Tag Archives: A’ Design Award and Competition

The Traffic Cone Charger That Actually Keeps You Off Your Phone

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Whenever I need to charge my smartphone, I still can’t resist using it, even though I know it will juice up faster if I just leave it alone. Charging time should also be the perfect excuse to stay away from my screen, but since my phone is still sitting right there, easily within reach, I end up answering messages, checking emails, or doom-scrolling through social media anyway. So what if my phone’s charger were the very tool that not only charged it up, but also nudged me to detox from my device and the digital world altogether?

That’s the idea behind the Cone Wireless Charger and Digital Detox, a product concept by South Korean designer Minseo Jung. It’s literally shaped like the orange traffic cone we associate with “no access” or “do not use.” When you charge your phone using this small device, you also stop yourself from reaching for it, thanks to both the way it’s positioned and the actual shape of the charger itself.

Designer: Minseo Jung

The way the Cone charger works is refreshingly simple. You place your phone face-down on the table, then set the charger on top of it. It charges your device wirelessly the entire time it’s covered. The combination of your phone’s hidden screen and the cone’s unmistakable “stay away” silhouette work together to override that automatic reflex to reach for your device and check whatever it is we usually check.

When it’s not busy charging your phone, the Cone can also double as a mini ambient light that blends nicely into a nightstand or desk setup. That dual purpose makes it more than just another single-task gadget cluttering up your already (probably) messy nightstand. It’s a charger and a lamp that happens to also curb your phone habit, not a wellness device you’re forced to make room for.

So how does the Cone stack up against the wireless chargers already crowding the market? Big names like Anker, Belkin, and Apple’s own MagSafe line are all designed with one goal in mind, which is to charge your phone as quickly, securely, and conveniently as possible. Anker’s MagGo and Belkin’s BoostCharge series, for instance, are built around fast charging speeds, magnetic alignment, and multi-device support for phones, earbuds, and smartwatches all at once. They’re excellent at what they do, but none of them are designed to change your relationship with your phone. If anything, most of these designs keep your screen facing up and glowing, practically inviting you to check it mid-charge.

The Cone takes the opposite approach. It doesn’t try to out-charge the competition with extra wattage or a longer feature list. Instead, it solves a completely different problem, which is our compulsive need to check our phones even when we know we shouldn’t. Digital wellness apps like Freedom or Forest attempt to tackle this same issue through software, locking you out of certain apps or gamifying your focus time, but they still require you to open your phone and dig through settings just to activate them. The Cone doesn’t ask you to lift a finger. Its entire strategy is physical and psychological, not digital, making it a rare case of a tech accessory that works precisely because it doesn’t add more screen time to your life.

At the end of the day, the Cone Wireless Charger and Digital Detox is a reminder that not every solution to our smartphone problem needs to be smarter, faster, or more high-tech. Sometimes, the best fix is refreshingly low-tech: a simple shape, a familiar warning sign, and a little bit of psychology working quietly in the background. Whether or not the Cone ever makes it to store shelves, it’s a clever piece of design thinking that tackles a very modern problem most of us silently struggle with every day. And honestly, in a world where our phones already run so much of our lives, having one object that gently tells us “not right now” might be exactly the kind of digital detox we didn’t know we needed.

The post The Traffic Cone Charger That Actually Keeps You Off Your Phone first appeared on Yanko Design.

Finally, a CD Player Gen Z Actually Wants to Own

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It really warms my heart when I see Gen Z and Gen Alpha kids collecting physical media from their favorite artists. These are people who probably weren’t even born yet when cassette tapes and CDs were our Spotify and Apple Music. One problem, though: while CD sales keep growing, there are still only a handful of decent, affordable CD players on the market. So there are some people out there, some people is me, who collect CDs but honestly don’t have anywhere to play them.

That’s exactly the gap the Syitren R400 CD Player, designed by ORGDOT Design, is trying to fill. It’s an entry-level, portable Bluetooth CD player built for young people who are either curious about physical music or already knee-deep in a growing CD collection. Think of it as the more affordable younger sibling to Syitren’s premium R300 player, which won a 2025 MUSE Design Award Gold. The R400 recently picked up its own hardware, too, winning a Silver A’ Design Award in 2026 in the Audio and Sound Equipment category, proof that this isn’t just a cute gadget, but a genuinely well-thought-out piece of design.

