Tag Archives: smart home gadget

This minimalist wooden board offers a interior-friendly way to control your home with Alexa

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The last thing you probably expected is for a beautiful piece of wood to be your control dashboard for your smart home.

The Internet of Things has slowly but surely invaded our homes in the guise of smart lighting, dynamic photo frames, and, of course, smart speakers. While many of these are designed to look stylish and handsome, most of them carry an aesthetic that often clashes with minimalist rooms or decor. Smart speakers are perhaps the biggest culprits in this regard, but a Japanese company has found a solution that lets you put Alexa-powered smart speakers out of sight.

Designer: mui Lab

mui looks like an unassuming block of wood, but it’s actually just as talented as a smart speaker. Actually, it can do more than what most voice-only speakers can, like the Amazon Echo, because it has a touch panel on its front surface. Unlike a busy and overwhelming touch screen, however, the mui board presents visual feedback as monochromatic icons and text in a dot-matrix style that matches the board’s minimalist aesthetic.

More than just being a novel way to present a smart home hub, mui offers an equally unique approach to mixing nature and technology. Rather than the usual cold elements of a tablet, a phone, or even a smart speaker, the wooden board adds a warm and almost human touch to interact with devices and appliances. Its designers want to evoke joy and calm, feelings that should be associated with the home in the first place.

Despite its minimalist appearance, the mui is by no means minimal in features. In addition to its own mobile app, mui Lab is introducing a new “calm” interface that turns the board into a visual interface for connected Amazon Alexa speakers. That’s in addition to the original mui Platform’s compatibility with the new Matter smart home platform.




Inspired by Taoist philosophy, the mui board offers a refreshing spin on how we interact with our smart homes, basically by doing or showing almost nothing. It’s not going to appeal to people who prefer seeing everything in one go, but this design will definitely go well with rooms and furniture that try to hide the tech behind soothing organic materials.

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Your leftover food powers this smart WFH desk!

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Furniture ideas are really evolving during quarantine and I am loving that a table brings a lot more to the table than being a table. Never did I think I would come across a clock that was also a table but the world of design always surprises us! Functional furniture is an essential as our lifestyles become more flexible, especially after the pandemic that has taught us to optimize our resources to serve more than one purpose – just like this conceptual work station.

This table is called a Clock and I want you to keep that in mind for the rest of this story. Clock was designed to be compact and fit in the growing trend of smaller living spaces. The designer wanted to create something that seamlessly blended into our workdays (especially when working from home!) without disrupting our office hours or eating habits. The hybrid station converts food waste into energy to power itself wirelessly but also includes the systems to be plugged into a wall if needed. It is an innovative product that combines technology and functionality to sustainably manage waste and encourage more people to shift to natural/renewable energy sources.

When you aren’t working, simply slide the parts back and close the product into a slim bench. In its closed state, only the power icon and energy levels are visible, simply tap the power icon to light up the panel. The smart furniture appliance also has defined heating and cooling areas that are touch-controlled. You can sync your phone with Clock to receive all the important updates and statistics about your hi-tech table. This is an award-winning project that gives us a glimpse of a better future where multi-functional, sustainably powered, and aesthetically sleek products give us the flexible life we crave.

Designer: Yeg Design Studio

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This smart door handle solves 4 issues of its predecessors

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Smart homes are no longer a thing of the future, it all started with TVs and mobile phones but now most appliances in our home have an ‘above average IQ’. One of the first few converts were lights, refrigerators, and thermostats, we also have a few smart handles and locks but they are just not ready to take the SATs (I can’t be the only one who finds these entertaining!). They are often overlooked when we think of smart appliances but this conceptual handle is here to ‘unlock’ some new levels in the smart home game.

The Handle solves a lot of the issues that come with the current smart locks in the market. The invisible tech feature has a human body sensor so the backlight in the handle will light up when you approach thus making it easier for you to touch the fingerprint identification on the backside of the product. The frontside has a laser microvia touch keypad which lights up subtly when needed and literally looks like someone has imprinted the handle with characters using a fine-tip glow pen. You can set a number password, icon password or pattern password on this keypad.

The indoor handle (when you are inside the room) has an unlock key to open the door and an ergonomic toggle switch you can use to lock the door. Unlike most smart handles and locks, the Handle is not black or bulky, it is slim, very sleek and has a modern yet minimalist design that makes it merge with any interior environment. The handle is here to open the door to a brighter future of smart homes.

Designers: Wayne Lu and Wenjie Zheng

This air quality monitor tracks 5 factors and recommends changes for health

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People are now more self-aware than ever about hygiene. In many ways, the global pandemic has served as a wake-up call for all us to make necessary changes in our lifestyle for better health. From simple habits to gadgets like air purifiers, these changes should stick in our daily routines even after the situation calms down. The first step to better health always starts at home and we usually don’t think about things like the air quality surrounding us unless there is a crisis. Devices like the Awair air quality tracker are here to make our homes a little more pure and safe.

We may not know this but, indoor air can be 5x more polluted than outside as we are constantly exposed to factors like paint, furniture, carpet, air fresheners, toys, and more. The air quality can have a major influence on allergies, asthma, focus, sleep quality, skin health, and overall well-being apart from just physical health. The Awair 2nd-edition air quality monitor can track it all for you and even give you personalized recommendations to improve the air in your space. The smart device records the 5 most important factors that affect your health like fine dust, chemicals, CO2, humidity, and temperature to give you a report straight on your phone with changes we can make to up the quality.

The Awair Score is a color-coded scale that lets you know the quality of your air and what changes you must make to improve it. The scale is from 0 to 100 with 0 being poor air quality and 100 being very healthy. It is compatible with smart home devices like Ecobee, Google Home and Alexa so it seamlessly integrates itself in your ecosystem. You can control it via voice commands or an app on your phone when you aren’t home. Even the physical monitor is designed to match all interior styles with its wood frame and subtle silver interface. If you wouldn’t drink dirty water then why breathe dirty air?

Designer: Awair

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