Yanko Design - Form Beyond Function

There’s one aesthetic style that binds most products that are made for the elderly. You’ll notice that all products one associates with the aged, have a vintage style. Walking sticks are seldom made to look minimal or contemporary. Rocking chairs too. You’ll seldom find a pair of futuristic looking bi-focals.

Studio Shiro challenges convention with the ENEA walking stick. Made out of 3D printing, the stick has a contemporary air that makes a style statement, rather than looking like a disability device from a bygone era. The design redefines functionality while celebrating minimalism. It features a 3-axis handle that one can grip firmly (while making sure it doesn’t slip out of your grip). The handle’s 3 pronged design even allows it to be rested vertically on the floor. To make things more interesting, the load-bearing shaft of the stick features an extra projection that allows the stick to balance on the side of desks or counter-tops in a fashion that’s convenient and fun both at the same time.

To keep the stick as light as, if not lighter than its wooden or metal-pipe contemporaries (or should I say ancestors), the ENEA is made using a stress-bearing, porous inner structure, much like the inside of our bones. To achieve this unique construction, the ENEA is printed from top to bottom via 3D printing.

Designer: Shiro Studio

Surgo is 4×4 offroad vechicle designed for rescue services in places an average ambulance would never reach. To make this possible, it sports an innovative suspension designed and prototyped by the Automotive Industry Institute in Warsaw. It has the ability to lock the entire body in a shifted position, a system of additional springs/shock absorbers. This allows unprecedented offroad capabilities and near limitless reach. As for the inside, the cabin interior can adapt to accomodate up to 8 rescuers and 2 stretchers to be safely transported. Thanks to its robust construction, use of durable materials and hard surfaces, it can handle dirt, moisture, and mechanical that are inevitable during all-terrain rescue missions.

Designer: 2sympleks

Literally occupying the same amount of space when closed as a handful of wooden twigs (I’m sure there’s some visual relevance there!), the WG Grill is incredibly minimal, but can work in the most demanding conditions. Touted as the grill that’s as portable as your lunch, the WG Grill comes in just two pieces. A stand, and a grilling surface.

Designed to be the most robust as well as the most accommodating portable grill in the world, the WG Grill doesn’t just fit in the back of your car, it can literally fit in your backpack… and when opened out, can rest atop any type of fire (with its 3 height settings), while even withstanding a good deal of weight, so you can have anything from steaks to cast-iron skillets on it without breaking a sweat.

Made from reinforced stainless steel, the designers behind the grill spent close to 18 months making the grill look as sleek and as strong as it is. The base is a folding frame that can open or close completely, to be held in place by the grilling surface, which has 3 height settings built into it. The grill can therefore be used over fires big and small, and has a load-bearing capacity of up to 16kgs (that’s roughly 300 hot-dogs!)

The WG Grill makes absolutely no compromises (how else would it be as light and portable for its size?). While most designers would take the easier route to product development, Wolf and Grizzly (the makers) pushed to have their prototype match their concept, spec for spec. The result is a grill that, when folded, is as portable as a flashlight… and when opened can match the sophistication of a terrace barbecue or a backyard cookout, as well as fare wonderfully in the rustic woods, and give you good food and great memories every time!

Designers: Joseph Hofer & George Rizkalla

BUY NOW: $59.00 $99.00

BUY NOW: $59.00 $99.00

Meet, Morgen – a smart speaker that aims to be your personal DJ! It learns your musical taste and will recommend music over time as you touch “like” and swipe to “dislike” directly on its simplistic interface.

It’s the latest application of the Internet of Things (IoT), combining a cloud service with a portable speaker for an enhanced music experience. Unlike Pandora which only streams online, Morgen can be played offline by caching songs the user likes while online for the user’s enjoyment later. Besides that, over 4000 songs are pre-loaded into different channels for each new Morgen speaker. Simply turn it on, select the genre of choice, listen, and start liking and disliking! The longer you use it and the more gestures you use to like or dislike, the sooner Morgen turns into your personal DJ!

Morgen is a 2017 Red Dot Design Concept Award winner.

Designers: Ye Liangwen, Yu Xueliang, Wang Hui & Lin Jinchun

Did you know that your fire extinguisher has an expiration date? That’s icing on the cake for a product that so few of us actually know how to use in the first place! The Ramifire is a modern, smart extinguisher that’s designed for more than just enhanced ergonomics and intuitive use.

It also pairs wirelessly with your smartphone and features a built-in fire detector. In the event of a fire, it will alert users immediately and help them locate the extinguisher. Better yet, it will alert when it’s time to replace the unit to help ensure you’re always prepared.

