Author Archives: Harsh Doshi

A modern fireplace designed to showcase the flames and keep you mesmerized!

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There is something about looking into flames that brings us closer to our inner self and keeps us transfixed there. However, with the advent of electric heating devices, we no longer get to sit and relish this experience at our homes. There are many who still keep a traditional fireplace or a gas stove in their houses. But, their purpose is limited to either heating or cooking and the flames are always entrapped in a black industrial frame that does not do justice to their spell-binding liveliness.

Designer Jeong Kim has taken a rather unique approach to this idea by designing a stove that showcases the flames in their captivating brilliance. He has created ‘Contact Surface’, a stove that also works as an ornamental piece to go with your furniture. The design is as much attractive as it is functional. The body features a glass door with various color gradients and a lever on the side which locks and unlocks the door. The action of opening however is vertical, keeping the hot glass safely away from the user’s touch and in steady movement instead of having it swing around randomly. At the top is also a regulator which controls the flow of oxygen into the stove. It also comes with a removable bin to collect and dispose of any ash or other particles that might accumulate.

The designer felt that traditional stoves made a rather abrupt break between flames and their surroundings. And thus, was born ‘Contact Surface’ which gently eases the separation between flames and the space around them.

Designer: Jeong Kim of Weekend-Works

This handheld portable printer + scanner seamlessly prints on any flat surface!

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Ever found yourself in a need to print something quickly on a flat surface? This handheld digital multi-tool might just be the thing you need. Called ‘VIA’, this portable printer + scanner brings together the physical and digital worlds ever closer.

Carefully designed to be used in many roles, this device comes with a protective cap, which when flipped over, exposes the printhead for printing and protects it from damage when not in use. It also contains guidance rollers to ensure a smooth and straight print. With its wide print head technology, you can now print in a single swipe. Imagine printing your favorite photograph on a surface to create instant memorabilia for a friend? Or party favors with multiple prints of the best picture or a funny moment captured that evening? With VIA, it is all achievable at your fingertips wherever you are! You can scan and print on any almost any flat surface. And you can pair up your phones via Bluetooth and save digital scans on the go. This device also comes with a stand-alone CMYK cartridge for both black & white and full-color printing.

The designers have integrated a large touch screen for an efficient user experience. Along with a neat UI, the screen shows you the final work before you start printing- no more wasteful prints! With its sleek and fluid design, this handheld printer + scanner hits all the marks. And with that book-like form, it is easy and convenient to take it along with you!

Designers: Jasmine Schubert, Matthew Koscica, and Dylan Willis.

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These dinosaur-inspired electric toothbrushes make brushing teeth a fun activity for kids!

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Isn’t it always so difficult to get little children to do basic necessary stuff? Like getting them to eat food or brush their teeth? Adding a fun element to it always gets them going. And for ages, the mighty spoon has always been the airplane in the stories but what about the toothbrush? Where’s the fun in that? In fact where is the fun in toothbrushes for adults too?

Well, get ready to begin your day on a joyful note with this Brachiosaurus inspired ‘dinos’ collection of electric toothbrushes. A perfect complement to the spoon-airplane dynamic, this dino-toothbrush will instantly make your kid want to start brushing their teeth. The design itself is very friendly and attractive, taking it away from the rather bulky looking toothbrushes we see around. The smooth curves and slender profile mimicking the long-necked Brachiosaurus immediately creates within us an emotional connection with a very personal object that we use every day. And with those color options, everyone in the family can now have their own pet dinosaur.

The designers have also done a brilliant job of blending the electric components within the body, keeping the overall natural form intact. The lower half of the animal acts as a charging dock and this dino’s got a long tail too, in the form of the power cable. And much like Ototo’s Nessie, this guy can stand on its own legs, no need to hang these cute little dinos on the wall. My only ask is if the designers could make a smaller version for the kids so that we can have a little dino family chilling at our homes!

Designers: Byoung-ki Hwang, Jiho Hong, and Suin Lim

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This low-cost baby health monitor is designed to make baby’s healthcare easy for new parents!

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Across the globe in 2018, 2.5 million babies died within their first month of life. Collectively, Africa and Southern Asia made up approximately 87.7% of these deaths. – UNICEF

To address this issue, designers Chris Barnes and others at Cambridge Consultants of Cambridge, UK have designed a wearable health monitor for newborns in areas where current solutions are not easily available. Called ‘Little I’, their innovation empowers parents in low resource countries to monitor the health of their newborns by providing a low-cost, durable device that gives them assurance of their newborn’s survival despite lack of medical knowledge. This service is implemented by NGOs first buying and transporting the device to the community and teaching the workers how to use it. And in parallel, the mother/caregiver would hear about the device within the community and then later be provided one by a health care professional after giving birth. After 28 days, the device is returned which is then cleaned and recharged to be used by another newborn.

