Yanko Design - Form Beyond Function

Those with missing limbs are more capable than ever of living fulfilling lives and, thanks to devices like the Nimble Prosthetic Fin, they may even be more capable than able-bodied individuals in some instances!

This aquatic prosthetic features a vacuum socket that allows for quick and secure attachment to the limb. Once in place, the user is immediately transformed into a streamlined diving, swimming, scuba-diving machine! It’s specially adapted to execute and enhance a variety of underwater maneuvers from treading water to long-distance lap swimming. Designed with a lightweight and strong material blend of carbon fiber, rubber and thermoplastic polypropylene, it achieves expert balance, comfort and hydrodynamics to make endurance swimming of all varieties not only feasible, but entirely enhanced!

Designer: Alberto Esses

The 3Doodler pen is a rather fun toy. I say toy because while it’s an extruder, it isn’t capable of industrial-grade printing. However, it’s cheap, fun-to-use, and retails at $99. Kodama’s Obsidian 3D printer is a rather capable printer. It prints at a minimum resolution of 50 microns, and works with a wide range of materials. It also costs the same amount as the 3Doodler pen.

Kodama has constantly wowed us with how far they can push the boundaries of 3D printing. Their first machine, the Trinus, was designed to be a DIY printer that literally was made of 11 components that snapped together easier than an IKEA bookshelf. However, their second machine, the Obsidian, is the one worth talking about. Designed to be used out of the box, this plug-n-play printer works like a dream. It can print in a wide range of materials, comes with a ‘resume’ function for power-cuts, and even with its own “dashcam” that streams progress to your phone or tablet while allowing you to check and modify prints from miles away.

The Obsidian printer is conveniently sized (perfect for the creative), and comes in three tiers. The basic model is capable of incredibly detailed prints and costs just twice as much as the filament you use. The Plus and Deluxe tier introduce innovative new features to the model while keeping the price still ten times cheaper than post 3D printers. Obsidian’s Deluxe comes with the resume function, in case of power failure, and even has a heated bed module, giving you the freedom to work with materials like ABS and Nylon. It also comes with a mounted camera that live-streams your print to you if you’re away and can even make a time-lapse video of your print taking place. The control panel is a Smart LCD touch-screen (with a quad-core ARM running Android) paired with a refreshing UI that allows you to work the printer like a charm, and it even extends functionality to your smartphone or tablet with a native app, allowing you to pause/resume prints on-the-go!

3D printing and crowdfunding are more interconnected than you’d think. They’ve both helped each other grow as big as they have and honestly, I was sitting here thinking that we’d hit saturation point. However Obsidian pushes the ceiling a little higher by delivering a printer that you can use literally out of the box, and costs less than your smartphone. Universal in every sense, the Obsidian can work with almost any type of 3D model you make, whether in a software on a computer, or even sculpted in VR. The print quality, from what we’ve seen, is exquisite, and the fact that you can monitor/stream your prints from wherever you are is something everyone needs, but no printer company ever anticipated. With the Obsidian, Kodama is definitely onto something big!

Designer: Michael Husmann of Kodama

BUY NOW: $99 $199

Forget your fugly fish bowl! Tau is a twist on the standalone aquarium that ditches all the awkward tubing, hard lighting and unsightly box filters for a cleaner, minimalistic look that you and your fishy friends will love!

All of the aforementioned features are neatly packed within the main body at the bottom. Even its light projects upward from the base before being reflected back down, giving the unit subtle, relaxing ambience rather than direct, harsh lighting. The coolest feature of all, however, is its ability to automatically turn 360° slowly, giving viewers a soothing, ever-changing view of the waterscape.

Designer: Franco Eduardo Battistella

Gotta love this blast from the past! The ATARI 9000 is a hybridization of vintage fun and new tech that both old-school players and modern gamers will dig!

Lovers of the 1980s platform will instantly recognize the classic ATARI joystick and paddle controllers. This means throwback playing appeal for former players and an entirely new style of playing for younger gamers! The asymmetric tablet offers scrolling, zooming, and use with a stylus (the removable joystick handles doubles as one!). Users can take it on the road, playing directly on the device, or connect to a TV at home to share the fun with friends! Whichever playing style you choose, you’l have access to a vast library of classic and modern titles!

