Author Archives: Ida Torres

The First Screwdriver With an Open-Source Handle You Redesign Yourself

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There’s a quiet arrogance built into most tools. Someone in a design studio somewhere decided how your hand should hold a screwdriver, how long the shaft should be, how thick the grip ought to feel. They tested it on a handful of people, ran the ergonomic studies, picked a shape, and shipped it to millions. The assumption is always the same: one form, optimized for an average that doesn’t actually exist, should work for everyone.

Siddhant Rai Garg’s final-year project at Central Saint Martins, titled Not Just Another Screwdriver, starts from a different place entirely. It asks a question that most product designers avoid because the answer is inconvenient: what if the person holding the tool is actually the best person to decide what it should feel like?

Designer: Siddhant Rai Garg

The system is deceptively simple in concept. A permanent titanium spine handles all the structural work, the torque, the load, the mechanical reality of driving a screw. Everything else around it, the grip, the length, the feel, is modular and replaceable. Segments can be added or removed to change the tool’s reach. Grip files are open-source, meaning anyone with access to a 3D printer or a block of wood and some patience can shape their own handle. The titanium core stays. Everything around it is yours to define.

What makes this interesting isn’t really the engineering, though the material separation between structural and non-structural components is genuinely clever. It’s the philosophical shift. Most product design operates on a model of authority: the designer knows best, the user receives the finished object, and any modification is either warranty-voiding or just plain weird. Garg’s project flips that relationship. The designer provides a skeleton and a set of rules. The user provides the identity.

I find this compelling because it confronts something the design world talks about constantly but rarely acts on: sustainability through longevity. We’ve all heard the pitch about buying fewer, better things. But “better” almost always means “more expensive and more permanent,” which assumes the first version of a product will remain the right version forever. That’s not how people work. Our hands change, our tasks change, our preferences change. A tool that can’t change with us eventually becomes waste, no matter how well it was made.

Not Just Another Screwdriver sidesteps this by making the most resource-intensive part, the titanium spine, the permanent element, while letting the lightweight, low-cost components around it evolve freely. It’s not asking you to commit to one perfect screwdriver for life. It’s asking you to keep the bones and swap the skin whenever you need to.

There’s also something worth noting about the open-source dimension. Releasing grip designs as downloadable, modifiable files is a deliberate act of giving up control. In an industry that guards intellectual property fiercely, choosing to let users become co-designers is a statement about where value actually lives. It suggests that a tool’s worth isn’t locked into its factory finish but grows through use and adaptation.

Of course, a final-year project isn’t a product on shelves. There are real questions about whether most people want this level of involvement with their screwdriver, whether the modularity holds up under years of heavy use, and whether open-source grip files would actually build a community or just sit on a server somewhere. These are fair challenges.

But the idea itself feels like it belongs to a larger shift happening across design, one that treats users less like consumers of finished objects and more like participants in an ongoing process. We’re seeing it in modular electronics, in open-source furniture, in customizable prosthetics. Garg’s contribution is taking that thinking and applying it to something so ordinary, so taken-for-granted, that most of us never think to question it.

A screwdriver is a solved problem. Except it isn’t, not if you believe that the person using it deserves a say in how it feels in their hand. That’s what makes this project worth paying attention to. Not because it reinvents the screwdriver, but because it reconsiders who gets to decide what a screwdriver is.

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Daniel Arsham’s New Drafting Table Has Brass Gears and Cup Holders Built In

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Contemporary artist Daniel Arsham’s studio just received a custom drafting table from Madrid-based CALIPER, and it looks less like furniture and more like a precision instrument from a machine shop. The entire structure is CNC-machined aluminum with exposed brass gears, machined hand cranks, and yes, two built-in cup holders, because even meticulous charcoal drawings require coffee.

The table was commissioned as a functional workstation for Arsham’s small-scale charcoal and graphite drawings on paper. If you know Arsham primarily through his large eroded sculptures or his high-profile collaborations with Dior, Adidas, and Porsche, the drawings might surprise you. They’re intimate, quiet things: detailed studies of the same classical and pop-cultural forms he renders in volcanic ash and crystal at monumental scale. Making work like that demands precision, sustained focus, and the right light. So this isn’t a vanity object. It’s a production tool with a very specific brief.