Designer: ORGDOT Design for Syitren

Here’s where the R400 gets interesting. Instead of just slapping a cheap plastic shell on a budget player, ORGDOT’s design team asked a different question: what if the shell wasn’t permanent at all? Their solution was a detachable, modular shell that separates the protective cover from the core unit. That single decision lowers the base cost significantly, but it doesn’t make the player feel cheap, it makes it feel customizable. Buyers can pair the R400 with a transparent, decorate-it-yourself cover (perfect for stickers or doodles), snap it onto the included stand for a tidy desk setup, or later add a wall-mount bracket that turns it from a tabletop player into an actual piece of room decor.

Even installing the shell was designed to feel less like a chore and more like a small ritual, a nice touch for a product aimed at a generation that genuinely enjoys unboxing and personalizing their tech. The body itself uses a dual-material construction that gives it a sturdier, more premium feel than you’d expect at this price, and there’s a sunken charging compartment with a built-in wire groove so your charging cable doesn’t bend or fray over time. It’s a small detail, but it’s the kind of thing that tells you someone actually thought about how this thing gets used every day.

Under the hood, the R400 runs on a custom Syitren “pure CD core” for solid playback quality, paired with a 70dB signal-to-noise ratio for clean, high-fidelity sound. Since it’s meant to be carried around, it also has anti-vibration engineering, so you won’t get skips or jitter while commuting or walking around listening to your favorite album. You can go wireless with Bluetooth 5.3 for easy streaming and pairing, or if you want to lean into the “retro” experience, there are wired options that work with headphones, speakers, or even a car stereo. Battery life clocks in at more than four hours of continuous playback per charge, which is plenty for a workday or a long commute.

For years, Sony basically owned the portable CD player category, from the original Discman to more recent boombox style units like the CFD-S70. But Sony has actually been quietly pulling back from that space, discontinuing several of its CD boomboxes in the U.S. in recent years. That’s left a real opening for brands like Syitren to step in, and the R400 takes a noticeably different approach than the old Sony playbook. Where the CFD-S70 was a bulky, four pound boombox built around AM/FM radio and cassette tapes as much as CDs, the R400 is compact, Bluetooth first, and designed from the ground up for a generation that wants their gear to look good on a desk or a wall, not just play music. At a similar price point to what those old Sony units used to sell for, the R400 feels like it’s actually built for how people listen today.

For anyone sitting on a shelf of unplayed CDs, or anyone who just wants a fun, tactile way to slow down and listen to a full album again, the R400 makes a genuinely compelling case. It’s affordable, it’s customizable, and it doesn’t ask you to choose between good design and good sound. Sometimes the best way forward really is looking back.

The post Finally, a CD Player Gen Z Actually Wants to Own first appeared on Yanko Design.

Smart Home Panels Look Like Tech, Fanora Looks Like Fine Craft

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A folding fan used to say something about the person holding it, signaling taste and refinement long before anyone cared about voice assistants or smart lighting. The Fanora Control Terminal borrows that exact silhouette and turns it into a wall-mounted switch panel, proving a home automation interface doesn’t have to look like it was designed by an engineer who’s never held a fan in their life.

Eight mechanical buttons fan out from a central hinge point, each one following the natural arc a real folding fan would take when opened halfway. That shape isn’t decorative shorthand either. It’s the whole control surface, built from aluminum and finished with a jade centerpiece that used to signal scholarly status in Chinese tradition and now doubles as a working sensor housing.

Designer: HDL Automation

A Body Built From Aluminum, Not Plastic

The panel’s main body is machined from 6063 aluminum alloy, then sandblasted and anodized to get that matte, slightly warm finish instead of the glossy plastic most switch panels settle for. Each of the eight buttons goes through CNC processing, with a curvature shaped around how a fingertip actually presses rather than how a mold happens to come out, and a fine sand texture that keeps fingerprints from building up over months of daily use.

That centerpiece pendant is carved from natural Hetian jade, a material historically prized in Chinese craftsmanship, polished by hand rather than mass-produced. It sits at the base of the fan where the ribs converge, doing double duty as both the visual anchor and the housing for the temperature and motion sensors underneath. A jade certificate ships in the box, treating the stone as a verified material rather than a cosmetic add-on.

