Tag Archives: Concept Designs

The Inflatable Umbrella That Finally Makes Sense

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Count how many umbrellas you’ve owned in your lifetime. Go ahead, try. Most people lose count somewhere around five or six, often because the memory of each one ends the same way: a gust of wind, a bent rib, a mangled heap left in a trash can on a rainy corner somewhere. We accept this as the unavoidable cost of staying dry. But a group of graduate students from the Savannah College of Art and Design decided that was a terrible deal, and they designed their way out of it.

Nimbus is their answer. It’s an inflatable umbrella made entirely from recyclable thermoplastic polyurethane, or TPU, and the absence of the usual suspects is the whole point. No metal ribs. No complex mechanical joints. No layered materials that make recycling a logistical nightmare. Just one material, doing everything.

Designers: Hannah Klein, Vishva Chauhan, Manasi Khatavkar, and Annika Hogan

Hannah Klein, Vishva Chauhan, Manasi Khatavkar, and Annika Hogan created Nimbus as part of their Master’s program in Design for Sustainability at SCAD. Their combined backgrounds span Interior Design, Graphic Design, Studio Arts, and Environmental Science, which is probably why the concept feels so well-rounded. When a team brings that range of perspectives to a single everyday object, it shows. They weren’t just asking how to make a better umbrella. They were asking why we’ve been making them so badly for so long.

The answer, it turns out, is that nobody really stopped to question it. The standard umbrella has looked more or less the same for generations: a metal skeleton, a nylon canopy, a plastic handle, all bonded together in ways that make the whole thing essentially un-recyclable. When it breaks, and it will break, it goes straight to landfill. Multiply that by the sheer volume of umbrellas sold globally every year, and you’re looking at a quiet but significant waste problem hiding in plain sight.

Nimbus addresses this by stripping the design down to its core job: keeping rain off your head. The inflatable structure replaces the rigid rib system entirely, which means fewer points of failure and a much longer functional life. It’s lightweight, designed to be repaired rather than replaced, and when the time does come to retire it, the single-material construction makes it genuinely recyclable. The team has also built in a buy-back program to support that end-of-life process, which tells you they’ve thought beyond the object itself and into the broader system it lives in.

The numbers behind this are worth sitting with. Compared to a standard umbrella, Nimbus carries a 99% lower impact according to life cycle assessment, the metric that tracks environmental cost from production to disposal. That’s not an incremental upgrade. That’s a complete rethink of what the object is allowed to be.

But what I keep returning to is the broader point Nimbus is making about design itself. We tend to celebrate innovation when it arrives in the form of something new, a gadget that didn’t exist before, a category that had to be invented from scratch. But sometimes the more interesting work happens when someone looks at something deeply familiar and asks whether it needed to be done this way at all. An umbrella feels like a settled question. These four designers disagreed.

The project has already been recognized by the Green Product Award, which is a good sign that the design community is paying attention. Whether Nimbus moves toward commercial production remains to be seen, but as a concept, it raises the right questions at exactly the right time. Consumers are increasingly asking where their things come from and where they end up. Products that can answer both questions honestly are going to matter more, not less, as those expectations grow.

You probably have an umbrella somewhere. Maybe it still works. Maybe it’s one rough commute away from the bin. Either way, Nimbus is a useful reminder that even the most unremarkable objects in our lives are worth questioning, and that sometimes the best design is just someone refusing to accept a bad answer.

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Your Shelf Corner Is Wasted Space: This Clock Turns It Into a Bookend

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Desk clocks have always had a spatial problem. They take up flat surface area that shelves and desks often can’t spare, and most serve no other purpose besides telling the time. Bookends are purely utilitarian fixtures that rarely bring any real character to a shelf. The two objects share the same territory but have never quite figured out how to also share the job.

That’s the gap that the EDGE Clock concept sets out to close. Designed to sit against the corners of shelves, desks, and bookcases, it works as both a timepiece and a stabilizing weight for the books and objects around it. It is labeled as a ‘deskterior’ object, a term that describes desk items thoughtfully designed to do more than one thing at once.

Designer: HoHyeon Lim

The inspiration comes from something most people do instinctively. Books and objects get leaned against corners all the time, using the meeting point of two surfaces as natural support. The EDGE Clock borrows that habit directly, concentrating the clock’s mass at its edge so it nestles securely into a corner rather than needing a flat, unobstructed surface to stand upright on its own.

