Canari: Clean Air You Didn't Know Was There.

More than just an air purifier, Canari is a modular product platform designed to integrate seamlessly into any home environment—from nurseries to living spaces and beyond. Inspired by the critical need for cleaner air for newborns, Canari rethinks traditional air purification with a flexible, user-centric approach.

Its customizable modular system allows users to scale and adapt purification to their needs, while its minimalist aesthetic ensures it complements, rather than disrupts, interior spaces. Crafted from sustainable materials, Canari balances performance with environmental responsibility, reducing waste without compromising efficiency.

Simplicity and functionality define Canari—a vision by Play&Co that challenges conventional notions of home wellness technology. Designed for effortless integration, adaptability, and long-term impact, Canari is air purification made invisible, yet indispensable.

View the full project here

Marketing platform Heepsy has put together a strange report: Out of the "most hyped cars on Instagram," which models are most frequently involved in accidents? The company pored over hashtags, sales figures and crash data to determine an odd metric: "Crashes per 10,000 Sold Cars."

The data is fairly startling: The most-crashed car on the list is not a sports car, and has a crash margin that dwarfs the runner-up. The ignominious award goes to the Fiat 500, which clocked 968.6 crashes per 10,000 units sold.

The distant runner-up is the BMW M5, with just 18.3 crashes.

Crash frequency apparently has little to do with brand. While the M5 ranked second, its M3 stablemate is at the bottom of the list, with just 0.3 crashes.

Chevy can claim bragging rights in the marketing and sales column. The Corvette is the most-hashtagged at 3,524,849 (crash rate 6.8), more than a million hashtags ahead of the number 2 Jeep Wrangler at 2,280,417 (crash rate 5.4).

And Chevy's Silverado is the bestselling vehicle on the list, at 10,669,565 units moved (crash rate 9.0), with the Honda Civic coming in a distant second at 5,872,044 (crash rate 8.5).

I can't get over the Fiat 500's far-and-away leading numbers for accidents, and am hungry for an explanation: Does that car attract inattentive drivers? Is it so small that it's difficult for other vehicles to see it? Or is it because the Fiat 500 is designed for congested urban environments, where fender benders are simply a fact of life?

Image: Vladimir Vinogradov on Unsplash

If you want to see the entire spreadsheet, it's here.

For over 20 years, trend analysis firm PSFK has produced reports used by companies like Apple, BMW, Google and Target. They've recently released "100 Ideas in Consumer Electronics," a comprehensive analysis of emerging trends in consumer electronics. Industrial designers in the sector can use this report for insights and inspirations that go beyond buzzwords.

At PSFK, we believe true inspiration comes from exploring original thinking and authentic design nuances, rather than following predictable AI-buzzwords like 'Circular,' 'Minimalist,' or… wait for it… 'Futuristic.' This report highlights thoughtfully selected, genuinely innovative ideas that reveal meaningful shifts in product design, materials, and consumer interactions.Available as a download today, this report provides over 100 unique consumer electronics ideas, concepts, and innovations organized around emerging themes. With case studies sourced from global innovators, design students, and tech brands, our analysis emphasizes practical inspiration and actionable insights—perfect for design teams seeking a fresh perspective or any creative leader looking to differentiate their products through exceptional design. Our download also includes 16 AI prompts and AI Seeds (Google ImageFX) for you to create your own moodboards inspired by the research.

The report highlights design trends across more than a dozen categories:

Personal Lighting: Portable lighting devices merging function with personal well-being, adaptable across environments.

Hideaways: Cleverly collapsible designs prioritizing compactness and mobility in everyday tools.

Smart Knob Interfaces: Tactile knobs offer intuitive, physical control amidst digital overload.

Detachables: Electronics that seamlessly separate into distinct, independently functional units for maximum adaptability.

Bold & Irreverent: Punk-inspired aesthetics transforming electronics into vibrant expressions of individuality.

