Author Archives: Ida Torres

The Aluminum Pen That Actually Lets You See What You’re Drawing

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Every designer who has ever sketched with a fat marker or a clumsy ballpoint knows the same small frustration. The barrel gets in the way of the exact point you’re trying to control, and by the time you glance past your own knuckles, the line has already wandered somewhere you didn’t plan. That is the specific annoyance Milan-based industrial designer Alberto Essesi set out to fix with the Exclamation Pen, a slim aluminum instrument built around one idea: let the person holding it see straight down to the tip, every single time.

Most pens are not designed for sketching. They are designed for writing, which is a different task with different demands. A note-taker doesn’t need to watch the nib travel across the page with surgical precision. A designer roughing out a form, a joint, or a curve does. Essesi, who has spent his career working across design and technology companies before starting his own studio, apparently got tired of choosing between tools that felt good in the hand and tools that actually showed him where the line would land. So he machined his own answer.

Designer: Alberto Essesi

The pen itself is carved from solid aluminum blocks and finished in a matte satin coat, and it comes apart into three simple pieces, including a stand that doubles as a cap. The tip is severely tapered, almost aggressively so, which is the whole point. That taper is what clears the sightline and lets the tip stay visible no matter the angle of the hand. When the pen and its stand are placed together, the silhouette reads like a punctuation mark, which is where the name comes from. It’s a small joke buried in a very serious object, and it works because the pen never oversells the gag. The humor sits quietly in the shape, not in the marketing copy.

What strikes me most about this project is how confidently it ignores trends. Pen design right now is dominated by refillable systems, smart pens, and gadgets that track your handwriting for an app you’ll open twice. Essesi went the opposite direction and stripped a writing tool down to geometry and material, betting that the right taper and the right balance point matter more than any added feature. I happen to think that bet pays off. There is something satisfying about a tool that solves a real, physical problem instead of inventing a digital one to sell you a subscription for.

The pen also isn’t new to Essesi’s practice. Around a year before the Exclamation Pen appeared, he shared an earlier, rougher concept online, inspired by a documentary about how early humans used rocks to mark walls. That instinct, wanting a tool stripped back to its most basic gesture, clearly followed him into this refined version. It’s rare to watch a designer’s idea mature in public like that, from a raw sketching stick to a numbered, limited-run object sold through Normal Objects for $168.

And limited is not an exaggeration. Essesi self-produces every batch, and the first three runs reportedly sold out before he could restock. He’s now considering a mirror-polished version alongside the current satin finish, which tells me demand caught even him off guard. There’s a version of this story where that scarcity feels like a marketing trick, but knowing this is a one-person operation machining aluminum by hand, it reads more like a production bottleneck than a strategy.

None of this makes the Exclamation Pen a mass-market object, and it probably shouldn’t be. It’s priced and positioned for people who already care about how a tool feels between their fingers, the same audience that lines up for a well-made notebook or a Japanese mechanical pencil. But the underlying idea, that visibility at the tip is worth designing an entire object around, is one that any pen maker could learn from. Sometimes the most useful design decision isn’t adding something new. It’s removing whatever was blocking the view in the first place.

The post The Aluminum Pen That Actually Lets You See What You’re Drawing first appeared on Yanko Design.

Cricut’s New Machine Actually Makes Custom Stickers in Minutes

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I have a drawer, and if you are the kind of person who understands sticker addiction, you already know the drawer I mean. Okay fine, it’s several drawers. And boxes. It is stuffed with washi tape, sticky notes in colors I will never actually use, and at least dozens of half-finished sheets of custom stickers I ordered online and forgot about because they took two weeks to arrive. That wait is the actual problem. Custom stickers, the kind with your own photos or artwork on them, have always meant either a bulk order from a print-on-demand site or a trip to a drugstore kiosk, and neither option works when the idea hits you at 9pm on a Tuesday and you want it in your journal by Wednesday.

I journal daily and I will die on the hill that good stationery makes the habit stick, pun fully intended. So when Cricut announced StickerPix, a line of machines built specifically to turn your camera roll into stickers and photo prints at home, I paid attention in a way I don’t usually pay attention to product launches.