The form is deliberately spherical, its mass distributed so the curved body settles naturally against two surfaces at once. The clock face is angled in a way that makes it readable from above, the way you’d glance at something on a shelf. There’s no kickstand, no flat base, no bracket. The only thing holding it in place is its own weight, guided by the corner.

What makes the concept particularly clever is that the weight isn’t fixed. The body opens to reveal a hollow interior, and the user can drop in coins or small everyday objects to adjust how heavy and stable it sits. It’s a simple idea that adds a layer of personalization most clocks don’t offer. You’re essentially calibrating it to your shelf and the things you already keep on it.

Set it at the end of a row of books on an open shelf, and it stops them from toppling while quietly telling the time. Prop it in the corner of a desk, and it keeps loose items from sliding away without any need for a dedicated organizer. The corner, usually the dead zone of any surface, becomes the most purposeful spot in the room.

The concept is envisioned in a wide range of matte colors, from dusty sage and burnt orange to slate blue and near-black charcoal. The palette feels warm and considered rather than flashy, suited to the kinds of curated shelves where design-conscious people tend to collect objects. It fits naturally beside the books and trinkets already there, adding to the arrangement rather than competing with it.

The EDGE Clock is still a concept, but it touches on a problem that most desk objects don’t bother to address. A shelf corner tends to collect forgotten coins and stray pens rather than anything deliberate. This design treats that edge as prime real estate, turning an overlooked spot into one that actually holds the rest of the shelf together.

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A Student Built Shelves That Fly Like Kites

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The first image that stops you is the outdoor shot: a tall shelving unit suspended in open sky, hovering above a treeline, trailing a thin string back to the ground like the most unexpected kite you’ve ever seen. The frame catches the light. The fabric panels billow slightly. It looks completely ridiculous and completely beautiful at the same time. That’s Aerodomestics, a furniture collection by Valerio Sampognaro, a student at HFBK Hamburg, and a finalist in the 2026 Rimowa Design Prize. The concept is straightforward and quietly radical: what if furniture was built the way kites are built?

Look at the pieces closely and the logic becomes visible. The frame is thin aluminum tubing, bent into clean rectangular forms and rounded at the corners, the kind of minimal structural skeleton that prioritizes weight savings above everything else. It’s not trying to disappear, but it’s not trying to dominate either. The tubing holds its shape without bulk, which is exactly what a good kite spine does.

Designer: Valerio Sampognaro

The shelves themselves are where it gets interesting. Rather than wood, glass, or metal panels, Sampognaro used ripstop fabric in bold, flat colors: sky blue, vivid orange, deep charcoal. The fabric is tensioned diagonally between shelf levels, crossing in a zigzag pattern that mirrors how kite sail panels are cut and stitched to distribute load across the frame. Up close, you can see the actual stitching along the fabric edges, neat and deliberate, the same hand of craft you’d find in a proper kite workshop. The shelves are functional. There’s a photograph of a hardcover book sitting cleanly on one of the orange panels, held in place by tension and the slight curve of the material.

The result, visually, is furniture that looks like it’s already in motion. The diagonal fabric panels create a sense of dynamic energy even when the piece is standing still in a white studio. The tall orange-and-black unit has an almost aggressive graphic quality, the two colors alternating in a chevron rhythm up the full height of the structure. The blue units are softer, more architectural, especially the tall single piece with its A-frame top that tapers to a point like a sail catching wind upward. Indoors, against a neutral wall, these pieces read as sculpture. Outside, with actual wind in the fabric, they become something else entirely.

Portability is part of the design in a way that feels genuinely considered rather than incidental. One photograph shows a person carrying a full-sized unit flat under one arm, the whole thing folded down to roughly the size of a stretched canvas. The aluminum frame collapses, the fabric folds with it, and the entire piece becomes something you could reasonably carry on public transit. That’s not a small thing. Most shelving requires two people, a car, and a level of commitment to a specific wall in a specific apartment. Aerodomestics asks for none of that.

Sampognaro has said that the project is about having a lighter relationship with objects, about not being so dependent on them. You can feel that philosophy in every material decision. Nothing is heavier than it needs to be. The color choices are bold enough to make a statement without requiring permanence. The fabric can presumably be replaced or recolored. The frame is the kind of thing that could last indefinitely or be disassembled in ten minutes.

