As a self-confessed hoarder and maximalist, my desk is anything but neat. I collect a lot of stationery and supplies (sometimes more than I need) and so I have a lot of things lying around. There are of course some desk organizers there but the small items can sometimes be just left scattered all over. This new DIY stationery items can help with that problem.
RAE is a desktop organizer that is made from recycled paper from scraps of Campus notebooks from Kokuyo’s manufacturing factories. Since the strength and abrasion resistance is affected if you fully use the recycled fibers as virgin materials, they decided to make that just 50% of the recycled paper.
What makes this even more interesting is that the user will be the one to “assemble” the organizer by folding the paper, origami-style. There are two sizes of the paper: the S size (W155 x D70 x H30mm) which is a smaller, squarish kind of organizer and the L size (W250 x D70 x H30mm), a more elongated version. You can place various stationery stuff on it, including pens, paper clips, washi tapes, and other small items you may have lying around.
The package, which contains two pieces, comes with an assembly practice sheet but there’s also a video on YouTube if you need more visual instructions. It comes in beige and khaki colors, keeping with the minimalist feel. It would be cute to have some of these paper organizers on my table, if I can actually follow the instructions.
Vases usually take a back seat to the flowers and plants that they house since the main attraction are the flora. Usually they are just functional or if they do have designs, they’re not always that eye-catching and can sometimes be minimalist. But who says you can’t have attractive flowers and also beautiful vases with various colors and patterns?
The Dot Dot Dot Paper Vase is one kind of vase that will catch your attention even before you put flowers or plants in them. From its name of course you can deduct that they are made from paper but it’s not just any ordinary paper but ones that have different colors, patterns, and shapes. It can spark creativity in the “viewer” and can also serve as an interactive canvas together with what you’ll put in it.
Since the material is paper, you will also be able to fold, shape, and decorate it in any way you want. You can use it to either complement the flora that you’ll put in it or provide a startling contrast to add to the visual smorgasbord. Minimalists will probably not be that fond of it because of the vibrant colors and the textured patterns.
The paper vases have different colorways like green, red, violet, yellow, and pink, but always with the white color creating patterns. There are also different shapes like circles, spirals, half moons, and lines. They can add an artful feel to your space aside from serving its function as a vessel.
We only have a very finite desk space, constrained by the available area in our rooms or offices. We can always stack up desk organizers or have drawers beneath to make up for it, but those can only go so far. One underutilized area of our desks is often the sides, and there will always be at least two free edges even if you have a corner table. Taking advantage of that unused space, this rather unusual desk organizer hangs a saddlebag on the side of your table, providing not only a place to put pens and notebooks inside, but even a spot for your phone or drink on top. Best of all, it’s made of a sustainable material that looks more like luxurious leather than paper.
You’d normally hear of saddlebags only in relation to horses or even camels, but our work desks are just as much beasts of burden as these animals. And just like on those, the SALTO dangles off to the side to provide more storage than our overcrowded desks can already accommodate. It’s deep and spacious enough for notebooks, pens, cables, or even headphones, just about anything you want to keep out of sight but still within easy reach.
It even has enough room for a power strip, which is probably the last thing you’d think of putting inside. The bag’s design actually creates a simple loop at the bottom for the strip’s cable to pass through, becoming the only location where it snakes its way to a power outlet. It’s an unusual but effective cable management system, letting those wires all drop off to the side and disappear into the abyss that is the SALTO bag.
There is one odd and potentially problematic part of the saddlebag’s design, at least in the way it’s being advertised. The half-circle tray that sits on top becomes a place for more important items you’ll always want to have access to, like your phone or a glass of water. The latter, however, might be a cause for concern, considering how the weight of the bag’s contents could very well be heavy enough to pull that tray off the table. You can probably imagine the disaster if that drink spills inside, especially if there’s a power strip there as well.
The SALTO is also a very sustainable design that’s surprisingly made of paper. Technically, it’s a type of washable vegan paper that’s being used as a leather alternative, which explains its fabric-like texture and composition. It definitely looks elegant and stylish, especially when hanging from a minimalist desk that has all its clutter cleared and dumped into this bag.