Sensors Hidden Where a Fan’s Handle Would Be

Motion detection lives inside that jade pendant, waking the panel’s touch display the moment someone walks close enough to reach for it, instead of leaving a screen lit and idle all day. A built-in temperature sensor reads the room and feeds that data straight into scene and automation logic, so a preset for movie night or afternoon reading can react to the actual conditions in the room rather than a fixed schedule.

Each button supports laser engraving with custom text, meaning a household can label its own shortcuts instead of memorizing generic switch numbers. One button might trigger a reading nook’s lighting, another could dim everything down for a film, and a third could raise the curtains, all without opening an app or hunting through menus. The panel handles curtains, music, and broadcast scenes across a room without breaking that same physical interaction.

Wall-Mounted or Freestanding, By Choice

Unlike a fixed switch plate, Fanora can sit flush against a wall or rest on a desk as a standalone display, a flexibility built into its wiring rather than bolted on as an afterthought. That range means the same object can function as a hallway light switch in one home and a bedside control surface in another, without needing a separate model for each context.

Customization extends to the jade pendant’s shape itself, letting a household choose a silhouette that fits their own taste rather than accepting one fixed design across every unit sold. That level of personalization treats the panel less like static hardware and more like a piece of furniture chosen for a specific room, which explains why a folding fan turned out to be the right shape for a light switch after all.

The post Smart Home Panels Look Like Tech, Fanora Looks Like Fine Craft first appeared on Yanko Design.

Nevi Brings a Little Playfulness to the Serious Desk Lamp

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There is something oddly comforting about an object that can lose its balance and find its way back. Nevi takes that small, almost childlike pleasure and turns it into a sculptural desk lamp. Inspired by the classic roly-poly toy, it borrows the familiar idea of wobbling, recovering, and returning upright, then translates it into a much quieter and more refined design language.

At rest, Nevi feels calm and almost architectural. A rounded stainless-steel base anchors a slender vertical stem, creating a silhouette that feels minimal without becoming cold. But the lamp is not meant to simply sit still. Give it a gentle touch, and it begins to sway, moving smoothly before gradually returning to its upright position. That subtle interaction gives Nevi a personality that most task lights never attempt to have. Instead of being an object that disappears into the background of a desk, it responds to the person using it.

Designer: Andrei Ananenka

The movement is deliberately restrained. Nevi does not perform tricks or demand attention. Its appeal lies in the small moment of interaction: the slight push, the controlled oscillation, and the satisfying return to equilibrium. It makes something as ordinary as a desk lamp feel tactile and surprisingly alive.

Material plays an important role in that experience. The lamp is made from AISI 304 stainless steel and finished entirely by hand. The lower portion of the spherical base has a satin-brushed finish that feels soft and durable, while the upper section is mirror-polished. When Nevi moves, that polished surface catches fragments of the room around it, making reflections shift across the base as the lamp rocks from side to side. The combination of brushed and reflective metal gives an otherwise simple form a sense of depth and movement even before the light is switched on.

For all of its sculptural qualities, Nevi remains a functional desk light. Its focused beam is designed for activities such as reading, writing, and working, with high color fidelity that keeps illuminated surfaces looking natural. The lighting itself is kept intentionally precise rather than flooding the surrounding space, which suits the lamp’s controlled and disciplined character.

Much of the complexity required to create that simplicity remains hidden inside. The designers had to carefully balance the lamp’s internal weight so that its tall, slender body could move freely without ever feeling unstable. The proportions, center of gravity, and duration of each movement were all studied to make the oscillation feel smooth rather than awkward or mechanical. Even the stainless-steel body quietly performs another role by helping manage the heat created by the light source, allowing the clean silhouette to remain uninterrupted.

Perhaps Nevi’s most interesting idea, however, arrives before the lamp itself is even revealed. Its packaging was designed with the same self-centering behaviour as the product inside. Rather than becoming an elaborate box that is admired for a few minutes and then stored away or discarded, the high-grade aluminum package has a second life as an ambient light.

After unboxing, a wireless warm LED illuminates a CNC-milled silhouette of the Nevi lamp on the lid, turning the packaging into a small illuminated object for the interior. It can also rock and return upright, echoing the movement of the lamp itself. The package therefore becomes part of the product story rather than an accessory that immediately loses its purpose.

