Yanko Design - Form Beyond Function

If you’ve been keeping track of the Geneva Motor Show happening right now, you’ll know that everybody’s talking about this absolute underdog that’s stolen the show and has had jaws dropping everywhere. From out of the smoke came India’s TAMO (short for Tata Motors) to steal hearts with its RaceMo car.

The car is nothing short of stunning, with a style that borrows inspiration from the best (do you see the McLaren influences?). Designed completely in-house, in collaboration with Marcello Gandini (known for his legendary Lamborghini Countach), the car wasn’t just unveiled at the Geneva Motor Show, it’s also making its debut in Forza Horizon 3, so grab that XBOX controllers, bros! It’s time for a test drive!

Designer: TAMO

Global warming has a strange way of working. While theoretically it means the earth’s average surface temperature is increasing, there are some places that are seeing a decrease in temperatures. In short, homes will now be forced to have either an air conditioner or a heater in them.

The Egloo has an incredibly pleasant, effective, and ingenious way of battling low temperatures. It uses regular tea light candles to generate heat that’s powerful enough to raise the temperature of a large room by 2-3° in just half an hour. Made out of terracotta, this nifty device has two domes that trap the candle heat between them, releasing it through a small orifice on the top. No electricity, no batteries, just a bunch of tea-light candles that cost 10 cents a day to make your room pleasantly toasty!

Egloo manages to do something rather marvelous. It replaces an expensive appliance that wastes electricity with an alternative that is easy to use and is made from natural materials. Terracotta as a material is nothing short of a wonderful choice for the Egloo. It has the ability to absorb and dissipate not just heat but even cold (for centuries, Indian households relied on terracotta pots to keep their drinking water colder than room temperature). With the Egloo, all you need is a couple of candles and the terracotta does the rest of the magic. In fact, it continues heating your room long after the candles have burnt out! (Psst… you can swap regular candles for scented ones to set the temperature as well as the mood!)

Egloo’s design gets full marks too. Its shape while designed for efficiency, is cute and looks good both indoors and outdoors. The terracotta looks great in its naked color but is also available in colored matte, glazed as well as ripple textured variants. Made entirely out of clay with just a single metal grid, the Egloo comes at an incredibly reasonable price and if maintained, can last forever! Find me another well-designed, everlasting, environment-friendly $53 room-heater. I dare you!

Designer: Marco Zagaria

BUY IT HERE: $50.00 $60.00

Artyom Trofimenko’s concept KAMAZ Vision truck looks like something straight out of Transformers! Cab-over trucks usually disregard aerodynamics to fit within length regulations, but this design does what it can to minimize wind resistance with a slicked back panoramic top glass section and air-directing surfaces. In a menacing all black, it would definitely be a Decepticon!

Designer: Artyom Trofimenko

Ever sat in a fancy car with seats that both heated and cooled?! There’s almost nothing more luxurious! The DEGRÉ applies the same idea to furniture for your home.

Minimalist in form, it’s a perfect entryway piece that you can use to sit on or place items. With its built-in heating/air-conditioner, it will cool or warm anything on or around it! Cozy up after playing out in the snow, warm your shoes before leaving the house… OR chill out after a run on a hot day!

Designer: Accent

“By its playful shape and its warm materials, it invites the user to get closer to it, use it, sit on it, sit astride, back against it. DEGRÉ is the rest next to the fireplace, it’s the cat purring on our feet at the end of the bed, it’s the coffee break in a snowy morning,” Designers Tim Defleur & Benjamin Helle told YD.

“The heat is diffused towards the floor and thus grows around the product and the user. It also diffuses the heat through the foam and the upholstered fabric in order to get a nice and inoffensive temperature when sitting on it or when we put clothes on it to keep them warm,” said Defluer & Helle.

“You can set the temperature directly on the minimal interface on the product or via a smartphone app. A leather loop helps you to move it simply as your favorite pet.”

Horizontal printers are not only an aesthetic vibe-killer in your office, but they also take up way too much space. As you might infer from the name, the Vertical Type Printer flips things around to both save space and look sharp!

Sleek and upright, this minimal twist on the printer is one you won’t mind having on display. Its vertical form is not only an aesthetic enhancement, but functionally easy-to-use and efficient. Unlike traditional printers, the VTP houses four replaceable color drum units for toner. When it’s in use, the drum units will print on a transfer medium before transferring the print onto paper.

Designer: Jiang Yujie

The interaction of squeezing toothpaste, shampoo, or ketchup, is quite a tactile one… but that experience always stuck to the FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) market. The Pillowy Humidifier does something unusual by trying to put that experience into a home appliance. Imagine squeezing some humidity out of a gadget. The more pressure you apply, the more humidity is released by the machine. It’s quite an unusual thing to have such a tactile experience in a touchscreen dominated world. I imagine it would make for an incredibly enriching user experience. After all, phones are now trying to do something similar with 3D touch too, right?

Designer: Lu Yicong