Sustainable furniture and designs are thankfully becoming more common, but the “sustainable” label can actually be applied to different things. They can be made from recycled materials like metal or PCR plastics, or they can be made from new but biodegradable materials like wood, cork, and paper. While both kinds are good, they don’t always address the accumulating material waste that comes from the production of these objects, even the bits and pieces of wood that get left on the cutting room floor and then thrown out. Giving a new purpose to these by-products is another sustainable practice, one that is being applied to a beautifully minimalist office chair that’s made from dozens of sheets of paper.
Of course, it’s not literally made from paper, which would be too soft for a chair no matter how many sheets you stack, especially for a sleek and slender seat based on Arper’s iconic Catifa 53. Instead, it uses PaperShell from a Swedish startup of the same name, a material that almost poetically transforms paper, which comes from wood, back to a wood-like material that offers rigidity, stability, and, more importantly, beauty. In a nutshell, it uses both wood by-products like sawdust and chips as well as waste wood like fallen branches in forests to create a new paper-like material that can be used in place of wood, plastic, or fiber composites.
That’s the case with the Catifa Carta, which compresses dozens of these sheets into a composite that’s then bent and formed into an elegant chair with a gentle slope sitting on top of thin yet sturdy metal legs. Unlike its older sibling, this more sustainable version of the chair leaves the seat in its original, unpainted glory. That means you can see the natural imperfections of the PaperShell material, giving each chair a unique character. It’s pretty much the same as the highly prized grains in wood that give designs their natural charm.
What’s even more special about the chair is that even the end of its life has a story to tell. PaperShell can be recycled to produce new and different products, but it can also be turned into biochar to nourish the Earth. The material itself sequesters carbon dioxide which can be used to enrich soil. It’s a truly circular life cycle that starts and ends with the Earth. Appropriately, Arper has made the Catifa Carta easy to disassemble to make this process even easier.
Of course, the chair isn’t just a thing of beauty inside and out, it’s also a functional piece of furniture. Though some might have concerns about the ergonomics of using such a chair for long periods at work, it’s still a well-designed seat that makes you feel good not only about sitting on it but also about the exciting journey that this wood-like material has made since its birth from a seed.
Over the years I have learned to embrace a digital + analog hybrid workflow process. While most of my work goes straight to the computer, tablet, or mobile phone that I’m working on at the moment, I still like having a pen and paper with me at all times to jot down things I’m thinking about or things I need to do. There’s something therapeutic about writing it down rather than just typing it out so products that can give me that convenience are always welcome.
Designer: Cortex
The Sidekick Notepad is basically a writing pad where you can jot things down while having a meeting or while doing your normal, every day tasks. It is designed to fit either above or under your keyboard and is meant to be your “sidekick” if you’re like me that sometimes likes to put her to-do list on paper rather than on pixels. There’s a section to put the date, a huge section for notes, and then on the side, there’s a to-do list section with checkboxes so it’s easier to tick things off.
It’s not meant to be like a journal where you keep it even after the tasks or notes have served their purpose. It’s a tear-away kind of pad where you can just tear it off and then throw it (or compile it somewhere else if that’s your thing). You can also scan your notes for posterity and then save it on your preferred notes app. It doesn’t seem to have a dedicated app that can automatically scan and store things for you so you have to do it the manual way.
The Sidekick Notepad has 60 pages of Munken Lynx paper so if you run out, you’ll have to buy a new notepad since it’s not refillable. The cover is made from something called “Extract”, a paper made from recycled coffee cups. This adds another layer of things that I love so this product seems to be created especially for people like me who still can’t let go of the analog stuff.