Designer: Nikos Manafis

Don’t let its toy-ish exterior fool you. The Bonzart Ampel is regarded as one of the finest cameras of its categories and got sold out in Japan mere weeks after it was launched. What Ampel specializes in is tilt-shift photography, a style that makes grand scenery look a lot like toys, with humans, cars, and buildings looking like miniature playthings. Most software allow you to mimic tilt-shift photos with linear blur, but none are as accurate as cameras made explicitly for the task, like the Ampel.

Capable of taking HD photos and videos, the Ampel looks like an analog camera, but in fact it is completely digital. Running off three AA batteries, the camera comes with a screen on the top, visible only after lifting the upper flap… something that’s highly reminiscent of vintage cameras. Knobs on the side allow you to toggle between photo and video modes, and even set color settings for your recorded media. A lens toggle switch and a shutter button on the front allow you to operate the camera, while viewing everything via the screen on top.

Regarded as one of the most capable yet reasonable cameras in the tilt-shift category, the Ampel accurately uses two lenses to calculate depth, but rather than using that to create 3D content, it creates mesmeric, retro-style tilt-shift photos with the capabilities of a DSLR lens five times its price!

What we especially love is how Ampel uses color to trick us into thinking landscapes are miniature toys. Color settings allow you to saturate colors in your images, making everything look instantly Lego-ish, along with a slight hint of chromatic aberration which just adds more pop to your images!

Designer: Bonzart

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BUY NOW

The more and more I think about it, the more and more I wonder whether Apple played their cards right. iTunes and the iPod shook the music industry a little over a decade ago, and now Apple’s focused all its efforts on Apple Music, but there isn’t any dedicated audio playback device to back it. As we made the transition from music storage and playback to music streaming, Apple just assumed the iPhone would fill the gap… but what they forgot is that the iPhone is least of all, a music player.

In steps Mighty, an iPod Shuffle-esque Music Streamer (not player). This little square gives you all your audio, and I mean ALL of it, in a tiny plastic square, allowing you to stream music to your ears. The Mighty works in partnership with Spotify, allowing you to wirelessly access all your Spotify music on the player without a phone. While phones come with battery woes, fragility, and most importantly, a massive price tag (plus maintenance costs), the Mighty just simply connects to your Spotify and allows you to play back all your music directly from its petite device. Think of it as a dedicated Spotify player. It can access an unlimited amount of musical data, comes with all the playback controls you need, and it’s small enough to clip onto your collar. Not to mention a battery life of up to 10 hours… and an audio jack input (ooh burn!)

Mighty, although small and rather plasticky (it’s the first of its kind), changes the music industry yet again by giving Spotify, arguably the most popular music streaming service, a product to rally its services around. Directly plugging you to the web, it presents itself as the next product to change the way you listen to music!

Designer: Anthony Pu

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BUY NOW

I learnt two new things today. The first was the word “glamping” which is a portmanteau of glamour and camping, associated with the world of camping that brings luxury to traditional practices. The second thing I learnt was that you can legitimately live inside a decommissioned Royal Navy Sea King helicopter in Scotland.

Martyn and Louise Steedman decided to convert their farmland into the perfect camping spot. However, they ditched the tents and settled for a massive helicopter instead! A move that took them a lot of time, effort and £40,000, the helicopter is now by far the world’s coolest bed and breakfast spot ever! The helicopter’s body was cleared out to make space for a mini-kitchen, a shower-room, and sleeping space for 6… achieved by a triple bed, then a double bed, and lastly, a single bed right at the tail of the helicopter. The chopper’s decor on the inside is starkly different from its well-maintained outside. While the outer body still looks like a navy helicopter, the insides are rather cozy and homely. They’re even painted white to seem spacious rather than cramped. The most interesting detail however, is the lounging area a.k.a. the cockpit which retains the entire control panel from the helicopter’s original make. The pilot seats were switched for much more comfy leather swivel chairs with a table in between for either champagne, or a rather appropriate game of Battleship!

Oh, yes, I asked myself the same question too… but no. The helicopter doesn’t fly.

Designers: Martyn & Louise Steedman.