That approach makes the sustainability thinking behind Nevi feel particularly natural. Instead of asking the user to feel responsible for disposing of premium packaging correctly, the design simply gives them a reason to keep it. The box becomes another useful and visually considered object within the home.

The research behind Nevi focused heavily on movement and perception. The designers explored how far an object could tilt, how quickly it should recover, and how long the motion should continue before returning to stillness. Optical studies helped refine the quality and direction of the light, while material experimentation informed the contrast between the satin and mirror-polished finishes. Each decision seems to support the same broader idea: making the lamp feel calm, responsive, and almost instinctive to interact with.

Nevi is ultimately compelling because it brings emotion into a category that is usually defined by utility. It does not reinvent the desk lamp through screens, smart controls or complicated technology. Instead, it uses something much simpler, the pleasure of touch, movement, and return.

There is a quiet metaphor embedded in it too. Push Nevi away from its natural position, and it does not fight the movement. It follows it for a moment, sways, adjusts, and eventually comes back to where it belongs. What began as the behaviour of a childhood toy becomes the defining character of a sophisticated lighting object, turning balance itself into part of the experience.

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The Lamp That Gives Material Memory a Home

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There are objects designed to illuminate a room, and then there are objects that quietly change the way a room feels. Otsuchi, a table light by a Japanese designer, belongs firmly to the latter. At first glance, it reads as an intriguing sculptural lamp. Look closer, and its story reveals something far more layered: an exploration of life, loss, material memory, and the possibility of giving an otherwise discarded resource a new purpose.

The lamp takes its name from Otsuchi in Iwate Prefecture, Japan, a coastal town devastated by the tsunami that followed the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. In the years since, the community has faced another, less visible challenge. As the local human population declined, deer numbers increased significantly, damaging agricultural crops in the region. Local hunters consequently began developing a gibier business around animals that needed to be culled, finding ways to make fuller use of the deer rather than allowing their lives to end as little more than pest control. Otsuchi emerges from this context, using deer leather as a way of extending the material life of the animal and translating it into something that can remain present in a home.

Designer: Yuto Yamada

That history could easily have turned the lamp into an object dominated by its narrative, but Yamada avoids that trap. The story is embedded in the material rather than spelled out through an overly literal form. The result sits somewhere between product design and art. It unmistakably functions as a light fixture, yet its silhouette and surface possess an almost animalistic quality. The leather does not simply cover the lamp; it gives the object a kind of skin. Its grain, subtle irregularities, and softness create the impression that the surface might once have breathed.

This sense of vitality is what makes Otsuchi so compelling. Most lamps are intentionally static. Their purpose is architectural: to illuminate a desk, soften a corner, or provide a pool of ambient light. Otsuchi feels strangely alive by comparison. Its organic contours and tactile exterior introduce a sense of wilderness into an otherwise domestic object. It does not resemble a deer in any obvious figurative way, yet it somehow carries the presence of one.

The construction adds another layer of interest. Beneath the leather is a 3D-printed structure, creating a rigid framework over which the hide can be carefully formed. It is a thoughtful meeting of contemporary fabrication and an unmistakably natural material. Leather is usually associated with flexibility, something wrapped, stretched, folded or worn. Here, paired with the underlying printed form, it becomes architectural enough to define the body of a lamp. That contrast is particularly satisfying: digital manufacturing establishes precision and structure, while the leather restores individuality, texture and imperfection.

Light completes the transformation. Rather than producing a sharp or intrusive glow, the shade diffuses illumination into something softer and more intimate. The effect feels suited to a bedside table, reading corner or quiet hospitality setting, where light needs to provide atmosphere without visually competing with the people around it. Its warmth is not simply a matter of color temperature; it seems amplified by the material itself. Light passing across leather feels inherently different from light reflecting from polished metal, plastic or glass. There is a depth and softness to it that makes the lamp comfortable to look toward rather than something that demands shielding from the eye.

It is this combination of material, story and atmosphere that prevents Otsuchi from becoming merely an exercise in sustainable reuse. Sustainability here is not presented as an aesthetic category. Instead, the lamp asks a more emotional question: what does it mean to continue the life of a material that once belonged to something living?