What makes Aerodomestics stick with you isn’t just the image of a bookshelf in flight, as memorable as that is. It’s the realization that the whole collection follows through on its own premise completely. Every joint, every fabric panel, every color choice points back to the same idea: that a shelf can hold your things without weighing you down. That’s a harder design problem than it looks, and Sampognaro solved it by looking somewhere no one thought to look.

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A Student Just Made a Pen From One Bamboo Stalk. No Factory Needed.

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We don’t usually stop to think about pens. They show up in our bags, our drawers, the bottom of every tote we own, and when the ink runs out, they quietly end up in a landfill. That’s the mundane life cycle of the humble ballpoint, and most of us have just accepted it. Which is exactly why Shoot, a bamboo writing instrument designed by Sarthak Prajapati, feels like a quiet rebuke dressed up as a very beautiful object.

Prajapati is an Industrial Design undergraduate at the National Institute of Design in Assam, India, and Shoot is his entry in the 2026 Green Product Award, currently shortlisted as a finalist in the Consumer Goods category. At first glance, it’s a precision pen carved from a single piece of bamboo. But the more you learn about how it was made and why, the more it becomes a kind of design manifesto condensed into something you can hold in your hand.

Designer: Sarthak Prajapati

The name itself is a clever one. A “shoot” is the young, fast-growing sprout of a bamboo plant, and that material is the entire premise of the object. Bamboo is one of the fastest-regenerating plants on earth, and Prajapati uses it here not as a trendy green overlay but as a functional, structural choice. The bamboo handles the grip. The bamboo handles the form. The bamboo is the design. There’s no layer of branding on top trying to convince you it’s sustainable. The material speaks for itself.

Shoot’s most compelling quality isn’t even the material. It’s the thinking behind how it was made. No electricity. No factory floor. No complex supply chain. Prajapati built this using low-energy, hands-on craft methods, which aligns with a wider movement in design circles pushing back against the idea that innovation always has to be high-tech to be meaningful. Sometimes innovation looks like stepping back and asking whether the thing we already have, meaning the plant, the material, the traditional skill, was actually good enough all along.

The pen is also refillable, which sounds like a small detail but isn’t. Disposable pens are a genuinely staggering problem. Billions are discarded every year globally, and most of them are made from mixed plastics that can’t be easily recycled. The refillable design of Shoot positions it directly against that culture of single-use convenience, and it does so without requiring the user to sacrifice function. You still get a proper writing instrument. You just don’t throw the whole thing away when it’s done.

I’ll be honest: I have a soft spot for design that comes from a student context. There’s a kind of fearlessness to it. Prajapati isn’t working within a corporate brief or trying to satisfy a retailer’s margin requirements. He’s solving a real problem the way he actually believes it should be solved, and the result has the clarity that comes with that freedom. The pen looks exactly like what it is. A bamboo stalk. A writing tool. Nothing more, nothing less, and somehow that is enough.

The Green Product Award itself, now in its eleventh year, evaluates submissions on approach, innovation, sustainability, and design. The fact that Shoot made the final shortlist tells you a lot about the kind of thinking that’s being rewarded right now. The jury isn’t looking for products that simply add a bamboo component to something otherwise unchanged. They’re looking for objects where the sustainability logic runs all the way through, from material to manufacturing to end of life.

If Shoot ever goes into production, I’d buy one. Not because I’m trying to make a statement, but because it looks good, it works, and it represents a genuinely more considered way of making things. The design world produces a lot of concepts that never leave the rendering stage, but Shoot has a physicality and simplicity to it that makes it feel ready. It’s a pen. From a bamboo shoot. Made by hand. And right now, that feels surprisingly radical.

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The Sculptural Speaker Concept That Sounds Good From Every Spot in the Room

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Most wireless speakers look like speakers. They announce themselves with grilles and ports and branding, and they tend to disappear into a corner or a shelf where the acoustic compromise of their placement gets quietly accepted. The room works around the speaker rather than the other way around. For a category that has grown enormously in the past decade, the design ambition behind most of what’s on the market hasn’t quite kept pace with the technology inside.

