Here's what we looked at this week:

Objets d'esign: Lexon is releasing speaker and lamp versions of Jeff Koons' Balloon Dog sculpture. Volvo's new Multi-Adaptive Safety Belt compensates for different sizes, shapes and crash severities.

Dometic's designey coolers use a different manufacturing method.

Wandercraft's Eve, the world's first self-balancing exoskeleton, allows people to walk again.

U.C. Berkeley's tiny pogo robot has a unique locomotion style.

BARE designs a better—and less expensive—Dutch oven featuring a host of UX improvements.

Clever materials use: How to clear standing water on a flat roof using rope.

Architecture that works with challenging terrain, not against it: The Zig-Zag Resort, by JA Joubert and UNS Architects.

Industrial design firm APE creates the Echo Pro, a perfect-fitting bike helmet with a novel adjustment mechanism.

The Splay Max: A folding portable 35" monitor.

Industrial Design student work: Dashiell Schaeffer's Curvesse rocking chair, made from a single sheet of plywood.

These unusual, "anti-ligature" doorknobs are designed with a grim functional purpose.

Designey tool kits: A trend with legs.

BareBag's unusual design approach: Bags that serve as hanging points for other bags.

From Germany, the NOHRD SlimBeam is a handcrafted, attractive piece of home exercise equipment.

Why America's streetlights have been turning purple.

When industrial design is subject to aftermarket modifications: BoxPlates to undo the PlayStation 5's look.

This ShowerClear design fixes the mold problem all showerheads have.

Industrial design case study: Curve ID tackles industrial kitchen equipment for JAVAR.

This case study is from Brooklyn-based Curve ID.

JAVAR is a Colombian-based company focused on industrial kitchen equipment. For more than 30 years, JAVAR has been part of the transformation of the butcher industry in Colombia, contributing to build products that meet compliance with stricter sanitary standards.

JAVAR approached us to develop an all-new range of meat grinders that will be built in Colombia and designed to meet international sanitary standards. Our process started with an in-depth research phase in which we learned how these machines are built and about the butcher industry of Colombia as well as the U.S.With these findings, we gained valuable knowledge that helped us guide the design of the project. We sketched a wide variety of different forms that give the product a robust and easy to clean look.

After down-selecting our design ideas, we began to define how the machine will be manufactured, keeping the number of parts low and capable of adapting to different model sizes.

After several rounds of CAD development and working closely with engineers, we had enough data to begin prototyping and testing.

Our final design focused on easy-to-clean surfaces with a robust stance that communicates durability.

You can see more of Curve ID's work here.

There is an inherent problem with the design of shower heads. Not some of them, all of them. The problem is that their very design creates the ideal circumstances for mold to thrive within them, internally, in areas that you cannot access for cleaning.

A bathtub faucet or kitchen sink tap is simply just a shaped pipe that allows water to flow through them. When you turn the water off, the pipe mouths quickly dry, thanks to their relatively wide shape and local airflow.

Showerheads, however, are complex workings of intricate inner channels and nozzles, designed to break the water flow into spray patterns that end users find desirable.

These channels are all inside the showerhead and get little airflow.

The channels can never really dry out completely, and over time, that interal dampness allows bacteria and mold—including the dreaded black mold--to thrive. In this shot of a showerhead that has been cut open by a saw, a lot of what you see is the detritus of the cut plastic, but you can also see the brown stuff.

And deeper inside the head, you find this:

The mother of Steve Sunshine, an inventor, was suffering from respiratory issues. Sunshine disassembled her showerhead and found it was filled with mold. He subsequently designed this ShowerClear:

This ingenious design pops open, so that after a shower you can let the shower head's innards dry out. It also makes it easy to clean, so you can eliminate mineral build-up. (This eliminates the mild hassle that many of us undertake to clean our showerheads, which is soaking them in a vessel filled with vinegar for a few hours.)

The ShowerClear heads come in a variety of finishes and run $140.

How might an architect feel, seeing a house that they designed being remodeled in a different aesthetic style? What is an automotive designer's reaction, when seeing a vehicle they worked on festooned in swoopy aftermarket body panels?