Designer: Cricut

Here is what it actually is. There are two machines. StickerPix Print is the simpler one, and it prints onto pre-cut sticker sheets, so your shapes come out set but the color and image are entirely yours. StickerPix Print + Cut goes further. You design your own layout, and the machine prints and then kiss-cuts around your actual artwork, so you get custom shapes instead of preset ones. Both use dye-sublimation printing and laminate the sticker as it prints, which means the finish is water, scratch, and fade resistant without you doing anything extra. No Cricut Access subscription is required to run either machine, which matters more than it sounds like it should, because plenty of hobby tech quietly nudges you toward a monthly fee the moment you want to actually use it.

The materials are proprietary, Cricut’s own sticker sheets and photo paper in 4×6 and 4×7 sizes, and that is a fair trade-off to be honest about. You are not going to run random cardstock through this thing. But the payoff is that you skip the entire ordering pipeline. No uploading files to a third-party site, no minimum order of 50 when you needed 5, no waiting for a mail carrier. You take a photo, open Design Space on your phone or desktop, and a few minutes later you are peeling a laminated sticker off a machine sitting on your desk.

What actually impresses me is who this is built for. It is not aimed at professional crafters who already own a full Cricut cutting setup and a separate printer. It is aimed at the person who wants a fast, pro-looking result without learning a new skill, which is most of us. Reviewers testing it early have pointed out that the Print + Cut model handles small, detailed designs well, and that the photo printing option is genuinely useful on its own, since plenty of people have thousands of photos trapped on a phone and nowhere to put them.

I am not going to pretend a sticker printer solves anything urgent in the world. But it solves a small, specific, recurring annoyance for people who like putting their own images on their own belongings, whether that is a journal, a water bottle, a gift tag, or an envelope that deserved better than a plain white label. That is a bigger group of people than it sounds like, especially with junk journaling and scrapbooking having their own quiet resurgence across social media over the past couple of years.

Price sits in the $150 to $380 range depending on the bundle, which is not nothing, but it is roughly what a few months of ordering custom sticker sheets online would cost anyway. For someone who already treats their stationery drawer like a small shrine, that math checks out. For everyone else, it is at minimum a genuinely clever answer to a problem most people did not realize had a name until they saw a machine built to fix it.

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4 Keychain Cameras Nobody Will Leave the House Without

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If we see something worth remembering, or something we want to celebrate, our first instinct is to reach for our smartphones and snap a picture or video. But what happens when your phone battery dies, your storage is full, or it simply isn’t on you when the moment strikes? That’s exactly when having a tiny, always-with-you camera comes in handy. All you have to do is reach into your pocket, and you’re ready to shoot.

Yashica has become one of the brands leading the charge in blending modern convenience with old-school charm, and its FUNtastic Keychain Camera line is proof of that. The lineup offers plenty of designs to choose from, and with every new release, Yashica adds even more characters and collaborations to pick from. The brand has now built an entire creative universe around this idea called FUNtastic World, designed to celebrate the many different personalities and styles its fans bring to the table.

Designer: Yashica

To celebrate this new universe, Yashica is rolling out four new camera designs, and each one comes with its own specific “personality.” Every camera in the collection is, of course, ultra-compact and built with a wearable form factor, so you can clip it onto your bag, belt loop, keychain, or anywhere else that keeps it close by at all times. Each one also features a 180-degree flip screen, making it perfect for selfies, group shots, and any moment you want to be part of instead of just capturing from behind the lens. As an added bonus, every FUNtastic camera also comes with a built-in LED light, since some of the most memorable moments don’t happen in perfect lighting. Think indoor concerts, parties, festivals, and spontaneous evenings with friends. It’s a small detail that makes a big difference when the fun doesn’t stop once the sun goes down.

The four new camera designs are:

Yashica Sailor Boy (Wanderers)
This design channels Yashica’s original character and captures a true sense of adventure with clean, maritime-inspired colors. It’s made for the free spirit in you, the one who’s always ready to explore what’s around the next corner.