The Mirage Onda concept comes at that problem from two directions at once. On one side is a five-decade-old Canadian audio brand whose reputation was built on omnidirectional sound, long before the concept became a selling point for portable speakers. On the other is a design studio that has treated the speaker not as a functional box but as a sculptural object with genuine presence in a room.

Designer: Andrea Ponti (Ponti Design Studio)

The brand history matters here. Mirage introduced the world’s first bipolar speaker in 1987, and spent the following decades developing omnipolar technology, the idea that sound should radiate in all directions as it does in a live space, rather than being aimed at a single listening position. That philosophy is what the Onda is built around. The speaker delivers a true 360-degree audio experience through its acoustic architecture: four woofers at the base produce warm, rounded bass that fills the room with depth and body, while an upward-facing midrange driver with a diffuser ensures even sound distribution, and a tweeter paired with a dedicated diffuser handles crisp high frequencies.

The result is a speaker that doesn’t ask you to position yourself relative to it. A discreet backlit touch interface sits between the lower body and the upper platform, while the removable magnetic upper grille lifts away to reveal the tweeter in Mirage’s signature deep purple. That upward-firing arrangement, coupled with the diffusers above and below, is what sends sound outward into the room in all directions rather than toward a fixed sweet spot.

Four polished aluminum pillars connect the lower body to the upper platform in a striking suspended configuration, while the distinctive rounded-square footprint, softened edges, and monolithic silhouette give the speaker a timeless character that integrates effortlessly into modern environments. The fabric grille wraps the body in a dual-color textile that adds warmth to what could otherwise be a purely hard-edged industrial form. Three colorways are available, ranging from a warm sand tone to charcoal and all-black, each one giving the Onda a different character while keeping its proportions unchanged.

Put it in the center of a room, and it works. Put it on a side table or near a sofa, and it still works, because the sound isn’t dependent on where you happen to be sitting relative to the driver. That’s the practical promise of omnidirectional audio at the room scale, and it’s something that most mainstream speakers, regardless of price, simply don’t attempt.

Onda builds on Mirage’s legacy, blending heritage with minimalism and contemporary sophistication. The design reflects clarity, balance, and sculptural presence, which is a rare combination in an audio product that still has to justify its place in a room by actually sounding good. Both sides of that equation matter here, and the Mirage Onda takes both of them seriously.

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No Battery, No Tech: A Grad Just Solved Outdoor Worker Heat Stress

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The numbers are hard to ignore. More than 2.4 billion workers are exposed to excessive heat globally, and according to the WHO and WMO, worker productivity drops by 2 to 3 percent for every degree above 20°C. In 2023 alone, high temperatures contributed to an estimated 28,000 workplace injuries in the United States. Yet very little of this conversation gets directed at the people who feel it most: those working outdoors, in the sun, in gear that was never designed to help them stay cool.

That’s what makes Teron°, a cooling workwear concept by German design graduate Jorin Frenzel, feel so refreshingly grounded. Frenzel, who completed his Bachelor of Arts in Product Design at Hochschule Hannover in early 2025, didn’t reach for a tech-heavy solution. No battery packs, no wearable air conditioning units, no app to pair it with. He went back to basics: evaporation.

Designer: Jorin Frenzel

Teron° is built around the principle of natural evaporative cooling, using breathable fabrics, hidden ventilation layers, and targeted cooling zones to keep workers comfortable without introducing direct moisture to the skin. The vest, which handles upper body cooling, uses integrated elements that activate through water evaporation while keeping the wearer completely dry. The trousers take a different approach, using an overlapping cut to enhance air circulation, with additional cooling elements at the thighs to address heat where it tends to build most. The whole system prioritizes freedom of movement, which matters a lot when you’re on a construction site and actually need to get things done.

There’s a quiet intelligence to the design. Frenzel didn’t try to reinvent the trades. He listened to what craftspeople actually deal with on the job and responded with a garment that slots into existing routines rather than disrupting them. Cleverly integrated storage, breathable materials, and a sporty silhouette that communicates confidence and function without looking like a science experiment. The design conveys strength, which turns out to matter quite a bit when you’re asking tradespeople to adopt something new. That’s a layer of thinking most student projects simply don’t get to.

