Author Archives: Sarang Sheth

This Zippo case now hides a full DIY micro-toolkit inside

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The Zippo lighter has been in pockets since 1932, surviving wars, road trips, and at least a few questionable life decisions. The iconic snap of that hinged lid is the kind of sound permanently lodged in pop culture. But here’s the thing about that stamped steel shell: pull the guts out and what you’re left with is a surprisingly well-engineered little box. It’s the right size, the right heft, and it already has a hinge that clicks with satisfying authority. Someone on the internet finally noticed, and decided to give it a better job.

That job is housing a chrome micro ratchet, one of the smallest 1/4-inch bit drivers in the EDC world, nested inside a custom 3D-printed platform. Two Steinwhale precision bits and a Klein utility knife extension fill out the rest of the space, held in place with eyeglass screws. A spring salvaged from a disposable Bic lighter gives the ratchet its push-out action, popping it through a small hole in the back of the case. Embedded magnets make the whole kit stick to any metal surface, which is a genuinely thoughtful touch. It’s scrappy, it’s clever, and the photos of it sitting open in a palm are almost unfairly satisfying.

Designer: Tiny Tool Shop

The 3D-printed platform is a custom insert that drops straight into the Zippo shell, locked down with eyeglass screws, the kind normally reserved for fixing a bent hinge on your reading glasses. Those same tiny screws appear in two spots across the build, which tells you something about how the maker approaches sourcing. Each component gets its own dedicated slot, keeping the ratchet, bits, and extension snug and rattle-free inside the case. The lid snaps shut over the top, and the result feels tighter than it has any right to be for a DIY project. It’s the kind of thing that makes you instinctively look for a price tag.

The chrome micro ratchet itself ranks among the smallest 1/4-inch drivers you can actually buy, and its scale is genuinely surprising next to almost anything else in a standard tool drawer. It accepts regular hex bits, so it plays well across the broader EDC and hardware ecosystem without needing proprietary accessories. A Bic lighter spring, salvaged presumably from a spent one on the maker’s desk, sits behind the ratchet and pushes it through a small hole in the Zippo’s back panel with just enough resistance to feel intentional. A Klein utility knife extension threads onto the ratchet for added reach in tight spaces, and when it’s not needed, the ratchet stores directly in the Klein knife’s handle instead. Both configurations tuck away cleanly, and the cross-compatibility means the kit pairs naturally with a knife you might already be carrying.

Steinwhale’s micro bits, built from S2 steel and sized specifically for micro ratchets, fill the two bit slots in the platform. The embedded magnets running through the build let the whole kit park on any nearby metal surface, a quality-of-life detail you’d genuinely appreciate halfway through assembling flatpack furniture with both hands occupied. The kit also fits inside a mini Altoids tin if that’s your preferred housing, though the magnets matter a lot more there since there’s no rear hole to push the ratchet out from. In practice, the Zippo remains the better vessel, slimmer, pocketable, and already equipped with a hinge that feels like it belongs. The Altoids option is a nice backup but the Zippo is clearly the intended home.

The whole build likely comes together for under $30 in parts, assuming you have a 3D printer and a spent Zippo shell on hand. The micro ratchet alone runs around $20, which makes this cheaper than most entry-level multitools with considerably less utility for light daily tasks. A Leatherman Skeletool brings pliers, a blade, and a bit driver for around $65 but also weighs 5 ounces and demands real pocket real estate. This kit trades tool variety for pure pocketability, and if your carry already includes a knife, that trade starts looking very reasonable. The one upgrade worth adding is some tactile labeling on the platform slots, so repacking everything in low light doesn’t become a small-scale puzzle.

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Genius ‘Tilted’ Apple Watch Band Makes The Entire Experience 10x More Ergonomic

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Have you noticed tilting always makes things ‘ergonomic’? A laptop stand tilts the keyboard towards you – ergonomic. A vertical mouse tilts your hands into a more natural position – ergonomic. A split keyboard often breaks and tilts the layout in two different directions for your hands – very ergonomic. It’s almost stupidly simple that the human body isn’t designed around perfect right angles. We’re filled with curves, joints, and limitations to how we move – so a simple tilt can often make life a lot easier. The Apple Watch apparently just got the memo.

Designed around a very clever 30° tilt, this Tilted Watch Band puts the Apple Watch at a slight slant, so it’s facing you even when your wrist isn’t. Normal protocol is to lift your wrist up perfectly horizontal, so the screen faces you in the right orientation. Tilt the band and you don’t have to make your wrist horizontal anymore – just hold it at a comfortable angle and the Watch screen faces you a lot more naturally, letting you read the time without flexing your hand or your neck too much… perfect for joggers or bikers who don’t have the luxury to orient their hands while mid-activity.

Designer: MXU

Click Here to Buy Now

As ergonomically obsessed as Apple is, I’m surprised nobody from Cupertino thought of building a band like this. Does it mess with the symmetry? Absolutely. Could Apple still elegantly work around it? I have no doubt they could. They did such a brilliant job with the iPhone Duo’s folding animation, a tilted screen feels like child’s play.

