Tag Archives: student design

This chair constructed from steel wire is hardly recognizable from the chain-link fence it’s built into!

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The Invisible Chair from student designer Lee Hyokk is a chair that’s constructed from and incorporated into a steel-link fence.

For centuries, designers have been redefining what chairs could look like. Forming new concepts for a piece of furniture that has been around for longer than a millennium is a big ask, but the chair’s patterned history also opens the door for daring new possibilities to emerge. Dubbed Invisible Chair, student designer Lee Hyokk constructed their chair, “that’s almost invisible,” out of a chain-link fence.

Fences generally require a lot of building material to be made and once finalized, fences are merely designs “that exist for objects other than themselves,” as Lee describes. Hoping to incorporate more than just one function into the chain-link fence, Lee noticed the design’s potential. Following intermittent periods of sketching and ideating, Lee took a small lot of chain-link fences and reorganized some wires to form the silhouette of a chair.

Malleable by design, some of the chain links that form the fence’s grids were removed or re-bent to build the shape of a small armchair. Emerging from the fence’s center area, Lee constructed a four-legged armchair out of the fence’s preexisting chain links. Camouflaged by the repetitive grid system, the built-in chair is difficult to spot unless you’re looking for it.

Describing this purposeful approach to building the Invisible Chair, Lee’s design is highlighted in an Instagram post from [@student.design], “‘Invisible Chair’ uses the characteristics of a fence to lower the accessibility of stimuli (e.g. ‘resting’). It’s difficult to recognize its existence when viewed without intentionally trying to recognize it.” Despite the chair’s seemingly anonymous presence, Lee designed it to provide a moment’s rest when one might be hard to find.

Designer: Lee Hyokk via Student Design

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This sustainable humidifier moistens the air in any room by using the natural evaporative qualities of terracotta!

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The Coarse Pottery Air-Humidifier uses terracotta to function as a sustainable alternative to electric air humidifiers by employing capillary action to moisten dry interior spaces.

For centuries, terracotta has been sculpted into household appliances that naturally perform cooling, heating, and evaporative methods. Porous by its organic composition, designers typically integrate a form of capillary action into their products for terracotta to execute forms of vaporization and cooling distribution. A group of students from Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts teamed up with some designers from Shenzhen Changsen Trading Company to produce an air humidifier from clay that doesn’t require any electricity for operation.

Led by Haibo Hou, the team of student designers produced the Coarse Pottery Air-Humidifier as a sustainable alternative to electric air humidifiers. Designed to moisten dry interior spaces, the Coarse Pottery Air-Humidifier almost appears like a radiator made from clay. The air humidifier is made from a type of pottery that contains just the right amount of porosity and moisture absorption qualities. By adding water to the Coarse Pottery Air-Humidifier’s basin, the droplets will gradually rise and evaporate through tiny cavities located near the Coarse Pottery Air-Humidifier’s top. As the water rises, the interior space’s air is moistened with small water droplets. The corrugated body of the Coarse Pottery Air-Humidifier creates a wavelike form that alludes to its natural evaporative function.

Recognized by Red Dot, the Coarse Pottery Air-Humidifier was chosen as a design winner in 2021 for its use of sustainable material and general practicality. Speaking on the product’s aesthetic and functional design elements, the team says, “Its beautiful and rhythmic wave-like surface form can increase the evaporation area of water to moisten the whole indoor environment. On this basis, The Coarse Pottery Air-Humidifier blends in with the tone of culturally rich interiors as an elegant accessory in the interior.”

Designers: Hou Haibo, Feng Jijie, Luo Li, & Yang Ruibing

The post This sustainable humidifier moistens the air in any room by using the natural evaporative qualities of terracotta! first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Dyson-inspired inclusive ticket machine adjusts its height, increasing convenience for its users!

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Coinvenience is an inclusive ticket machine design that incorporates adaptive light fixtures and a hydraulic rail system that adjusts the machine’s height to meet users where they are.