Designer: CALIPER

CALIPER’s design addresses that brief with an almost obsessive level of care. The table surface is backlit, providing even illumination through a frosted glass top for tracing and examining fine mark-making. A magnifying lamp on an articulated arm lets Arsham inspect the surface of the paper up close, which matters enormously when you’re working with the kinds of tonal subtlety that charcoal and graphite demand. The whole thing tilts on a worm-gear mechanism with a machined hand crank and those beautiful brass gears, allowing the drawing surface to be angled from flat to near-vertical. The hardware looks like it belongs in a machine shop, and that’s entirely the point.

What elevates this beyond a well-made table is the integrated storage panel on the right side of the surface. CNC-machined from aluminum, it features recessed compartments for paper, charcoal sticks, and other tools, plus those two cup holders (the unsung hero of any studio setup) and what appear to be surface-mounted charging ports and controls for the light sources. Everything is contained within the footprint of the work surface, so there’s no reaching over to a side table or hunting through drawers. It’s the kind of considered, artist-specific workflow thinking that separates a custom commission from something you’d buy off a catalog page.

The material choice is worth noting too. The entire structure is CNC-machined aluminum with a clear anodized and bead-blasted finish, giving it a uniform matte silver tone that reads as both industrial and refined. It’s not trying to be warm or domestic. It’s not pretending to be anything other than a machine for drawing. The base structure uses a pair of splayed trestle legs connected by horizontal stainless steel rods, with beautiful machined junction pieces where the rods intersect. Even the feet, with their leveling pads, look purposeful.

CALIPER assembled the table entirely in-house at their Madrid studio before shipping it to New York, where Arsham is based. For a studio whose work spans from trivets for Madrid restaurants to homeware collaborations, this kind of one-off commission represents the more ambitious end of their capabilities, and they’ve clearly relished the challenge.

What makes this project compelling beyond the obvious craft is what it says about the relationship between tools and creative practice. Arsham’s drawings exist in deliberate contrast to his larger, more commercially visible work. They’re analog, slow, and physically demanding in a way that eroded crystal sculptures are not. Building a bespoke instrument for that practice is a statement about its value. It says: this part of the work matters enough to warrant its own architecture.

There’s also something appealing about the visible mechanics of the thing. In an era where most studio equipment tries to disappear into sleek minimalism, CALIPER has left the gears exposed, the crank handles proud, the engineering legible. You can see how it works, and that transparency feels right for a tool that supports handmade work. It’s a machine that respects the hand.

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A 9-Kilogram Lamp Built From 120 Handmade Parts (Only 15 Exist)

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Most lamps want to disappear into a room, but every now and then, one shows up that demands the room reorganize itself around it. The ML15 Helios, designed by Berlin-based artist Frank Buchwald in collaboration with MB&F’s M.A.D.Gallery, is one of those objects. It’s a lamp, technically. It gives off light, it has a switch, it plugs into a wall. But calling it a lamp feels reductive in the same way calling a Porsche 911 a commuter car technically isn’t wrong but misses the entire point.

The ML15 Helios was created to mark the 15th anniversary of the M.A.D.Gallery, MB&F’s network of spaces dedicated to what they call Mechanical Art Devices. The gallery itself was born out of a kind of beautiful stubbornness. Back in 2011, MB&F founder Maximilian Büsser couldn’t get traditional retailers to properly display his three-dimensional watches, and art galleries told him his creations weren’t really art. So he opened his own space in Geneva’s Old Town and started curating the kind of work that lived between disciplines. Frank Buchwald was one of the very first artists to join.

Designer: Frank Buchwald

The origin story between the two is almost too good. Büsser discovered Buchwald’s retro-futuristic Machine Lights online, visited his scarred industrial workshop in Berlin, and left having committed to buying the next ten lights for a gallery that didn’t even exist yet. That kind of instinct, that willingness to bet on something before the infrastructure is in place, is rare. Fifteen years later, the ML15 Helios feels like the natural product of a creative relationship built on that kind of trust.

The piece itself is a 9-kilogram sculpture made from stainless steel and brass, standing on three legs that give it an almost biological quality, like something that evolved rather than was engineered. At its center sits a 120mm spherical globe bulb surrounded by a dimmable LED ring that replicates a solar corona. Two blue diffuser rings frame the sphere, and this is where the design gets interesting. Depending on your angle and your mood, the Helios can look like a celestial body, a precision scientific instrument, or a human eye staring back at you. That ambiguity is intentional, and it’s what separates Buchwald’s work from decorative lighting that simply tries to look expensive.