That idea is particularly powerful in a culture of products designed to arrive immaculate, identical, and disconnected from their origins. Otsuchi is the opposite. Its value comes partly from knowing where its material came from and why that material became available in the first place. The deer, the hunters, the changing population of Otsuchi, and the agricultural landscape are all indirectly present within the finished object.

Otsuchi demonstrates how a table lamp can carry more than light. It can carry geography, circumstance, and memory. Its wild texture reminds us of the animal it came from, while its gentle illumination transforms that history into something peaceful. In doing so, the lamp occupies an unusual and beautiful territory: not quite sculpture, not simply lighting, but an object through which a past life continues to cast a quiet glow.

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This Georgian Residential Complex Rejects Straight Lines on its Floor Plan, Mimicking The Ocean

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Straight lines are easy. Any architect can slap a rectangular tower on a plot and call it a day, and most beachfront developers do exactly that because straight lines are cheap, fast to build, and easy to sell off a brochure. Georgia’s Adjara coast just got a project that looked at that playbook and said absolutely not. Montemar Residential, a three tower complex rising in the seaside town of Gonio, ditches the grid entirely in favor of forms that ripple, curve, and cantilever like something dragged up from the Black Sea itself. It is the kind of building that makes you stop scrolling, then immediately want to know who signed off on it and how.

Designed by Irakli Emiridze and Irina Chkonia of Alpha Architecture, the complex sits on a 10,000 square meter plot within a UNESCO listed stretch of coastline, right where Adjara’s oddly tropical microclimate runs into the Black Sea. Each of the three 16 story towers tops out around 48 to 52 meters and wears a dramatic aluminum crown that flares out over the roofline like a mushroom cap, or if you squint, a seashell caught mid opening. Parking for 300 vehicles sits tucked below grade, keeping the ground plane free for landscaping and plazas. It is a lot of building, and it wants you to know it.

Designers: Irakli Emiridze and Irina Chkonia

The seashell inspiration shows up in how the facade behaves. The balcony edges do not stack in the usual identical, floor by floor grid you see on every coastal high rise from Miami to Marbella. Instead they undulate, staggering in and out like sediment ridges carved by tidal movement, which gives each tower a texture closer to a geological formation than a construction product. Aluminum embossed sheet cladding wraps the crowning terraces, catching light in a way that concrete or glass simply cannot, and it is the detail that separates Montemar from the generic curved tower trend that has been creeping through Gulf and Black Sea resort markets alike.

The space between the three towers is treated as public terrain rather than leftover setback, with green plantings, plazas, and communal zones designed to pull residents out of their units and into shared space. Panoramic apartments come with private terraces and jacuzzis angled toward the water, the kind of amenity that used to be penthouse exclusive and is now standard issue on any coastal development trying to compete for buyers. Whether that democratization of the infinity view holds up once the cranes clear out is the real test, since renderings are notoriously generous with light, weather, and empty beaches.

Gonio is a strange place for this kind of architectural swing. It is a historic town, not a resort capital, and Montemar is betting that sculptural ambition can coexist with a UNESCO designation next door rather than clash with it. If the finished towers deliver even half of what the renders promise, this stretch of the Adjara coast is about to become a lot more interesting to watch than its neighbors on the Black Sea.

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This Bulgarian Bank Branch Looks Like You’re Sitting Inside a Crystal

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Walls, generally speaking, have one job. Stand there, hold up the ceiling, maybe hide some plumbing, and stay out of everyone’s way. DA Architects looked at that job description for the DSK Bank flagship branch in Sofia and decided it was criminally boring. So instead of a wall, they built a single continuous folded surface in punchy olive green that runs the length of the branch and somehow moonlights as a bench, a desk, an ATM housing, a screen bezel, and a light fixture, all without changing material once.

The trick is genuinely clever once you notice it. Every fold in that green ribbon is doing structural or functional work, not just decorative flexing, and the surrounding white louvers exist mostly to give the whole thing a clean edge to disappear into. Sit inside one of those angular little niches and you are basically perched inside a piece of the wall itself. It is origami logic applied to interior architecture, and it turns a routine bank visit into something closer to sitting inside a crystal.

Designer: DA Architects

The branch sits inside The Mall on Tsarigradsko Shose in Sofia, and it was built out between October 2016 and early 2017 as the pilot for a much bigger idea. DA Architects had won a competition to redesign DSK’s entire branch network, and this space was the proof of concept, the one location that had to sell an entire bank on going full geometry. At roughly 270 square metres, it is not a massive footprint, but the design punches well above it by refusing to waste a single wall surface on doing nothing.