Basketball Snoopy (Sparks)
This sports-inspired design channels our favorite beagle’s endlessly positive energy. It celebrates teamwork, friendship, and staying active, making it the perfect companion for your next pickup game or afternoon at the park with friends.

Cherries Hello Kitty (Blush)
This cherry-inspired design gives our favorite cat (or human dressed as one) a sweet, vibrant aesthetic. It’s made for the days when you’re feeling cheerful and want to add a little brightness to your look, and your life.

Polka Dot Edition (Blush)
This is the more stylish version of Hello Kitty, combining a timeless polka-dot pattern with the character’s signature charm for a look that feels both classic and contemporary. It’s made for the days when you’re feeling cute and ready to add a little extra pizzazz to your outfit.

All four YASHICA FUNtastic Keychain Cameras are now available for pre-order at yashica.com, with shipments expected to begin the week of September 28, 2026. And if you’re already thinking about who else might love one, you’re onto something. With its collectible designs, character collaborations, and everyday usability, FUNtastic makes a fantastic gift for friends, family, and fans of the characters and pop culture alike.

At the end of the day, FUNtastic isn’t just about snapping quick photos. It’s about making room for spontaneity in a world that often feels too scheduled and too filtered. It’s a reminder that not every memory needs a perfectly lit, perfectly staged shot. Sometimes the best photos are the blurry, laughing, in-between ones you almost didn’t catch. Whether you’re the Sailor Boy dreaming about your next trip, the Basketball Snoopy chasing adventure with friends, or the Hello Kitty fan looking to add a little extra sweetness to your everyday carry, there’s a FUNtastic personality out there with your name on it. And since your mood can change from one day to the next, why not have a camera that changes right along with you?

The post 4 Keychain Cameras Nobody Will Leave the House Without first appeared on Yanko Design.

4 Keychain Cameras Nobody Will Leave the House Without

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If we see something worth remembering, or something we want to celebrate, our first instinct is to reach for our smartphones and snap a picture or video. But what happens when your phone battery dies, your storage is full, or it simply isn’t on you when the moment strikes? That’s exactly when having a tiny, always-with-you camera comes in handy. All you have to do is reach into your pocket, and you’re ready to shoot.

Yashica has become one of the brands leading the charge in blending modern convenience with old-school charm, and its FUNtastic Keychain Camera line is proof of that. The lineup offers plenty of designs to choose from, and with every new release, Yashica adds even more characters and collaborations to pick from. The brand has now built an entire creative universe around this idea called FUNtastic World, designed to celebrate the many different personalities and styles its fans bring to the table.

Designer: Yashica

To celebrate this new universe, Yashica is rolling out four new camera designs, and each one comes with its own specific “personality.” Every camera in the collection is, of course, ultra-compact and built with a wearable form factor, so you can clip it onto your bag, belt loop, keychain, or anywhere else that keeps it close by at all times. Each one also features a 180-degree flip screen, making it perfect for selfies, group shots, and any moment you want to be part of instead of just capturing from behind the lens. As an added bonus, every FUNtastic camera also comes with a built-in LED light, since some of the most memorable moments don’t happen in perfect lighting. Think indoor concerts, parties, festivals, and spontaneous evenings with friends. It’s a small detail that makes a big difference when the fun doesn’t stop once the sun goes down.

The four new camera designs are:

Yashica Sailor Boy (Wanderers)
This design channels Yashica’s original character and captures a true sense of adventure with clean, maritime-inspired colors. It’s made for the free spirit in you, the one who’s always ready to explore what’s around the next corner.

Basketball Snoopy (Sparks)
This sports-inspired design channels our favorite beagle’s endlessly positive energy. It celebrates teamwork, friendship, and staying active, making it the perfect companion for your next pickup game or afternoon at the park with friends.

Cherries Hello Kitty (Blush)
This cherry-inspired design gives our favorite cat (or human dressed as one) a sweet, vibrant aesthetic. It’s made for the days when you’re feeling cheerful and want to add a little brightness to your look, and your life.

