Tag Archives: European Product Design Award

Genius Saucepan Lid Design Sits Vertically On Your Kitchen Counter While You Cook

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Cookware is one of those product categories where familiarity can easily disguise bad design. A pan heats up, a lid comes off, a handle gets held. These actions are so routine that small frustrations are often accepted as part of cooking. Gresland Benc Artisan Cast Cookware approaches the category differently, treating each of these familiar interactions as an opportunity to reconsider how cookware should perform, feel, and age in a contemporary kitchen.

The cookware, designed by Christophe Paul Gresland for Gresland Benc Technology, was recognized as a 2025 European Product Design Award winner in the Home and Kitchen Accessories category. Much of its innovation sits beneath a deliberately restrained exterior. Its revolutionary multi-layered core, developed through advanced metallurgy, achieves greater thermal responsiveness and retention, heating 40% faster and distributing heat 30% more evenly than traditional cast counterparts while eliminating hotspots. For the cook, those numbers translate into something much more tangible: less waiting, more predictable results, and fewer areas of the cooking surface demanding constant attention.

Designer: Gresland-Benc Technology (Foshan) Co., Ltd., United Kingdom

That performance is paired with some surprisingly thoughtful decisions around everyday use. The sculpted handle has been engineered for balance and comfort, but its more interesting contribution is how it responds to one of cooking’s most common and rarely addressed hazards. Removing a lid can release a concentrated burst of steam directly toward the hand. Here, the handle geometry has been considered specifically to reduce the risk of scalding from lid release steam. It is a small interaction, but one that reveals where the product’s priorities lie. Good kitchen design is rarely about adding more features. Often, it is about noticing where the user has quietly learned to compensate for the product.

The same thinking appears in details that are less dramatic but equally relevant. A flat base makes the cookware suitable for induction cooking ranges as well as conventional stovetops. It may seem like an expected feature today, yet it matters because cookware is usually purchased to last much longer than the appliance beneath it. Designing for different cooking environments makes the object more adaptable to changing kitchens and a broader range of users.

The external chamfered edges also bring function and form closer together. When the cookware is cold, the softened geometry provides a more comfortable surface to grip and maneuver. Visually, those edges prevent the form from appearing unnecessarily heavy, giving an otherwise substantial piece of cast cookware a more considered profile. It is an example of detailing that earns its place because it improves both handling and character.

Material choices extend that thinking beyond the immediate cooking experience. The cookware uses 85% recycled stainless steel alongside locally sourced components, while its zero-waste casting process is stated to meet B Corp environmental standards. For an object whose value is tied to durability, this feels particularly relevant. Sustainability is more convincing when it is embedded into how a product is manufactured rather than treated as an additional feature attached to it afterward.

There is still one consideration that deserves attention. A metal handle can potentially absorb and retain heat during prolonged cooking. Depending on the final thermal isolation and construction of the handle, users may still need to remain aware of its temperature, particularly during extended stovetop use. It does not undo the strength of the design, but it is exactly the kind of practical behavior that matters in a product built around everyday physical interaction.

What makes Gresland Benc Artisan Cast Cookware compelling is that its most meaningful decisions are not limited to one headline innovation. Thermal performance, safer lid handling, induction compatibility, comfortable edges, material responsibility, and visual restraint all contribute to the same experience. It is cookware designed with an understanding that refinement often happens in the moments people barely notice, until someone designs them better.

The post Genius Saucepan Lid Design Sits Vertically On Your Kitchen Counter While You Cook first appeared on Yanko Design.

MagSafe Drone Lets You Attach An iPhone For Perfect Hands-free Selfies And Videos

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Flying Gimbal Drone concept with an iPhone mounted on it

Google’s Add Me is one of the stranger things a phone has ever done. Introduced on the Pixel 9, it takes a photo of your family, then hands the phone to somebody in that photo, who takes a second shot of you standing where the gap was. The phone stitches the two together and produces a group picture that never existed, of a moment where everybody was never actually in the room at once. It works remarkably well. It is also, if you think about it for longer than four seconds, deeply odd, a family portrait assembled in post like a Marvel crowd scene.

