This air-conditioned formal shirt keeps you cool during heated board meetings

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Let’s face it, global warming is real, and it’s already affecting millions worldwide. Japan is also bearing the brunt of hot summer days, prompting manufacturers to come up with innovative ways of cooling down in the peak heat. There are personal fans to direct chilled air at the most sensitive neck areas that cool down the whole body, or the more radical solutions like the human refrigerator to walk into and have the next-generation cooling effect.

We’ve come across another interesting personal cooling solution that comes from the land of the rising Sun, and is equally out of the box for everyday use. The solution takes the popular Yofuku no Aoyama formal attire and outfits it with fans to provide active cooling to settle down the extreme heat build-up on hot days. Called the Kuchofuku Air-Conditioned Short Sleeve Work Shirt, the attire developed in collaboration with fan-equipped fashion maker FZN is meant for people exposed to extreme daytime heat.

Designer: Yofuku no Aoyama

If you are in Japan, Yofuku no Aoyama is a household name when you need to be dressed for important events or meetings with clients. They’ve got the idea to keep you well dressed all day long without any uncomfortable feeling triggered by the lack of proper cooling outdoors. This seemingly normal button-up shirt has the understated summer business look, but on the inside, it comes loaded with two active cooling fans. Who could have thought of that? Although it does look a little bulged up on the sides, which can make you seem slightly fatty on the sides. That’s because of the wearable cooling fan system taking up the space, and the fans engaged during use.

The fans have three operating settings: direct cool air inwards, keeping the wearer comfortable when the Sun is beating down hard. Although not as foolproof as the human cooling refrigerator mentioned earlier, this one does provide temporary relief. At the highest settings, it can stretch for around 3.5 hours, while at the lowest operation mode the wearer can enjoy cool air for around 10 hours. We’ve seen such solutions in the past coming from Japan, mostly targeted for field workers, but they are mostly gear and nothing like apparel. This one changes the outlook, as it is a blue-collar uniform disguised as a cool-down solution for more formal business settings.

From the front, the Kuchofuku Air-Conditioned Short Sleeve Work Shirt doesn’t give away the innards, but from the back, the fans can be visible. That means you’ll either have to mask it with some blazer, or not expose to onlookers from the side profile. You’ll also have to be mindful of the 95 grams added weight of each of the fans, and the 165 grams rechargeable battery pack. I hope the weight distribution is done better on this formal shirt; it’ll feel like carrying a sizeable phone or battery bank.

The short-sleeved shirt meant to be worn hustling for a day’s meetings from one location to the other is available in blue or gray colors, in medium, large, or XL sizes. It can be bought right away from the Yofuku no Aoyama stores or the company’s online shop for 17,490 yen (approximately $111).

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A $150 Portable Espresso Machine That Heats Its Own Water in 135 Seconds

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Good coffee and travel have never really gotten along. At the hotel, there’s that sad drip machine on the counter producing something closer to warm brown water than an actual espresso. At the campsite, it’s instant granules and lukewarm hope. Even for commuters, the office coffee situation rarely inspires confidence. The demand for a proper cup of espresso away from home has always been real; the solutions, less so.

Fanttik’s Cafein 11 is the kind of portable coffee machine that takes that problem seriously. Rather than asking you to pack a separate kettle or hunt for an outlet, it handles heating, pressure, and extraction entirely on its own, running off a built-in rechargeable battery. Fanttik, a brand behind over 40 product design awards, including multiple iF Design Awards, didn’t approach this as a novelty gadget.

Designer: Fanttik

Weighing 825g, the Cafein 11 sits comfortably in the same mental category as a travel thermos, which makes packing it feel like a non-decision. It’s built from food-grade stainless steel, which keeps it durable and easy to clean, and its cylindrical silhouette slips neatly into a backpack without fuss. The machine doesn’t look or feel like a compromise, and that’s actually a harder design goal to hit than it sounds.

The most meaningful thing the Cafein 11 does is heat its own water. That might sound basic, but it’s the feature that separates a genuinely portable espresso machine from one that’s merely small. From room temperature, it reaches brewing heat in about 135 seconds, meaning a proper shot is ready before a campsite morning gets going, or before the next highway stretch begins. No kettle required.

On the extraction side, the Cafein 11 operates at 20 bar of pressure and runs an 8-second pre-infusion cycle before the main brew begins. Pre-infusion saturates the grounds before full pressure is applied, which generally leads to a more even extraction and a richer cup. It’s a detail that suggests Fanttik was thinking as much about what ends up in the cup as about how compact the machine could be.