These are things most industrial designers don't have to worry about. It's not common to see people buying aftermarket parts to modify, say, the look of their toaster. But as even industrial production methods become more accessible to non-designers, that will change.

A case in point are these BoxPlates.

Some background is required here.

Sony's original PlayStation, released in 1994, was a grey box. With its basic geometric shapes, it was very of the '90s.

The PlayStation 2, released in 2000, signaled a new, more Modernist design direction. It resembled a sleek heat sink.

The PlayStation 3, released in 2006, pushed a bit further, doing away with the cooling-fins aesthetic and bringing in a swoopy curve top and bottom. The finish went from matte to glossy. The overall effect was as if it was borrowing from sports car aesthetics.

The Playstation 4, released in 2013, seemed to backtrack towards the Modernism of the 2, with a dash of Brutalism.

Fans seemed to tolerate all of these changes or at least, in those years of limited social media, didn't make much noise about them. That all changed in 2020, with the release of the PlayStation 5:

Its Calatrava-like design was shocking to many. The compound curves of the side panels and the color contrast were too avant garde for gamers not used to design statements. Sony's designers were trying to do something bold, fresh, and new, and not all gamers were onboard. There was a backlash.

Which prompted PC modder Devyn Johnston to create BoxPlates. These are "replacement cover plates for the PlayStation 5, designed to transform its look from swooping curves to clean, minimalist lines. Inspired by classic consoles and modern tech aesthetics, it gives the PS5 a boxy silhouette that blends seamlessly into any setup."

These are not pieces that some dude is 3D printing in his basement; BoxPlates are actual injection-molded parts. (It's not clear if they're ABS or polycarbonate, my two guesses for materials.) Johnston went to the length of ponying up for the tooling, and is selling these for $85. The pieces snap together over the console with internal clips, and he says they "install easily with no tools required."

Notably, Johnston doesn't mention whether the case is also easy to take off. The side panels on the original PS5 are designed for easy removal, for cleaning and servicing; though Sony's designers were trying to make a visual statement, they still kept function in mind.

Johnston, who is not affiliated with Sony, says his redesigned panels yield "a sleek, squared-off form that fits better into your setup. It's not just a cover; it's a full aesthetic overhaul."

For better or worse, the control that industrial designers once had over the final form of their objects will increasingly be subject to the end user's whims.

Right around the time of the pandemic, people across America began noticing something unusual: Streetlights were turning purple. In at least 30 states, people started taking photos like these, typically posting them to social media with questions.

In this photo you can see that the effect isn't consistent across neighboring streetlamps.

Scientific American got to the bottom of what was happening. All of the streetlamps that turned purple were LED "upgrades" from sodium lamps. LEDs cannot produce truly white light, just red, green or blue. To compensate, manufacturers use blue LEDs coated with phosphor. This phosphor layer distorts the blue wavelengths to produce a light that appears white.

The phosphor layers in the affected lamps have been delaminating, yielding purple. In short, it's a manufacturing defect. American Electric Lighting, an Atlanta-based manufacturer that has federal contracts and makes (or at least assembles) their lights in America, is one of the suppliers that has acknowledged the malfunction. Other manufacturers have not been named.

AEL, for their part, has been stepping up and replacing the affected lamps.

Home exercise equipment is typically bulky and unattractive. German manufacturer NOHRD breaks the mold by employing craftspeople to build their SlimBeam, a small-footprint cable machine designed to be aesthetically pleasing while taking up little space. Wrapped in wood, it features a set of height-adjustable pulleys in a butterfly arrangement, accommodating a variety of exercises.

The weights are hidden in the back. I love this particularly German bit of product copy: "The rubberized weight plates prevent any unpleasant clanking noises during your workout."

There's an option to add a 7" touchscreen monitor.

Here we get a look at their actual production process:

NOHRD does have U.S. distribution, and the machines start at $2,000 for the Oak finish; stepping up to Cherry and Walnut raise the price by $400 and $500, respectively.

For most of us, bags are vessels for holding things. But a Chinese company called BareBag has taken an unusual design approach, viewing them more as hanging racks. Their BareBag Nano, which is essentially a wallet that you strap to your body, has a knob at the bottom for hanging other bags off of.