The band comes in a variety of colors, although the best thing you could do is buy a bunch of them and mix and match pairs to create a dual-tone design. The silicone construction makes the band perfect for any kinds of sports, or for people with hypoallergenic requirements. One caveat, however, is that this watch’s tilt makes it so that it only works on the left hand. The clockwise tilt means if you wore the watch on the right hand, the tilt would work against you, requiring you to crane your neck even further than you originally would. Also, the crown would press into your forearm a lot more, which isn’t particularly fun considering you’d have to deal with constantly awakening Siri every few minutes.

The solution, however, is elegantly simple, and works better for smartwatches than it does for watches. You see, reading an analog watch at any tilt or angle is fairly easy – reading a notification on a screen while it’s tilted can be a chore. That specific detail makes the Tilted Watch Band pretty useful, as it reduces the strain on your wrist and neck while you glance down at your wearable.

The Tilted Watch Band is available online through retailers like Amazon, and works with all Watch series and sizes, even with the Ultra. So you can buy and keep the band even through all your watch upgrades over the years!

Click Here to Buy Now

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MetMo turned a 1912 mechanism into the perfect hands-free tweezers for hobbyists and craftsmen

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If the name MetMo rings a bell, that’s because this small Leeds outfit has built its reputation out of taking old mechanical ideas nobody else bothered reviving and turning them into objects people genuinely want to own. We’ve covered the MetMo Driver reworking the mid-century ratchet screwdriver, the Fractal Vise shrinking industrial clamping logic down to desktop scale, and the Pocket Grip channeling a century-old patent into nearly half a million dollars of Kickstarter support. The catalog reads like a museum of mechanisms reimagined with modern metallurgy and CNC precision. Now they’re circling back to something smaller, more delicate, and more universally frustrating than anything they’ve tackled before. Their next target is the humble tweezer.

The Precision Grip is calibrated for a different job than MetMo’s earlier clamping tools, the kind of featherlight, controlled pressure needed to hold a model part without crushing it. Where the Pocket Grip chased 21kg of clamping force for daily carry tasks, this one maxes out at 5kg, by design. It runs on a miniaturized drive screw borrowed from precision machining equipment, so you set your grip force once and the jaws hold that position without assistance. That’s the core limitation tweezers can never escape: they hold via sustained finger pressure, and the moment that wavers, the part is gone. For anyone who has ever sacrificed a miniature to the carpet gods, that last sentence is the whole pitch.

Designer: Sean Sykes & James Whitfield (MetMo)

Click Here to Buy Now: $129 $143.33 (10% off). Hurry, only 19/1050 left! Raised over $579,000.

For decades, precision hobbyists have been improvising with tools from completely different disciplines. Jewelers raid surgical supply catalogs. Electronics hobbyists use soldering tongs that launch parts across the room the moment grip pressure drops. Model painters hold tiny figures between their fingers and simply hope for the best. MetMo’s position is that these people deserve something built specifically for the job, and the Precision Grip’s lightly textured jaw tips are designed to grip without marking or damaging delicate surfaces, a distinction that no repurposed dental or electrical tool reliably delivers.

The mechanism at the center of all this is a miniaturized version of the drive screw used in high-precision machining equipment, a category of hardware that lives and dies by tolerance accuracy. A solid barrel hinge keeps both jaws in perfect alignment during clamping, preventing the sideways drift and tip-twist you’d get from a conventional pivot, and that dimensional stability is what makes the needle-nose tips usable for genuinely pinpoint work rather than approximations of it. Turn the knurled screw, the jaws close to exactly where you set them, and they hold there with up to 5kg of clamping force. The underlying mechanism traces back to 1912, which MetMo has made into a design tagline for a reason. It’s a genuinely good mechanism.

The jaw tips carry a patent-pending micro-grip texture that MetMo calls “The Gecko’s Finger,” a name that is slightly ridiculous and also completely on point. Small smooth parts get just enough extra friction at the contact surface to stay put without the jaws needing to clamp any harder, which is the right problem to solve when you’re working on something fragile. Beyond the standard needle-nose stainless steel nibs, the system accepts silicone soft inserts for delicate surfaces, round clamp heads for gripping a part’s inner cavity rather than its outer face, and even custom 3D-printed nippers for shapes no off-the-shelf tip could reach. Individual nibs swap out independently when damaged, without touching the body.

Set the jaws slightly open and a spring-loaded mechanism activates, giving you conventional tweezer behavior for quick sorting tasks without engaging the screw-drive lock every time. When you need both hands free, the Precision Grip clamps into a quick-release mount and becomes a miniature desk vice, holding your part steady while you solder, file, or paint. Three V-grooves machined into the body let you form wire or prop the tool as a makeshift stand, keeping parts right where you left them when you step away. The whole setup is fully ambidextrous, which sounds minor until you’re a lefty who has spent years buying tools that don’t think about you. All of that function lives in a body that measures 134mm (5.3 inches) long, 29mm wide, and 16mm deep.