We don’t know how inconvenient ticket machines can be until we have to use one. In parking garages, when we don’t pull up close enough, ticket machines are impossibly out of reach and the glare of sunlight makes reading the screen on outdoor ticket machines hopeless. With a few random clicks, all we can do is hope we pressed the right buttons to avoid a ticket. Making it more convenient for everyone’s use, Coinvenience is a new ticket machine designed to adapt to changing daylight and heights to meet people where they are.

Inspired by the Dyson Tower Fan’s ingenious bladeless build, Coinvenience encases its ticket machine inside of a multifunctional metal shroud. Addressing the conventional ticket machine’s lack of adaptive lighting fixtures, Coinvenience is wrapped in a metal shroud that blocks sun glare from obstructing the machine’s main control display.

Additionally, the metal shroud features a toplight that turns on at night to ensure the ticket machine and display panel are always visible no matter the lack of daylight. Another key feature of Coinvenience is its adjustable height. The same metal shroud that protects the machine from sunlight glare keeps a hydraulic rail system that moves the ticket machine on a vertical plane to reach different heights.

Primarily designed as a project for Loughborough University, Coinvenience was designed by Harry Rigler, Katy Finch, Reuben Williams, Omar Alqasem, and Bianca Tartaglia who each shared the same vision of creating a ticket machine with its users at the heart of it. Following the university’s guidelines that required the design to operate on a strictly coin-based payment system and feature a non-touchscreen display panel, the team of student designers looked to inclusivity to give Coinvenience the edge it needed.

Designers: Harry Rigler, Katy Finch, Reuben Williams, Omar Alqasem, and Bianca Tartaglia

An introvert-friendly semi-enclosed chaise lounge chair that doubles as a private resting area for public spaces!

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‘Esc.’ is a semi-enclosed chaise lounge chair designed to double as a resting space in public to get away from overpowering outdoor stimuli.

Nowadays, the world is at our fingertips–it can be hard to get away from it all, even for only a minute. Distractions come in the form of digital timelines, midday traffic, lunch rushes, and our own smartphones. Our minds and mental health could benefit from a moment’s rest. Realizing the need for a piece of furniture that could double as a place of respite in public spaces, student designer Toine Baert of Two One Design created ‘Esc.,’ a semi-enclosed chaise lounge chair.

Designed to provide people with a secluded resting area, ‘Esc.’ is essentially a chaise lounge chair that’s partly wrapped in an overhead umbrella-like awning. Baert felt inspired to create a private nook for the Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) to look forward to when the stimuli of everyday life become too much. The overhead awning buffers any noise coming from outside to offer an acoustically, visually, and emotionally quiet hideaway inside. The awning can even be adjusted to varying positions to tread the spectrum between enclosed and semi-enclosed, offering anything between an open bench to a dark zone for sleeping. Made from 100% recycled PET felt and durable wood, ‘Esc.’ was made responsibly and built to last.

With upcoming generations giving more credence to the needs and stressors of mental health, design-focused industries are following suit. ‘Esc.’ was developed in part to showcase the ways that furniture can work as a conduit for change within the field of design, creating solutions for today’s and tomorrow’s obstacles.

Designer: Toine Baert x Two One Design

This traffic cone uses a one-of-a-kind transformation to become a stackable stool. Watch the video!

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Inspiration for design hits when you least expect it. Could happen when you’re binge-watching your favorite show on Netflix and it could happen as you’re tirelessly flipping through old art books itching for an idea to hit. For Timo Riemann, a Germany-based design graduate, inspiration seemed to have hit while he was busy watching a traffic cone across the street from where his school lecture was taking place. Envisioning the blueprint for a traffic cone that could unfurl into a stool, Riemann developed Pylon, a convertible stool that doubles as a piece of interior artwork and also saves space in the living room.

At first glance, the Pylon appears as an ordinary traffic cone. Brass hinges line the circumference of the cone’s round base and hint at the traffic cone’s secondary form. By unlocking one of the brass clasps along the base’s outer edge, the traffic cone unfolds and inversely furls back together to form a stool, complete with four-pointed legs. Described as a “cross-section between art and design,” Riemann’s traffic cone stool has a certain industrial appeal – the ideal interior furniture piece for a warehouse turned art studio. Pylon was constructed from laminated fiberglass, fiberglass-reinforced polyamide, as well as a collection of molds that harden Pylon into its full shape. In addition to its fiberglass structure, the brass locks and hinges that line Pylon’s base each were made one-of-a-kind to streamline Pylon’s metamorphosis from traffic cone to office stool.