Every one of the 120 individual components is handcrafted in Buchwald’s Berlin workshop. The electrical wiring runs through flexible stainless steel tubes, kept visible rather than hidden, because Buchwald believes in showing the inner workings of his machines. Even the laser-cut parts get extensive manual reworking, and each piece takes several weeks to complete. The head rotates 90 degrees, which means the Helios isn’t just a static sculpture but something you physically interact with to direct light across a room.

What I find most compelling about the ML15 Helios is how it occupies a space that most designers avoid entirely. It’s not minimalist, it’s not maximalist, it’s not mid-century modern, and it doesn’t reference any trend you could pin to a specific decade. Buchwald was a science fiction illustrator before he started working with metal, and that background shows. There’s a narrative embedded in the object, a sense that it belongs to a fictional world where machines are revered for their beauty as much as their function.

Limited to just 15 pieces and exclusive to M.A.D.Gallery locations in Geneva, Dubai, and the MB&F Labs network, the Helios is priced on request, which in this world means it’s not for the casually curious. But I think the limitation is part of what makes it meaningful. In an era where everything scales, where even luxury brands chase volume, there’s something quietly radical about a handmade object that exists in a quantity of 15 because that’s all one artist can responsibly make.

The ML15 Helios isn’t trying to be the future of lighting design. It’s trying to be a singular object that earns its place in a room not through branding or spectacle, but through the sheer quality of its craft and the clarity of its vision. In that sense, Buchwald and Büsser have made something that the M.A.D.Gallery was always meant to celebrate: a machine that gives light, and in doing so, becomes art.

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Swiss Brand ‘On’ Just Built a $280 Running Shoe Using Robots in 3 Minutes

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Most running shoes are Frankenstein jobs. Twenty, thirty pieces of fabric cut, stitched, layered, and glued together by human hands on a factory line. It’s been done that way for decades, and for the most part, nobody questioned it. On just did.

The Swiss brand’s new LightSpray Cloudmonster 3 Hyper doesn’t have a traditional upper. Instead, a robotic arm sprays a single continuous filament onto a foot-shaped mold, and in about three minutes, the entire upper is formed. No seams. No laces. No glue. The result bonds directly to the midsole through thermal fusing, and the whole shoe is made from just eight components. For context, a typical performance runner uses somewhere between 30 and 50. That’s not an incremental improvement. That’s a fundamentally different way to build a shoe.

Designer: On

On first debuted LightSpray in 2024, when marathon runner Hellen Obiri wore a prototype to win the Boston Marathon. Back then it was a single robotic unit in Zurich, a proof of concept more than a production method. Now the brand has opened a second factory near Busan, South Korea, housing 32 robots and boosting production capacity 30 times over. The technology has gone from lab curiosity to something you can actually buy, and that shift matters more than the shoe itself.

What makes the Cloudmonster 3 Hyper interesting as a design object is the tension between its upper and its sole. On top, you get this gossamer, almost skeletal spray-on structure that looks like it was grown rather than assembled. Below, there’s a massive stack of Helion HF hyper foam sitting on CloudTec cushioning geometry. Minimal above, maximal below. It’s a deliberate contrast, and it works visually in a way that most performance shoes don’t even attempt.

On co-founder Caspar Coppetti has said it’s what a shoe from Apple would look like, and while that comparison gets thrown around too loosely in consumer products, here it actually tracks. The Limelight/Bloom colorway, with its white upper, black branding, and yellow tooling, has that same kind of restrained confidence.

There are real performance implications, too. At 205 grams for a men’s US 8.5, it’s roughly 90 grams lighter than the standard Cloudmonster 3. That’s a significant gap for a max-cushion trainer. On deliberately skipped a carbon plate in the midsole, which is a choice that goes against the current arms race in performance footwear. The reasoning is sound: plates are great for race-day propulsion, but for training shoes built around long runs and high mileage, they can actually fatigue legs faster. The plateless design, combined with enhanced rocker geometry, is meant to keep your legs fresher over sustained efforts. It’s a shoe that asks you to trust the foam instead of the hardware.