Flafa proposes the analog answer to the same question. A concept from Kaiyuan Liu and four classmates at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, it’s a small quadcopter that carries your phone into the air so the camera can hold its own position while every human stays put. The phone snaps onto a magnetic pad below four fully enclosed rotors, hangs face-out, and records while the drone flies itself. It won its category at the 2025 European Product Design Award. Same problem, opposite philosophy: Google removes the photographer with software, Flafa removes them with lift.

Designers: Kaiyuan Liu, Qiushi Wang, Yan Wang, Shiqi Liu & Xiaoyi Chen

Family posing in front of a drone with an iPhone mounted on it

Selfie drones have failed so many times that the category has a graveyard. AirSelfie tried in 2017. Snap’s Pixy launched in 2022, died four months later, and was recalled in 2024 because the batteries caught fire. They all lost for the same reason. A drone light enough to fly indoors cannot carry a camera that beats the phone already in your pocket, so you buy a flying camera, fly it twice, and quietly retire it to a drawer. Flafa declines that fight entirely by bringing no camera at all.

Mounting an iPhone onto a Drone Gimbal using MagSafe

Two small sensor windows sit on the front propeller shrouds, giving the drone its own eyes for navigation while your phone dedicates itself to recording. That division of labor is the smartest thing in the whole project. Most flying cameras ask one sensor to handle obstacle avoidance, subject tracking, and image capture simultaneously, and it shows in the footage. Here the quadcopter worries about the ceiling fan and the phone worries about your kid’s face, which is roughly how you’d split the job if you had two people.

Somebody on this team understood that a drone meant to hover near a toddler cannot look like drone. The renders show warm oat cream, soft radii, matte surfaces, and not one visible screw, putting Flafa closer to a Muji humidifier than to anything DJI has shipped. Consumer drones are almost universally styled for a man in sunglasses on a cliff, all black plastic and angular vents. That grammar makes sense in a camera bag. It makes none in a living room during a birthday party.

The mount deserves credit for paranoia. A magnetic puck holds the phone, and a hinged brace folds along the handset’s edge as mechanical backup, which suggests the team thought hard about a thousand dollars of glass becoming a lawn dart. That said, the physics remains the open question. An iPhone Pro Max weighs around 233 grams, heavier than an entire DJI Neo, and hanging that mass below the center of lift makes a pendulum. The project is called a flying gimbal, but the renders show a hinge rather than an actuated axis.

Student concepts are allowed to be ahead of their batteries. What Flafa gets right is the framing of the problem, and that part is free. Every family album has one person missing, and it’s whoever picked up the camera. Google’s answer is to invent them back in afterward. This one just sends the camera upstairs for a minute.

The post MagSafe Drone Lets You Attach An iPhone For Perfect Hands-free Selfies And Videos first appeared on Yanko Design.

Daewoo’s Rose Iron Folds to A4 Size and Steams Without a Soleplate

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Daewoo’s Rose Portable Iron collapses into the profile of a classic clothes iron, except there’s no soleplate anywhere on it. The red dome is a 550kPa steam head that never touches your shirt, and the whole assembly parks on a desk in the footprint of a sheet of A4 paper. The black wand tucks flat against the body when you’re done, closing everything into one clean shape instead of leaving cords and heads scattered around. Fold it up and you get a glossy red teardrop that looks like it belongs on a shelf next to your hats and cufflinks, not shoved in a closet with the vacuum. It might be the best looking iron I have ever laid eyes on, full stop.

That’s kind of the point. Ironing has looked the same since your grandmother’s era, hot metal, heavy arm, burnt fingertips optional. Daewoo took the silhouette everyone recognizes and gutted the inside, swapping pressure for a fine mist of high pressure steam that hovers over the fabric instead of flattening it. The project comes out of Guangdong Daewoo’s in-house design team under Wang Jun, and it won Top Design honors in the Home Appliances: Small category at the 2025 European Product Design Award, a competition that judges shipping products rather than sketches. It’s a weird little magic trick, and somebody clearly thought it deserved a trophy for pulling it off.