The pen is mightier than the sword, especially given how it has withstood the test of time, even in our current digital age. But while writing things down by hand has plenty of cited benefits, from psychological to practical, handwritten notes also miss out on a lot of conveniences and potential, especially when it comes time to search through dozens of pages of scribbles. For years, smart notebooks have tried to bridge this gap between analog and digital with some measure of success, but the majority of them stop at turning handwritten notes into digital text you can easily search. This innovative smart notebook, however, upgrades that experience by harnessing the power of AI to make the best out of your scribbles and sketches, turning them into summaries, tasks, appointments, and even translations that will take your productivity to the next level.
AI has been a hot topic for the past years, impressing many while scaring off others. The power that artificial intelligence, machine learning, and neural networks can bring to seemingly ordinary products can really be mind-blowing, especially when you consider the new experiences they enable. ChatGPT, for example, is quite a famous large language model (LLM) application that is being used for things like conversations, searches, and other text-related processing that makes it feel like you’re talking with an actual human person. The XNote smart notebook utilizes this amazing AI to bring together the joy of writing on paper and the convenience of digital technology in an intuitive and seamless way.
The magic of the XNote starts, of course, with pen and paper, specifically a beautiful invisibly coded notebook and a revolutionary smart pen. The notebook itself bears a Moleskine-like design, complete with an elastic band to keep it from opening accidentally. The smart pen looks like it’s simply leaving ink marks on paper, but it’s also detecting invisible patterns so that every stroke is accurately sent and mirrored to the XNote app via Bluetooth in real-time. You don’t have to take pictures of your notes and you don’t even have to wait for your scribbles to sync with the app. You can see your scribbles and drawings recreated inside the app instantly, almost like magic. With a built-in 265mAh rechargeable battery, you can write for 7 to 8 hours of use without having to worry about a forced break.
While other smart notebooks stop there, XNote transforms your ink marks into text, formulas, or diagrams, all kinds of digital objects that can later be searched or even shared with others online. XNote, however, goes beyond handwriting recognition and uses ChatGPT to create contextual recognition, smartly identifying the kind of text so that you can simply ask XNote when you need to look for a note. Can’t remember where you stored a friend’s suggestion for your next binge reading? Just ask in the XNote app to look for the book recommendation you wrote last week. Need a quick recap of the meeting notes you took earlier? Ask XNote to summarize those for you in easy-to-digest pieces. You can even have those notes translated for easier communication beyond geographical boundaries. And since the notes are digitized, you can easily search across different notebooks and access your data on platforms, ensuring that your analog notes remain accessible long after the paper notebooks go away.
XNote not only cares about your notes but also about your privacy as well. It uses advanced end-to-end encryption, two-factor authentication, and top-tier cloud security protocols to ensure no unauthorized person ever lays eyes on your notes. And while the basic package has the core features you need, XNote offers a $9/month ($59/year launch special) Premium subscription that brings all the power of AI to your fingertips, including Smart Task Alerts and AI-driven Tags and Categories. Even better, now that it has reached its $200,000 funding milestone, every backer who has selected either the 1-Year Subscription or the Combo Bundle will be automatically upgraded to a Free Lifetime AI Membership! With the ChatGPT-powered XNote smart notebook, you can employ that powerful AI to do the heavy lifting of making sense of your notes while you continue to enjoy the benefits of writing with pen and paper.
Passive RFID tags, like the ones attached to products in stores for easy checkout, are generally manufactured using a mixture of metal and circuitry to form the tag’s primary parts: a microchip and an equally microscopic antenna. These bits work together to store and communicate information to a nearby RFID reader, and they’re decently cheap to mass-produce, only costing around $0.10 in materials per tag (according to the IAITAM in 2021).
Still, the gross cost of mining and producing large quantities of metal and circuitry components adds up over time, and due to the nature of those materials, regular passive RFID tags have nowhere to go — well, other than the trash bin — once they’re pulled off of the products they’re designed to protect.
According to PulpaTronics, the developer of a revolutionary all-upcycled paper RFID tag design, over 12 billion RFID tags are manufactured per year, often for single-use purposes, after which they end up in landfills. Founded by a group of four students at the Imperial College London’s Dyson School of Design Engineering, the PulpaTronics team is already making waves (and winning multiple awards in sustainable design) for their ingenious paper RFID tag design, which eliminates metal from the manufacturing process entirely.
