Yanko Design - Form Beyond Function

A Squeezing Bottle Made from the World’s Strongest Metal

Posted: 24 Mar 2018 06:20 AM PDT

Titanium is truly a wonderful thing. It’s virtually indestructible, having the highest strength to weight ratio of any metal. It’s unreactive, allowing it to be used inside the body too (I’ve got titanium clips inside me). It’s also a really nice song by David Guetta, but let’s not get into that. What’s more interesting is a recent bit of innovation that’s allowed titanium to behave it’s made of titanium.elastic. The Keego is a squeeze bottle… but it isn’t made out of HDPE or PET, it’s made of titanium.

The creator of Keego being a sportsperson and sports enthusiast himself, Lukas Angst, realized how much athletes depended on staying hydrated, and how none of the bottles delivered an experience that matched up to the quality standards set by the industry for sports equipment. You wear the finest breathable apparel, the best shoes, use the gear that gives you the best performance, but the bottle you drink from is made from cheap polymers having a bad taste and potential health risk. The need to reinvent the product struck him when he saw his favorite tennis player, Federer, take a break from destroying his opponent to sit at his bench beside his bag of specialist gear, and then drink from a lowly PET bottle.

A plastic bottle, Lukas says, seems to be the natural choice for a few reasons. Even though water tastes better coming from metal or glass bottles, they’re usually cumbersome and breakable, you have to stop and break up the flow to unscrew them. Plastic bottles are lightweight and can be passed or even thrown around. Their squeeze nature makes them a better choice on the field, because it’s quick and it promotes contact-less drinking, allowing teammates to pass around and drink from a single bottle. The price of that convenience? Bad-tasting water in a bottle that becomes a cesspool of germs and dirt, needing thorough cleaning every week.

It seems natural to say, in this situation, I wish we could make a squeeze bottle out of metal, and that’s what Lukas set out to do. Partnering with a team that produces accelerator components for CERN, Lukas developed Keego, the world’s only squeezable drinking bottle that uses metal. Its innovative design and material layering process (that allows to add an elastic core to a titanium bottle) lets the metal bottle be squeezed just the way a plastic bottle would. The titanium construction keeps the water clean and fresh while making the bottle nearly indestructible, scratchproof, and corrosion resistant. Keego retains all the positives of the plastic bottle, without any of the negatives.

Designed to be as high-end, functional, and cutting-edge as the rest of your sports gear (because no one likes settling for mediocrity) the Keego looks and behaves like your regular squeeze bottle (even fitting seamlessly into most bottle holders), but comes made not in polymer, but one of the strongest metals known to mankind. Me, I’m no sportsperson myself, but I’d definitely fancy owning the world’s first and only bottle to be made of squeezable metal!

Designers: Lukas Angst, Robert Vierlinger & René Bang Madsen

Click here to Buy Now: $56.00 $79.95

You’ve got high-tech shoes, shirt and a high-tech bike. Why not a high-tech bottle?

Up until Keego all squeezable bottles were made of plastic. Which comes with a lot of disadvantages: Potential health risks, a throw-away mentality and most of all BAD TASTE.

Keego’s Technology

How can titanium be elastic? The secret behind KEEGO’s functionality lies within the ground-breaking production process, which allows us to add an elastic core to a titanium bottle. The key is to accurately control the fusion process in order to modulate the elasticity according to the amount of stress in different parts of the squeeze bottle. By the way: The Danish company mastering this process is renowned for producing accelerator parts for CERN and other accelerators around the world.

Click here to Buy Now: $56.00 $79.95

It’s knife to meat you!

Posted: 23 Mar 2018 03:50 PM PDT

The Blanka was designed to be a miniature cleaver. Its design follows the cleaver’s big blade form, but the entire knife just about fits in your palm, making it look cute, but incredibly capable. The Blanka has a blade made out of VG-10 Japanese steel, along with a handle cut in a glass-reinforced resin material. The blade has two cutting edges, along with a Japanese-style tanto tip, allowing you to use the front edge of the blade as a cutting edge as well. This makes the Blanka extremely versatile as you can grip it in any fashion, exerting a downward, upward, or even forward motion. The semi-circular cut permeates both the blade and the grip, giving you a nice place to rest your index finger as you work the blade.

The knife comes with its own lanyard hole as well as a leather sheath that you can suspend from your belt hoop or even slip into your pocket. With a blade that is sharp on all edges, the Blanka is perfect for cutting, chopping, slicing, and piercing. So don’t really go by its toyish size!

Designer: JHO Knives

Click Here to Buy Now

Click Here to Buy Now

A fine bit of biomimicry, this!

Posted: 23 Mar 2018 12:29 PM PDT

Who knew that the shape of a snowflake could inspire the cooling fins of a product?! Literally inspired by something that’s cold, the Phillips Black Snow high-intensity industrial lights have a set of snowflake pattern inspired cooling fins at the back. The fins, aside from looking like a black snowflake, leverage the design to dissipate heat into the air, hence cooling the product down.

The Black Snow is an ultra-thin High Bay Light used in warehouses and factories. Its innovative design allows it to be the lightest 150W light, weighing just a mere 1.5 kgs. It even comes with the ability to tesselate, forming larger and stronger lighting units.

The Phillips Black Snow is a winner of the iF Design Award for the year 2018.

Designer: Phillips