Polka Dot Edition (Blush)
This is the more stylish version of Hello Kitty, combining a timeless polka-dot pattern with the character’s signature charm for a look that feels both classic and contemporary. It’s made for the days when you’re feeling cute and ready to add a little extra pizzazz to your outfit.

All four YASHICA FUNtastic Keychain Cameras are now available for pre-order at yashica.com, with shipments expected to begin the week of September 28, 2026. And if you’re already thinking about who else might love one, you’re onto something. With its collectible designs, character collaborations, and everyday usability, FUNtastic makes a fantastic gift for friends, family, and fans of the characters and pop culture alike.

At the end of the day, FUNtastic isn’t just about snapping quick photos. It’s about making room for spontaneity in a world that often feels too scheduled and too filtered. It’s a reminder that not every memory needs a perfectly lit, perfectly staged shot. Sometimes the best photos are the blurry, laughing, in-between ones you almost didn’t catch. Whether you’re the Sailor Boy dreaming about your next trip, the Basketball Snoopy chasing adventure with friends, or the Hello Kitty fan looking to add a little extra sweetness to your everyday carry, there’s a FUNtastic personality out there with your name on it. And since your mood can change from one day to the next, why not have a camera that changes right along with you?

The post 4 Keychain Cameras Nobody Will Leave the House Without first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Power Strip That Actually Moves With Your Desk

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Anyone who has ever crawled under a standing desk at 6 a.m. trying to find an outlet knows the specific frustration of modern furniture. We’ve spent the last decade making our desks height-adjustable, our floor lamps articulated, our shelving modular, and somehow the humble power strip never got the memo. It just sits there, bolted to a fixed spot, forcing every cord in the room to stretch, sag, or dangle in whatever direction gets the job done.

That mismatch is the actual problem Swift Creatives set out to solve with Power Duck. When your desk goes up, the outlet doesn’t follow. When your lamp shifts, the plug stays put. You end up buying extension cords to bridge the gap, and then you end up hating the extension cords, because now there’s a tangle of cable running across the floor where someone is guaranteed to trip on it. Power Duck’s whole premise is simple: let the power source move with you instead of making you adjust around it.

Designer: Swift Creatives

The mechanism itself is almost embarrassingly obvious once you see it. A grey pole, shaped a bit like an angular coat hook, holds a mint green sleeve that slides freely up and down. Inside that sleeve sit four outlets. Raise the sleeve when you need power near shoulder height, lower it when you want it tucked near the floor, and the cord just loops along for the ride instead of getting yanked taut. It’s the kind of adjustable height mechanism you’d expect on a desk lamp, quietly borrowed and applied to something as unglamorous as a power strip.

What makes the concept stick in your head, though, is the face. One of the four outlets has been given a pair of googly eyes and an orange beak, turning it into a duck peeking out at whoever plugs something in. It’s a small, almost throwaway detail, but it does a lot of work. Power strips are objects we’re trained to ignore, to hide behind furniture, to feel a little embarrassed about when guests are over. Giving one a face flips that instinct. Suddenly it’s not clutter you’re apologizing for, it’s a character sitting on your desk.

I like this move because it says something honest about where product design is headed. For years, “good design” in tech accessories meant disappearing entirely, going matte black or brushed silver so nothing draws attention. Power Duck takes the opposite bet, leaning into color and personality instead of camouflage. That’s a riskier choice, since a cartoon face can read as gimmicky if the underlying function doesn’t hold up. Here it doesn’t feel like a gimmick bolted onto a boring product just to make it shareable. The sliding mechanism is the real idea, and the duck face is the thing that makes you actually want to look at it twice.

It’s also worth saying plainly that Power Duck is a concept out of Swift Creatives’ Innovation Lab, not a product sitting on a shelf at your local hardware store. Plenty of clever ideas like this live on Instagram and never make it past the prototype stage, and there’s no guarantee this one breaks that pattern. But that doesn’t make it less useful as a signal. Somebody looked at a genuinely mundane annoyance, the fixed-height outlet strip fighting against our increasingly adjustable furniture, and treated it as worth solving rather than shrugging off.