Aerospace-grade hard-anodized aluminum (70.3g), Grade 5 titanium (83.3g), and surgical stainless steel (114.5g) are the three material variants, and each one maps to a different kind of user. The aluminum is the nimble everyday choice, the titanium balances weight savings and durability for more demanding environments, and the surgical stainless is autoclave-rated and built from high-chromium steel throughout, making it viable for medical and laboratory settings. All three are fully user-serviceable, strippable to individual components for maintenance or repair, with high-tensile screws throughout rather than whatever was cheapest to source. MetMo talks about a 200-year product goal, and the fully serviceable construction is what gives that ambition actual credibility.

Pricing for the Precision Grip runs at £89 ($118 USD) for the Aluminum version, while the Stainless Steel variant is priced at £119 or $157 USD. For serious hobbyists and EDC collectors, the Titanium Precision Grip is priced at £179 or $237 USD. The Precision Grip ships worldwide from the UK and comes with the 200-year repairability guarantee that you could possibly only expect from a company as obsessed with detail and quality as MetMo. MetMo balanced the weight distribution around fine writing instrument ergonomics, giving the body a contour that doesn’t tire your hand across long sessions. It also looks genuinely purposeful doing nothing, like an intricate ornament that earns questions from people passing your desk, which MetMo treats as part of the design brief rather than a happy byproduct.

Click Here to Buy Now: $129 $143.33 (10% off). Hurry, only 19/1050 left! Raised over $579,000.

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San Francisco’s most iconic buildings are now a 4,200 brick LEGO diorama

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Every city has one view that ends up on the fridge magnets, and San Francisco settled that argument a long time ago. It’s the row of Victorians on Steiner Street facing Alamo Square, seven Queen Anne houses put up between 1892 and 1896 by a developer named Matthew Kavanaugh, who liked them enough to move in next door. They’ve since appeared in roughly 70 movies, shows and ads, most famously as the establishing shot of Full House, a sitcom whose cast never actually lived there. The houses have a nickname (Postcard Row), a backup nickname (the Seven Sisters), and a level of fame most buildings would commit crimes for.

Wonderbrick_design went to California a few months ago, came home charmed, and built the whole street. The San Francisco Street runs to roughly 4,200 pieces and stretches 50cm across, with three Victorian facades on a sloping baseplate and a cable car climbing the hill beside them. Each house opens from the back like a dollhouse, the roofs lift off, and there’s a jazz dance academy, a surfer’s place and an artist’s home waiting inside. He built it with his sister, who teaches modern jazz, so one of those houses is hers. It’s a Staff Pick already sitting at 6,491 supporters.

Designer: Wonderbrick_design

Worth knowing before you look too closely at the colours: they’re a 1960s remix. The architecture is 1890s Queen Anne, all gingerbread trim and bay windows and Victorian restraint. Then in 1963 a local artist called Butch Kardum started repainting grey facades in lime, vermilion, gold and turquoise, other colourists piled in, and the city quietly redecorated itself. The term “Painted Ladies” only arrived in 1978, via a book. So the most photographed houses in America are a century-old building wearing a sixty-year-old outfit, and this MOC (My Own Creation) nails the outfit. Salmon pink, curry yellow and sand blue, white trim on everything, with a sand-green conical turret capped by a tiny gold finial.

That turret is my favorite thing here. Cones are miserable to build in LEGO because the system hates anything that tapers, and Wonderbrick_design has shingled the whole thing, stacked three storeys of bay windows underneath it, and then still found room for a wrought-iron fence over the basement level. Behind it, the dance academy occupies the ground floor with a black upright piano and a mirror upstairs, the yellow house holds a surfboard with a shark mouth painted on it leaning against an armchair, and the blue house has an artist at work with an easel, canvases and paint tins.

The whole baseplate is pitched, so the sidewalk, the stone retaining wall, the curb tiles and the track all descend together, and the cable car sits at a genuine angle rather than parked on a flat road pretending. Look at the rails and there’s a slot running down the middle, which is exactly how the real thing works. San Francisco cable cars carry no engine. A steel rope moves under the street at a constant 9.5 mph, powered from a building on Mason Street, and the gripman works a lever that clamps onto it. Andrew Hallidie got the system running in September 1873, and it survives today as the only moving National Historic Landmark in America.

LEGO has flirted with this material before, tucking a microscale Postcard Row into the 2019 Architecture skyline set, and builders keep proving the appetite is real. Peter_Designs pitched a 2,997-piece Ascensor da Bica at 20.5 degrees to match Lisbon’s hills a couple of years back. Minifig-scale San Francisco remains unclaimed territory.

With 766 days on the clock and 6,491 supporters banked, the climb to 10,000 looks very doable. You can head to the LEGO Ideas page and cast your vote here. The only thing missing is a string and a winch to pull that cable car up the hill for real.

