Yanko Design - Form Beyond Function

Following the lines of the highly interactive and endlessly entertaining Quetzal Chair is the Quetzal Lamp, a light that invites you to interact with it… almost like a fidget toy of sorts. The Quetzal Lamp takes inspiration from the South American Quetzal bird’s plumage. Just like in the chair, the lamp comes with dual-colored individual paper members that can be fanned out or inwards in either clockwise or anti-clockwise directions. The double colored members end up allowing you to dim the light when closed completely, and when opened out, cast a beautiful pattern of light against the walls and the floor.

The entire lamp comprises a simple base, two mounting rings, and a set of 30 dual-colored Arjowiggins heavy-weight textured paper fins. Easy to assemble, and delightful to interact with, the Quetzal Lamp is the kind that brightens not just the room, but your life too!

Designer: Marc Venot for Missana

Felix is a miniature sofa with a mesmerizing canopy that takes inspiration from Mexican architectural designs of the 1950s in which paraboloid structures and arches defined the country’s identity. Its pergola-style cover provides visual separation to the user without restricting visibility. This visual lightness is a perfect contrast to its robust frame. Its skeleton is made of tough tubular steel while the cushion is fashioned from polyurethane foam and polyester, making it ideal for either indoor or outdoor use.

This contemporary interpretation not only pays homage to this landmark in architectural history in a fun, modern way, but it also part of a larger effort by designer Christian Vivanco to conceive, produce and market his products in Mexico and in collaboration with Mexican companies like Los Patrones.

Designer: Christian Vivanco

The Plantashelf brings the beauty and inherent pleasure of being around greenery, along with the simplicity and minimalism of a wall-mounted shelf. Designed to be as easy as installing a bookshelf, the Plantashelf puts flora on your wall in a way that gives it an appeal vastly different from other indoor planters.

It’s important that you view the Plantashelf not as a planter, but almost as a bookshelf-esque piece of decor that you would install around your home. It’s this perception-crossover that makes the Plantashelf the breakthrough product it is. Made to be modular, clean, and nothing like any planter we’ve ever seen, the Plantashelf mounts on your wall in any configuration you choose. Its interlocking pieces allow you to build a planter shelf the way you want/need. The shelves fix against the wall using concealed fixing points and independent modules can be joined to one another using the mortise and tenon joints built into the sides of the planter. What you’re left with is planter shelves that integrate with each other seamlessly and sit against a wall almost magically with no ugly fixtures or screws showing in any way.

The Plantashelf brings the greenery indoors but retains the elegance of a shelf. The shelf’s ABS construction follows a linear design, and the planters get integrated into the spaces created by the U-shaped bends in the shelf. A transparent panel on the front closes off the design, while showing you the soil level and the plant growing out of it, with a transparency that looks intriguing, almost like a cross-section in a biology text-book. Underneath the soil bed sits a reservoir that drains off the excess water poured into the plant, only to be used by the plant later on. The Plantashelf is perfect for any room indoors. It gives your living room a neat splash of green while also allowing it to be used as a mantelpiece. Put it in a bedroom and the Plantashelf can be used as a bookshelf that adds a touch of flora to your decor. You can even use the Plantashelf in the kitchen, turning any empty wall you have into a herb-garden that adds beauty not just to your decor but also on your plate!

Designer: Prieto Studio

Click here to Buy Now: $67.00 $100.00

Click here to Buy Now: $67.00 $100.00

The Pidget Case (a play on the words fidget and phone case) is the latest in a trend of attention deficit remedies! As silly as the craze might seem, it actually proves useful for people who need to move in order to think. However, few remember or are willing to carry these fidget toys along with them.

Integrated into the case, the Pidget Case conveniently incorporates the same functionality as the world famous Fidget Cube. Because you always have your phone, you’ll always have your fidget toy handy so you can flick, spin, click or whatever else you need to do to focus!

By the way, totally calling dibs on “phidget”!

Designer: Choi Jae Yeon

Know any first-time parents who made an Instagram account just for their newborn baby?! Well, don’t be surprised if you start seeing fetus accounts next! The Smart Baby Camera lets impatient parents get a sneak peak as their baby grows and record photo and video to save and share.

