carabiner alternative, they have a nice, classic look that signals their nautical provenance. Those photos above are from Snake Bite Co., which sells them for 22 bucks, or $24 with the ring. They're made

By Rain Noe - Apr 18

Watch This #ProcessPorn Video on How Rubber Gloves Are Made 

Production Methods: Dip Molding

With blow molding or injection molding, a single unit of molds will eject thousands of parts during a production run. In other words if you need 1,000 bottles or 1,000 caps, you don't cut 1,000 molds that each produce one part; there's no economy of scale there. So I was

By Rain Noe - Apr 04

Oh, Just a Chainsaw Attached to a Drone

Finnishing move

This is possibly an April Fools Day (or Aprillipäivä) gag, as it was posted on March 31st, by Finnish folks who are a few hours ahead. A group of Finnish farmers have apparently managed to get a drone to carry a running chainsaw: The POV footage is a little suspect,

By Alexandra Alexa - Mar 30

Everyday Objects Sliced in Half By a Waterjet Cutter

Consider this your Hump Day pick-me-up

Cutaways are endlessly fascinating. Peeling back the layers of otherwise impenetrable objects and getting a glimpse behind their inner workings is a great visualization tool for designers and pretty much anyone who's even slightly curious. Cut in Half, a fairly new YouTube channel, is creating real-life cutaways of everyday objects

By Alexandra Alexa - Mar 17

Blooks: The Art of Books That Are Filled With Anything Except Paper and Ink

You can't judge a blook by its cover

We've all experienced the transformative, transporting power of a good book but what about objects that adopt the book as a form—do they hold a similar ability to move us? For years, Mindell Dublansky, a preservation librarian at the Metropolian Museum of Art's Thomas J. Watson Library, has been collecting

By Core Jr - Mar 11

The End of China's "Weird" Architecture, the Strange History of Scent and Why Creatives May Never be Able to Retire

A weekly selection of great links curated by the Core77 team

Core77's editors spend time combing through the news so you don't have to. Here's a weekly roundup of our favorite stories from the World Wide Web.