Designer: Guangdong Daewoo Design Team

Design history has a name for this trick, skeuomorphism, when a new object borrows the shape of what it’s replacing so people instinctively know what to do with it. Digital cameras kept the shutter click, and early e-readers animated a page turn, small gestures borrowed from objects they were busy erasing. The Rose runs that instinct backward, keeping the exact wedge shape of a clothes iron even though nothing inside actually presses fabric anymore. It’s a strange kind of respect for a shape nobody thinks about, right up until someone guts everything underneath it and leaves the outline alone on purpose. The result looks familiar enough to trust and strange enough to stop your thumb mid-scroll.

Inside that dome is the actual news. A 550kPa pressurized system pushes steam through five stages of vaporization, dense enough to punch through fabric fibers without soaking them, so clothes come out warm and dry rather than damp. Daewoo’s own demo shows the head steaming a balloon without popping it, which is either a fun party trick or genuinely reassuring if you own anything silk. Five modes tune temperature and steam volume by fabric, running from 110°C for silk up to 210°C for wool, with a narrower precision tip built for touchy spots like coat buttons. None of that matters if the thing scorches your favorite shirt, but on paper, it is built to avoid exactly that.

The original Daewoo chaebol collapsed into bankruptcy in 1999, and this badge now belongs to Guangdong Daewoo, a licensed China based operation with a Korean trading office attached. That is not a knock on the product, plenty of legacy names live second lives this way, but the actual design credit sits with Wang Jun’s team, not the vintage logo. It is also a corded, mains powered unit rather than a battery gadget, so portable here means light enough to carry across a room, not cordless freedom. It currently ships only in China across a small ladder of trims, working out to roughly 140 to 196 dollars depending on exchange rate. No release outside China is confirmed yet, so importing one means budgeting for a plug adapter and a converter.

Most appliance makers chasing “reinvented” just bolt a screen onto something and call it smart. Daewoo instead looked at the single most recognizable silhouette in the laundry room and asked what would happen if everything under it changed while the outline stayed put. The answer folds down to the size of a sheet of paper and looks better on a dresser than most speakers do. Whether it actually out-irons a cheap steamer from the drugstore is a separate question nobody outside a Guangdong test lab has fully answered, but as a piece of industrial design humor, it is hard not to grin at.

The post Daewoo’s Rose Iron Folds to A4 Size and Steams Without a Soleplate first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Award-Winning Armchair Proves One Bold Detail Changes Everything

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Pepê Lima’s Jacob armchair doesn’t ease itself into a room — it arrives. Designed for Indonesian furniture brand Blackwood, the chair took home three accolades at the 2025 European Product Design Award, including Top Design Winner in Home Furniture and the title of Best Furniture Design of 2025, and one look at the chair tells you why.

Jacob is built on a fundamental tension between softness and structure. The upholstery is rounded and generous, the kind of seat that pulls you in before you’ve even made up your mind to sit. Beneath it, a solid wood frame has been precisely machined into sweeping, embracing curves that mirror the body’s own geometry. There’s nothing arbitrary about the silhouette. Every radius feels considered, every transition from material to material deliberate.

Designer: Pepê Lima

The defining move, though, lives at the back. A cast-metal detail cuts across the wooden structure in a way that could have felt aggressive, but lands as something closer to punctuation. It draws your eye without demanding it. It gives the chair its identity, a flash of industrial honesty inside what would otherwise be a purely warm, organic object. It’s the kind of detail that rewards a second look, the mark of a designer who understands that restraint and boldness are not opposites.

Lima is no stranger to that balance. A graduate of Centro Universitário Belas Artes in São Paulo with more than fifteen years in the furniture trade, he sharpened his craft further at the Politecnico di Milano, where he worked with Studio Incontri on projects for Alessi and Samsung. That combination of Brazilian warmth and European precision shows up clearly in Jacob. The chair speaks both languages fluently.

Customization is central to how Jacob lives in the world. Leather or fabric upholstery, a range of wood tones, and various metal finishes mean the chair can read as a classic club seat or a sharp contemporary accent depending on the room it enters. It doesn’t compromise to fit in. It adapts without losing its character, which is a much harder thing to design.

What Jacob ultimately achieves is something the furniture world rarely pulls off cleanly: a sculptural piece without being unwelcoming, refined without being cold, and bold without being loud. It sits in a room the way a well-dressed person sits in a conversation, present and unhurried, with something worth saying.