American homes and offices have quietly filled up with height-adjustable everything over the past several years, from standing desks to monitor arms to modular shelving, and our power infrastructure has never caught up. Power Duck is a small, almost funny reminder that the unglamorous parts of a room deserve the same design attention as the parts we actually show off. Whether this exact duck ever ends up on a store shelf matters less than the fact that someone bothered to ask why a power strip has to be the one static object in an otherwise flexible setup. That question feels overdue, and I hope more designers start asking it.

The post The Power Strip That Actually Moves With Your Desk first appeared on Yanko Design.

A Hidden $1.7M A-Frame That’s Actually an Hour From NYC

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Every few months, I go down the rabbit hole of homes for sale that promise total escape without an actual commitment to distance. The pitch is always some version of “close to the city, far from everything else,” and it rarely delivers. What usually shows up is a subdivision with a few extra trees or a renovated farmhouse that swapped one kind of sameness for another. That gap between what people want (real quiet, real nature, real character) and what’s actually on the market is the exact problem the Woods Home in Yorktown Heights solves, and it does it without pretending the answer is another gray-and-white farmhouse flip.

Built in 1966, the Woods Home sits on 6.74 wooded acres in Westchester County, perched on the property’s own natural rock outcroppings. It’s a four-sided A-frame, which is rarer than it sounds. Most A-frames top out as cozy ski cabins under 1,500 square feet. This one stretches to nearly 5,000, with four bedrooms and two bathrooms, soaring ceilings, and walls of glass that turn every room into a framed view of the trees. Listing agent Douglas Dill of Houlihan Lawrence put it plainly when he said he’s sold plenty of A-frames, just never one this size, with this much acreage and this much light. That’s not sales talk. That combination genuinely doesn’t come up often.

What makes the place feel honest rather than staged is that it was actually lived in, not flipped for a listing photo shoot. The current owners bought it three decades ago as a weekend retreat from Manhattan and eventually made it their full-time home. That kind of ownership shows. The kitchen has updated granite counters, sure, but the bones are untouched: the wood paneling, the built-in shelving, the sliding glass doors that open the lower level straight onto a patio and a pool tucked below the house. There’s a second living area set up as a rec room with its own deck, bedrooms with private balconies, even a small potting shed and a garage converted into an artist’s studio. None of it feels added for resale value. It feels like a family actually used every inch of it.

The price is $1.7 million, which will read as either shocking or refreshingly reasonable depending on which coast you’re comparing it to. For a house this distinct, on this much land, an hour from Manhattan by train, I’d argue it’s the second one. You’re not paying for granite and crown molding. You’re paying for a genuine piece of midcentury design history that never got gutted, plus a rock outcropping and a swimming pool most suburban lots twice the price can’t offer.

I’ll admit a small bias here. Midcentury homes that survive fifty-plus years without losing their identity are becoming harder to find, especially near major cities where land value tempts owners to tear down and build something forgettable but bigger. Every time one of these shows up still intact, it feels like a small win against that pattern. The Woods Home never got flattened into a colonial or stretched into a McMansion. It stayed exactly what it was built to be: a bold, slightly eccentric retreat that trusts its architecture instead of hiding it.

What I actually appreciate most is that the house doesn’t ask you to choose between wilderness and convenience. You get the boulders, the deck views, the sense of being tucked into a forest, and you still get a train that pulls you into Manhattan when you need it. That balance is rarer than people admit, and it’s why listings like this one tend to move fast once word gets around. If you’ve ever wanted proof that a genuine escape and a short commute aren’t mutually exclusive, this one hour, wooded acre by wooded acre, quietly makes the case.

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An $1,165 Pencil Sharpener That Refuses to Stay Boring

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Most desk objects disappear the moment they do their job. A stapler staples. A tape dispenser dispenses. A pencil sharpener sharpens, and then it goes back to being a small plastic or metal box that nobody looks at twice. That is the actual problem MB&F and Caran d’Ache set out to fix with their new GorillaSharpener, a device that takes the most forgettable tool on any desk and turns it into something you would rather display than hide in a drawer.

