Yanko Design - Form Beyond Function

An Adventure-ready Rescue Drone

Posted: 31 May 2017 09:53 AM PDT

The Eagle Eye drone is a tricopter packed with powerful technologies to give wilderness rescue teams a birds-eye-view of the landscape below. For hard-to-reach areas and treacherous terrain, it uses a cocktail of cameras, sensors and integrated artificial intelligence to know the topology of the field.

Solar powered pylons keep the drone recharged so that it can work autonomously, scanning the ground daily to map track changes due to rain, falling trees that block paths, and the overall growth of vegetation in the area. This way, rescuers are always aware of the best routes and familiar with the territory in order to make the most effective rescues.

Designers: Francois Baptista, Stephane Pietroiusti, Manon Gerard, David Plachez & Gregoire Lauwers

Print is NOT dead!

Posted: 31 May 2017 07:00 AM PDT

The designer of the Print camera concept raises an important question? 20 years later, when you want to show your kids or grandkids snippets and memories of your life as a young person, what will you do? Direct them to your Instagram? Or provide them with a Google Drive link? No, right?

Memories are best preserved and relived in the tactile format, and that’s why Polaroid is making its comeback. There are some memories that should be personal, not on social media gathering blind-likes from practically virtual people who you haven’t met or talked to in years. Print steps in to pioneer that movement with a camera that acknowledges the print format.

Truly simple and smart in its design, the camera features one beautiful screen, 4 buttons on the front, and 2 interchangeable lenses. The screen on the back virtually ditches the bezel (looks like we have a design trend here). It looks a lot like a touch-input screen based on the UI, but is virtually completely controlled by buttons on the front. These large buttons are hard to miss, as they form the front facade of the product, divided beautifully by parting lines that run symmetrically across the product. The two interchangeable lenses allow you to switch between Landscape and Portrait styles, somewhat like the iPhone 7’s camera options.

While Print champions the instant-print format, it doesn’t abandon the web. The camera also allows you to publish your photos online on social media, or save them to your phone (as per my knowledge, only Fujifilm’s latest Instax Square SQ10 allows for physical and digital image storage). We also love the incredibly intuitive branding for the Print that outwardly looks like a finger’print’ but also contains the numbers 1, 2, and 3, in it, just tipping its hat to our age-old tradition of saying “One Two Three Cheese!” before we click a picture!

Designer: Jordan Steranka

This Thumb-sized Pocket-blade Packs Some Punch

Posted: 31 May 2017 05:05 AM PDT

UPDATE: Less than 3 days left in their Kickstarter campaign!

Not many products come with a lifetime warranty… and definitely not products that are subjected to rough use. The Bomber B-2 Nano Blade is quite a surprising exception. You’d expect a knife with a 1mm thick blade to succumb to the elements but you’d be wrong! The tactical blade, despite its rather slim size takes on immense roles, making it the one blade you’ll carry everywhere.

Designed for tactical usage by hobby enthusiasts, campers, and the occasional engineer, the blade is small yet powerful and comes with two types of edges and various possibilities. It works as a slicing blade, capable of replacing your boxcutter, it cuts through materials like leather, wood, and even seat-belts and paracords (known for their resilience). The blade tip doubles down as a screw-driver, and also a staple-remover. More so, you can use it as a fire-starter against a piece of flint, effectively making it the best EDC while camping because one blade cuts your food, cuts the wood, and starts a fire.

Taking inspiration from perhaps one of the most iconic stealth bombers of our time, the Northrop B-2, the Nano Blade is tactical and inconspicuous together. Crafted from 440C heat treated black stainless steel, the hard blade is just 30mm long and 1mm thick. Half of the blade has a flat yet dangerously sharp edge, while the other half has Great American style serrated teeth, known for working against wood like a knife against butter. The entire knife measures at 80mm when opened, making it easy to grip and use, and folds down to just 48mm when folded in, allowing it to slip comfortably into the tiny pocket in your jeans. It even comes with a clip for you to fasten to your belt loop. Designed for every day use, the knife promises never to buckle under rough treatment… and in the rare case that it does, Bomber and Company promise to replace it free of charge!

Designer: Vincent Pilot Ng

BUY NOW: $25.00

Exoskeletal Exercise in Space!

Posted: 31 May 2017 01:21 AM PDT

What could an astronaut and ballet dancer possibly have in common? The answer is in their movement! In space, astronauts move almost as if they’re dancing between one place and another as they float around in zero gravity. Inspired by aerial and ballet dancers, this wearable, full-body device called Orpheus offers astronauts in the International Space Station an entirely new way of exercising.