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A ‘Wolverine’ DualSense controller so feral it makes the actual game look tame

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I distinctly remember the Wolverine game hype. It’s quite literally why I bought a PS5… well, that and GTA VI. And then September rolled around, the game released, and it was instantly trashed for its patronizing game design, made to feel so sandboxed and easy that some people literally played through missions without touching their controller. The game might have been trash, the graphics and the hype definitely weren’t… and while I most certainly won’t be spending my well-earned money on a copy of the Wolverine, I would buy this controller in an absolute heartbeat!

Designed by an artist by the name of FAZ, this Wolverine-themed DualSense controller is about as unhinged as Logan in his boundless rage, slashing away at enemies without a hint of holding back. Wolverine in his peak form is pure animalistic rage, and this controller captures that while still honoring the superhero part of the equation. The controller is themed after the outfit, and rather cleverly leans into the parts of Wolverine that aren’t adamantium. There are no metal accents, fake claw motifs, or anything that would feel like maybe a visual crutch. There’s just the yellow and black, a hint of distressed fabric, a few scratches, and copious amounts of spattered blood… probably of Logan’s enemies.

Designer: FAZ Des

For the unitiated, FAZ is a South Asia-based visual designer and creative director, working primarily with an iPad Pro and boundless creativity. FAZ’s Instagram isn’t a chronicle of his work, it’s a gallery of videos showing him creating designs, taking you through the WIP journey rather than showing you the final product. In an AI slop-filled world, FAZ actually shows you the man-hours instead of the final images, and that’s refreshing. Not to mention the fact that he’s freakishly talented too, using a mere sculpting app on the iPad (Nomad Sculpt, if you’re asking), to create designs as beautiful as this Wolverine-themed controller.

The controller’s color scheme is but obvious. Even the game leans heavily into the black and yellow visual DNA that is Marvel’s Wolverine, and it only makes sense that FAZ would stick to the same palette for his controller. The yellow remains glossy, while the black parts have a corduroy-style texture on them. What I personally find highly interesting is that the controller doesn’t use the Adamantium theme anywhere, not on the joysticks, the function buttons, or even the triggers. I guess it’s FAZ’s way of saying that the indestructible metal doesn’t define Wolverine, his personality when he dons his costume does. To be honest, I could totally work with that.

The controller also has a fair amount of blood on it, added to reinforce the NSFW nature of Wolverine’s work. A good Wolverine fight doesn’t see him effortlessly destroying his enemy. It sees a struggle, it sees Wolverine taking a beating, bleeding, healing, and reaching that animalistic flow state while he fights his enemy to the death. That specific moment is what this controller captures so well – not the polish of a Wolverine who hasn’t entered the battlefield yet. Rather, the avatar of Wolverine after he’s done slicing and dicing his opponents, as the adrenaline wears down.

The only real caveat here is that FAZ made this as a pure concept. Unless some third party reaches out and helps 3D print and fabricate the skins for this, there’s no realistic universe in which this controller would exist. I’m pretty sure Marvel and Insomniac Studios have resigned to the negative press Wolverine’s getting and don’t really plan on milking this particular cow anymore, especially after pouring hundreds of millions into its development. That doesn’t change the fact that this controller looks absolutely wicked, and that I’d pay a pretty penny for it, even if I don’t care too much about the game itself!

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Pink Floyd has never gotten a LEGO set. This fan built the one everyone’s been waiting for

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Fifty one years. That’s how long Wish You Were Here has been sitting in the canon, selling something like 20 million copies, topping the charts on both sides of the Atlantic, and generally being the album your dad puts on when he wants you to know he had a personality before you were born. In that same window, LEGO has given us a Fender Stratocaster, a Rolling Stones tongue, a Beatles mosaic, an Elvis portrait, and a grand piano that talks to your phone. Pink Floyd? Nothing. Not a brick. The band that basically invented album art as a medium, and LEGO has never once picked up the phone.

Funny enough, we’ve seen this exact gap close before. Back in 2020 we covered a scrappy little fan-made Stratocaster MOC chasing votes on LEGO Ideas, and a year later it was sitting on shelves as an official 1,074-piece retail set. Rustiest_Brick is running the same play now, except instead of a guitar he’s rebuilt the most famous handshake in rock history, one businessman calmly on fire, framed like a museum piece. Early days, sure, but so was the Strat once.

Designer: Rustiest_Brick

Two brick-built figures, roughly BrickHeadz-scale but fully posed and articulated, clasp hands in front of a glossy black tiled wall, one in cool grey, the other in a black suit with a white shirt and skinny tie. Trans-orange and amber flame pieces erupt off his shoulder, back and hat, and because they’re semi-transparent they actually catch light the way real flame photography does, which is a smarter solve than painting fire in brick would ever be. Rustiest_Brick has said he kept both figures deliberately stiff and manufactured looking rather than natural, and honestly, that’s the whole joke of the original photo anyway. Two men performing warmth while one of them burns.