The knob is detachable, to accommodate loops too small to fit over the knob.

Their BareBag Classic, which is clutch-sized, features a U-shaped translucent plastic piece that serves as two hanging hooks. The bag's magnetic lid holds the hooks closed.

I prefer carrying a larger bag that I can use as a vessel, and don't think I'd enjoy walking around with things dangling off of me. But the bag market is as vast as people's preferences, and these two designs have been successfully Kickstarted, with 10 days left to pledge at press time. The Nano goes for $80, the Classic for $100, and both are due to ship in August.

Here are the designers laying out their thinking behind their approach:

A few years ago, we spotted a trend: Designey tools aimed at the DIY crowd. A far cry from what you'd find in a contractor's toolbox, these tools appear to have been designed with CMF input, in a studio whose walls are covered in mood boards. Players in the space include at least one established brand in Bosch, as well as newcomers including Hoto and, on the hand tool side, Character (with an assist from industrial design firm Doris Dev).

Now there's another entrant in the space: A startup called TINKR, launched by influencer Lainy Hedaya Hoffstein, has scored distribution through Target and launches this week. They sell a variety of kits featuring basic hand tools done up with rubber grips and Instagrammable colorways.

Their spirit level even contains blue fluid rather than the standard yellow, apparently for the sake of aesthetics.

The compartment you see in the top left of the lid is an interesting add-on I've not seen before. It's specifically to hold a smartphone, assuming the tool wielder will be following a video tutorial for the project they're working on.

We can assume this trend is here to stay: Depending on which market research firm you believe, the market for household/DIY hand tools runs anywhere from $5 billion to $21 billion and is projected to grow. Established tool brands do not seem interested in stepping down to meet the DIY demand, perhaps for fear of losing credibility from the professional crowd. TINKR, Character and the others will probably thrive.

Here are a series of unusual doorknob designs with vastly different forms. See if you can work out what they all have in common:

What they have in common is that you cannot loop a cord/rope/shoelace around them.

These "anti-ligature" doorknobs are designed specifically for behavioral health facilities, hospitals and correctional institutions where the room's occupants might harm themselves.

It took "five months of struggle," but Pratt ID student Dashiell Schaeffer successfully designed and built this Curvesse Rocker out of a single sheet of plywood.

"The aim of this chair was to challenge the traditional concept of a rocking chair. I wanted this design to be sleek and elegant. It's meant to welcome any body type with its ergonomic curves on the seat and back. The material and overall design allows flexibility making the user ease into the chair."

"The objective of this piece was to create a piece of furniture out of one 4 feet by 8 feet sheet of plywood. To accomplish this I used two different types of poplar bendable plywoods. I steamed, bent, layered and laminated three barrel sheets of 1/8 inch material and three column sheets of 1/8 inch material to give it an overall thin, elegant 3/4 inch thickness."

"One challenge was to have the grain flowing along the bends and still make it strong enough to hold a person's weight. By layering and alternating the column and barrel sheets I gained strength and rigidity while keeping its flexibility. Half the layers had to be bent with steam and then set in position using molds I designed. To laminate everything together I used a vacuum bag. Some pieces cracked and it required a lot of experimentation to get the perfect rocking motion."

The Curvesse won a 2025 SIT Furniture Design Award, and also racked up an honorable mention in Rockler's "Try That Challenge," a social-media-based woodworking competition.

Schaeffer documented the entire project in a 45-minute video, below. (Fellow Pratt alumni: It's fun seeing the old shop again, but it sure wasn't that nice when we were there!)

It's been four years since we looked at the Arovia Splay, a portable monitor that takes a collapsible softbox form factor. Since then the projector-based unit has received generally positive reviews, despite its chief drawback: You won't be using this in a brightly-lit space. For many, the convenience of being able to carry an extra monitor that folds down to the size of a book is attractive.

The company says a frequent customer request is to release a bigger version—the original Splay was 24"—and now they've obliged. Their Splay Max unfurls to a whopping 35".

The softbox screen can also be removed, allowing you to use it as a standalone projector. The company says it can project an 80" to 100" image.