The timing of Teron° is not incidental. The WHO and WMO issued a joint report in August 2025 calling out occupational heat stress as a growing global health crisis, one no longer confined to equatorial regions. Europe has been having its own reckoning with this. Earlier in 2025, the death of a Spanish street cleaner from acute heat stress became a rallying point in conversations about how poorly equipped many outdoor workers still are. Design alone can’t solve climate change, but it can help close the gap between the conditions people work in and the gear they’re given to do it.

What elevates Teron° beyond a clever school project is its commitment to longevity. The garment uses durable, repairable textiles that extend its useful life and reduce waste over time. That puts it squarely in conversation with what responsible design looks like right now: not just functional and attractive, but genuinely built to last. It isn’t about making something sleek and disposable. It’s about making something that earns its place in a worker’s daily kit, season after season.

Teron° was recognized by the Green Product Award and featured among the German Design Graduates class of 2025, which is meaningful recognition for a debut project. But more than any award, what strikes me about Frenzel’s work is the clarity of its intent. He identified a real, pressing problem affecting millions of people and answered it with a solution rooted in material intelligence and plain human dignity.

The design world has a habit of celebrating the spectacular, the provocative, and the conceptually avant-garde. Projects like Teron° remind us that the most pressing problems don’t always need the most theatrical answers. Sometimes the most meaningful thing a designer can do is pay attention to who’s struggling and ask one simple, serious question: what would actually help? Frenzel asked it. The answer is worth wearing.

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The Thermostat That Finally Looks Like It Was Designed

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At some point, every well-designed room has a thermostat on the wall. And at some point, nearly every well-designed room has been slightly let down by it. That’s the quiet irony of home design. We agonize over paint colors, hunt for the perfect light fixtures, spend weekends debating sofa legs, and then right there at eye level lives a beige plastic rectangle covered in tiny buttons that no one fully understands. We’ve simply accepted it as the ugly compromise of functional living.

Uriel Electronics, a design-focused electronics brand, apparently decided that compromise is no longer necessary. Their new temperature controllers, the USH-02 and the UEH-02, make a surprisingly compelling argument that utility and beauty don’t have to negotiate a truce. They can just coexist, elegantly, without one apologizing to the other.

Designer: Uriel Electronics

I’ll be upfront: I didn’t expect to have strong opinions about thermostats. But these two pieces carry a clarity of intention that’s difficult to walk past. Both models are built around the same core idea: strip away the complexity, keep only what matters, and make it look like it belongs on the wall rather than just stuck to it. A single rotary dial. A clean display showing the temperature. A refined body that reads more like a considered object than a hardware accessory. No confusing menu navigation, no crowded button grid, no searching through a manual to figure out how to lower the temperature by two degrees.

The USH-02 is the surface-mounted version, and it’s the one with visible personality. Its translucent skeleton design lets you glimpse the hardware inside, which feels like a little gift to anyone who appreciates how things are made. The graphic detailing adds visual wit to what could have easily been a clean but flat minimalist slab. It sits on the wall in a way that makes you actually stop and look, which is a strange thing to say about a thermostat, but here we are. It doesn’t disappear into the surface; it quietly introduces itself.

The UEH-02 takes the opposite route. Flush-mounted and incredibly slim, it’s designed to nearly vanish. The profile barely protrudes from the wall, creating the kind of visual quiet that interior designers specifically obsess over. If the USH-02 says “notice me,” the UEH-02 says “I’m here, I work perfectly, and I won’t interrupt your space.” Both approaches are valid. Both are well-executed. The choice between them is really just a question of how much personality you want your walls to carry.

The discipline behind this project is worth calling out. It is genuinely difficult to design something that is both beautiful and immediately intuitive, especially in a category most manufacturers have treated as purely functional. Removing complexity rather than adding features is a confident design move, and we’re living through a moment when more is still frequently mistaken for better in tech. Seeing a product that resolves itself into a single tactile dial and a clear display feels almost like a statement. The rotary control has a satisfying physicality that touchscreens never quite manage to replicate. High-end audio equipment and quality appliances have kept the dial alive for exactly this reason: turning something to get a result is one of the most natural gestures there is. It’s a reminder that good design often means returning to what already worked, done with more intention.

The engineering side, visible in the controllers’ back panels, confirms this isn’t just a surface-deep exercise. Components are neatly organized, an Omron relay handles the heavy work, and the specs support voltages between 85V and 265VAC with a max current of 18A. The function is serious. The form just happens to be beautiful.