The base doubles as a proper display plinth, with a framed platinum disc bolted to one side, the same George Hardie mechanical handshake logo from the actual 1975 shrink wrap sticker printed on its center label, and a UCS-style plaque up front reading Wish You Were Here. Slide that plaque out, though, and there’s a small trans-blue gem tucked in a hidden compartment behind it. Rustiest_Brick isn’t saying what it’s for outright, but if you know your Floyd lore, that’s Shine On You Crazy Diamond hiding in plain sight, a quiet nod to Syd Barrett folded into a set that’s supposedly just about a handshake. That’s my favorite detail here by a mile, the kind of thing only a genuine fan bothers to hide.

The project just went up on LEGO Ideas and currently sits at 120 supporters, with 425 days on the clock to reach the first 1,000-vote milestone before the real climb to 10,000 even starts. It’s a long road, but the Strat took one too. If you’d like to see Pink Floyd finally get their overdue LEGO moment, you can head over to the Ideas page and cast your vote. Just don’t let the wind change direction on your way there.

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This $249 Clip-on Device Shines ‘Invisible’ Infrared Sunlight On You To Boost Your Mood

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Amsterdam gets around 1,600 hours of sunshine a year. Los Angeles gets close to 2,500. Anne Berends spent years feeling that difference, which is a very common Dutch experience and a very uncommon reason to start a hardware company. She was a nanomaterials scientist, so rather than buying a lamp she asked herself, “What if I could mount a piece of the sun on top of my laptop, which I spend roughly 8 hours in front of everyday?” The answer was near-infrared, the invisible band that shoots out of your TV remote. Turns out, at the right wavelength and focus, it provides a similar physiological experience as being in the sun. Berends built a webcam-ish device that sits on top of your laptop/desktop screen, giving you that dose of “sunlight” you wouldn’t get in most northern countries between September and March.

I have had a unit from IFA 2026 clipped to my screen for roughly twenty days now. It is a 120 gram puck, 83mm across, aluminum and plastic, USB-C powered, with three LEDs running at 850nm. A presence sensor confirms you are between 30 and 100cm away and cuts the light the moment you leave the desk. Berends co-founded SunLED with lighting industry veteran Ayhan Siriner, out of the Amsterdam research lab Seaborough. It sells for $249 and carries a 2026 iF Design Award in Medical and Healthcare.

Designers: Dr. Anne Berends & Ayhan Siriner (SunLED Life Science)

SunLED did not start with a clip-on gadget. The original plan baked near-infrared into ceiling fixtures, so whole rooms got a dose without anyone changing habits. That idea collapsed under basic physics, since near-infrared only works on skin, and light scattered from three meters up wastes itself on the walls. Berends summed up what the ceiling version would require in one blunt line: you’d need a nuclear plant, basically. That is not a metaphor she reached for lightly. The whole product shrank from architecture down to arm’s length, landing on the surface everyone stares at for eight hours a day.

The product does not do anything you can perceive, which is the strangest part of the brief. No warmth, no glow, no hum. At MWC, SunLED’s team had to hand journalists a special viewer just to prove the beam was there, since 850 nanometers sits outside what human eyes register. Most companies faced with an invisible feature would have cheated and added a soft status light for reassurance. SunLED skipped that. What you get instead is a presence sensor that checks your distance, and an app that logs weekly exposure after the fact.

On the desk, the SunBooster reads less like a wellness gadget and more like a webcam that wandered off from a video call. That is deliberate, since it never screams self-care at anyone glancing at your monitor mid meeting. Compare that to the SAD lamps this category grew up on, glowing slabs you sit in front of like you are serving a sentence. Or compare it to red light panels, which mix visible red with near-infrared and demand a timed session standing in front of them. SunBooster skips the ritual and the spectacle both.

The science leans on a study from the University of Groningen, double-blind and placebo-controlled: participants reported better mood after a single day, most pronounced in winter, and more energy after four weeks. A separate UBC study found near-infrared exposure improved emotional stability under demanding cognitive tasks. None of that is nothing, for a category that usually runs on vibes over citations. I will admit upfront that I live somewhere the sun works unpaid overtime year round, so whether this does anything for a hypothetical Dutch February version of me, I genuinely cannot tell. What I can report is that it has never once made my desk feel cluttered, which is more than most wellness gadgets manage.

The standalone device might not even be the real plan here. SunLED has shown concept hardware alongside it, including a phone case with the same LEDs built in and a laptop with near-infrared woven into the display housing. The company is licensing the tech to monitor and laptop makers, and Berends has pitched it as adding roughly the cost of a Netflix subscription to a device’s bill of materials. If that lands with even one major laptop brand, the object on my screen stops being a product and becomes a proof of concept that shipped first. That is bigger ambition than most $249 gadgets carry.