The Splay Max has been successfully Kickstarted, with 32 days left to pledge at press time. Units start at $744 and are scheduled to ship in November.

Dutch industrial design studio APE was tasked with designing a new type of bike helmet: One that could adapt to the shape of the user's head. The client, Dutch startup Headfirst, reckons that roughly half of cyclists wear ill-fitting helmets, which compromises the protection they're meant to offer.

After two years of prototyping, APE came up with this SafeFit system.

It's a ratcheting strap mechanism that allows the user to simply squeeze the helmet against the sides of their head. Doing so slides the toothed straps into a housing, where an internal catch locks the strap into the desired position, holding the sides of the helmet firmly against the user's head. When it's time to doff it, the catches can be released at the press of a button.

In addition to the novel fit mechanism, it also features an integrated brake light that you don't need to connect to anything. Instead it contains a sensor that detects when you slow down and illuminates the brake light.

Called the Echo Pro, the helmet has been successfully Kickstarted, with two days left to pledge at press time. The helmets are going for $112 and should ship in November.

Building on a rocky coastal hillside might yield spectacular views, but it also requires heavy excavation and an environmental cost. Faced with a challenging plot of land on Albania's coast, JA Joubert Architecture of Holland and UNS Architects of Albania found a way to work with the land rather than against it. Here are the plans for the Zig-Zag Resort the two firms co-designed:

"Architecture should not dominate the land; it should respond to it," says Marc Joubert, of JA Joubert Architecture. "At Zig-Zag, we created a design where nature dictates the structure—ensuring that every guest experiences this amazing landscape."

The resort harmonizes with the natural terrain through its signature zig-zag layout, ensuring that each guest enjoys uninterrupted views of the breathtaking surroundings.

The project prioritizes sustainability and seamless mobility, incorporating a funicular system, pedestrian pathways, and drop-off points for intuitive navigation. It is built with locally sourced Berat Stone, blending regional craftsmanship with modern luxury while optimizing passive cooling and solar energy efficiency. With minimal land disruption, rainwater management systems, and an indoor-outdoor architectural flow, Zig-Zag integrates ecological sensitivity into its design.

The resort's sea-water infinity pool and private coastal access further enhance its connection to the Albanian Riviera, making nature a core part of the guest experience. The project spans 30,000m², including hotel accommodations, gardens, and various amenities, and is currently in the design phase.

Wick cord, or wicking rope, is a hack used by some gardeners and plant enthusiasts. A cord or rope made of cotton or nylon is used to connect a water source with the soil surrounding the plant. Capillary action causes water to slowly move from the water source to the plant.

On a roofing forum on Reddit, one poster had a problem unrelated to gardening. He recently replaced the flat roof on his house with a new one. Flat roofs are notoriously poorly draining, and the poster observed standing water on their roof, an 8-square-foot puddle. For four days, the puddle would not evaporate nor drain.

Seeking a solution, the poster put one end of a wicking rope in the puddle, weighing it down with stones, and routed the other end through a scupper into the drainpipe.

"It seems to work great!" the poster writes. "The puddle went from 8 sq ft and an inch deep to totally dry in less than 12 hours."

It's cheaper, and a lot less hassle, than having to pump the standing water out.

The original promise of industrial design, as a profession, was to apply intelligent design decisions and an advanced understanding of materials to create better products that are affordable for the masses. In practice, we haven't seen much of this lately; as prices soar, objects with superior design tend to be much pricier than the incumbent designs.

Well, here's one refreshing difference. Dutch company BARE Cookware aims to use modern materials to improve the design—and price—of cooking utensils. Their BARE Dutch Oven, recently posted to Kickstarter, does away with the pain points of traditional Dutch ovens, while coming in at a fraction of the price.

The traditional Dutch oven, invented in the 1700s, was made out of cast iron. This was a good choice for the time, as the production method was widely available. In the 1800s the innovation of an enamel finish was added, which prevented the vessel from rusting or reacting to acidic foods.