That balance is rarer than it should be. Home tech has long been given a pass on aesthetics in a way that furniture or lighting simply would not tolerate. Uriel Electronics is quietly making the argument that it shouldn’t. Your thermostat is on your wall every single day, in full view of everyone who walks into that room. It might as well earn its place there.

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A Student Built a Buoy That Could Fix Seaweed Farming

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Most of us don’t spend a lot of time thinking about seaweed. It turns up in sushi, drifts around in the ocean, and occasionally ruins a beach day. But seaweed farming is quietly becoming one of the more compelling conversations in sustainable food and ocean health, and the tools that support it are finally starting to catch up with the ambition. Enter Symbios, a buoy system designed by Aaron Mooser as his bachelor thesis project at Bauhaus University Weimar, and one of the more quietly impressive things to come out of student design in recent memory.

The core idea is straightforward, but the thinking behind it is genuinely sharp. Symbios is an automated buoy system built for Nordic nearshore seaweed farmers. Its central feature is depth regulation, allowing the buoys to move seaweed into cooler, deeper waters during warmer months. This solves one of the most persistent problems in seaweed cultivation: ocean temperatures fluctuate enough to disrupt or completely derail a harvest season. By managing that shift automatically, Symbios makes year-round cultivation and partial harvesting not just possible, but practical.

Designer: Aaron Mooser

That might not sound like a design story, but it absolutely is. The challenge Mooser was solving wasn’t purely biological. It was logistical, environmental, and deeply human. Seaweed farmers in Nordic regions deal with the compounding pressure of climate variability and the sheer labor of monitoring a harvest that lives underwater. Every unnecessary boat trip costs time, fuel, and money. Symbios addresses this through remote monitoring built directly into the system, reducing the number of trips farmers need to make without losing visibility into what’s happening below the surface.

There’s an elegance here that feels distinctly Bauhaus-trained. Mooser completed his bachelor’s in product design at Bauhaus University Weimar and is now pursuing a Master’s in Industrial Design at FH Joanneum, where he’s focused on Eco-Innovative design. That background shows. The buoys are modular, built to be repaired rather than replaced, and designed for durability in conditions that would wear most things down quickly. It’s the kind of systems thinking that doesn’t get enough attention in sustainability discussions, because repairability rarely makes a headline. But designing for longevity in a marine environment is a serious commitment, and it’s a far more honest environmental gesture than a lot of what gets labeled green.

What Symbios also does, somewhat unexpectedly, is create stable marine habitats. Because the seaweed is cultivated continuously in a regulated environment, it offers more consistent ecosystem support for the marine life around it. The design doesn’t just serve the farmer. It serves the water, too. That dual benefit, where agriculture and ecology work together rather than in opposition, is what makes Symbios feel like more than a polished student project. It reads as a genuine proposal for how nearshore food systems could be structured.

The fact that this began as a bachelor thesis is worth sitting with. Student design can sometimes feel speculative, imaginative but distant from actual use. Symbios pushes back on that assumption. It’s detailed, practical, and built around a real user: the Nordic seaweed farmer navigating a genuinely complex set of conditions. The design process clearly involved deep engagement with that context, not just a convincing visual presentation.

Aaron Mooser’s work has been recognized by the Green Product Award, and it earns that recognition. Not because it’s flashy, but precisely because it isn’t. Symbios doesn’t try to solve everything at once. It addresses specific problems cleanly, considers the full lifecycle of the product, and respects both the people who will use it and the environment it operates within. That kind of restraint, in a design culture that so often rewards novelty over genuine usefulness, is worth paying attention to.

Seaweed farming isn’t going anywhere. If anything, it’s going to become more prominent as food systems shift toward more sustainable sources. The real question is whether the infrastructure supporting it can evolve fast enough. If Symbios is any indication, the answer might surprise you.

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This Concept Organizes the First 30 Seconds of Coming Home in the Rain

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Home entryway products have a coverage problem. A shoe rack deals with footwear, but not the umbrella. An umbrella stand handles the wet item but does nothing for the dripping floor around it. A small tray catches keys but not the daily chaos that accompanies them. The pieces exist, but they don’t form a coherent system, and the result tends to be a doorway that feels permanently unsettled.

