The 60-Ton Blue Whale You Walk Through to Get Home

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If you told most architects to design a residential gate, you’d probably end up with something clean, understated, and entirely forgettable. A nice water feature, maybe. Some carefully shaped hedges. Wutopia Lab looked at the same brief and decided the answer was a whale. A full, mid-leap, cobalt blue whale, placed at the entrance of a residential complex in Shangqiu, Henan, China. It is one of the most confidently strange things built in recent memory, and I mean that as the highest possible compliment.

The project is called Whale Gate, and it serves as the entrance structure for Golden Island, a development by Jinsha Group. The masterplan for the entire site is built around an archipelago concept, with residential buildings that appear to float across a landscape of water and greenery, as if scattered across a private sea. The client’s stated goal was to create the feeling of entering a different world when residents came home. Wutopia Lab took that mandate seriously, perhaps more literally than anyone expected.

Designer: Wutopia Lab (photos from LIU Guowei)

Architect Yu Ting froze the exact moment a whale breaches the ocean surface and translated that image directly into architecture. The result spans 242 square meters and weighs sixty tons, covered in 1,170 double-curved aluminum panels, not one of which is identical. The exterior is that deep, specific cobalt blue that reads instantly as oceanic. The entry point cuts through the belly of the structure as a golden vertical opening, giving the whole composition a two-act quality: the whale from the outside, a golden threshold from within. Perforated white aluminum panels above suggest water spray mid-exhale. It works on every level it is trying to work on, and the total absence of subtlety feels like a feature rather than a flaw. Most architecture of this scale tries to keep its options open. This one doesn’t.

What gets me about Whale Gate isn’t the strangeness of it, though that’s certainly part of the appeal. It’s the clarity of conviction behind it. The design doesn’t hedge. There’s no half-measure where it almost looks like a whale but could also be read as a biomorphic abstraction. Wutopia Lab made an animal, and they committed. The studio has been explicit that symbolism is a function, that arriving home deserves the kind of architecture willing to acknowledge what that moment actually means to people.

That position is worth sitting with. So much of what gets labeled “landmark architecture” in residential design is really just scale. Big things that feel important because they are big. Whale Gate earns its presence differently. The structure runs on a six-layer construction system with nearly 4,000 individual components, and every steel and aluminum member was custom-fabricated to account for varying curvatures and torsions across the form. The engineering involved in making a sixty-ton whale look like it’s mid-leap is genuinely extraordinary. But the engineering serves the story, which is the right order of operations.

There’s also a viewing platform at the top, accessible exclusively to residents via a golden staircase that climbs through the whale’s head. From up there, the entire compound unfolds below: water, cypress trees, buildings still under construction. The platform transforms the gate into something more than a threshold. It’s a place that belongs specifically to the people who live there, a reward for the commute home, a brief moment of elevation and perspective. One that quietly asks you to look at where you live and actually feel something about it.

I know biomorphic architecture has a complicated history of landing closer to spectacle than to substance. Plenty of “iconic” gateway designs end up aging like novelty; the initial wow gives way to “why, though?” within a decade. Whale Gate sidesteps that trap because the symbolism isn’t arbitrary. The whale connects to the water, the water connects to the archipelago layout, and the archipelago connects to the mythological idea of arriving at an island realm. The logic holds all the way down.

Whether or not you’d want to drive through a whale every morning is a fair question. But few people would argue it’s worse than a security booth and a speed bump.

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“Exoskeleton Mouse” Gives Each Individual Finger Its Own Ergonomic Saddle

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The history of mouse design is essentially a history of addition. More buttons, more weight options, more RGB zones, more surface textures, more software profiles, more reasons to spend three hundred dollars on a peripheral that still cradles your hand in the same closed-shell geometry Bill English built in 1972. The ergonomics conversation in particular has produced some genuinely thoughtful vertical mice and trackball revivals, but even those radical-seeming pivots keep the fundamental assumption intact: that a mouse is a body, and your hand rests on top of it. Psudoku, a maker and keyboard enthusiast whose work lives on GitHub, decided that assumption was the problem.

Kotinos is what a wireless mouse fossil looks like, the skeletal trace of an input device after everything non-essential has been removed by time or intent. An open 3D-printed scaffold rises from a flat base, each branch terminating in a small saddle pad matched to a specific fingertip, with the HSK Pro mouse internals sitting completely naked at the center of the lattice. Hand size and paddle geometry are both configurable through OpenSCAD scripts, meaning the fit is genuinely personal rather than averaging across a bell curve of palm measurements.

Designer: psudoku

The structural logic here is closer to a finger splint or an orthotic brace than anything in the Logitech catalog, and that framing is deliberate. Traditional mouse shells work by distributing contact across the entire palm and finger surface, which sounds ergonomic until you realize that it also means your hand is constantly fighting the geometry of a form designed for an average that probably doesn’t match you. Kotinos inverts the relationship entirely. The scaffold contacts only the fingertips, each pad saddle-shaped to cradle the distal phalanx rather than the whole finger, and the palm floats free of any surface entirely. Whether that produces genuine relief for RSI sufferers or just relocates the pressure points somewhere new is a question only long-term use can answer, but the premise is at least architecturally honest in a way that most ergonomic marketing copy never manages to be.

The construction photographs suggest multi-jet fusion 3D printing for psudoku’s own unit, that characteristic fine-grained grey surface that reads almost like sandstone in photographs, though the OpenSCAD source files mean any hobbyist with a resin or FDM printer can generate their own version. The exposed internals are genuinely striking in person: purple PCBs, a teal scroll wheel housing, ribbon cables and red wiring running between struts, all visible through the open lattice like a dissection model. There’s no attempt to prettify any of it. The aesthetic is pure function, which ends up being far more visually arresting than another matte-black gaming peripheral with aggressive chamfers and a glowing logo.