Initially thought of by Riemann as a last-minute idea for a class assignment, Pylon’s blueprint practically opened itself up to Riemann before he hit the workshop to begin the stool’s construction. Stackable and versatile in purpose and design, Pylon is an exciting piece of furniture for the design enthusiast in each of us.

Designer: Timo Riemann





By simply unlatching one of the cone’s metal clasps, Pylon then unfolds to inversely connect once more, turning it into a stool.

One-of-a-kind metal clasps and brass hinges were integrated into Pylon’s base to ensure a seamless transition.

The Pylon stool morphs from traffic cone to office stool simply by inverted its structure and flipping it upside down.

Pylon was constructed from laminated fiberglass, fiberglass-reinforced polyamide, and a series of molds.

An innovative wooden hinge easily folds this multifunctional bookshelf in half!

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Interior design relies on changing styles to keep things interesting. New trends and color schemes have a way of dictating the trajectory of new products. Then, there are interior design products that stand the test of time and changing trends. These are the pieces of furniture that move with us from apartment to apartment. Student designers Rasmus Palmgren and Hanna Höglund gave their own remix of the traditional bookshelf, designing a foldable bookshelf that consists of shelves, a cabinet, and a drawer.

Timeless pieces of furniture like bookshelves and armoires seem to be most functional when they’re stripped down and designed to accommodate their most essential use. At first, Palmgren’s and Höglund’s bookshelf appears as an ordinary, minimal bookshelf, but a closer look reveals the intricate cabinetry work that went into the ‘Fold Shelf’s’ design. The folding mechanisms that fill out Fold Shelf also allow the unit to shrink down to nearly half its size compared to when it’s fully opened and ready for use. The designers say that Fold Shelf was designed as a Swedish cabinetmaker’s, or journeyman’s piece, requiring the incorporation of a pull-out drawer, hinges, veneered surfaces, and joints.

In building Fold Shelf, Palmgren and Höglund hoped to create a piece of furniture for flexible living, allowing owners to bring the bookshelf with them as they move to different places. Fold Shelf is filled out with wooden hinges that comprise a folding system, allowing the shelf unit to be dismantled and reassembled without the use of tools or additional hardware. Each individual shelf is connected to the unit’s frame and forms an X via wooden beams that merge at a wooden hinge.

The shelf’s wooden hinge allows the beams to fold onto one another, shrinking the bookshelf down to its ladder frame, which could alternatively be used as a rack for hanging. However Fold Shelf is used, the thoughtful combination of minimal cabinetry work with an adaptive design gives Fold Shelf an air of modern sophistication, while not compromising its simple assembly.

Designers: Rasmus Palmgren and Hanna Höglund

Fold Shelf is outfitted with a wooden hinge system which gives it a foldable structure.

To use the shelf, the wooden beams connected to the shelf’s hinge need to be fixed apart.

In addition to the product’s foldable design, Fold Shelf features a cabinet and a pull-out drawer to double as bookends.

When fully opened, Fold Shelf is a minimal bookshelf with a Scandinavian design.

Top shelves made from wooden boards rest on top of the shelves’ hinges, locking into place with a peg-and-socket.

When disassembled, Fold Shelf shrinks down to nearly half its size.

This James Dyson Award-winning self-sanitizing door handle kills 99.8% bacteria

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Given the times that we are living in, I would much rather have a self-sanitizing handle than having to manually sanitize my handle – it can turn into an OCD spiral very quickly. Hong Kong-based students, Sum Ming Wong and Kin Pong Li are actually a step ahead on the matter and have designed a door handle that uses light to always keep itself sterilized. In 2020, this classifies as a smart object and an equivalent of someone who knows the importance of washing their hands.