The post This Award-Winning Armchair Proves One Bold Detail Changes Everything first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Award-Winning Armchair Proves One Bold Detail Changes Everything

Posted on by

Pepê Lima’s Jacob armchair doesn’t ease itself into a room — it arrives. Designed for Indonesian furniture brand Blackwood, the chair took home three accolades at the 2025 European Product Design Award, including Top Design Winner in Home Furniture and the title of Best Furniture Design of 2025, and one look at the chair tells you why.

Jacob is built on a fundamental tension between softness and structure. The upholstery is rounded and generous, the kind of seat that pulls you in before you’ve even made up your mind to sit. Beneath it, a solid wood frame has been precisely machined into sweeping, embracing curves that mirror the body’s own geometry. There’s nothing arbitrary about the silhouette. Every radius feels considered, every transition from material to material deliberate.

Designer: Pepê Lima

The defining move, though, lives at the back. A cast-metal detail cuts across the wooden structure in a way that could have felt aggressive, but lands as something closer to punctuation. It draws your eye without demanding it. It gives the chair its identity, a flash of industrial honesty inside what would otherwise be a purely warm, organic object. It’s the kind of detail that rewards a second look, the mark of a designer who understands that restraint and boldness are not opposites.

Lima is no stranger to that balance. A graduate of Centro Universitário Belas Artes in São Paulo with more than fifteen years in the furniture trade, he sharpened his craft further at the Politecnico di Milano, where he worked with Studio Incontri on projects for Alessi and Samsung. That combination of Brazilian warmth and European precision shows up clearly in Jacob. The chair speaks both languages fluently.

Customization is central to how Jacob lives in the world. Leather or fabric upholstery, a range of wood tones, and various metal finishes mean the chair can read as a classic club seat or a sharp contemporary accent depending on the room it enters. It doesn’t compromise to fit in. It adapts without losing its character, which is a much harder thing to design.

What Jacob ultimately achieves is something the furniture world rarely pulls off cleanly: a sculptural piece without being unwelcoming, refined without being cold, and bold without being loud. It sits in a room the way a well-dressed person sits in a conversation, present and unhurried, with something worth saying.

The post This Award-Winning Armchair Proves One Bold Detail Changes Everything first appeared on Yanko Design.

CUKTECH’s 300W Desktop Charger Wants to Replace Your Entire Drawer of Power Bricks

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If you have ever charged a Xiaomi phone with the bundled brick, there is a decent chance CUKTECH’s engineers had a hand in it, even though the name never made it onto the packaging. The company started in 2016 as a straight up OEM, building chargers behind the scenes for Xiaomi and other big players, before merging with ZMI in 2022 and finally launching products under its own name. It is the classic story of a supplier deciding it was tired of being invisible.

That decision has paid off. The CUKTECH 30 Charging Station Ultra just picked up two wins at the European Product Design Award, one for computer accessories and one for office appliances, thanks to a 300W GaN powered design from Chong Wang and Ziyao Wang. We have followed the brand’s climb as its power banks and chargers kept getting screens, better materials, and sharper industrial design with every release. This latest charging station, with its five ports and a live readout of exactly what your gear is pulling, is the moment the sleeper brand stops sleeping.

Designers: Chong Wang & Ziyao Wang

Three USB-C ports, one USB-A port, and a dedicated DC output share the front face, and together they can push out up to 300W total. The two primary USB-C ports handle up to 140W each under PD 3.1, which covers most modern laptops without breaking a sweat, but the real number only shows up when you route power through the DC port. That single line is built to talk directly to compatible laptops and can hit the full 300W ceiling on its own, essentially replacing the oversized proprietary brick that usually ships in the box. I have three of those bricks sitting in a drawer right now doing absolutely nothing, and a single box that can outmuscle all of them at once is exactly the kind of consolidation I did not know I needed.

Third generation GaN sits at the core of the whole system, paired with what CUKTECH calls a PFC plus LLC dual architecture, a combination chosen specifically to keep five simultaneous charging sessions stable without the unit turning into a space heater. Gallium nitride has become the default material for anyone chasing high wattage in a small footprint, since it switches more efficiently than older silicon designs and sheds heat faster under sustained load. Thirteen fast charging protocols are baked in, including PD 3.1, PPS, Xiaomi’s own 120W standard, UFCS, Huawei SCP, and both QC and AFC, which is a genuinely broad net for a single charger to cast. Intelligent power allocation reads what is plugged in and redistributes wattage on the fly, with specific tuning for handhelds like the Steam Deck and ROG Ally that tend to confuse less sophisticated multi port chargers.

