Build exactly the kind of drone you need

Smaller drones are better suited for indoor use. Larger drones are much more efficient outdoors and can navigate better in inclement weather. Sheida Amiri-Rigi devised a way to build the drone you need based exactly on your specific requirements. Plug-and-use models allow you to arrange as many motors or even camera modules as you need, creating complex drones that can fly better, or for longer, or can perform complex maneuvers to get exactly the camera shot you need. The multiple camera modules let you grab different angles on the go, allowing the Dash Drone, as Sheida calls it, to perform reconnaissance, or even capture mutiple view-points during one flight. Besides, imagine flying a massive drone into the sky that can detach and disperse in multiple directions if and when needed?! I don’t know of any drone that can pull that off yet, but perhaps in the not-so-distant future!

Designer: Sheida Amiri-Rigi

The ‘au-naturel’ way of dehydrating and sun-drying your fruits and veggies

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Drying is one of the oldest and healthiest ways of preserving food. The drying process allows for long-term, compact storage while retaining vitamins, minerals, and flavor. Modern-day dryers and dehydrators may speed up the process, but are expensive, guzzle electricity, and are frankly unnecessary when you have the largest drying resource available to you for free… the sun.

Myriam Meyer’s Aliz uses the sun’s heat to dry out food. The Aliz looks like an alluring outdoor piece of decor, with its metal compartments layered upon one another (looking like a lantern). The sun’s heat pulls the moisture out from the food, which is stored in a ventilated chamber that is protected from pests. After a few days of drying, the food you’ve placed inside, be it berries or fruits or even vegetables gets effectively dried out by the sun and becomes preserved naturally while locking in every bit of flavor!

Designer: Myriam Meyer

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This wall-mounted shelf is actually a micro-fridge!

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Imagine this. You’re in front of your television and you’d really like a nice chilled beer, but you don’t want to walk all the way to the fridge. Or imagine buying groceries but having no space to store them because your fridge is jam-packed with stuff. Now imagine having a dedicated refrigeration unit disguised as furniture right where you need it. That’s the Shelves Fridge by Jinho Han. Designed to look like a shelf but work like a cooling unit, the Shelves is a temporary shelf-fridge that you can place stuff on, instantly chilling/preserving them.

The Shelves comes with a resting platform, a horizontal cooling duct, and a translucent box-cover. The cooling duct can push air either upwards, cooling the stuff kept on the shelf (you’ll have to place the box cover to enclose your bottles/food to cool them better and faster… or the cooling duct can push air downwards, allowing you to hang a shopping bag on it, as the air blows down on your groceries, giving them temporary refrigeration before you take that massive turkey out of the fridge to thaw and create more space for today’s groceries. When you don’t need the Shelves, simply collapse the shelf upwards into the wall and your temporary cooling unit recedes into the background! It would be cool if the ‘closed’ Shelves unit could work as an air-conditioner though…!

Designer: Jinho Han

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Drone lights will guide you home

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The idea seems wild, but the more and more you think about it, the more it begins making sense, and seems more plausible than before. The idea behind the Twinkle is to combine drone tech and illumination to make the world’s smartest and most useful street-lights.

Each individual street-lamp would be a vertical pole with multiple Twinkle drones docked in it. The drones would come with powerful lights at their base, illuminating the land right underneath them, and when docked in their lamp-posts, would look just like any streetside lamp. However, as soon as pedestrians pass from underneath, a single Twinkle drone would leave its dock and follow the pedestrian(s) around, lighting their path. This individual lighting solution would mean no dark alleyways or blind-spots for pedestrians, as they quite literally have a guiding light with them. If a Twinkle’s battery reached critical status, it would head back to its dock and send another Twinkle on the way.

A floating street-light goes far beyond making streets safer. Its ability to move allows it to patrol streets, alleys, and even off-road paths where you probably wouldn’t find any lights. The Twinkle drone helps guide you from A to B, rather than rely on a string of streetlights to illuminate your path. When done, it goes back to its dock, transforming back into your regular streetlight!

Designers: Honghao Deng & Jiabao Li.

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