Old-school bank branches keep everything locked in the center, tellers, machines, security, and make customers orbit around the edges like they cannot be trusted too close to the cash. DA Architects flipped that completely, pushing every functional unit, screen, and device to the periphery and leaving the entire core of the room open. It is the kind of move that only makes sense once you realize digital banking already killed the old security logic, most people just never bothered to redesign the room to match.

The material choices back up the concept instead of just decorating it. MDF louvers and mirror-polished stainless furniture handle the hard surfaces, while the green strip itself splits into solid panels where devices are built in and softer upholstered ones where people actually sit, a small distinction that keeps the whole thing from feeling like one giant showroom prop. Behind the louvers and green niches, the studio tucked away cabling and services, so the geometry reads as intentional rather than as a skin bolted over a normal room.

Tucked at the back is a private consultation room sealed off by a switchable glass wall, milky one second, fully transparent the next, once you run current through it. It is a small gesture buried at the end of a much louder design, but it says a lot about the studio’s instincts. They know exactly when to let geometry do the talking, and exactly when to go quiet.

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This Mooncake Tin Box Turns Into A Chinese Lantern Once You’re Done Enjoying The Sweets

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Back in the 90s, every packaging was a craft project. Milk cartons were turned into pen-stands, Pringles cans into kaleidoscopes, Coca-Cola bottles into backyard rockets… and that approach made a lot more sense than throwing packaging into the waste bin. We’d go out of our way to repurpose these objects, giving them a (sometimes unintended) second life. We don’t do that anymore because for the most part, brands don’t believe in fun packaging anymore. However, Yanlun Wu’s trying to reverse that approach.

A winner of the A’ Design Award, Wu’s packaging for traditional Chinese mooncakes looks like your standard tin box. With cultural elements evoking the beauty of the Mid-Autumn festival, this box forms an integral part of a ritualistic gifting experience, where you visit your loved ones with mooncakes, wishing them good health and prosperity. The packaging for a mooncake plays a simple dual-purpose role – it encases the cakes for safe transport, but it also serves as a visual signifier of quality – a good packaging is indicative of a well-thought gift. However, that dual-purpose role ends once the moon-cakes are consumed. Wu’s packaging, however, turns the lid of the mooncake box into a traditional paper lantern, giving it life even after you’ve consumed the dessert.

Designer: Yanlun Wu

Lanterns form an integral part of the Mid-Autumn festival too. Apart from eating mooncakes, gazing at the moon, and bonding with family, people also light paper lanterns which are either hung outside houses, or sent cascading into the sky. Wu’s design aligns with the former. Each food-safe tin box comes with a lid that has a foldable lantern pressed into it. Once you’re done with the mooncakes, simply unfold the lantern and you’ve got a traditional keepsake that allows you to enjoy Wu’s packaging well beyond its original purpose.

That’s the beauty of what Wu’s trying to achieve here – giving the package a third purpose and a second life. Each lantern comes adorned with traditional Chinese motifs that represent the Mid-Autumn festival. “This innovative dual-lifecycle design combats waste by turning disposable packaging into a lasting decorative object, seamlessly blending traditional Chinese mid-autumn symbolism with modern sustainable practice,” Wu says.

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This Plywood Stool Has Cords That Hold Your Books, Magazines, and Stationery

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Every stool I’ve ever owned has ended up doing three jobs it was never designed for. Phone stand. Laundry rack. Temporary table for the cup of tea I told myself I’d finish before it went cold. Furniture absorbs the chaos of daily life whether designers plan for it or not, so the smarter move is to plan for it. Yamashiro did exactly that, and she did it in Okinawa, designing from a culture that has always understood objects as participants in daily life rather than background props.

The Strings Stool won an A’ Design Award in the Furniture Design category, and looking at it, you understand why immediately. Blue cords run in parallel grooves down the face of a molded plywood form, taut like the strings of a sanshin, Okinawa’s traditional three-stringed instrument. Slip a book between them. Slip a notebook. The stool holds them without complaint, the same way it holds you.

