Yanko Design - Form Beyond Function

The Electricity Meter got a Makeover

Posted: 29 Dec 2017 10:39 AM PST

If you’re familiar at all with electricity meters, it’s likely because you saw this big, clunky contraption attached to your house and hated the way it looked! Here is one that’s a little less obtrusive to your exterior aesthetic and a lot easier for professionals to access. It’s called SM101 and it’s a single-phase residential electric meter that’s highly precise and programmable with surge protection and the ability to independently transmit metered information to the energy company and calculate costs.

The front of the meter is covered with transparent plastic panels. They make terminals and wires easily visible and protect the device from dishonest energy users: changing anything inside is impossible without breaking seals. This equates to guaranteed protection against vandals.

Compact and discrete, the device can be attached to a mounting rail or bolted using the holes and the eyelet. Offered in two color variants: classic black and cheerful light green – it is capable of blending in with your other exterior elements and hints at its environmental friendliness. Despite having minimal dimensions, the meter is equipped with a large screen and easy to understand display graphics that shows big, easy-to-read digits. Users can easily see how many kilowatts they spent in a month.

Designer: Art Lebedev

A Bicycle Born in the Sky

Posted: 29 Dec 2017 09:30 AM PST

This stunning roadster bike looks to the sky for avian inspiration! It’s called the Wing Cycle and its frame veers from the traditional diamond shape, instead adopting the form of a bird wing structure. This includes a mesmerizing cable wire design that supports the seat. Furthermore, the cable rope system can be adjusted to change the position of the seat for different riding modes. Clad in a beautiful material blend of chrome, leather and wood, the result is skeletal yet sleek and entirely different than anything out there.

Designer: Lin Jian Ming

More than ‘Just another lamp’

Posted: 29 Dec 2017 07:01 AM PST

My professor in design college told me something that really resonates with me even today. You don’t decide when to get an idea. The idea decides when to get to you. The mark of a creative person is their ability to catch the ideas that come to them. The JAL (Just Another Lamp) was born from that very moment when a fleeting idea was caught by a designer as he doodled his way through a meeting. Obviously, the meeting then went off-topic, and the JAL was refined and developed into what it became today!

Designed to look like an hourglass, but one filled with light, rather than sand, the JAL is rather appropriately named because its conception wasn’t intentional. It’s beautiful no doubt, but its inspiration seems so casual, it’s almost comedic that something this aesthetic developed from it.

Designed to look like a martini-esque hourglass with an ambient lightbulb in it, the JAL’s beauty arises from its simplicity and its ability to be whatever you want it to be. The glass comprises two conical containers in the hourglass shape, that can be used to store anything, making the lamp a rather versatile piece of decor (rather than ‘just another lamp’!). The bulb can be oriented either way, allowing you to use the lamp in any orientation that you’d like. The JAL comes in multiple sizes and even colors and finishes. The small lamp is ideal for shelves and tiny side-tables (or even around greenery), while the larger one can be used as a stand of sorts or even as a part of the decor should you go for the frosted JAL or the tinted Prussian blue (my personal favorite remains the JAL with the Bonsai cactus underneath it).

Each hourglass component of the JAL is handblown by renowned glass blower Ferran Collado in Barcelona. It comes with a slight notch in its rim to allow the lamp’s cable to slide through. The light itself is an LED bulb, so it won’t ever heat up, making the JAL an ideal stand for your pencils, plants, or bits and bobs. You even get to choose the color of electrical cord you want with the JAL.

Designed to be simple and pure, but also infinitely versatile, the JAL can be any type of lamp you want it to be. It’s the sheer number of possibilities with the JAL that make it more than ‘Just Another Lamp’. A rather marvelous thing to come out of a doodle, I’d say!

Designer: MOS Design

Click here to Buy Now: $118.00

Click here to Buy Now: $118.00

Med Storage Made Easy

Posted: 29 Dec 2017 02:00 AM PST

You might think that all medication is as a simple as taking a pill every morning, but many ailments or conditions require a regimented prescription process to control symptoms or even keep people alive. For them, the Smart Medical Box makes it easy and safe to store all their sensitive medications.