Pixelated Interfaces: Retro, pixel-based displays provide nostalgic yet interactive digital experiences.

Electronic Paper: Minimalist e-ink displays blend simplicity of paper with digital functionality, offering calm visual experiences.

Self-Powered Electronics: Devices leveraging renewable and alternative energy sources, driving sustainable innovation.

Single Block Design: Products meticulously crafted from solid blocks of materials, emphasizing ecological consciousness and durability.

Proximity-Aware Tech: Smart devices that communicate intuitively when close, reshaping connected experiences.

Visualization: Creative data visualization transforming complex information into visually accessible experiences.

Orb Interfaces: Playful spherical controls and displays offering uniquely tactile interactions with technology.

Transparent Tech: Devices showcasing internal precision engineering through transparent casings, appealing to authenticity seekers.

Ultra-Compact Nostalgia: Miniaturized tech products blending nostalgic charm with modern convenience.

Spyglass Devices: Educational viewing gadgets merging digital interaction with curiosity-driven exploration.

Heritage Reflection: Electronics inspired by historical and cultural aesthetics, enriching modern functionality.

The report sells for $50, but for a limited time it's available for free here. Use the code RINGROUND at checkout.

From the Beetle to the Rabbit to the Golf, Volkswagen has long made affordable, practical cars that those with smaller budgets can afford. Now they're aiming that prowess at the EV market with the unveiling of their ID EVERY1.

The concept car is intended to make the transition into production for €20,000 (USD $21,667) in 2027. Hailed as "affordable entry-level all-electric mobility" by Thomas Schäfer, CEO of Volkswagen Passenger Cars, the 94hp vehicle will reportedly have a range of 155 miles.

Aesthetically, the vehicle was designed to have a friendly, approachable look. "Our ambition was to create something bold yet accessible," says Andreas Mindt, Volkswagen's Head of Design. "The ID EVERY1 has a self-assured appearance but remains likeable – thanks to details such as the dynamic front lights and the 'smiling' rear. These design elements make it more than just a car: they give it character and an identity that people can relate to."

The big question for Americans is whether that €20,000 sticker will apply in 2027, given the way our current administration's tariff war is going. The point may be moot; sadly, VW has announced no plans to bring this affordable EV to the U.S. market. With any luck things will change in two years' time.

There isn't much design in your average bike pump: It's a plunger, a hose and a couple of wimpy feet you step on to stabilize the base. And the hose has no place to dock when the pump isn't in use.

In contrast this Zilch pump, by a startup called Radian, was designed with a heavy emphasis on UX.

The designers started with the typically fiddly process of getting the nozzle onto the valve stem. Rather than going with a friction arrangement, where you jam the nozzle onto the valve, the Zilch uses an elegant clamping mechanism. You slide the nozzle over the valve with no friction at all, then press a lever to activate an internal clamp, forming a secure connection. You do the same in reverse to disconnect, meaning there isn't that annoying little blast of air as you remove the nozzle.

When you're done pumping, the hose can be hung from the plunger for storage. The plunger handle is self-centering, so the hose handle's dock is always in place.

The base of the pump features three feet rather than two, splayed for stability.

Lastly, the pump has been designed for serviceability; the user can easily disassemble it and replace parts as necessary.

The Zilch pump has been successfully Kickstarted, with 24 days left to pledge at press time. It starts at $95.

Final Deadline for 2025 is March 25th at 9 PM EST—get to work on your entry now with the help of this guide.

Receiving an honor in the Core77 Design Awards takes a little more than just an exceptional design project—it requires turning that exceptional project into an entry that will grab the jury's attention. With the Final Deadline looming on March 25th, there is still plenty of time to submit your best work in a way that thoroughly impresses the jury and helps you stand out from your competition.

We've created the following guide to help you nail every step of the submission process, so your entry is presented in the best light possible. Included are tips and tricks to highlight your project's strengths and maximize your entry's potential.