The pain points are twofold. The first is that cast iron, while possessing excellent heat retention, is extremely heavy. This makes it tricky to handle, particularly when it's searingly hot. The second is that the enamel finish is brittle and easily damaged. Once chipped, the damage tends to spread, and chipped enamel on Dutch ovens cannot be repaired.

BARE has done away with both pain points. By using a two-ply construction—a 5mm-thick aluminum core and stainless steel for the cooking surface--they've created a much lighter vessel with similar heat retention properties to a traditional Dutch oven, but without the hotspots.

Being that the interior is stainless steel, there's no enamel to damage, and it's dishwasher-safe. Other nice UX touches include wide handles, less draft angle for more cooking surface and measurement tickmarks on the interior.

Best of all is that these added conveniences come at a reduced cost, compared to premium brands. A Dutch oven from Le Creuset or Staub can run from the mid-$300s to over $500. BARE's offering is going for $148 on Kickstarter, where it's been a smash hit, landing $610K in pledges and counting. At press time there was 22 days left to pledge, and they expect to ship in November.

Robots that move typically have legs or wheels, for walking or rolling. But researchers at U.C. Berkeley have developed a pogo-like robot with just a single leg. It locomotes—up to 8 miles an hour—by hopping.

The diminutive robot is called SALTO, for Saltatorial Agile Locomotion on Terrain Obstacles. ("Saltatorial" is the scientific name for the locomotion style used by kangaroos, grasshoppers and rabbits.) The thinking behind the robot's small size and unusual movement style is that it can travel through challenging terrain. "Small robots are really great for a lot of things, like running around in places where larger robots or humans can't fit," said UC Berkeley robotics grad Justin Yim.

"For example, in a disaster scenario, where people might be trapped under rubble, robots might be really useful at finding the people in a way that is not dangerous to rescuers and might even be faster than rescuers could have done unaided. We wanted Salto to not only be small, but also able to jump really high and really quickly so that it could navigate these difficult places."

That was the robot's original mission, dating back to 2016 when development on it first started. Now, nearly ten years on, another potential application has come into sight. As Robert Sanders of U.C. Berkeley Research explains, "Yim is embarking on a NASA-funded project to design a small, one-legged robot that could explore Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, where the gravity is one-eightieth that of Earth, and a single hop could carry the robot the length of a football field."

In order to achieve a moon-ready robot, the researchers reckon SALTO must be able to land on small targets with pinpoint accuracy. They've looked to squirrels, who can leap long distances and land precisely on branches. After studying squirrels' leaping mechanics, they've modified SALTO with both a grasping claw and a propellor-like flywheel that helps the robot make attitudinal adjustments:

As for why the robot only has one leg and not multiples, Yim explains that it's more efficient. "One leg is the best number for jumping; you can put the most power into that one leg if you don't distribute that power among multiple different devices. And the drawbacks you get from having only one leg lessen as you jump higher. When you jump many, many times the height of your legs, there's only one gait, and that is the gait in which every leg touches the ground at the same time and every leg leaves the ground at approximately the same time. So at that point, having multiple legs is kind of like having one leg. You might as well just use the one."

It's worth noting that SALTO's development was made possible by collaboration between researchers from two very different fields: Biology students from Berkeley's PolyPedal Lab, and Engineering students from the school's Biomimetic Millisystems Lab. It's a great example of how two diverse disciplines can come together to yield true innovation.

Perhaps this will one day be a common sight in hospitals and homes:

That's Eve, the world's first self-balancing personal exoskeleton, according to French robotics company Wandercraft. Eve's mission is to restore walking independence to those with severe mobility issues. Once a user dons it, Eve allows them to stand and walk, with AI tackling the self-balancing. The company says it requires five training sessions to get the hang of.

Eve caused a stir last year, when it was featured in the 2024 Summer Olympics Torch Relay in France. Paralympian Kevin Piette donned the exoskeleton to carry the torch through a village outside of Paris.

The exoskeleton has made its way 'Stateside, where it's currently undergoing trials at the James J. Peters VA Medical Center in the Bronx and the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation in New Jersey. The trials allow adults with spinal cord injuries to walk again.

The company says they still have regulatory hurdles to clear, but that pending further validation, they expect Eve to become commercially available.