Winning an iF Design Award for a wellness gadget is not rare anymore, the category has gotten crowded with panels and pods chasing the same jury. What sets the SunBooster apart is that it never asked to look like medicine. It looks like hardware, sized and finished the way a camera accessory would be, sitting on a bezel instead of a bathroom shelf. If SunLED pulls off the licensing play, this unit gets remembered less as a product and more as the pitch deck that worked. Until then, it sits on my monitor, doing something I will never see, for a winter I will never have to survive.

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Whirlpool Spent 60 Years in an Italian Engineering Lab Just to Make Its Ovens Quieter

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Here’s a fun rule of thumb: the less effort something takes to use, the more effort someone spent making sure it works. Good waiters make service invisible. Good editing makes a movie feel like it was never touched. Good design, generally, hides its own homework. Weirdly enough, that exact rule is now showing up in kitchen appliances, of all places. Whirlpool has spent the last few years chasing that kind of invisibility, building ovens and hobs that do more while asking you to do less. Its new premium lineup for Europe is basically one giant bet that simplicity is the hardest thing in the room to engineer.

That bet has a name and an address. The name is 6TH SENSE, the sensor-driven backbone tying together Whirlpool’s W Collection Kitchen Suite, a built-in range of ovens, hobs, dishwashers and fridges. The address is Cassinetta di Biandronno, a 60-year-old campus in northern Italy where design studios, food scientists and materials labs work out exactly how much invisible effort a “simple” appliance actually requires. The suite got its biggest showcase yet at EuroCucina 2026 in Milan, where Whirlpool shared a pavilion with sister brands Beko, Hotpoint and Bauknecht for the first time. It’s part of a wider premium push across a European built-in market worth around 6 billion dollars in 2024, expected to clear 9 billion by 2030. Turns out making an oven feel effortless takes a small army.

Designer: Whirlpool Global Industrial Design Centre, Cassinetta di Biandronno, led by Massimo Pedrazzini

The five-hour chocolate test that explains the whole strategy

A pan of chocolate sat melting on a Whirlpool induction hob for five straight hours during the brand’s EuroCucina demonstrations, and came off glossy, smooth and completely unbroken. HeatControl is the reason, letting you set an actual target temperature between roughly 113°F and 392°F (45 to 200 degrees Celsius) in small increments instead of guessing at a power level between one and nine. Conventional induction asks you to translate “gentle simmer” into an abstract number, then keep wandering back to check whether you guessed right. HeatControl deletes the translation step. Its Hide & Touch interface goes one further and disappears entirely when the hob is switched off, leaving black glass and nothing else to look at.

The oven that switches itself off before you remember to check it

The self-supporting Food Sensing Probe tracks the internal temperature of whatever sits in the 73-liter cavity, and once your target is reached, the oven ends the cycle by itself. You pick a doneness, walk away, and the appliance handles the endgame. Cook4 runs the same logic sideways, cooking up to four dishes at once without flavors migrating between them, which Whirlpool says saves up to 72% of the time and 53% of the energy of doing them in sequence. The test behind that number involved cooking a full meal twice, a tart, roast potatoes, lasagna and chicken pasta, once simultaneously and once one after another. Pizza Party stretches it to four fresh 12-inch pizzas in roughly 15 minutes, preheat excluded.

Beko called it the invisible kitchen, and Whirlpool took it a layer deeper

Beko named the theme of its EuroCucina pavilion the invisible kitchen, applying the phrase to hardware: flush surfaces, concealed hinges and handleless doors, all arranged under an undulating textile canopy designed by Mario Cucinella Architects. The staging was genuinely lovely, with each brand assigned its own palette, cream for Whirlpool against navy, terracotta and mineral for the others. Whirlpool then ran the same idea one layer deeper than the cabinet fronts. Visual invisibility is the easier half of the job, and plenty of the handleless minimalism sold as quiet luxury stops there while still asking for constant attention. Making the interaction disappear is the harder version of that idea, and it is the one the W Collection actually attempts.

Why removing a dial costs more engineering than adding one

Every decision an appliance makes on your behalf is a decision someone else had to get right in advance, permanently, for millions of households and every recipe they might attempt. A power dial hands that responsibility to you. A temperature target absorbs it. That absorption is why a story about simplification keeps leading back to a 1.25-million-square-meter campus founded in 1965, where Whirlpool runs three production plants alongside industrial design, cooking R&D, food science and materials research. Roughly 1,480 people work there, with an average tenure of 19 years, which is its own quiet argument about how long this kind of knowledge takes to accumulate.

The design studio that reached for light instead of another screen

Massimo Pedrazzini leads a 31-person team at Cassinetta spanning industrial design, CMF, UI, ergonomics and prototyping, working from hand sketches through CAD and rendered finishes to physical models. Their brief for the latest built-in cooking platforms included a new cavity, a redesigned door mechanism, an internal divider to improve energy efficiency, and light used as the element that guides a user through cooking. That last one is the tell. Handed an opportunity to add another display, the team reached for illumination instead, a guidance layer that communicates without requiring anyone to read. The UX group behind it pulls from psychology, ergonomics, interaction design and product design, and still builds multitouch screens when a product genuinely earns one.