Step One: Create a C77DA Account

Head to designawards.core77.com and click "Enter Now" to start the process. By doing so you'll enter the portal to begin your C77DA entry, use your email address and then add a password. If you forget your password, you can tell the system, and it will send you a new link and a way to update your password.

Step Two: Begin your Entry

Once you've signed in, click the "Start + Enter" button in the middle of the page to the left. Or if you have started your entry will be listed under "My Entries" where you can click it and review what you've started.

Next, choose your entry type: Professional or Student. If the project you are submitting was completed while you were actively enrolled in school between January 1, 2024 and March 25, 2025, select "Student". For all other circumstances, choose "Professional".

Then choose from the 20 categories by clicking the perfect category for your project. Fill in your project name and click the button that says you meet all the requirements. NOTE: your project name will be used throughout the system and for the announcement of winners. Click "Save + Next" and head to the next section. You can go back and edit as often as you would like. You can also continue to edit your entry until the final deadline.

Step Three: Fill Out the "Submitter + Contact for the Win" Information

In this section you are giving the C77DA the submitter's name AND the name of the person to contact should your project win an award. Please don't use a blind email address that's never checked in this section of the form. By giving us the best way to contact you, we are both assured that you learn the results, get your trophy copy confirmed, and your trophy shipped to the right place.

Step Four: Fill out the "Entry" Information

All questions in the "Entry" information section are REQUIRED unless they are marked as "(optional)".

The Solution/Project Description is the MOST important section. You have 1500 words to describe the problem, the process, the unique features, and the solution your project provides. Frame the problem you were given and then include all pertinent information such as unique design solutions, materials, sustainability features, or anything that makes your solution special.

Following the first section you will insert the "Designer Name"—if it is a team project then put your Firm Name in the Designer First Name section followed by the word "Team" in the "Designer Last Name" section.

In the Additional Design Credits section, you can give recognition to those who helped your project become fully realized. Make sure to list everyone here who was involved so we can congratulate all the right people if your project is honored.

Use the "Other" field to list any other contributors, vendors or fabricators that have not been listed in the previous fields.

Step Five: Submit your Attachments

This is the "show" in your C77DA submission. You can submit up to 11 attachments—JPEG or PDF files—each with a maximum file size of 15mb. Use a video to show how your project works. Video attachments must be hosted on a video site such as YouTube or Vimeo, so all you need to insert is the URL for your video. Make sure website URLs are publicly accessible and are active URLs that lead to a landing page. Please ensure any applicable usernames and passwords are provided and active.

Please do not upload any further written material within the attachments. Your project description should fully explain everything about your submission.

Don't forget to check the box to be eligible for the Autodesk Fusion prize! If you used Autodesk Fusion as part of your design process then you are eligible. We will follow up during the judging process to collect additional information regarding this prize for those who enter.

Tips for filling out entry elements:

• Your Solution/Project Description should describe your intent as you approached your project. What is your point of view? Talk about the process that informed your project. Think about research, ethnography, subject matter experts, materials exploration, technology, iteration, testing and anything else that went into it. It also helps to describe the stakeholder interests your project considers, such as audience, businesses, organizations, labor, manufacturing and distribution. The jury loves to read about these facets of the project but be sure to keep it to 1500 words or less.

• The final point to consider when describing your design in your Solution/Project Description section is how your project earns its keep in the world. What is its value? Discuss the type of social, educational, economic impact it has, whether it's paradigm-shifting, sustainable or if it creates an environmental, cultural or gladdening effect.

• Also check that you haven't exceeded the character limit in your Solution/Project Description, especially if you cut and pasted your text from another file. We don't want your words to get cut off!

• Your Attachments must be either JPEG or PDF formats. The maximum individual file size is 15MB. Sorry, but we can't accept Zip, Stuffit or other compressed files.

• When you are uploading your files, double and triple check that your sizes and file types are correct!