Designer: Xiong Tao

The iPad is the ultimate consumer media machine. Even with Apple issuing ‘Pro’ versions of the world’s favorite tablet, it still is primarily used for watching content on its big screen (between sending mails). However, it wasn’t built with that sole intent. It has single-direction speakers (no stereo) which aren’t particularly rich in audio output, lending to a rather bland multimedia experience. The immediate solution? Fire up an external speaker via bluetooth or aux. The better solution? Simulate the cinema experience with a home-theater dock for the iPad.

The OIO Amp puts two incredibly sleek speakers on either side of your iPad in a format that seems like a TV and Home Theater set-up, but made portable. Unlike every external wireless speaker that is designed as an independent unit, the OIO Amp was built to integrate with the tablet, becoming a singular unit that can be opened out anywhere, and then folded and stored away for another Netflix binge-watching session.

Virtually as slim as the iPad it docks (it was built for the iPad Air and Pro 9.7″), the OIO Amp opens out into a docking space for the iPad that instantly pairs the device and speakers the moment it docks. The two flaps that open outwards are in fact electromagnetic speakers and vibrating acoustic panels (allowing them to be slim yet produce sound that is a literal “bang for its buck”). The speaker flaps go the extra mile by being covered with a microfiber cloth that doesn’t scratch the iPad screen, but rather cleans it, because the last thing you want is to try to watch a movie through fingerprint smudges.

The OIO Amp is built with a 900mAh battery, designed to give it 7 hours of playtime (that’s enough for half a season of Game of Thrones). While the Amp was created to uplift the iPad’s multimedia experience (bringing great sound and a great display together), it works with all Bluetooth enabled devices too, becoming a fold-to-open external speaker. And if you’re more of an iPad for work kinda guy, the Amp allows you to have the most audible conference calls on a 9.7 inch tablet. Me? I’ve just found the perfect mini-cinema that I can carry around with me, so color me satisfied!

Designer: Gregg Davis

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Many have tried to perfect the grinder. Kruve perfected the grind. It makes sense, that instead of refining a process, or developing new products that do the job better, sometimes one should have the foresight to create a new product that gets added to the existing process. An extra step, if you will.

That’s what Kruve does. The triangular sieve helps regulate the size of your grind, making it more consistent, so that the flavor gets extracted the way it was intended, or the way you want it. An inconsistent grind often results in particles that are of uneven sizes. This leads to undesirable flavors in your coffee, because the water remains in contact with differently sized particles for the same amount of time, meaning that larger chunks get ‘under-brewed’ while smaller particles get ‘over-brewed’. Compare it to cooking vegetables or meats of different sizes for the same amount of time. You’re going to be left with large raw pieces, and/or small over-cooked pieces. In coffee parlance, this would result in your brew tasting sour/acidic and bitter.

Kruve avoids that with its 3 layered design that traps the large chunks of the grind at the top, the perfectly sized particles at the middle, and the smallest grains at the bottom. The sieves used come with highly precise meshes, going into microns, to make sure your cup of coffee is made with the kind of precision no grinder can ever achieve. The Kruve comes with multiple sieves, so you can choose how precisely ground you want your beans. Use a coarser grind for your french-press, or for cold-brews, and a finer grind for stronger coffees like espressos. Here’s a chart to make things easier to grasp!

The simplicity of Kruve is that even though it adds an extra step to your brewing process, it works with any coffee grinder, and it absolutely uplifts the taste of your brew… but don’t go by my word. Try the Kruve for yourself… because ‘sieving is believing’!

Designer: Marek Krupa

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[The Kruve was initially called the Rafino at the time of its debut and has since then re-branded itself.]

While hammers and hair-dryers have virtually nothing in common apart from being hand-held, it’s an interesting exercise to borrow an idea from one and implement it in the other.

Jang Junyoung’s Hammer Dryer gives the hair dryer’s design some volume… not like the kind you’d associate with hair, but literal mass! The handle serves as nothing but a cylindrical gripping area (and the wire passes through it). The Hammer Dryer’s blower unit is given full focus with its heavy looking shape, and even the controls are shifted onto the hammer’s body, giving it functional focus too.

Whether this would result in a significant center-of-gravity shift, or whether it may make the hair-dryer easier or more difficult to use still remains to be discovered, but it sure makes for an interesting aesthetic, and it even allows the hair-dryer to be rested in a rather unique fashion!

Designer: Jang Junyoung