The files are free, the build is approachable, and the only real donor hardware you need is an HSK Pro mouse to gut for parts. Psudoku suggests applying fabric tape on the contact points to give the Kotinos mouse a more natural, comfortable feel. Because the Kotinos only touches you at the fingertips, those few contact points carry all the sensory weight that a conventional mouse spreads across your entire palm. If the saddle pads feel rough or cold or slightly wrong, there’s nowhere else for your hand to escape to. For a mouse built from struts and exposed circuit boards, that kind of tactile warmth might be exactly what keeps it from feeling like the medical device it occasionally resembles.

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Nothing 4a Pro with an E-ink Display Looks Way More Interesting than the Glyph Matrix

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The Glyph Matrix is nice, but it’s not really useful, is it? How much value can you extract from spinning the bottle on the back of your phone, or playing unique patterns on it every time your phone rings? Sure, Nothing will have you believe that the Glyph Matrix is the natural evolution of the Glyph Lights – but one redditor had a different idea. Ditch the matrix instead, give the consumers an actual screen.

This Nothing 4a Pro revised concept features a full-fledged e-ink display on the back, serving as a useful second space for notifications, alerts, QR codes, etc. It’s a little less manic than the original with the flashing lights and all, but I kind of like the silent seriousness of a phone that sports an e-ink screen on the back. Everything else remains the same, the exact same triple-camera layout, the same Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 processor, the same screen. Just, less flashy, more useful.

Designer: Taweros

Here’s where Carl Pei would come in objecting to this entirely. The Glyph Matrix is supposed to be Nothing’s secret sauce, the thing that makes you look twice at a phone, the element of surprise. Ditching flashing lights for an e-ink screen feels a little less TikTok and a little more LinkedIn. That’s not Nothing’s brand, and I can understand. It’s more YotaPhone or TCL NXTPaper than Nothing. However, reddit user ‘Taweros’ has a case to make.

“I’ve been thinking about an alternative to the Glyph Matrix on a future Nothing phone: a small always-on E-Ink display integrated into the same area on the back. Instead of only showing animations, it could display useful information with no power consumption,” Taweros says. “The idea is to keep the minimalist Nothing aesthetic while making the space more practical. Since E-Ink only uses power when the image changes, it could stay visible all day without significantly affecting battery life.”

This new glyph replacement offers a more discreet, low-power, always-on alternative that can be used for a bunch of things. Aside from actually displaying information (instead of wonky patterns), it becomes this ambient second screen that you learn to rely on. Keep it displaying weather notifications, or have it show the face of someone who’s calling, or even use it to display the QR code of your business at a networking event – all this is stuff you CAN’T do with the current Nothing 4a Pro, and to be honest, that feels like a bit of a shame.

To be clear, I don’t hate the glyph matrix. I saw it first-hand at a launch and was blown by how beautiful it looked. I just think beauty without utility is just… art. It’s fun. It isn’t function. Here’s to hoping the Nothing 5 will surprise us!

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This zero-gravity motorized workstation replaces your setup to eliminate back pain and boost productivity

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If you’re working out of a desk with a triple monitor setup and a regular office chair, you don’t have a workstation worthy of 2026. To upgrade your working environment, MWE Labs has created a zero-gravity ergonomic workstation, which it calls the Emperor S2. Dubbed the world’s most advanced workstation, the Emperor S2 actually has some distinctions to qualify the humongous claim.

Transitioning the setup from a regular table and chair into a more integrated system that looks uniform, the Emperor S2 resembles a simulator you would get into and start flying a fighter jet. It is engineered to ensure you feel relaxed while working, and to that end, the workstation comprises an ergonomic chair with lumbar support, a magnetic pillow for the backrest, and a footrest right underneath the monitor setup to stretch your legs and relax during long hours of sitting.

Designer: MWE Labs

This unification of table and chair for a functional workstation that you and I can use with convenience is designed and built in Canada. It’s beyond the usual workstation, somewhat in the domain previously explored by this portable workstation that goes outdoors with you or this workstation that converts into a dining table in minutes, but still feels worth your money for a few reasons.

The setup is clean, and it comes in a carbon black color theme. The workstation is targeted more toward the work-from-home generation, and I feel it has a little bent toward gamers. But no one is stopping you from throwing in a multiple-display setup and getting into high-stakes gaming action. From its appearance though, which lacks the colorful, flashing LEDs and futuristic decals, it’s easy to presume that people focused on productivity will give this one a good look.

“The Emperor S2 transforms your workspace into a fully supported, ergonomic environment built for long-lasting comfort and performance,” the product listing page notes. It allows one to sit back on the zero-gravity chair, adjust the monitor positioning, and set out on a productive work day with the least distraction. The entire system, especially the seat, adapts to your posture throughout the day with a range of motorized adjustments that you can personalize to your convenience.

The “all-in-one workstation with a minimal footprint…is ideal for home offices, corporate environments, and flexible workspaces.” To match different environmental needs, MWE Labs offers the workstation in two configurations, with a single monitor and an option to install a dual or triple-display setup. With the option to adjust the monitor height, the footrest position, and the height of the armrests on the press on a button located on the right side of the frame connection the seat and the monitor, the Emperor S2 also arrives with a keyboard extender and side-tray for accessories.

The workspace engineered to maximize focus, productivity, and well-being starts at CAD $5,795 (approximately $4,200) for the single monitor setup. A three-monitor setup will set you back CAD $6,140 (about $4,500). If you like more colors or want some feature specific to your work setup, you can have the Emperor S2 customized, though we believe that would entail some additional cost.

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