The sustainability angle is worth noting without overstating. Eight components instead of dozens means less material waste and a simpler path to recyclability. On claims up to 75% lower CO₂ emissions for the upper compared to its other racing shoes. No running shoe is carbon-neutral, but the LightSpray approach at least moves in the right direction by simplifying what needs to be disassembled and reclaimed at end of life.

I do think there are legitimate questions about the laceless design. A form-fitting sprayed upper is a beautiful engineering solution, but it puts enormous pressure on the sock system and the structure itself to keep the foot locked down during dynamic movement. On includes an Elite Run Sock High Hyper with each pair, which is a smart acknowledgment that the shoe and sock need to function as a system. But runners with wider feet or higher arches should probably try these on before committing $280.

That price point is notable. It’s $90 more than the standard Cloudmonster 3 and $60 above the Cloudmonster 3 Hyper. You’re paying a premium for the LightSpray construction, and whether that premium is justified depends on how much you value the weight savings and the novelty of the technology. For some runners, that will be an easy yes. For others, the standard Hyper at $220 might be the smarter buy.

What excites me about this release isn’t really the shoe, though. It’s what it represents. The footwear industry has spent years competing on foam compounds and plate configurations, essentially tweaking the same fundamental construction methods. On is asking a different question entirely: what if the way we build the shoe is the innovation? A robot, a mold, three minutes, eight pieces. That’s a compelling answer, and I suspect the rest of the industry is paying very close attention.

The LightSpray Cloudmonster 3 Hyper drops March 5 in North America through On’s website and retail stores, with a global release following on April 16. It’s priced at $280.

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This Ruler Holds Paper, Guides Your Blade, and Forgives Shaky Hands

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I’ve been staring at these renders for a while now, and I keep coming back to one line from the project page: “A cutting-aid tool designed for the human hand as it actually trembles.” That’s not marketing copy. That’s a design philosophy most product designers never arrive at.

Quiver is a concept by Tunir Maity, a designer based in Noida, India, and it’s one of the most thoughtful pieces of industrial design I’ve come across recently. On the surface, it looks like a premium aluminum ruler with a built-in paper guide and blade channel. Sleek, minimal, the kind of object that would look good on a studio desk. But what makes it interesting isn’t how it looks. It’s what it admits about you.

Designer: Tunir Maity

Most cutting tools are designed as if you’re a surgeon. Steady hands, perfect pressure, ideal lighting, infinite patience. The reality is different. You’re hunched over a desk, eyeballing a line, gripping too hard because you’re afraid of slipping. The paper moves. The blade drifts. You end up with a cut that’s close enough but never quite right. It’s a small failure, the kind you shrug off, but it accumulates into a quiet resentment of a task that should be simple.

Quiver’s approach is to stop pretending the problem is you. The tool has a clip mechanism that holds paper in place, a slit that guides your blade in a straight line, and a weight distribution that favors the cutting end so you don’t have to press as hard. The whole thing is made from anodized aluminum with recyclable plastic components, designed for over 300 cuts and years of daily use. There’s even a carabiner attachment so you can clip it to a bag, which is a nice touch for anyone who actually uses tools instead of just collecting them.

What I find compelling about this project isn’t any single feature. It’s the framing. The name “Quiver” carries a double meaning that I think is genuinely clever without being precious about it. There’s the archery sense, that moment of readiness before you release, and there’s the literal quiver of a human hand. Most designers would pick one meaning and run with it. Maity holds both, and that tension is where the design lives.

There’s a broader conversation here about inclusive design that I think Quiver speaks to without ever using the term. When you design for trembling hands, you’re not just designing for people with motor difficulties or arthritis. You’re designing for everyone who’s ever been tired, rushed, cold, nervous, or just not that precise. That’s all of us, at different moments. The best accessible design has always worked this way. Curb cuts were designed for wheelchairs and ended up helping everyone with strollers, luggage, or sore knees. OXO Good Grips started as kitchen tools for people with arthritis and became the standard for comfortable design. Quiver fits into that lineage. It’s not a medical device or an accommodation. It’s just a better tool that happens to respect the full range of human capability.

I also appreciate that it comes in multiple colorways. The amber, yellow, and blue clip variants shown in the renders suggest this is meant to be a personal object, not just a utility. That matters. Tools you choose tend to be tools you use.

