Yanko Design - Form Beyond Function

The Italian police officers’ job just got a lot cooler now that they’re going to be driving around in 505 HP Alfa Romeo Giulias! Designed exclusively for the carabinieri’s new rides, the Space Light not only enhances the cars aesthetic with an aggressive look that’ll have criminals shaking in their boots.

Unlike clunky police light fixtures of the past, it’s not some giant eyesore bolted on a rack! Instead, this bespoke system fits like a crown and is seamlessly integrated into the roof of the vehicle and follows the existing lines and curves.

Functionally, it’s equipped with 4 LED lights for 360 degree visibility, a solid cruise light, a front searchlight for precision beaming, as well as an LED backlight screen for directing traffic or alerting to crashes and other emergencies… all of which are controlled by conveniently-placed paddles behind the steering wheel!

Designer: Mattia Marvardi

I’m loving how the Puzlook’s phone case borrows an idea from one of the most beautifully relatable puzzles we’ve all played with as kids, and transforms something playful into something useful. Taking cues from sliding puzzles, Puzlook’s case puts three interchangeable camera lenses in your phone’s cover, allowing you to easily and accurately swap between lenses, to instantly upgrade your photography chops!

The lenses stay attached to your phone case, which means you don’t need to A. spend time looking for them, and B. spend more time adjusting them to precisely rest over the camera lens of your phone. The case’s design takes care of lens positioning by allowing them to snap exactly into the precise position, giving you an incredible range of photo styles to choose from! While most camera lenses come as separate attachments, Puzlook’s case puts three (wide-angle, fish-eye, and a telephoto) lenses in a puzzle-inspired interchangeable format, allowing you to cycle through different lenses and choose which one you want to use, or not use the lenses and rely on the phone’s camera itself.

The Puzlook is a winner of the K-Design Award, for being functional, convenient, and ingeniously unique!

Designers: Jimmy Song, Sooljin Sim & Heejin Lee.

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Let your OCD run wild with this little bitty vac with a whole lotta suck! It’s called Aeriwand and it’s designed to reach areas that typically don’t get as much cleaning as they do micro-clutter.

The 180-degree rotatable wand is perfect for annoyingly hard-to-reach areas like in-between car seats or within the spaces between keys on your keyboard. It offers expert precision for collecting dust, hair, food crumbs, tiny bugs and more.

As an added bonus, users can turn it over to reveal an electrostatic lint attractor. One side will have positive or negative charges which attracts minute debris. Once held firmly in place, the vacuum with automatically draw the debris through micro-sized holes.

Designer: Michelle Piotrowski

This is a story of how I attempted making meringues (thrice), but I always ended up messing the proportions, because the recipe used 4 egg whites, but I had to downsize it to 1 egg white (I was cooking for myself). The result? Burnt, collapsed meringues that had the consistency of soaked, sticky cookies.

Honestly, life would have been so much easier if things were standardized. No one understands 3 cups sugar because we all have differently sized cups. The same goes with spoons. Teaspoons? Tablespoons? Regular spoons, or scoop spoons? Nightmare.

The minute you change things to metric or empirical units, everyone wins, because Hostweigh’s spoon allows you to measure out your ingredients by weight. Basically a handheld weighing scale, the Hostweigh Weighing Spoon allows you to calibrate all your measurements down to a tenth of a gram, so that you can prepare food with accuracy. The spoon comes in modes, allowing you to measure in ounces too. Plus the spoon’s scoop comes with level markings, letting you measure out milliliters of liquid out too. Not just for the cooking enthusiast, the Hostweigh is a rather useful tool for people who want to measure their sugar/calorie intake by weight, as well as for medicinal preparation (as niche as it may be). No, please don’t think of Breaking Bad.

Designer: Hostweigh

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With a legacy of vertical forests (in Milan and now to debut in Nanjing) around the world, Stefano Boeri decided that one single tower wasn’t enough. His latest endeavor is the world’s first Forest City in Liuzhou, South China. Designed for humans and greenery to coexist in a format that is as modern as eco-friendly, as well as a radical plan to battle China’s smog problem, the entire city will host up to 30,000 people, while outnumbering them with 40,000 trees and a million plants. Already under construction, the forest city is all set to be complete by as early as 2020, and I’m already wondering why this isn’t an architectural norm by now!?

Designer: Stefano Boeri

(Images via Stefano Boeri)