The design comes from Maximilian Maertens at MB&F, the Geneva-based outfit better known for building watches that look like they escaped a spaceship. Here, they have grafted a set of muscular, knuckle-walking gorilla limbs onto Caran d’Ache’s classic desktop sharpening machine, the kind of hand-crank sharpener that has sat in Swiss schoolrooms for decades. The arms and legs are cast in chrome-plated zinc alloy and steel, textured to mimic coarse fur, and they lift the sharpener’s body into a forward-leaning stance, as if it is about to charge across your desk. It stands about 150mm tall, finished in a pale Alpine Frost blue that somehow makes the whole thing look calmer than it has any right to.

Designer: Maximillian Maertens

I like objects that admit they are having fun without apologizing for it. This is one of them. It is limited to 300 pieces, priced at CHF 850 plus tax, which works out to roughly $1,165 in the US. That is an absurd amount of money for something that puts a point on a pencil, and MB&F seems to know it. Their own materials describe it as the least expensive thing the brand has ever made, which tells you everything about the company’s usual price range and nothing about whether this thing is worth it. Function still matters here, though. It takes round or hexagonal pencils between 4 and 10mm, the cutter is interchangeable, and it comes with a clamp so it can actually be mounted to a desk rather than just posed on one.

What makes this release land, at least for me, is the timing and the reasoning behind it. It launched on September 24th, World Gorilla Day, and it is not the first time these two brands have played in this space. In 2024, MB&F gave a DinoSharpener to its collector community as a gift, dressing the same base machine in dinosaur legs instead. Before that, back in 2016, Caran d’Ache and MB&F built Astrograph, a rocket-shaped writing instrument. The GorillaSharpener continues that pattern, but it also marks 15 years of M.A.D.Gallery, MB&F’s platform for mechanical art, which explains why this piece leans harder into sculpture than the earlier ones did.

There is also a cause attached, and it does not feel bolted on for marketing points. MB&F has partnered with the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, symbolically adopting the historic Pablo mountain gorilla group in Rwanda, with proceeds supporting field protection teams and conservation research. A silly desk toy funding actual gorilla conservation is the kind of pairing that should feel forced and somehow does not.

Every piece ships in its own case with an instruction booklet, the securing clamp, and a set of Caran d’Ache pencils packaged in artwork by illustrator Maxime Schertenleib, built around MB&F’s own line about creativity: a creative adult is a child who survived. That phrase does a lot of explaining. Nobody actually needs a gorilla to sharpen a pencil. Plenty of us do it just fine with a two-dollar plastic version from the drugstore. But there is a difference between an object that works and one that makes you want to sharpen a pencil you did not need sharpened, just to watch the arms do their thing.

Design like this will not solve anything important, and it is not trying to. What it does is remind you that even the most utilitarian corner of a desk can still hold a little bit of wonder, and that sometimes the best response to a boring object is to give it arms.

The post An $1,165 Pencil Sharpener That Refuses to Stay Boring first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Gaming Controller That Refuses to Look Like One

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Most gaming controllers are built for an idea of a hand, not an actual one. They’re symmetrical, boxy, covered in ridges meant to accommodate everyone equally, which usually means they fit no one particularly well. After a few hours, your palms cramp, your thumbs ache, and if you’ve been playing anything remotely intense, your grip starts sliding around from sweat. It’s a problem the industry has mostly solved by adding more buttons rather than rethinking the shape itself.

Designer Jiayi Wu’s concept, PALMIO, starts from a different question entirely: what if the controller was shaped around the hand instead of the other way around? The result looks less like a gamepad and more like a smooth stone or a teardrop, something you’d pick up off a beach rather than off a store shelf. It’s a small shift in thinking that ends up changing almost everything about how the object reads.

Designer: Jiayi Wu

The body curves and tapers, wide at one end and narrowing into a grip that sits low in the palm. Rather than the usual two-handed symmetrical layout, PALMIO appears designed for one-handed use, closer in spirit to VR motion controllers than a traditional Xbox or PlayStation pad. That alone makes it feel less like an accessory and more like a tool you’d hold the way you’d hold a flashlight or a whisk, something with a clear front and back, a natural way in.