The lab that measures browning so you don’t have to stand there watching

Food Technology landed at Cassinetta in 2003 as a discipline connecting appliance engineering to how food physically behaves, studied chemically, nutritionally and microbiologically. The team measures color, browning, crispness and texture through objective methods, which is the only honest way an oven can decide something is done. MaterialsLAB handles the parallel job on surfaces, and its output shows up as MatteProtect, a matte induction finish Whirlpool claims is around three times more scratch resistant than standard ceramic glass while hiding halos and fingerprints. CleanProtect, a nanotech hob treatment, targets cleaning without detergents at all. X-Lab closes the loop with robotics, machine vision and additive manufacturing, bridging research and the actual production line.

The industry is split, and Whirlpool picked the harder side

Hisense turned up at CES 2026 with a smart induction range carrying a seven-inch cooktop display and AI agents coordinating timing between oven and stovetop, an opposite bet placed with equal confidence. One camp is adding a screen to the hob while the other removes the one already sitting there. AEG reached Whirlpool’s conclusion independently, launching four products at IFA 2026 built around never babysitting an appliance again, which suggests a genuine movement rather than one brand’s marketing angle. Even within Beko Europe the instincts vary, since sister brand Beko’s HomeWhiz platform makes energy and water use more visible per cycle. Whirlpool committed to attention as the scarce resource, and committed across an entire suite.

Who this suits, and why the intelligence sits where it does

Sensor-led cooking fits anyone who treats dinner as something to get done well rather than a craft to practice, which honestly describes most weeknights in most houses. Cooks who enjoy the fiddling lose nothing, because HeatControl exposes exact temperatures and the 6TH SENSE menu can be ignored entirely. There is a second point in Whirlpool’s favor that became obvious this summer, when Weber switched off the June Oven’s AI camera and turned a $999 appliance back into a box that heats. Intelligence running on the device ages considerably better than intelligence running on somebody’s server. Whirlpool’s sensing lives in the hardware you paid for.

Appliance marketing has spent a decade answering what a machine can do, and that answer stopped being interesting somewhere around the fridge with a television bolted to the door. The more useful question now is how much of that capability you are never asked to supervise. Whirlpool’s answer required a 60-year-old Italian campus, four laboratories and a team of 31 designers to arrive at a hob you can comfortably walk away from. Measured in effort spent per decision removed, that ratio looks gloriously lopsided. Measured by what makes a kitchen pleasant to actually live in, it might be the only ratio worth counting.

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Teenage Engineering meets iPod Shuffle: This music player puts the screen where your eyes actually are

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Sony killed the MiniDisc in 2006 with the MZ-RH1, a recorder so good that people still pay silly money for working ones on eBay. It did something unusual with its display, mounting the OLED on the front edge of the body rather than the top, so you could read it at an angle no other player offered. That edge-mounted screen is a small footnote in audio history, the kind of detail only a handful of collectors ever think about. Florent Porta has been staring at that screen for years, by his own admission, and the MAD-5 is what came out of the staring. It is a square aluminium player with a thin blue ticker running along its front lip, reading out format, sample rate, track number, timecode and song title.

The MZ-RH1 measured 83.8 by 84.4mm, which is to say almost perfectly square, and the MAD-5 lands on the same proportion. That is either a deliberate quote or a very good accident. What Porta has added is a clip, borrowed from the later iPod Shuffles, and the combination solves a problem Apple never bothered with. A clipped-on player shows you its edge, not its face. So put the words there.

Designer: Florent Porta

The third generation Shuffle in 2009 stripped every physical control off the body, leaving a bare power switch, and pushed volume and track changes onto a three-button remote wired into proprietary earbuds. Reviewers hated it, and Apple reversed course within a year, bringing the button ring back on a fourth generation that shrank into something nearly square. Porta borrows the fourth gen’s clip and skips the third gen’s whole premise, which is the correct call. Wrap a screen around the exposed edge of a clipped device and you get the information without a button, an earbud remote, or Apple’s old workaround, a talking menu called VoiceOver that was software standing in for a hardware idea nobody had built yet.

The jog disc on the face nods toward Teenage Engineering’s TP-7, the field recorder we covered when it landed in 2023, whose motorized tape reel actually spins under a brushed motor with ball bearings while you record or scrub through playback. Porta’s disc has no motor behind it, just concentric rings etched into aluminum with arrows for navigation, so the homage is visual rather than mechanical. That is a fair trade in a concept render, but it is worth naming, since a spinning reel earns its charm through motion and this one borrows the charm without it. The engraved spec plate leans aspirational too, and the 1337 mAh battery is the second time Porta has hidden that exact number in a product.