Is it perfect? It’s a concept, so there are open questions. How does the blade channel handle thicker materials? What’s the learning curve for the clip mechanism? Would the weight feel different after an hour of continuous use? These are manufacturing questions, not design ones, and they don’t diminish what Maity has accomplished here at the conceptual level.

What stays with me is the generosity of the premise. So much of product design starts from a place of optimization, making you faster, more efficient, more precise. Quiver starts from a place of acceptance. Your hands shake. That’s fine. Let’s work with that. In a design landscape obsessed with eliminating human imperfection, there’s something quietly radical about a tool that says your imperfection was the brief all along.

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4 Upholstered Columns Become a Chair, And One Bends Into a Table

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There’s a particular kind of furniture that makes you stop scrolling. Not because it’s trying to be art, and not because it’s doing anything especially clever with materials or manufacturing. It stops you because it looks like something you’ve never seen before, and then a second later, you completely understand it. Liam de la Bedoyere’s Quad Chair is exactly that kind of object.

The concept is almost aggressively simple. Four upholstered cylindrical columns stand together in a cluster. Three of them are straight, functioning as seats or backrests depending on how you lean into them. The fourth one bends at its base in a tight U-curve, loops back up, and becomes a side table at standing height. The whole thing is covered in a single color of fabric, currently shown in a striking orange-red that does a lot of work in making the form read clearly. Available too in yellow and blue, but the red is the one that landed.

Designer: Liam de la Bedoyere

What I find genuinely compelling here is the restraint. De la Bedoyere could have made this complicated. He didn’t. There’s no mixed material moment, no contrasting leg, no cutout geometry trying to signal craft or exclusivity. The Quad Chair is basically a pipe that got upholstered and brought some friends, and somehow that reads as both completely absurd and completely resolved.

The side table column is the real insight. Furniture that doubles as something else is usually a compromise, some convertible thing that does two jobs adequately and neither one well. But because the column is already structural, already cylindrical, already the right diameter to hold a glass or a book, bending one back up to table height doesn’t feel like a feature. It feels inevitable. A Dieter Rams book propped between the columns in the product photography feels less like a styling choice and more like the designer making a point about what the object is actually for.

The brand behind the project is Bored Eye Design, which is a name that earns more credibility the longer you look at the work. There’s something in the moniker that acknowledges where design ideas actually come from: not from briefs or trend reports, but from a certain restless attention to ordinary things. Four cylinders. One bent. That’s it. You can feel the boredom that preceded the idea.

It’s worth noting this is currently a personal project rather than a production piece. The renders are polished enough that it’s easy to assume otherwise, and the product photography, shot on pale timber floors against clean white walls, is exactly the kind of work that gets picked up by design publications and mistaken for launch imagery. De la Bedoyere is clearly fluent in the visual language of contemporary design brands.

Whether the Quad Chair translates to manufacturing is a different question. The upholstered U-bend is the interesting technical challenge, and how that curve holds its shape over time, under weight, across different uses, is something renders can’t tell you. But as a concept it’s more than compelling. It’s the kind of thing that makes you wonder why it doesn’t already exist.

Furniture has been having a cylindrical moment for a while now. Puffy, tubular, soft-edged forms have been creeping through interior design for the better part of a decade, a reaction against the hard-cornered minimalism that preceded it. The Quad Chair sits comfortably in that lineage without feeling derivative. It has a specific idea at its center, which is more than can be said for a lot of what’s riding the same aesthetic wave.

The top-down photograph is the one I keep coming back to. Four circular ends of upholstered columns arranged on a light wood floor, looking less like furniture and more like a glyph, or a punctuation mark from an alphabet that doesn’t exist yet. It’s the kind of image that sticks. The kind of object you’d sketch on a napkin and then be surprised, weeks later, to realize it was real.

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When Design Understands That Starting Is the Hardest Part

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There’s a particular kind of guilt that lives in the corner of a messy room. You see it, you know it needs to go, and somehow you still walk past it three more times before doing anything. Most of us don’t lack the ability to do chores. We lack the spark to begin them.

That’s the exact problem Gun Park, Gain Lee, Yangwoo Choi, and Jinha Hong set out to solve with Momenta, a concept collection of household products that uses behavioral psychology and deliberate design to nudge you into action. The collection consists of three pieces: a tape cleaner, a cabinet, and a detergent dispenser. Each one is quietly brilliant, and together they represent one of the more thoughtful takes on domestic product design I’ve seen in a while.