It features two dedicated compartments: one for storing items at room temperature and the other for medicines that require refrigeration. It syncs with the users smartphone as well as the patient’s medical office to monitor supplies. Medical professionals or nurse practitioners can receive direct notifications when it’s time to refill prescriptions or if a patient seems to be forgetting to take their meds. Easily locked directly from the app, it’s also childproof and safe. Compact enough to carry when you’re traveling, it’s the most convenient and reliable way to store and transport time-sensitive medication yet.

Designers: Ye Jin Won & Su Jin Yun

A car built with care

Posted: 28 Dec 2017 09:00 PM PST

If you talk with a couple raising a newborn, they’ll tell you that casual transport and journeys are a lot harder than they ever anticipated. There are a lot of nuances that only then become clear. With the future fast approaching, Anand Asinkar believes that the ownership model of vehicles will become obsolete in the future, meaning mobility will be used as a service.

In the hope of accommodating a 3-member family, Anand Asinkar has developed CARe – a retrofit vehicle that compromises the togetherness, care & separation at the same time. Complete with a removable baby stroller, CARe can be manipulated to facilitate from newborns to children aged 5. The vehicle itself has a somewhat elegant tone across the colors and materials chosen, revealing a premium service for the family that oozes quality and assurance.

Filled with sensors and some neat technology (similar to that of a Segway) the handsfree baby stroller provides a more comfortable transition from automotive vehicle to baby stroller in a seamless fashion. There is no doubt the CMF choices and tire design of the stroller are inextricably linked to the primary vehicle, and it neatly ties together but you can’t help but feel you’ll want to keep that baby stroller after the service. Reflecting the needs of the newborn and parents, CARe is a fun look into the future of autonomous service vehicles and one with a twist rarely looked into – potentially this may open the minds of other concept designers to come.

Designer: Anand Asinkar

Training in air-traffic-control!

Posted: 28 Dec 2017 05:00 PM PST

The Nintendo Wii changed gaming. While everyone is still married to the joypad, the Wii kicked off a movement that made game control more natural more intuitive. It spawned the Kinect and eventually was poised to become the way we interacted with VR. It’s high time that natural sense of control got extended to drones too. Controlling a complex flying piece of electronics with a joypad is just about as counterintuitive as typing on the iPod’s click wheel.

The KD Aura Interactive Gesture Drone does exactly what you think it does. It ditches the remote for gesture control. The drone comes with a glove that tracks your hand movements and even gestures that help send controls to the drone. Feeling almost like telekinesis (Jedi mind-tricks?), the glove offers control so smooth and intuitive, it’s far easier to use than a remote. Allowing you to simply ‘push and pull’ your drone in midair and waving for altitude changes or performing gestures to have the drone doing barrel rolls and flips, the KD Aura promises to give you more than the joy of drone flight. It gives you the joy of actually “controlling” the drone!

Designer: KD Interactive

BUY NOW

BUY NOW

Virtual reality, the educational tool

Posted: 28 Dec 2017 03:00 PM PST

Yes, virtual reality is a rather wonderful piece of technology that lets you immerse yourself in digital surroundings, but it’s important to remember that it’s also a wonderful window into experiencing things we can’t. Whether it’s used for tourism or as an empathy machine, VR has a massive role to play in education, by allowing people to use their most powerful sense to experience something. Beyond VR aims at taking that approach by letting children use VR as not just an entertainment device, but almost like an experiential encyclopedia.

Made for children from ages 4 to 12, the Beyond VR is a headset and camera kit that allows kids to interact with and socialize with children across the world, allowing them to experience life across different countries and cultures. Beyond VR is designed to be a social tool that revolutionizes social networking, taking the traditional keyboard an UI away from the experience and allowing people to truly live in each other’s shoes.

The Beyond VR is a winner of the Red Dot Design Concept Award for the year 2017.

Designer: Daizo Industrial Design