A 1.83 inch IPS display sits front and center, color coded per port, tracking wattage, voltage, and current across all five connections in real time, with a small running graph of total load underneath. Most chargers ask you to trust a single LED and hope for the best. This one just tells you, continuously, which is a small shift that changes how the object feels to live with on a desk. Nine layers of protection cover temperature, over-voltage, and over-current scenarios, which matters more than usual given how much power is moving through a chassis this size.

The form itself leans minimal, angled slightly on a magnetic tilting base so the screen stays readable without craning your neck, and finished in a two tone silver and black that reads more like studio monitor than power strip. A right angle DC cable keeps the desk tidier than the usual straight jack, and the grounded three pin AC cable is a small nod to safety that a lot of competitors skip to save a few cents.

None of this would matter much if the pricing did not make sense, and at $159.99 it lands right where a serious desk upgrade should, undercutting rivals capped at 140W or 200W while offering meaningfully more headroom. CUKTECH spent a decade building other companies’ chargers before it ever put its own name on a box. Two design award wins later, it is clear that decade taught them exactly which details actually matter.

The post CUKTECH’s 300W Desktop Charger Wants to Replace Your Entire Drawer of Power Bricks first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Foam-Free Eco Packaging Is Made From Compressed Rosemary Waste, And It Carries The Aroma Too

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Expanded foam or polystyrene has had a good run as the default packaging filler, mostly because it’s cheap, light, and nobody was really committed to sustainability for the last half century so the industry is pretty set in its ways now. Expanded foam does not decompose, it does not do anything useful once you rip it out of the box, and it has spent decades sitting quietly in landfills being extremely unbothered by the concept of consequences. Designers have been chipping away at its throne for years, swapping in mushroom mycelium, seaweed film, pressed pulp, whatever grows fast and decomposes faster. Scentra joins that lineup with a twist nobody else has really tried. Rosemary.

Instead of growing a material or pulping something into a smooth foam substitute, this one compresses actual rosemary waste, stems and all, into a block held together with a seaweed binder. The result looks rustic rather than manufactured, and it carries the plant’s natural scent right there in the fibers. Crack the box open and rosemary hits you before the product does. Foam never managed that trick, and honestly, it never tried.

Designers: Zhixi Dai, Zhou Yun, Wang Zhan

The rosemary itself comes from an organic farm in Guizhou, China, run under Omni Biotech’s AOLUX line, where trimmings that would normally get swept up and discarded are collected instead. The farm also employs local workers from low income families as part of a rural revitalization push, so the sourcing story has a human angle sitting quietly underneath the material one. Designer Zhixi Dai led the project with Zhou Yun and Wang Zhan rounding out the team, and between them they turned a farming byproduct into something structural enough to actually protect glass.

The block is cut with a cavity shaped exactly like the essential oil bottle it holds, silhouette and all, so the packaging reads almost like a little doorway with the product framed inside it. Pull the bottle out and you are left holding a chunk of compressed herb that still smells like the plant it came from. Set it on a shelf, add a few more drops of oil when the scent fades, and it keeps working as a passive diffuser. No batteries, no wiring, no porcelain filter to keep clean. Just plant matter doing what plant matter does.

We have seen versions of this waste to material pipeline before. Beer mash has been pressed into leather, spent grain has been molded into stools, rice husk has been packed into furniture. What usually happens in those stories is the waste becomes inert once it is shaped, useful for its structure and nothing else. Scentra skips that step. The rosemary does not stop being rosemary just because it got compressed into a block. It keeps its oils, its texture, its smell, all the things that made it worth growing in the first place.

That is really the whole pitch here, and it is a good one. Most eco packaging asks you to feel good about something you cannot see or verify, a recycling percentage or a compostability claim buried in fine print. This one just smells like rosemary. You do not need a certificate for that, though it has one anyway, having picked up the Best Eco Design win at the European Product Design Awards.

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