Designers: Gun Park, Gain Lee, Yangwoo Choi, and Jinha Hong

The concept behind Momenta is rooted in a simple but profound observation: incompleteness bothers us. Think about a crooked tile on a sidewalk or a puzzle missing a single piece. Something in your brain just wants to fix it. The designers tapped into this instinct, using what they call “deficiency triggers,” small physical cues that signal something is out of place, to make starting a chore feel less like a decision and more like a natural response.

The tape cleaner is the most visually striking of the three. It mounts on the wall via a magnetic board, and at whatever cleaning interval you set, a small trigger pops out from the panel at a random spot. The visual effect mimics the look of a dusty, untidy surface. It doesn’t scold you or send a notification. It just sits there, slightly off, until you push it back in. And to push it back in, you have to grab the tape cleaner, which means you’re already cleaning. It’s almost sneaky in how seamlessly it works.

The cabinet follows a similar logic. When you take something out and don’t put it back, a spherical trigger drops down into the empty slot, making the absence visible. It’s the physical equivalent of a raised eyebrow. The item is missing. You know it. Now you feel the pull to return it. The trigger itself serves as a placeholder, holding the space and the guilt until the task is done.

The detergent dispenser might be the most playful piece of the three. Nine small circular triggers sit in a grid on the face of the unit. When it’s time to do the dishes, one of them changes color. To reset it, you rinse it under water, which gets your hands wet, which is basically half the battle when it comes to starting the dishes. Once the trigger is placed back into its slot, detergent dispenses automatically. The whole sequence is almost gamified, and that feels intentional.

What makes Momenta genuinely interesting beyond its novelty is the layer of restraint in its design. Nothing here is loud or demanding. There’s no beeping, no blinking display, no app required. The products are minimal and clean, rendered in white with sharp pops of green for the triggers. They look like they belong in a thoughtfully curated home. The triggers do their work subtly, appealing to your instincts rather than interrupting your day.

There’s something worth celebrating about design that works with human nature rather than against it. So much productivity culture is built on willpower and discipline, which, for most people on most days, is simply in short supply. Momenta sidesteps that entirely. It doesn’t ask you to be a better, more motivated version of yourself. It just places a small, fixable imperfection in front of you and trusts that your own psychology will do the rest.

Whether the full collection ever reaches production, the concept stands on its own as a compelling piece of design thinking. It makes you reconsider what household objects are even for. Maybe the best ones don’t just hold or clean or organize. Maybe the best ones know exactly how to get you started.

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This $219 Screen Runs 6 Months Per Charge and Wants Nothing From You

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Most of the screens that you encounter everyday is always fighting for your attention, always buzzing, glowing, pulsing with red notification badges designed to hijack your focus. The TRMNL X, a 10.3-inch e-ink smart display priced at $219, takes the opposite approach entirely. It just sits there, calm and papery, waiting for you to glance over when you’re ready. And that restraint might be the most radical design choice in consumer tech right now.

TRMNL’s original model was deliberately lo-fi, a smaller 7.5-inch 1-bit screen with no touchscreen and no backlight. It was almost stubbornly analog in spirit. It appealed to developers, minimalists, and those of us tired of all the bright screens. The TRMNL X is the company’s answer to users who loved the philosophy but wanted more screen real estate and polish. And it delivers on both counts without losing what made the original special.

Designer: TRMNL

The display itself is gorgeous in the understated way that only e-ink can be. At 1872 x 1404 resolution with 16 shades of gray, it renders calendars, weather dashboards, news headlines, and artwork with a crispness that feels more like a printed page than a screen. Partial refreshes happen in under 200 milliseconds, which is fast enough that the display doesn’t feel sluggish when cycling through your content. It’s the kind of screen you can stare at for hours without your eyes complaining, which is something no LCD or OLED can honestly claim.

What I find most compelling about the TRMNL X is how much it trusts you. There’s no algorithm deciding what you should see. You configure your own dashboard with plugins pulled from a library of over 850 options, everything from Google Calendar and Reddit feeds to ChatGPT summaries and YouTube subscriber counts. You arrange them in one of eight layout templates, set your refresh interval, and walk away. The device wakes up periodically, pulls a new image from the server, displays it, and goes back to sleep. That’s it. No infinite scroll. No dopamine trap. No dark patterns. Just information you asked for, presented when you want it.