• Think carefully when selecting the category or categories in which you are entering your work. We have full definitions here on the Categories Page. We recommend reviewing them all to ensure you enter the most appropriate category. You can enter the same project in multiple categories. You never know... your design might be perfect as a Consumer Product entry, and it might also fit into the Interaction category.

Step Six: Submit and Pay for your Entry

After you fill in all the required elements, and any of the optional elements you want to include, click on the Submit button near the bottom of the page. This will take you to the check-out page. Here you will be asked to:

1. Add all your entries into the payment process. (So, fill out all your entries, then check-out and pay for all of them at one time).

2. Apply any discount codes you may have received from our partners.

Choose your Payment Method and fill in your information. You can use MasterCard, Visa, American Express, Diners Club, Discover, JCB or Maestro. A receipt will be emailed to the email address used by the "Submitter".

With this guide, the power to build the perfect Core77 Design Awards entry is now in your hands. If you find you're still running into problems, please contact us at awards@core77.com.

The 2025 Core77 Design Awards call for entry closes on March 25th. Start your entry and knock the socks off the Judges today!

We were working on one of life's most vexing problems: where to put your shoes. You can line them up like a baseboard of shoes, but good luck keeping that looking nice. You can have a shelf or hang them from the door, but that's a bit too prominent in any room. And where do you sit while you lace up?

We started with a simple goal to design an efficient, modular shoe storage solution that includes a place to sit. Quadrant takes the efficiency of the wedge shape and rolls your shoes up under a gravity-defying bench. You can extend the bench by placing multiple Quadrants next to each other so everyone can have their own cubby.

View the full project here

Today most of us use keyboards, whether physical or touchscreen, to conduct our business and personal lives. We all know the keyboard emerged from the typewriter, a machine that revolutionized business in the 19th and 20th centuries, and you could be forgiven for assuming that the typewriter was invented by a mechanical engineer working for a business organization.

Instead, the typewriter was first developed by a pastor at the Royal Institute for the Deaf-Mute in Copenhagen, around 1865. Rasmus Malling-Hansen, the Institute's principal, observed that his students could communicate in sign language more quickly than they could write. He set out to invent a machine that would allow students to "speak with their fingers," quickly getting words down on paper.

With no incumbent form factor to mimic, Malling-Hansen had to pioneer his own user interface. According to the Malling-Hansen Society:

"Its distinctive feature was an arrangement of 52 keys on a large brass hemisphere, causing the machine to resemble a giant pin cushion…. Malling-Hansen made experiments with a model of his writing ball made out of porcelain. He tried out different placements of the letters on the keys, to work out the placement that lead to the fastest writing speed. He ended up placing the most frequently used letters to be touched by the fastest writing fingers, and also placed most of the vocals to the left and the consonants to the right. This together with the short pistons which went directly through the ball, made the writing speed of the writing ball very fast."

Malling-Hansen managed to get his machine, the Malling Hansen Writing Ball, into production by 1870.

However, two years earlier in 1868, American printer Christopher Latham Sholes and inventor/lawyer Carlos S. Glidden had invented their own typewriter design. They licensed their Sholes & Glidden model, which featured the QWERTY keyboard layout we all know, to firearms manufacturer E. Remington and Sons. Their machines went into production in 1874.

E. Remington and Sons had vast capital resources that Malling-Hansen did not. In the end, less than 200 Writing Balls were made, whereas E. Remington and Sons pumped out 5,000 Sholes and Glidden machines in their first four years of production.

Today, less than 40 Malling Hansen Writing Balls still exist, the bulk of them in museums. One of them is being auctioned off by Auction Team Breker, a German auction house. The last time they sold a Writing Ball, in 2019, it fetched $140,643.

To anyone who pays an energy bill, harvesting free power from the sun sounds attractive. But solar remains prohibitively expensive, at least in the U.S. The up-front cost of the panels and the installation mean the overall savings take years or decades to accrue, which is too long for most homeowners.