Yeti leads the cooler market, with an estimated 37% market share and double the revenues of the nearest competitor. On a recent trip to a big-box, I was not surprised to see other cooler brands attempting to mimic Yeti's design aesthetic. Yet there is at least one cooler brand (that you won't find in American big-boxes) that is trying to compete without copying, and relying instead on unique design differentiators. That's Swedish brand Dometic.

Yeti's coolers, like most of their competitors', are rotomolded. This production process yields thick, tough, one-piece cooler bodies that are hollow. Insulating foam is injected into access ports that are drilled into the cooler body, and concealed beneath design features like handles and drain ports so that consumers can't see them.

If there's a downside to rotomolding, it's that the parts it yields are quite heavy. Dometic has instead chosen to injection mold their coolers, producing separate inner and outer shells. These are fitted together, foam is squirted between them, and the shells are then ultrasonically or thermally welded together. The wall thicknesses are thinner than with rotomolded, yet do not sacrifice thermal performance, the company reckons. And their process yields coolers about 30% lighter than competing products.

With injection molding, you can also get more design detail into a part than you can with rotomolding. Dometic has taken advantage by molding their Recon coolers to stack together, taking a cue from the overlanding world. Their lids are designed to be opened from either side, improving access, and the lids can also be removed entirely.

The drain plug on their smaller 16L model can be swapped out for a spigot or a faucet, turning it into a water cooler.

Stackability, lighter weight and a clean, modern design aesthetic make Dometic's offerings stand out in a market of Yeti-emulators. (In head-to-head ice retention tests, though, Yeti remains the indisputed leader.

One place you won't catch a break is on the price. These are just about as pricey as Yeti's offerings. (Direct side-by-side comparisons are tricky because the capacities of the two brands' models don't jive.)

Two companies that made world-changing innovations in safety are Volvo and Festool. Volvo invented the three-point seatbelt in the '50s, and released the design as open-source; today every passenger car in the world has them. Festool pioneered track saws and dust collection, and while their designs were not released as open-source, the expiration of their patents means most power tool manufacturers have now jumped into that game. In short, countless lives have been saved by the innovations of these companies.

Now Volvo is pushing seatbelts even further, with their Multi-Adaptive Safety Belt. By harnessing car crash data from their vehicles, Volvo has learned that seatbelts should not behave the exact same way with every crash and every user. "Modern safety belts use load limiters to control how much force the safety belt applies on the human body during a crash," the company explains. These load limiters rely on deformable metal parts within the retracting mechanism to deliver one of three different levels of restraint. The variance in these three levels is meant to compensate for both crash severity and occupant size.

Volvo reckons these three settings, which are tailored to the 50th percentile male, are not accurate enough to compensate for the variety of body sizes and crash types. For instance a short, skinny teenager and a six-foot-tall pregnant woman require different levels of restraint.

By relying on a host of interior and exterior sensors in the vehicle, the Multi-Adaptive Safety Belt thus provides 11 different load-limiting profiles. These take into account everything from crash direction and severity to occupant height, weight, shape and even sitting position. "For example, a larger occupant in a serious crash will receive a higher belt load setting to help reduce the risk of head injury. While a smaller occupant in a milder crash will receive a lower belt load setting to reduce the risk of rib fractures."

The new design will debut in the 2026 Volvo EX60, an EV. No word on whether they plan to release the design open-source or will keep this in-house as a competitive advantage.

Jeff Koons broke a record with his Balloon Dog sculptures from the '90s: At $58.4 million, his ten-foot-tall Balloon Dog (Orange) was the most expensive sculpture ever sold by a living artist.

Now he's licensed the design to French design house Lexon, which aims to turn the iconic pooches into household objects.

Their forthcoming Balloon Dog Speaker will reportedly deliver 360-degree sound and be operated by touch sensitive controls and a smartphone app.

A second product, their Balloon Dog Lamp, is fitted with LEDs with adjustable color and brightness.

Lexon says it took a whopping 50,000 hours to get the prototypes right. Now, they say, they're production-ready and will release limited-edition versions of both products this month. At press time prices and specifications hadn't yet been released.

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