The hardware reflects this same philosophy of quiet confidence. The frame comes in six finishes, from black and white to sage and faux wood, and the front is completely clean with no visible branding. There’s a magnetic USB-C charging connector, a built-in accelerometer for auto-rotation, and a touch gesture bar for quick navigation. Battery life stretches anywhere from two to six months depending on your refresh rate, which means you can genuinely forget it needs power at all. The enclosure is also waterproof and dust-proof, so it can live in a bathroom or a workshop without issue.

But the real personality of the TRMNL X shows in its hacker-friendly DNA. The firmware is fully open source. The case has actual screws, not glue, so you can open it up, swap components, and tinker to your heart’s content. There’s a Qwiic connector for attaching external sensors, and the community on Discord has already built custom integrations for Home Assistant and all sorts of niche projects. In an era when most gadgets are sealed shut and locked down, this level of openness feels almost rebellious.

At $219, the TRMNL X isn’t an impulse buy. But it’s also not competing with tablets or smart home hubs. It occupies a category that barely existed a few years ago: the passive information display. Something you put on your desk or mount on a wall that keeps you informed without pulling you into a screen-time spiral. The fact that it runs for months on a charge and requires almost zero maintenance makes it feel less like a gadget and more like a piece of furniture.

There’s a growing appetite for technology that respects boundaries, that does its job and then gets out of the way. The TRMNL X is a beautifully considered expression of that idea, a screen that proves sometimes the most powerful design choice is simply knowing when to stay quiet.

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A 24-Sided Lamp That Reveals Hidden Colors When You Turn It On

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There’s a moment when you look at a well-designed object and feel something shift quietly inside you. Not a gasp, not a dramatic reaction, just a quiet recognition that someone thought deeply about what they were making and why. That’s exactly how I felt when I came across Aoi, a pleated lighting fixture by designer Ingrid Ng of InOutGrid, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

At first glance, Aoi looks like geometry made soft. The lampshade is built in the shape of a twenty-four-sided icositetragon, which sounds like something out of a math textbook but translates visually into something surprisingly graceful. It sits somewhere between origami and architecture, structured enough to feel intentional but tactile enough to feel human. And that tension, that careful balance between rigor and warmth, is really what makes the piece worth paying attention to.

Designer: Ingrid Ng / InOutGrid

Ng’s approach centers on traditional pleating techniques applied to sheer layered fabrics. Pleating, of course, is one of the oldest forms of textile manipulation we have. It’s been used in clothing, in paper crafts, in Japanese lanterns for centuries. What Ng does with Aoi is take that heritage and redirect it toward function and light in a way that feels both reverent and completely fresh. The design draws from the proportions and framing logic of traditional Japanese lanterns, and you can feel that lineage in the piece without it ever feeling like a costume or a direct reference.

What’s genuinely clever about Aoi is what happens when you turn it on. In its unlit state, the exterior reads as mostly monochromatic, clean and composed. But the moment light is introduced, the superimposed sheer fabric layers begin to interact with each other in ways you wouldn’t predict from looking at it cold. Layered shades of blue emerge, arranged in geometric configurations. Shadows shift in calibrated patterns across surrounding surfaces. The lamp doesn’t just illuminate a room, it performs in it. And I mean that as a compliment, not a critique. There’s a meaningful difference between performance that’s gratuitous and performance that reveals something true about an object’s construction.

The internal structure is worth mentioning too. A wire armature supports the pleated fabric envelope, keeping everything stable without visually intruding on the lightness of the textile. It’s the kind of detail that rarely gets appreciated because when it works, you simply don’t notice it. The fabric appears to float and hold its shape simultaneously, which sounds contradictory until you see it and understand that the whole point was to let the material speak for itself, without interference.

What I appreciate most about Aoi is that it doesn’t overcomplicate its own thesis. So much of contemporary product design is about stacking features or making an aesthetic statement loud enough to be photographed. Ng does the opposite. The idea here is elegant in its restraint: fabric can be structural. Fabric can modulate light. Fabric, when handled with precision and care, can become a medium as rigorous as steel or glass. That argument doesn’t need a manifesto. The lamp makes it entirely on its own.