Sitting on top is an oversized circular thumb control, a ring with a raised center that dominates the upper half of the form. It’s an unusual choice to make one input the visual centerpiece of an entire product, but it works because it mirrors how your thumb naturally lands when you pick the thing up. You’re not hunting for a joystick buried among six other buttons. There’s one obvious place for your thumb to go, and the design just gets out of the way after that.

Where the grip meets the palm, a diamond-textured silicone panel breaks up the otherwise glossy shell. It’s a practical fix for slipping hands during a tense match, sure, but it also does something quieter: it tells you where to hold the controller without a single word of instruction. Your hand just goes there. That kind of tactile signage, using texture instead of labels or diagrams, is the sort of detail that separates a design exercise from a genuine product idea.

Then there’s the color story. Cream, sage green, powder blue. None of it screams “gamer” in the way we’ve come to expect from black shells with red accents and aggressive angles. I don’t think that’s an accident, and I don’t think it’s a bad instinct either. Gaming has quietly outgrown its own aesthetic stereotypes for years now, and hardware is only just catching up. A controller that looks like it belongs on a shelf next to a diffuser or a nice speaker isn’t a compromise. It’s an acknowledgment that the people playing games look nothing like the imagined teenager in a dark room that hardware design has been chasing for two decades.

What keeps PALMIO from feeling like a pretty rendering with no substance behind it are the exploded and cutaway views Wu included. Screws holding the battery cover in place, a visible circuit board, a joystick mechanism nested into the shell. Someone thought about how this would actually be built, not just how it would look in a hero shot.

To be clear, PALMIO is a concept, built and visualized digitally, with no functional prototype yet. Comfort claims and control feel are still theoretical until someone actually holds one for an hour-long session. But the direction it points toward, gaming hardware that takes the human hand as seriously as it takes frame rates, is one worth paying attention to regardless of whether this exact object ever ships.

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The Bluetooth Speaker Hidden Inside a Wood Sculpture

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Most Bluetooth speakers look the same. They are round, black, rubberized, and built to disappear into a shelf or a beach bag without asking anyone to notice them twice. That sameness is the actual problem nobody talks about. We have accepted that everyday tech gets to be boring looking, as long as it works, and we have quietly let go of the idea that an object we use daily should also mean something.

Larry Tchogninou’s new speaker, Gankéké, pushes back on that quietly accepted trade off. Instead of starting from a generic pod shape, he built the entire object around the form of the gankéké, a double bell used in ceremonial and communal music across Benin, where Tchogninou is from. The result is a speaker shaped like two flared cones meeting at a center point, wrapped in wood veneer, and mounted on a sandblasted aluminum frame with an oak dowel handle running through the top. It looks nothing like a gadget. It looks like an instrument that happens to play your Spotify queue.

Designer: Larry Tchogninou

Tchogninou is a Chicago based architect and designer who was mentored early on by Virgil Abloh, and that lineage shows up in how he treats materials as carriers of meaning rather than just finishes. He has said he started making Gankéké after realizing how many audio gadgets he had been gifted over the years without ever understanding how any of them actually worked. So he built his own, and instead of hiding the engineering, he built a housing that turns the mechanics into the whole point of looking at it.

Inside the two wooden horns sit lateral speakers, with a central subwoofer positioned between them in a magnet to magnet configuration for stability. The controls are refreshingly analog for something wireless. Volume and power sit on the right side, a dedicated bass dial sits on the left, and there is a micro USB charging port along with a line in jack for anyone who still wants a wired connection. Tchogninou says it holds about three hours of playback at medium volume, which is not going to outlast a flight to Los Angeles, but that was never really the pitch.

What actually sells the object is the craft. Every unit is made to order, built from plastic, wood veneer, dowels, and sandblasted aluminum, with a four week lead time before it ships. That kind of patience is rare in a category where most people expect same day delivery for a speaker they will forget about in a year. Gankéké costs $700, which sounds steep next to a mass produced speaker until you consider what you are actually paying for. You are not buying a component. You are buying a small sculpture with a working speaker built into its logic, made by one person who understood the shape before he understood the circuitry.