A big challenge the designers faced was to create a device that could run in conditions without access to electricity for the full neonatal period of 28 days. The components and features were designed keeping these criteria in mind. The device shaped like a strap-on shoe comes with a silicone strap and an ABS case for holding the electronics. It comes with an ON/OFF switch which gets triggered as soon as the shoe is worn. And within the strap and the case is included the temperature sensors and SPO2 sensors that monitor the health of the baby regularly.

The design of the device is made to appear friendly, non-intrusive, and trustworthy while still communicating an appropriate sense of urgency when necessary. All the while, removing any obvious association with any illness, which might be the case with a design that is more medical in appearance. Thereby minimizing the anxieties that a caregiver could have while putting a never before seen device on their newborn’s foot. The device also boasts a simple user interface using a traffic light system, icons, and distinctive audible sounds to make it effective for anyone to learn how to use it quickly and take immediate action in case of emergencies. A device that is user-friendly, durable, reliable, and can be conveniently carried along, this product is a true healthcare innovation!

Designer: Cambridge Consultants

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This skyscraper-inspired speaker brings your love of architecture to your home!

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Inspired by modern urban city landscapes, designer Jaeyong Lee has created this beautiful Bluetooth speaker which would sit elegantly in your home. This 2.1 channel speaker is made from aluminum extrusion panels whose sleek look is reminiscent of the long skyscrapers scattered across cities.

Called the FAKES speaker, its body which is made of a rectangular form consists of a linear grill and a ridge pattern on the adjacent side, while the other two sides are flat. These ridges include within them the knobs for controlling the various functions and beautifully blend with the serrated pattern when not in use. You can also use these ridges to place your phone in a tilted position.

The outer body comes in a variety of anodized aluminum colors and colorful speaker meshes which give a brilliant visual appeal. Now, the speaker is meant to be placed horizontally flat on one of the longer sides, but I can’t help but want to keep it standing tall just like the skyscrapers it mimics!

Designer: Jaeyong Lee of Weekend-Works

This stool is designed to let you sit cross-legged while eating!

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Product design is almost always influenced by the culture of the region it comes from. Sometimes even defining that culture. We, humans, have been making things that suit our lifestyle needs for ages, and timeless objects have been seamlessly amalgamating in our ways of life ever since. And when there is more than one way of doing something, a certain subconscious understanding develops of performing something in set ways. The result is an apparent and contrasting style of life involving humans and the things around them. But, every once in a while something comes along that changes the status quo. It is either something completely new or a confluence of many things we are already used to.

Designer Estab Han has observed something very similar and created a fusion of two very distinct settings human beings are used to in the context of eating while seated. He has created a product that brings together different aspects of seating merged into each other creating a new human experience built upon old methods – bringing cross-legged sitting to a modern stool design and is influenced by the environment of the Eulji-ro region of Seoul, Korea. Although not limited to that region, a very common product used by many small restaurants for outside seating is the ubiquitous four-legged stool. Whereas quite prominent in eastern cultures, another style of eating especially while inside the restaurant is the cross-legged seated position. It is the standard practice there in restaurants and at homes so much so that they call it the aristocratic method.

Han has brought together these two styles of seating, the old and the new, and created a novel hybrid stool that caters to both of them. The product, called the ‘Eulji-ro Stool’ has two parts, one a standard four-legged stool and the other, also a stool but with a circular profile and a little cutaway section on the top. You can use the ‘Eulji-ro Stool’ in two ways – you can use both the parts separately if there are more people. And when you want to sit cross-legged, you can combine the two by inserting the leg from one into the cut section of the other. This inserting of the stool keeps the design in place while you adjust yourself while sitting. Moreover, the stools are designed to be stackable and hence can be tucked away inside the restaurant at the end of the day. With this fine combination of different styles, you can now experience eating in the aristocratic ways anywhere!

Designer: Estab Han of Weekend-Works

This BMW R18 custom-built motorcycle takes neo-retro styling up a notch!

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Blechmann has done it again. First, it was the R nineT and now he has customized BMW’s recently launched cruiser, the R 18. And what a stunning customization it is! Designer Bernhard “Blechmann” Naumann of Austria has left no stone unturned in creating this neo-retro design that is sure to turn heads around.

Taking almost 450 hours to build it, Blechmann doesn’t start his customizations with sketches or drawings per se. Rather, he dives directly into the build with the final material keeping a keen eye on proportions and meticulously crafting his artwork. He calls it “rapid prototyping – Blechmann style”. And the results are surely out of this world! Called the “Blechmann R18”, this custom job keeps the original frame and the mounting points of the stock BMW R18 as is, while adding a beautiful full fairing which emphasizes the underlying heritage design of the base model. The final rendering is a narrower, sportier, and more extravagant piece of handiwork. Not to forget, the eye-catching headlights which are inspired by the iconic kidney-shaped grills of BMW and the sleek black paint job adorned with classic BMW Motorrad white pin-stripes.