ENTRY is a concept that answers that scatter with one vertical object. It integrates umbrella guidance, water collection, elevated footwear storage, and a top catch-all surface into a single threshold form, described by its designer as something that organizes the first 30 seconds of coming home. Rather than treating the entrance as a storage corner, it reframes that space as a managed wet-dry transition between outside conditions and domestic calm.

Designer: Zhenhua Chen

The design gives the wet umbrella a precise position rather than a vague area to lean against. A vertical spine with controlled side geometry holds the umbrella in a defined relationship to the base, reducing the casual lean that scatters water across walls and floors. It’s structural thinking that locates the wet object deliberately, so that whatever drips off it goes where the design expects it to go.

Below the umbrella position, a concealed, removable tray collects water at the base. Rather than allowing drips to pool on the floor or soak into a mat, the design makes water collection part of the object’s own structure. The tray pulls out when it needs emptying, keeping the maintenance cycle as minimal as the design premise itself. Water arrives with the umbrella, gets directed downward, gets caught, and gets removed.

Footwear gets lifted off the floor onto dedicated raised platforms rather than accumulating at the base of the door in the usual loose arrangement. The difference between floor-level disorder and a designated surface is partly visual but also functional: the floor around the entrance stays clear, and the entryway retains the quality of a space someone has thought about rather than one that simply absorbed what was dropped into it.

The top surface is a flat catch-all tray for keys, cards, and anything else that comes in at the end of the day. Placing that surface on the same object as the umbrella and shoes means the coming-home ritual resolves at a single point. You don’t split between the entryway table, the kitchen counter, and the shoe mat; everything lands together, and the entrance stays coherent rather than scattered.

The design doesn’t try to decorate the problem. It reframes the entryway as a piece of domestic infrastructure, a small managed object whose job is to absorb the friction of arriving rather than add to it. ENTRY currently exists as a concept prototype that confirms scale, spatial arrangement, and visual language. Drainage performance and load testing are identified as the next steps before the design moves further forward.

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Nothing Book laptop concept let’s you be more expressive with a slender secondary screen on the lid

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Nothing has revived and redefined the see-through design aesthetics that blew up in the late 1990s and early 2000s. That era was highlighted by colorful polycarbonate plastic material for translucent casings for the futuristic, fun vibe. Carl Pie took the bold step and weaved his brand’s design philosophy around clean minimalism and see-through designs in colorless aesthetics.

Over the years, Nothing’s products have inspired countless designs and concepts for good reason. Battery banks, headphones, turntables, vacuum cleaners, and whatnot. So how could we not bet against a Nothing-themed laptop tailored for gamers and creators?

Designer: Nikita Bukoros Design

The designer wants to grow on the idea of a Nothing laptop that Carl hinted at years earlier when the brand was taking its baby steps. The highly anticipated gadget never came to fruition thus far, and left Nothing fans yearning for one. Nikita wants to give the fans another reason to keep believing and perhaps subtly remind Carl of the prospect. He calls it the Nothing Book, and his idea is to reveal the complexity underneath, much like a see-through gaming PC case that reveals the innards in their glory. Everything from the inner architecture, dynamic cooling system boards, to the other components is layered in a hypnotic composition.

The designer labels the performance laptop as an industrial art piece, more than a high-end consumer electronics gadget. I totally agree with the emotion, as the PC, when flipped over, reveals all the inner electronics. One unique element that defines this laptop is the secondary screen on the lid of the machine. This external display breaks the monotony of the machines we are accustomed to, as you can show off any messages, symbols, emojis, or other elements in the classic Nothing font. To spice things up, Nikita goes beyond the monochrome color scheme and offers the concept laptop in peppy options. You can have it in hot red, cool green, subtle pink, or magnetic teal hues as well.

Going with the modern design aesthetics of the creator-focused laptop, the accompanying charging dock is purpose-built to flaunt the attractive make of the machine. When docked in, the cool charging animation is displayed on the secondary screen. At the end of the day, the laptop has to be highly practical, hence, it comes with the customary HDMI, USB-C, USB, and wired charging port.

Whether Nothing will release a laptop anytime soon is anybody’s guess, but one thing is for sure: the brand needs to look at it very seriously. The design aesthetics of the modern-day laptops are quite muted and predictable, and this concept gives fans one more reason to believe.

The post Nothing Book laptop concept let’s you be more expressive with a slender secondary screen on the lid first appeared on Yanko Design.