There is no Bluetooth listed anywhere on the body, no balanced output for the higher-end headphone crowd, and nothing marked for expandable storage, all of which current audiophile DAPs from Sony, FiiO and HiBy treat as standard at this level. The stronger idea might not be the ticker screen at all. It is the USB DAC mode, since anyone carrying a laptop already owns half the reason dongle DACs exist, and a player that folds into an audio interface the moment you plug it in solves a real annoyance rather than a cosmetic one. Porta says a desktop dock is next, meant to unlock more I/O once the MAD-5 is home, which quietly admits the ports on this version are thin. That is pretty self-aware for a concept render.

We covered Porta’s last swing at this category back in February, the DAP-1, a maximalist FLAC player built around an OLED touchscreen and a built-in speaker. The MAD-5 is the opposite instinct from the same person eight months later, stripped down to a disc, two buttons and a strip of text. Neither one exists as hardware yet, and a dock that is still just a thought puts no real timeline on anything. But the edge screen is worth remembering regardless of whether this specific object ever ships, because it solves something two decades of clip-on players walked straight past. Sony found the location by accident in 2006. Apple never looked. Porta just put both ideas in the same room.

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These $90 Cover Plates turn your PS5 into an Xbox-ish Monolith with much better thermals

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We called the PS5 the most beautiful console in the world on reveal day in 2020, and I still mostly mean it. Yujin Morisawa’s shell is a bold piece of industrial design, a vertical monolith with two floating wings that looks like nothing else in the category. Bold monoliths have one correct orientation, though, and living rooms have shelves. Tip the thing sideways and the composition falls apart, because the asymmetry that reads as dynamic standing up reads as tipped over lying down. Devyn Johnston, a PC modder whose YouTube channel runs on small form factor builds, decided to answer that with tooling instead of opinions.

His BoxPlates are aftermarket cover plates that clip on exactly where Sony’s official ones go, replacing the console’s compound curves with orthogonal geometry and crisp corners. A dense linear rib pattern runs across the top face, hides a vent sitting directly above the fan, wraps the corners and continues down the sides. Johnston sank more than $100,000 into custom injection mold tooling so the parts come out of the same process Sony uses for controllers and first-party plates. Sets cost $89.99 in black, gray, white and black, or gray and black, and cover five of the six PS5 variants. The original Digital Edition is the one still waiting.

Designer: Devyn Johnston

Here is the part that might have aged like milk. That same 2020 article of ours took a swing at the Xbox Series X for being bulky, blockish and air-purifier-like, and the fix the internet has now rallied behind is, functionally, a box. Johnston admits the first prototype drew loose inspiration from the Xbox One S before he redrew it as an original design for intellectual property and manufacturability reasons. The finished plates land somewhere between an Xbox One S and a mini ITX case, which is more flattering than it sounds, because both of those objects understood that a home entertainment product should look calm sitting next to a soundbar. Sony built a trophy. Johnston built an appliance.

Getting there took considerably more work than sanding down a silhouette. The PS5’s surfacing is full of subtle compound curvature that had to be reverse-engineered before anything could be drawn over it, and Johnston then spent iterations correcting alignment, killing the tilt and straightening angles while staying inside the console’s internal mechanical constraints. Injection molding is what separates this from the 3D-printed shells cluttering Etsy, since it buys tight tolerances, sharp corners and a light matte texture that a printed part can only approximate. The clips are the clever compromise. They stay 3D printed in PETG with thick walls and solid infill under each snap, which means a worn clip costs you a small replacement part rather than the whole shell.

That blockish design actually ends up providing better thermals than Sony’s own design, which is kind of ironic. Sony’s plates block direct access to the side intakes and route air around the top of the front face, with plastic rails near the fan holding everything in shape. Johnston’s plates leave the side vents fully exposed and add that extra opening above the fan, which is the opposite philosophy. He ran God of War Ragnarok for over two hours on a PS5 Pro with stock plates and then with his own, and found centre temperatures unchanged while the surface and rear exhaust ran noticeably cooler. He is careful to call this unscientific, with no internal monitoring comparable to a PC, and I would treat it as a pleasant side effect rather than a thermal upgrade.

Sony’s official vertical stand will not work with BoxPlates, though the console does stand on its own without it, and the plates raise a real question about servicing, since the PS5’s side panels were designed to come off easily so you can vacuum dust out of the intakes. Johnston says installation is tool-free and completely reversible, which covers it, but anyone who has owned a console for five years knows dust is the actual long-term enemy. Johnston hasn’t confirmed whether the shells are ABS or polycarbonate either. At $89.99 on top of a console you already bought, this is enthusiast money for an aesthetic problem.

That problem has clearly been real for six years. YD’s archive is full of people trying to fix it, from Riccardo Breccia’s Discman-inspired reinterpretation to Alexandre Touguet’s all-black homage to the original PlayStation and Ismail Mits’ geometric Sony-meets-Microsoft concept. Those were renders. This one has a Shopify page, a final production batch for 2026 currently shipping in five to seven business days, and a tooling invoice that would make most design studios flinch. Renders argue with a design. Tooling overrules it.

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