The students were inspired by the SARS outbreak in the 2000s and figured that a self-sanitizing door handle is more effective than the chemical-based cleaning processes we are using right now. The handle is made of a glass tube with aluminum caps at each end and the entire handle is covered in a powdered photocatalytic coating made from a mineral called titanium dioxide. The bacteria is decomposed through a chemical reaction that is activated by UV light reacting with the thin coating on the glass tube. Powered by an internal generator, the handle converts kinetic energy from the opening/closing motion of the door into light energy and that is how the UV light is always doing its job. This germ-killing product actually destroyed 99.8% of the microbes during lab tests and that is more than what Thanos did with his infinity stones.

Other than being the hero of handles, it has a modern visual aesthetic and a sleek form. The backlight almost makes it look like a lava lamp! Imagine if it lit up in green or red to indicate whether the handle was safe to touch or not. The students were influenced by the number of people infected and killed during SARS and wanted to do something to change the picture of public health through innovative design. Given that public door handles are hotspots for bacteria, this could be a headstart in making safer infrastructure for a world that is better prepared to handle pandemics.

The self-sanitizing door handle was one of the winning entries for the James Dyson Awards 2019.

Designers: Sum Ming Wong and Kin Pong Li

This conceptual Nike controller will enable better real-time football strategies

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Life as we know it has completely moved online, everything we do now is digital and this transformation happened rather quickly. Working from home was a perk and now it is mandatory, universities that never closed during blizzards have turned into total online schools and even exercise classes are happening via Zoom. It is almost like we are all living like the Sims now and when this game ends, you best believe our house cleanliness is going to level up to 5000! The one thing we all miss that can’t be digitized is how nature physically feels – the wind in our hair, the sand on our toes and the football field’s grass in our face when we fall. PSA: football and soccer are the same, let’s not get into that match.

While everyone is online, one designer thought of how he can bring the tech world to football coaches and that is when he designed the conceptual Nike controller. Now it may look like your average controller but it is actually a tool for coaches and managers to analyze training sessions as well as matches in real-time. Think of it as playing a real game with real people where your controller gives you the data on how each team member is performing so you know exactly what is working and what needs improvement. Coaches are human too and they cannot keep their eyes on each of the 12 players for 100 minutes, so a controller like this is perfect – it maps out players in the stadium and summarises the data on the controller.

The design is similar to the controllers we recognize – minimal and ergonomic so it feels natural instantly. Now unlike a game, you cant actually control the players but this data is crucial for strategies, for picking substitutes in real-time and for optimizing the performance. It keeps the learning curve minimal and the guesswork mistakes low. The team will ultimately become consistent and emerge as better players with well-crafted game plans backed by data. I think this conceptual Nike controller for real players has scored its goal in bringing the digital and real worlds together for a better game.

Designer: Rohit Mudliyar

This article was sent to us using the ‘Submit A Design’ feature.

We encourage designers/students/studios to send in their projects to be featured on Yanko Design!

A foldable mini stove that fits in your hiking pants!

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Have you seen Tiny Kitchen videos? A student industrial designer, Elad Achi, took Tiny Kitchen’s stove up several notches and that is how Katipo was created. Katipo is a foldable outdoor gas stove that can fit in the palm of your hand. Imagine the weight and space that can be saved when you go camping or backpacking with Katipo instead of usual outdoor stoves.

Katipo got its name because its shape and form resembles that of a Katipo spider. It is an Australian redback spider that is small in size with long legs that bend at angles which inspired the stove’s own leg stand and tiny size. The Katipo is a stainless steel stove that folds into a portable size of 50 mm wide and 120 mm long, and when opened it is 180 mm in diameter. “Each leg has a cutting edge that stops its motion by a stopper pin and opens to the angle of 120° and thus produces an equal opening to them all perfectly” explains Elad Achi. Apart from the product proportions, even the colors of the stove were inspired by the spider’s red and black body. The stove’s red and black look comes from a ceramic-based color that is heat resistant.

It is the perfect size when you want to go on a long hike or camp in nature and have warm meals. The stove may be small but it is a powerful outdoor trip essential and something to keep you cozy under the stars.

Designer: Elad Achi

This article was sent to us using the ‘Submit A Design’ feature.

We encourage designers/students/studios to send in their projects to be featured on Yanko Design!