There’s also something meaningful about rooting contemporary work in craft traditions that predate digital tools by centuries. In an era where generative design and algorithmic aesthetics dominate so many design conversations, Aoi is a gentle but firm reminder that the fold, the pleat, the carefully stitched edge, these are not primitive precursors to modern design thinking. They are sophisticated techniques with as much to offer today as they ever did, perhaps more so, precisely because they require patience and physical understanding that no software can replicate or shortcut.

Aoi isn’t trying to reinvent lighting design. It’s doing something more interesting than that. It’s asking what happens when you apply genuine craft curiosity to a very ordinary object, and it keeps proving that the answer can be quietly extraordinary. Not every design needs to shout. Some of the best ones just glow.

The post A 24-Sided Lamp That Reveals Hidden Colors When You Turn It On first appeared on Yanko Design.

This 40-Pound Robot Dog Can Carry 143 Pounds of Cargo

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Robot dogs have been having a moment for a few years now. From Boston Dynamics’ Spot strutting through construction sites to viral videos of four-legged machines dancing to pop songs, the quadruped robot has gone from fringe sci-fi concept to a fixture of the modern tech conversation. But most of what we’ve seen has felt like proof of concept, interesting to watch but not quite ready to show up and do real work. Unitree’s new As2 feels like the machine that finally closes that gap.

Unitree, the Chinese robotics firm behind the popular Go2 robot dog, just unveiled the As2, and the spec sheet alone is enough to make you stop scrolling. At about 18 kilograms, roughly 40 pounds with its battery included, the As2 is compact enough to move through tight spaces, yet built to handle a standing payload of up to 65 kilograms. That’s more than 143 pounds sitting on top of a 40-pound robot, which is genuinely impressive and a little hard to picture until you actually see it in action. For continuous walking with a load, it handles up to 15 kilograms and keeps going for over 13 kilometers. Its battery, a 648Wh, 15,000mAh unit, gives the As2 more than four hours of runtime when unloaded, covering over 20 kilometers. For an industrial robot, that’s a serious range.

Designer: Unitree

Speed-wise, it hits over 5 meters per second, roughly 11 miles per hour, which is faster than most people jog. It can climb stairs up to 25 centimeters high, tackle slopes at 40 degrees, and mount vertical platforms as high as 50 centimeters. The torque output sits at approximately 90 N·m with a torque-to-weight ratio of about 5 N·m/kg, driven by low-inertia inner rotor motors paired with industrial-grade crossed roller bearings. The engineering here is dense and deliberate. This isn’t a toy built to look capable; it’s a machine built to actually be capable.

What I find most interesting about the As2, though, is how Unitree is positioning it. The tagline is “Compact Size, Industrial Capability,” but the word they keep coming back to is “companion.” That’s a deliberate choice, and it tells you something about where the company sees this going. The robot dog market has largely split into two camps: big industrial machines that feel cold and utilitarian, and smaller consumer products that are more novelty than anything else. The As2 seems to be genuinely trying to live in the middle, built tough enough for real environments with an IP54 weatherproofing rating and an operating range from -20°C to 50°C, but designed with a level of approachability that suggests Unitree has a broader audience in mind.

The platform is also open, which matters more than it might seem. The As2 supports large AI models for what Unitree calls “embodied AI interaction,” essentially giving developers the tools to build autonomous behavior on top of the hardware. The EDU model can even be expanded with an NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX, which opens the door to more complex AI applications. GPS and 4G are built in, though disabled by default. It runs on an 8-core CPU and comes in three configurations, AIR, PRO, and EDU, each scaled for different use cases from general exploration to full industrial deployment.

What strikes me about the As2 is that it represents a shift in tone for robot dogs as a category. The conversation around this technology has often leaned either dystopian, think surveillance and military use, or dismissive, as if legged robots are just expensive novelties. The As2 doesn’t entirely escape those conversations, but it does reframe them a bit. A machine this capable, this portable, and this open as a development platform has real potential in search and rescue, agriculture, infrastructure inspection, and logistics. The vision of a robot companion that is genuinely useful rather than just impressive is within reach, and the As2 is one of the better arguments for it.

Whether Unitree can translate this hardware into widespread, practical adoption is a different question entirely. But as a statement of where robot dogs are heading, the As2 is worth paying attention to.

The post This 40-Pound Robot Dog Can Carry 143 Pounds of Cargo first appeared on Yanko Design.