A British company called Power Roll is in the process of disrupting this space. Their eponymous product is a film-like solar harvesting material that can be produced in rolls; their production method is closer to producing photographic film than building solar panels. And rather than relying on expensive rare-earth metals like indium, Power Roll's product uses widely-available perovskite, a mineral, as the "active ingredient" that turns sunlight into electricity.

The company says their manufacturing costs are inexpensive and scalable. Moreover, because the product is a film, the thinking is that installation will be far easier. Not just the roof, but every surface of a house could in theory be sheathed with the stuff.

That extra surface area might come in handy. An important component of solar harvesting materials is the PCE, or Power Conversion Efficiency rating, which is simply a measure of how much sun-borne energy hitting the panel actually gets converted into usable electricity. Traditional silicon-based solar panels have a PCE of 22% to 25%. Power Roll's product currently achieves just 12.8%. However, the company notes that the material is still under development and they expect to optimize it further.

Even with a PCE roughly half of the incumbent technology, if Power Roll's product is indeed low-cost, scalable, and easy to install, it would potentially have a gigantic impact on the solar market. "?In just one hour," the company writes, "enough sunlight hits the earth to power the whole world for a year…. We need to generate more solar energy. On more surfaces. In more places."

Here's the company's vision for how their product would be integrated into our environment:

Here's what we looked at this week:

Specialty tools: Cascade Designs' snow saw for safety and shelter.

Chery's wild living-room-on-wheels vehicle concept.

Industrial designer and innovation leader Kevin Bethune's new "Nonlinear: Navigating Design with Curiosity and Conviction" book is now out.

Modern-day Autoprogettazione: The Delta Lamp, by industrial designer Christoph Hauf and 1x1 Systems.

"Check Engine Light," Joshua Vides' show of real-world Pop Art cars.

Thyrm's DarkVault 2.0, a chest-mounted smartphone case for soldiers and police.

Grau's Fire Table Lamp is a gorgeous piece of industrial design.

The Vibrant, by industrial design firm Intenxiv, is a wifi router with aesthetics you can customize.

The well-designed Roller Pro, by Peak Design, has reached millions in funding on Kickstarter.

The Dock 3, DJI's incredible vehicle-deployed drone.

The 21st-Century power strip: bFRIENDS Power Modules, by industrial design firm Pearson Lloyd.

Swedish cloakroom furniture by Dalform.

The AC Cobra makes a comeback. It's English, Swedish and Chinese now.

The Ultra Mobile Vehicle, a robotic BMX bike that can freestyle.

A funny story about Gaetano Pesce's UP 5 Chair and a car accident.

Another vice-friendly design classic: Joe Colombo's Poker Table from 1968.

Shosetsu: Japan's clever anti-snow roadways rely on groundwater, geothermal heat and embedded sprinklers.

Industrial design case study: Character's designey tool set, by ID firm Doris Dev.

Jetco's Wachtel Panel Cutter is a better tool for cutting corrugated metal or plastic.

Is your engineering salary up to snuff? Find out with this look at the top, bottom, and median salaries for engineers working in various roles.

The Empire Strikes Back: GM Leads 2024 JD Power Initial Quality Scores

Given challenges with standardization, workforce, and compliance, manufacturers turn to AI to streamline workflow, enhance collaboration, and drive efficiency.

Here are eight examples of farm automation, from planting and irrigation to harvesting and farm management.

The AI-powered laser tool from Carbon Robotics is helping farmers to eliminate weeds without chemical herbicides or soil disruption.

The carmaker is used to exploding expectations, so maybe its new Verne subsidiary can solve the robo-taxi puzzle.

Latest sensors, lots of data, and AI teaming to make buildings smarter.

3D printing company, Carbon, is producing one-off bike saddles designed for individual riders.

3D digital twins, advanced sensors, and AR/VA are boosting efficiency, automation, and productivity in manufacturing.

Tech CEO at Sensors Converge keynote adamant sensors will help farmers meet goal of growing more food with fewer workers.