Designer: Yuna Yamashiro

The sanshin has been part of everyday Okinawan life for so long that it stopped being a cultural artifact and became furniture in its own right, something you pick up, put down, lean against a wall, live around. Yamashiro’s design carries that same quality of unassuming presence. The Strings Stool doesn’t announce itself as a design object. It sits in a room and waits to be useful, which is a harder thing to design than it sounds. The A’ Design Award jury clearly recognized that the stool operates on two registers simultaneously, as a cultural translation and as a genuinely functional piece of furniture, and rewarded it accordingly.

Yamashiro built a mold and applied pressure to bend multi-layered plywood into a continuous arc, a single curved form that flows from one leg face up and over the seat and back down the other side. Getting wood to adhere cleanly to a mold under pressure without losing its shape is genuinely difficult work, and the finished piece shows no evidence of that struggle. The layers visible at the edges give the form its graphic quality, a subtle striation that rhymes with the cord spacing running down the face. At 500mm wide, 300mm deep, and 450mm tall, it occupies a room without dominating it. The legs splay outward in a trapezoid stance, which does two things at once: it makes the seat more comfortable to straddle, and it lets the stools nest and stack cleanly, a practical consideration that most furniture designers treat as an afterthought but Yamashiro baked in from the start.

Most keen-eyed enthusiasts will remember a similar organizer format in Cocoon’s GRID-IT, elastic cords stretched across a rigid panel holding gear in place through tension alone. Yamashiro scales that mechanic up to furniture size, anchors the cords at the base with visible knotted eyelets, and makes them user-replaceable, so you can swap colors to match a room or replace worn cords without retiring the whole piece. That replaceability is the kind of decision that separates designers who think about ownership from designers who think about photography.

The one honest caveat is that those same cords, running across the seat surface, will make themselves known after a few minutes without a cushion. Yamashiro designed a central opening into the seat to improve comfort, and it helps, but anyone planning to use this as their primary work perch rather than an occasional seat should factor a thin cushion into the equation. That’s a small asterisk on an otherwise cohesive and quietly impressive debut.

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The Folding Charging Hub That Charges Your Phone, Watch, and Laptop Without Taking Over Your Desk

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The Power Elf I from TESSAN starts its life looking like a modest bedside box. Then the magnetic wireless panel hinges upward, your iPhone snaps into place on the MagSafe pad, and the whole unit transforms into a proper charging station with a phone stand, two AC outlets, and three USB ports all sharing the same compact base. The hinge is the design’s central idea, a single mechanical move that changes the object’s identity entirely depending on how far you open it.

TESSAN designed the Power Elf I with two distinct use contexts in mind: the desk, where the upright position turns it into a functional workstation accessory, and the nightstand, where it folds flat and keeps every device topped up through the night without consuming half the surface. Both modes feel deliberate rather than incidental, which is the difference between a product that was designed and one that was just assembled.

Designer: Zhuhai Tessan Power Technology Co., Ltd.

Six devices charge simultaneously on the Power Elf I, a number that sounds ambitious until you look at the port layout and realize TESSAN actually planned for it. Two Type-B AC outlets handle anything that still demands a full plug. Two USB-C ports and one USB-A port cover the wired cable ecosystem. The wireless phone pad sits on the hinged module, and the detachable wireless watch charger extends outward on a side cradle, handling Apple Watch independently. Every slot has a designated device in mind, and none of them compete for the same surface area.

Stepless angle adjustment lets it tilt anywhere up to 65 degrees, which TESSAN identifies as the optimal hands-free viewing angle, and the system holds position without clicking between fixed stops. That kind of continuous adjustment is more expensive to engineer than a two-position hinge, and its presence here signals that the design team was thinking about actual use rather than spec-sheet bullet points. The watch charger is detachable and can operate independently once the main unit is powered, meaning it functions as a standalone puck when you need it away from the base.

The entire unit is built from V0-rated fire retardant engineering plastics, the highest flammability resistance classification for plastics used in electronic enclosures, with a metal spray coating applied over the surface for tactile and visual quality. At 130mm by 130mm by 40mm when folded flat, the footprint is genuinely compact for everything it contains. The slate and charcoal finish, visible across all four product images, reads as intentionally neutral, designed to disappear into a desk or nightstand setup rather than announce itself. The 65W fast charging output covers a laptop at full speed as the primary device, with intelligent power distribution across the remaining ports when the full ecosystem is connected simultaneously.

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