The current Advanced Resistive Exercise Device is large, static and lacks versatility in terms of the range of exercise and muscles worked. Orpheus not only offers a major reduction in mass and volume (thanks to its aluminum and carbon fiber composition), it also gives astronauts the ability to move freely while placing resistance on the muscles. It’s not only adjustable to suit each user’s unique body shape and size, but programmable to provide fitness routines and muscle training techniques that can be user adapted. Users can even comfortably move about the station as they work and train their bodies simultaneously.

Designer: Mehmet E. Ergül

What do Photography and Pasta have in common?

Posted: 30 May 2017 05:22 PM PDT

When you look at Joseph Joseph’s Spaghetti Measure, you instantly see a resemblance to a camera’s aperture/shutter.

The spaghetti measure borrows a rather nifty mechanism from the camera’s shutter to measure out volumes of spaghetti. A wide opening/aperture constricts when you operate a switch on its side. Markings against this switch help you decide how much pasta to cook by choosing how many people you’ll be cooking for. While some people decide to rely on their hands to measure out clusters of spaghetti, the Joseph Joseph Spaghetti Measure is just one of those beautiful, ingenious products that does the job for you while delighting you with its creativity!

Designer: Joseph Joseph

BUY NOW

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Instant Rocking Chair!

Posted: 30 May 2017 03:57 PM PDT

The Outdoor Bascule rocks. No, I mean it physically rocks! Designed cleverly to turn any flat surface into an immediate rocking chair, the Outdoor Bascule relies on a curved seat to give the chair its rocking action. It turns areas that aren’t conducive to sitting into perfect sitting spots with the added advantage of being able to rock back and forth. Now who doesn’t love that?

Unlike most rocking chairs (or even regular chairs), the Outdoor Bascule is portable and easily transportable. The two armrests are easy to flat-pack and carry, while the chair element itself is stackable, making logistics rather easy. Once you’re at the park, or on your balcony, just fix the armrests to the chair and you have yourself a chair with a backrest that rocks gently without tipping over, just making that evening a delight.

The Bascule (french for see-saw) was built with new parents in mind. Allowing them to rock back and forth with their children, the Outdoor Bascule becomes an interactive element in the playing-time between parents and their infants. However, the Bascule is ideal for all sorts of uses. Wouldn’t you be tempted to carry that to the nearest park and rock gently back and forth while flipping through a book, or crack open a bottle of chardonnay and rock away, being kissed by the sun, listening to soft jazz?

Designer: Rhea Mehta

The “too aesthetic” smartphone?

Posted: 30 May 2017 01:19 PM PDT

Earlier today we were introduced to the Essential Phone. Andy Rubin departed from Google after having “made” Android, to work on this phone and things have been pretty much under the wraps until today, when the phone was officially unveiled… and boy, what an unveiling!

The Essential Phone looks like one of those crazy Coroflot/Behance projects done by some student with the screen stretching from end to end. Undeniably, all these crazy concepts are labeled as iPhone concepts for the year 2020 and so on. However, the interesting bit is that the Essential Phone isn’t a concept. It exists! Designed with a screen that’s hard to wrap your head around, the Essential Phone’s front face literally has a screen wrapped around all of it! That’s right. Virtually no bezel. In fact, the screen even comes with a small indent, allowing the front facing camera to sit proudly on the top of the phone. This is, the Essential Phone.

With the Essential Phone’s rather futuristic aesthetic, we have a rather strange conundrum on our hands. Ask yourself one thing. Would you buy this phone? I for one wouldn’t, and my answer would pretty much unlock a Pandora’s box, but let’s leave that for later. Strangely, like I said, the Essential Phone looks too futuristic for me, and you may have noticed that products that are too futuristic, seldom catch on (Jog your memory… Microsoft did the tablet way before Apple did). Look at the world of Concept Cars for instance. Every year, automobile companies push themselves to release “conceptual” car models that are good to look at, but not to own. Even though their aesthetic is admired on Facebook, reposted on Instagram, favorited on Pinterest, we don’t see them as cars that would “fit” on our roads, and honestly, maybe that’s exactly the problem with the Essential Phone… and it’s a rather fascinating problem. The phone is way too aesthetic or way too groundbreaking to be acceptable.

Moreover, the phone dapples with modularity (yet another tech direction that’s way to ahead of its time… Google ditched the Ara project, remember?) by putting magnetic connectors on the back that allow you to snap a 360° camera onto the back of the phone. It also ditches the headphone jack, a move that Android isn’t too keen on adopting. The phone will retail at $699 later this year and I’m interested to see if I’ve been proven wrong (Andy Rubin states that this phone will sell in a limited capacity due to technological constraints), but I’m more interested on seeing if the phone’s presence creates a ripple the way the phone’s announcement has. If I’m right, it’ll just go to prove that there’s a fine line between the kind of design we love to admire, and the kind of design that we love to own. Thoughts?

Designer: Essential