Yanko Design - Form Beyond Function

Where there is VR, there will be a screen, and what better than your phone screen? They’re beautifully hi-res, come with rich colors, and most importantly, they’re always with you. However, carrying a VR headset with you seems like too much of a hassle. That’s unless you’ve got the Figment VR case snapped around your phone.

In a trend to put more and more into or around one’s phones, the Figment headset is almost as wild as the Selfly that literally put a drone onto the back pf your smartphone. Super-thin for the competition in its category (not counting the Google Cardboard, because the cardboard only comes flat packed. It doesn’t go back to a flat design once it’s assembled) the Figment snaps the VR eyepiece to the back of your phone and with the simple click of a switch, makes it spring forward and into place, allowing you to use your phone as a VR headset.

The design is a true champion of innovative thinking. Imagine allowing the billions of smartphone users to have instant access to VR content at the press of a switch. There are obviously some caveats to the Figment. For starters, the wall that separates the left-eye content from the right-eye content is absent in the design. Plus, given that those lenses sit on the back of you’re phone, they would probably have to be made out of some incredibly resilient tempered glass. However I believe the Figment has opened the floodgates for making similar products that make VR incredibly accessible, because until we actually start getting a taste of Augmented Reality, VR is the most obvious future!

Designers: Jake (Jongha) Lee, Rich Park, Soohun Jung & BEBOP Designers.

Well, the sun won’t actually mow your lawn, but it’ll definitely power the lawnmower. The Aurinco lawnmower merges manpower with solar power to provide the optimally energy-intensive lawn-mowing experience. The mower is a hand-pushed machine, but the blades and motors are powered by solar panels that sit out on the top of the lawnmower’s body.

The design of the mower features a folding handle, allowing it to be stored easily. There’s even provision for powering the lawnmower via electricity, in case the sky happens to be overcast… or you live north of the arctic circle. Neat, isn’t it??

Designer: Leonardo Caricato