Yanko Design - Form Beyond Function

For any athlete, icing is a crucial therapy for acute injuries and recovery from intense performance. The Hail Ice Pack offers an alternative to messy, less than ergonomic conventional ice packs of today.

It acts as a second skin of cool relief, adapting to the anatomy of the athlete no matter which part of the body it’s placed. The flexible design is composed of hexagonal pods that bend and contour. Inside, micro hydrogel beads provide more consistent cooling than regular ice. They not only freeze faster than water but stay colder longer. Covered with a tactile gel surface, these convenient cooling patches can be placed anywhere and stay put even during exercise!

Designer: Alyssa Melotik

Just as secure as you want your payments to be, the Arceo Wallet doesn’t fold, or even bend for that matter! Completely CNC machined out of aerospace grade carbon-fiber, this wallet epitomizes the word robust with its construction and design to match. The Arceo comes with space to hold cards as well as cash together in a magnetically secure housing. Designed with space maximization in mind, this may be the only wallet capable of holding up to 14 cards!

Outwardly, the wallet’s design immediately conveys a visual language that is rugged, powerful, and no-nonsense. A magnetic clip holds down on your cards and cash securely. The lack of compartmentalization works to its favor, meaning no matter what your card-to-cash ratio is, the wallet takes care of it for you… in fact you can even slip loose change in. The wallet’s spring action is attributed to an actual spring, rather than relying on elastics or silicone bands that wear out or break. The spring keeps the two plates of the wallet pressed against your cards/cash/coins so they don’t move around or rub against one another, and is designed to last a lifetime. To top it all off, the Arceo comes with an attachment for your keys too that allow them to stay securely positioned in your wallet with the ability to pivot them out and use them whenever needed. Once you’re done, just fold them back into the wallet’s carbon-fiber casing…effectively putting all your important belongings into one, compact, literally indestructible case.

Because the unbreakable businessman deserves an unbreakable wallet!

Designers: Alex Balogun & Ronin Energetics

BUY NOW: $65.00

The Arceo is designed for cash users in mind to keep your money secure and out of sight.

Spare change? No problem.

BUY NOW: $65.00

Snow Energy is a 100% sustainable lamp and a smart phone charger that you can take just about anywhere but especially in cold places! The design utilizes a thermoelectric generator that works by generating energy when there is a temperature difference between the upper and bottom sections of the unit.

The light bulb head serves as the vacuum flask for containing hot water to warm the heat pipe which is connected to one side of the thermoelectric generator module. The other side of the module is the spiral-shaped heat sink containing a rechargeable battery. After pouring hot water into the vacuum flask and assembling it with the other components, the user needs only to stick the heat sink into somewhere cold! Alas! The thermoelectric generator will create electricity based on temperature differences between the piece of the heat pipe and the heat sink.

Designers: Shim Jieun & Won Boram

The entire concept of the Revolights sounds fascinating. A headlamp, and a tail-lamp, within the wheel of your bicycle itself! How it works is even more fascinating. Rather than illuminating your entire wheel as it goes round, the LEDs on the wheel know exactly which position to light up in, giving you the arc shaped light that you see when you’re riding your bike. The lights even adjust to the speed of your bike, so no matter whether you’re slowing down or speeding up, the lights adjust so that they go on and off only at the correct moment in time, maintaining the arc shaped light on the front and back of the bike.

A step up from the first edition of Revolights, these lights, titled the Eclipse+ come with a much better design that elegantly and easily sits on the wheels of your bike. The lights pair with your smartphone via the Revolights app and give you stats like LED battery power, bike speed, distance covered, and even weather alerts (so you can ride well-prepared). The lights are powerful enough to illuminate a 360° area in front of the bike, serving as great head-lights, whereas the tail-lights not only flash when you slow down, they can even help acting as indicators when you turn left or right, flashing in the direction you’re about to turn in, so that people behind you stay clued in. Oh, and since they’re so prone to grabbing eyes and fascinated looks, they also come with a theft-proof design that allows them to be traditionally locked along with your bike!

Designer: Kent Frankovich (Revolights)

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BUY NOW

Obviously water pumps should have see-saws on them! Countries in parts of Africa still rely on the bore-well system to pump drinking water out of the ground. I’ve tried my hand on these pumps and they’re no easy task. They require a good deal of continuous forceful pumping, and I can only imagine how difficult it must be to do this daily after having to walk long distances between the home and the community bore-well.

The Seesaw Well allows you to offload the pumping activity to children by disguising in the avatar of a seesaw. The upward and downward movement allows the well to pump up water, hands-free, while keeping the kids entertained!

The Seesaw Well is a winner of the iF Design Talent Award for the year 2017.

Designer: XueFei Liu

This article is as far away from and as close to design as possible. Sounds strange, doesn’t it? However think about the amount of time and effort that went into designing the iPhone. Now look at your iPhone and imagine that with the correct resources, you could literally build your own from scratch.

Following serial tinkerer Scotty Allen into China, the above video showcases his journey towards building his own iPhone from top to bottom. Standing in Shenzhen, China, Scotty finds himself in the most appropriate place to build his own smartphone. He chooses a 6S and immediately hunts down the parts he needs. Finding most parts in separate locations, he’s forced to opt for a rose gold variant because the buttons seemed to be only available in that color. He procures a screen and has a repair-man input the 3D touch module in, then sources a logic-board, and finally a battery and then sits down to put the entire phone together right from the building blocks, to the small screws, camera modules, and even the home button (that has Touch ID). The completely built phone looks exactly like something you’d pick up at an Apple Store, and works like a charm. Scotty admits that it took a few months to get things right, but I assume it cost him a whole lot less.

It’s quite a journey, but it captures the essence of a person filled with curiosity and determination to reach a goal. It also shows that technology no matter how state-of-the-art, or how glossy, always has a flip-side. Maybe one of us can build our own phone someday. I guess we’ll have to go to Shenzhen to make that happen.

Video Credits: Scotty Allen