Much like the previous customization of the BMW R nineT, called the Giggerl, the Blechmann R18 is too an absolute show-stopper. But unlike its garish predecessor, the Blechmann R18 is more a silent beast that tends to slow down time in its wake.

Designer: Bernhard “Blechmann” Naumann

BMW-inspired dockable joystick designed to help you control your autonomous vehicle in the future!

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Autonomous vehicles are going to be the future of transportation. Or at least partially autonomous ones. And a lot of those we are already seeing around us today. But an SAE level 5 automation is still a distant dream. Until then, partial manual control or at least some form of human intervention will still be needed. But that doesn’t mean the control interface has to be the same. In a substantially advanced self-driving vehicle of the near future, we can quite possibly replace the steering wheel with some other form of control mechanism. One such concept has been developed for BMW by designer Lars Welten while interning there.

Lars draws cues from Oculus Rift’s VR controller to build the form of the joystick and embeds within it the signature design language of the BMW brand. The output is an astonishing product that molds the polygonal surface features quite well into a demanding ergonomic layout. He visualizes the use of concrete/stoneware material as the highlight of the rich design with other parts made in anodized aluminum and polycarbonate. The use of leather and Alcantara adds to the premium feel that goes well with the luxury interiors of BMW’s autonomous vehicles.

Remember, autopilot, be it in cars or airplanes, is just a commonplace terminology. And it doesn’t mean that the vehicle can run completely on its own. That kind of technology has not been developed yet. But little advancements over time like this concept joystick will surely take us there someday. In fact, BMW has applied for a patent of an airplane like steering joystick quite recently. The future might be closer than we think!

Designer: Lars Welten

Microsoft Surface Watch, a bold look at what could be!

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Its high time Microsoft released a smartwatch. They entered the mobile phone market rather late and couldn’t capitalize on it compared to the other players. And with news of a smartwatch development doing the rounds for quite a few years now, it is very much likely that they may launch one soon in their Surface family of products. Until then, we have designer Reiten Cheng who has developed a concept Surface Watch which goes with the design language of Microsoft’s latest line of products.

Reiten has boldly gone ahead and made the body circular. An approach that may not be congruent with the rectangular tile UI that Microsoft carries across all its devices and one that I don’t think the designers at Microsoft would take. Nevertheless, the form is quite appealing and the concept comes with some neat features other than the ones on the screen. The watch features a magnesium alloy chassis with Alcantara for the band. It comes integrated with a rim around the dial, which acts as an interactive input method. The adjustable band comes with a unique mechanism too. You can adjust the clasp by pushing the button, which is adorned with the Microsoft logo, which then releases the lock. The designer has also taken a spin at the UI, reshaping the tiles of the Microsoft logo. And this watch comes in a wave of beautiful colors we can’t wait to get our hands on if they ever become a reality.

Microsoft really needs to buck up and bring their product to the market which is increasingly getting over-crowded. Maybe the not so successful Microsoft Band has dissuaded them from launching another product that hasn’t been fully developed in all ways. But the cost of perfectionism is that the customers would get used to other brands and may no longer switch loyalties. Either way, market response and customer feedback are the only ways you can make changes and improve your design and I hope Microsoft brings out their Surface smartwatch real soon!

Designer: Reiten Cheng

This minimalist umbrella purifies and stores rainwater in its shaft!

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Rainwater is usually safe to drink directly unless it has caught some contaminants on its way down. However, you don’t want to take that chance, do you? Well luckily for us, BMSTU design student Volkan Ugurel has come up with an innovative idea of integrating a filtration system right into the shaft of an umbrella. This way you can drink or store purified rainwater on the go.

Volkan’s umbrella design has a three-level filtration system, first of which is a metal mesh on the top to block coarse particles. Inside the top part of the shaft is a replaceable unit that contains a carbon filter and a membrane filter, which can remove all the organic chemicals as well as nasty tastes and odors from the rainwater. When the filtration process is over, the drinkable water gets filled up in a 220-ml glass bottle attached at the bottom of the shaft, with ridges for easy which easily comes off when you turn it. You can also mount any plastic bottle with a standard thread to the bottom if you’re really thirsty or if it’s raining really heavily. Maybe even fill up a few bottles for later use.

The overall design features a sleek shaft and translucent canopy with nine spokes, and hence the name ‘Nonagon Umbrella’. It was inspired by the music album ‘Nonagon Infinity’, a record that’s designed to be played as an infinite loop since the end of one song is the beginning of the next one, signifying the never-ending life cycle of water as it moves from one place to another!

Designer: Volkan Uğurel