PulpaTronics’ all-paper RFID tags store information geometrically, using a laser to imprint a “conductive layer of carbon material” directly onto paper materials upcycled from the recycling bin and from the trash. According to the James Dyson Award organization, the team also experimented with other materials, like wood and cork, before ultimately landing on paper. The result: an RFID tag design that is twice as cheap to mass-produce as other RFID tags, while contributing 70% less CO2 emissions.
What’s interesting about this design is how the team was able to create each part of the RFID tag, including antennae, without any metal whatsoever — once again, it’s all just paper with a little bit of carbon sketched on top — and the geometric shape of the carbon layer is what gives the RFID tag design its conductivity and its ability to transmit information to a nearby reader.
If PulpaTronics’ new tag design goes into mass-production, that could apparently save “20,000,000 kilograms of CO2 annually” per 100,000 items using the design. In any case, this is a sizable win for sustainable engineering — further proving that it’s possible to replace metal and other scarce and non-degradable materials with easily-sourced alternatives.
Productivity systems like GTD and the Bullet Journal have made paper notebooks all the rage again. But while it’s inspiring to see so many creative designs for notebooks and stationery, these can also get in the way when you just need to write or sketch something down. Bound notebooks might not have the right combination of grids and lines that you need, or they might have too many or too few pages. Ring binders let you add, remove, and move pages, but the rings tend to get in the way, and the holes lead to tears and unaesthetic pages. You could always make a DIY notebook combining just the sheets and designs that you need, but keeping them together can also be a hassle. If all these sound familiar to you, here’s how this simple yet ingenious clipboard removes the friction when it’s time to take notes while also letting you design your notebook your way.
Rather than limiting yourself to the type and number of pages a notebook comes with, this clipboard lets you mix and match any kind of paper that fits inside it. An A4 jacket, for example, can hold A4 paper or A3 paper folded in half, while the A5 version can use A5 and A4 sheets in the same way. You can use unmarked blank paper, grid paper, dotted sheets, printed designs, or anything you want or need to give your thoughts a physical form.
You can really use any paper that you can write on, even those with printed text on the back. This is an excellent way to make use of those discarded sheets before they’re dumped into the bin. Even perforated or loose leaf paper with holes is fair game because they can easily be hidden inside the jacket’s “margin.”
Clip Paper Easily in Any Order
Unlike typical binders, this clipboard uses a clever Magnet x Lever mechanism to hold those loose sheets together while still letting you easily remove them as needed. Simply pushing down on the edge lifts up the clip, releasing the paper and allowing you to add or remove sheets in a snap. The clip can hold up to 30 sheets of paper, but it can secure even a single sheet if that’s all that you have left.
This deceptively simple design gives you absolute freedom in how you arrange your notes. You can always put a blank page at the top of the stack, ready to meet the tip of your pen or pencil at a moment’s notice, or you can order them according to topic or a specific flow of thought. Or you can just leave them as-is and none will be the wiser.
Take Notes Anywhere
This ultra-minimalist paper notebook isn’t just easy to organize, it’s also super easy to use. Simply lift the flip tab to open the notebook and you’re good to go. You can even leave your pen inside so that it’s ready the next time inspiration strikes. The same strong magnets that keep the sheets of paper together also keep the cover from accidentally opening and exposing your precious scribbles. The jacket’s rigid hardcover and flexible angle make it trivial to fold it around and hold it in one hand, allowing you to take notes even while standing up.
Best of all, both the inside and outside of the jacket are waterproof and you can easily wipe any drops that fall on it. This gives you the flexibility to not just take notes anywhere but also take your notes everywhere. You can even put it up on a metallic surface or whiteboard thanks to its magnetic clip. Time to ditch those pretty but inflexible notebooks and embrace the freedom that this magnetic, loose paper jacket can bring to your creativity and productivity.