From the comfort of home, this portable echograph system is intuitive and safe to use safely without professional assistance. It pairs wirelessly with the user’s smartphone to feed live images and audio. As for ergonomics, it is held in such a way that mimics the natural open palm position mothers use when touching their tummy. Just slab some jelly on the belly and ultrasound away! It uses 4D ultrasonic technology to get a complete perspective of the baby’s size, shape and distinct features. This way, you’ll get the right Insta-angle and pose each time!

Designers: Maxime Journeaux & ND Industrial Design for Marvoto

The office space used to be one of ‘trendy’ patterns on office dividers, chairs that offered no lumbar support but had an abundance of cushioning and outdated phones/water dispensers/kitchen appliances and more. There has been a silent office space revolution happening underneath us, and I think we’re all with it. Dae-hoo Kim certainly is, with his redesign of the water purifier, the CHPI-620. This device not only purifies water but also produces ice. This is a combined water purifier + ice maker that can be installed in homes and businesses to purify tap water of contaminants such as fine particles, rust residue, heavy metals, and chlorine using multiple filters and provide its users with clean drinking water and ice. It’s designed with its ice-making feature on the left and its purified cold/hot/room-temperature water features on the right so anyone can use it easily and intuitively. The purifier itself is gorgeously simplified with two pads signifying the interaction points for the user of both the ice and the water outputs. The bottom ledge cleanly reaches out, inviting the user to rest their glass upon it during the filling process. With a backlit indication and a larger aperture, it is evident which nozzle is the ice and which is the water, adding once again to what is a subtle yet attractive enhancement to the workspace.

Designer: Dae-hoo Kim

Kiwis are the first in the world to see the sunrise, first to celebrate the New Year, and now they’re the first with the opportunity to cycle over water. The very idea of the Hydrofoiler XE-1 was manifested in 2010 by Guy Howard-Willis when he began Manta5, only to be further developed by bike designer Roland Alonzo, bringing the bike to life in an electric-assisted pedal bike for water use. Hydrofoiling drastically reduces drag, allowing you to cut through fast-moving water easily. The front tiller section, surfaced with the choppy seas in mind, lets you carve down steep ocean swells and over rough chop. The Hydrofoiler could potentially replace the hype around the water-powered jet packs that got very popular only a few years ago. I could definitely find myself replacing that Sunday morning bike ride for a trip across the lake in no time.

Designer: Manta5

The guys at The New Raw make a rather interesting point. The one material property of plastic we consider a benefit is in fact a curse. Plastic is designed to last long, but its usage cycle falls vastly short of its actual lifespan. A mere wrapper, bottle or garbage bag has a usage cycle ranging from a couple of hours to a couple of months, yet this very material has a lifespan of anywhere from 500 to 1000 years, making its way into landfills and the oceans because it was designed to outlive its need.

The Print Your City project was spawned out of the need to extend the usage cycle of plastic by developing a technology to turn waste plastic back into a raw material. The New Raw transform waste plastic into public furniture using 3D printing, not just extending the life of plastic and minimizing waste as a result, but doing it in a way that doesn’t necessarily make the end-result look “recycled”, but rather a well designed, beautifully manufactured product.

According to The New Raw, individual citizens of Amsterdam generate up to 25 kilograms of plastic waste annually. The Print Your City XXX Bench, one of the first in the series of products uses 50 of waste plastic (an amount generated annually by two such citizens) to develop a bench with a unique, iconic aesthetic, the Amsterdam XXX branding, and the ability to seat up to four people!

The New Raw’s approach to recycling involves visualizing waste as a resource and raw material. Their hope is to turn waste generated by the residents of Amsterdam into products that are designed to serve its citizens and use plastic’s long life-span as an advantage!

Designers: The New Raw & Aectual. (Supported by TU Delft)

Seldom do we admire a table for not its surface, but its edges. The Breaking Surface table by Sophie Hardy pays tribute to the small Swedish village of Dals Långed, a village that once had a thriving paper industry. The table comprises multiple stacked sheets of colored paper trapped between pieces of birch veneer and ply. The colors of the paper sheets come out with the way the edges are machine milled to produce a design detail that’s nothing short of eye-catching and marvelous, whether admired from above or the side. What’s truly interesting is the possibility of experimenting with various color combinations and cut patterns to create a complete, exhaustive series that explore different designs, colors, trends, cultures, etc.! The possibilities are endless!

Designer: Sophie Hardy