What also helps is that the Cafein 11 works with both capsules and ground coffee. On a rushed office morning, a capsule is in and out in seconds with no measuring or cleanup required. On a slower weekend trip, freshly ground beans are equally welcome. Either way, the machine adapts to how you feel rather than asking you to commit to one kind of coffee ritual.

Charging works through USB-C, which sounds like a small detail but matters more in practice than you’d think. There’s no proprietary cable to track down or forget at home, since the cord you’re already using for your phone or laptop does the job. A triple 4,500 mAh battery configuration handles multiple shots per charge, so the machine doesn’t run out of steam faster than the average traveler’s patience does.

At $149.99, the Cafein 11 isn’t the cheapest addition to a bag, but the math shifts when you consider what it replaces: hunting for a decent café in unfamiliar places, hotel drip machines that have seen better days, and the persistent compromise between going somewhere and having a good espresso while you’re there. It’s the kind of thing you don’t realize you want until you’re somewhere without a decent cup.

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Nobody Designed a Drum Kit for Beginners. Until Boxboom.

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Picking up the drums has always come with a quiet, frustrating tax. Before you’ve played a single beat, you’re already being asked to make a significant financial commitment, figure out where to put a massive piece of equipment, and accept that your neighbors might hate you. For most people, that’s where the dream ends. Not with failure, but with logistics.

Xiaoyu Yu, a graduate from the Umeå Institute of Design’s class of 2026, noticed this gap and did something about it. Her project, Boxboom, is a rental-based, foldable electronic drum kit designed specifically for first-time players. On paper, it sounds straightforward enough. In practice, it reframes the entire conversation about what a beginner drum experience should actually look like.

Designer: Xiaoyu Yu

The existing drum market is oddly shaped. At the entry level, you get cheap kits that feel nothing like playing real drums. At the high end, you get electronic kits that come closest to replicating acoustic feel, but they’re expensive, require serious space, and carry the weight of a long-term commitment for someone who isn’t even sure they like drumming yet. As Yu observed, the market offers little for true beginners. Boxboom identifies that gap clearly: the problem isn’t that beginners can’t learn, it’s that the tools were never really designed around them to begin with.

The physical design is worth appreciating on its own terms. Boxboom unfolds from a compact box into a fully functional drum configuration. Modular joints allow for quick setup and flexible arrangement, which means you’re not stuck with one rigid layout that doesn’t suit your body or your room. Parts are designed to be replaced individually, a detail that matters a lot for longevity. When a product is rentable, it has to survive multiple users, multiple moves, and the general roughness of being a learning tool. The design accounts for all of that without looking like it’s trying too hard.

What makes Boxboom more than just a folding drum kit is the service thinking built around it. Yu designed a three-sided ecosystem connecting users, rental shops, and drum training institutions through an online booking and delivery system. You’re not just renting a piece of hardware. You’re entering a structure that connects you to learning, not just to ownership. That shift matters more than it might seem. Ownership, it turns out, is one of the biggest barriers to entry, not a lack of enthusiasm.

The research behind the project is just as considered. Yu conducted field research at Umeå Music School and Toontrack, a leading drum sound engine company, to understand how beginners experience rhythm and what it genuinely takes for a kit to support early learning. The design process ran from 1:10 scale models all the way to full 1:1 prototypes, testing folding logic and setup sequences until the physical experience matched the idea. A central Hub integrates a phone holder, power panel, and teaching stick storage dock into a single arm. The whole system is organized around one driving question: how can a drum kit itself teach you to play?

That question is what separates Boxboom from the many beginner-focused products that quietly shrink their ambitions and rebrand it as accessibility. Yu isn’t simply lowering the financial barrier. She’s rethinking the relationship between a learner and their instrument entirely. Most musical tools are designed with the assumption that you already know what you’re doing. Boxboom assumes you don’t, and it respects you for exactly that.

Graduation design projects like this tend to get filed away a little too fast. They show up at exhibitions, earn some well-deserved attention, and then disappear before anyone asks whether they could actually become something real. Boxboom feels like it deserves a longer conversation than that. The drumming market hasn’t seen this kind of structural rethinking in a long time, and the problem it’s addressing is genuinely underserved.

Whether Boxboom ends up in production or remains a concept, it already does something worth noting: it makes you wonder why nobody asked these questions sooner. Drums have always been for everyone. The design just hadn’t caught up yet.

The post Nobody Designed a Drum Kit for Beginners. Until Boxboom. first appeared on Yanko Design.