I like that this object does not try to hide where it came from to seem more universal. A lot of design aimed at a broad audience tends to sand down anything culturally specific until it reads as generically modern. Gankéké does the opposite. It keeps the bell shape legible, keeps the name intact, and lets the story sit right on the surface instead of tucking it into a press release nobody reads. That choice makes the object feel less like a lifestyle accessory and more like a small act of memory that happens to also connect to your phone.

Objects like this will never replace the fifty dollar speaker that lives in a gym bag, and that is fine, because that was never the competition. What Gankéké actually competes with is the idea that a speaker has to be forgettable to be useful. It does not. It can hold a shape passed down through generations, sit on a shelf as something worth looking at, and still play music when you need it to. That combination is harder to pull off than it sounds, and Tchogninou managed it without making the object feel like a costume.

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Veo’s Rover Trike Actually Solves Shared Mobility’s Biggest Gap

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Standing scooters have a way of quietly sorting the world into two groups: people who can hop on and zip off, and everyone else. If you’ve got balance issues, a bad hip, low vision, or you’re just pushing a stroller and can’t manage handlebars with one arm, shared micromobility has never really been built with you in mind. Veo’s new Rover trike is the first real attempt I’ve seen to close that gap.

Launched this summer in Denver, Rover is a three-wheeled, seated electric vehicle that looks less like a scooter and more like a cross between a golf cart and a rickshaw, minus the driver. It’s low to the ground, has a cushioned seat, a throttle instead of pedals, and baskets front and back that can haul up to 100 pounds of groceries, bags, or a folded walker. Fifty of them are currently rolling through downtown Denver as part of the city’s shared fleet, alongside the usual scooters and e-bikes.

Designer: Veo

What makes this launch worth paying attention to is not the hardware so much as who Veo built it for. The company spent nearly two years working with disability advocates, older adults, and more than 20 organizations, including the Parkinson’s Foundation and Capitol Hill Village, before finalizing the design. That’s not a marketing footnote. It’s the difference between a company slapping “accessible” on a spec sheet and one that actually sat with riders who’d been shut out of shared transit for years.

Anna Zivarts, who directs the Nondrivers Alliance and wrote the book on what it means to navigate American cities without a license, put it plainly: shared micromobility has excluded a lot of disabled people and anyone uncomfortable balancing on two wheels. That’s a quiet admission for an industry that’s spent the last decade selling itself as the future of urban freedom. Freedom, it turns out, only counted if you could already stand up and steady yourself at ten miles an hour.

Rover tops out at 10 mph, which sounds unglamorous until you consider what that speed is doing. It’s not chasing the thrill of a scooter; it’s chasing confidence. A three-wheeled base means no tipping over at a stoplight. Throttle assist means no straining up a hill or nursing a bad knee through a pedal stroke. The vehicle is 2.5 feet wide, narrow enough to navigate a normal bike lane without becoming a hazard to itself or anyone else on the path.

I like that Veo didn’t try to disguise who this is for. A lot of adaptive design gets watered down into something “universal” so it doesn’t look like a medical device, and in the process it loses the features that actually made it useful. Rover doesn’t do that. It looks like what it is: a stable, cargo-friendly, seated ride that happens to also work fine for a tourist who doesn’t want to fall off a scooter on cobblestones. Good accessible design tends to work that way. It never needed to be secretly for everyone. It just needed to actually work for the people it was built for first.

Denver makes sense as a proving ground. The city already runs one of the largest and most varied shared micromobility programs in North America, with about 9,000 vehicles in rotation, so a new form factor doesn’t have to fight for infrastructure that isn’t there yet. Veo says it’s watching rider feedback closely before deciding whether Rover expands citywide or beyond Denver altogether, which feels like the right amount of caution for a vehicle type nobody has really tested at scale before.

Whether Rover becomes a fixture in other American cities depends on things design alone can’t solve: pricing, docking logistics, whether cities are willing to give trikes the same curb space as scooters. But as a statement of intent, it’s hard to argue with. Shared mobility spent a decade optimizing for speed and cool factor. Rover is the first one I’ve seen optimize for who actually gets to ride at all.

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