Yanko Design - Form Beyond Function

Take the Guesswork Out of Saving Water

Posted: 06 Mar 2018 09:51 AM PST

It’s easy to lose track of time when you’re enjoying a hot shower but that also means precious water goes down the drain, literally and figuratively. The Drop water tap takes the guesswork out of saving water. To help you stay aware of your time in the shower and your own personal consumption by using a representation of time that’s familiar to most people: sand!

Simply turn the hourglass on the device and set your desired temperature. While it won’t shut the water off on you, it does provide a visual reminder to help heighten awareness. Drop also syncs wirelessly with an app on your phone that displays your overall consumption with easy-to-understand graphics and recommendations for improving your water usage.

Designer: Pascal Grangier

Asia Design Prize: Free for Design Students!

Posted: 06 Mar 2018 06:56 AM PST

Awards are expensive ordeals. I remember trying to push my work out as a design student and being absolutely shocked at the amount I was required to pay to just get my work into the preliminary judging round. Most students (and a few professional studios and brands too) shy away from award programmes because of the expenditure required to just register your work, but that expense is justified because most award programs have A. Large jury panels of design elite, B. Logistics and inventory managing expenses for designs where prints and product samples are sent over for judging, and C. The award ceremony which needless to say, is a monumental undertaking, involving venue bookings, decor, light, sound, personnel, logistics, travel, hospitality, etc. All these costs get covered by contestants who pay fees for registering their designs for the various judging rounds.

So the question begs to be asked… What if you stripped a design competition of everything unnecessary? A minimalist awards program, if you will. That’s what the Asia Design Prize was built to be. Online judging, an online exhibition, and digital certificates… the Asia Design Prize is probably the first cloud-based Design Award! Barring the one tangible trophy, the Asia Design Prize retains everything that’s absolutely necessary i.e., the judging, the award, and the showcase. As a result, the Asia Design Prize is the most student-friendly design award programme, with minimal incurred expenses. As a result, the awards program is absolutely free for students, with a zero entry fee for all participants, and a small Finalist Judging Fee for Design Professionals and Companies who clear the first round.

The ADP hosts a permanent online exhibition for all its winners, with works being featured in design magazines and blogs world over. Winners get trophies along with a certificate and the rights to use the ADP logo on their work, while the Grand, Gold, and Silver winners get cash prizes and framed plaques.

The Asia Design Prize is a brilliant way to get your work noticed as well as validated. Free for students, it’s your chance to get a critical evaluation of your work without breaking the bank, and if you do win an award, an award logo is a great addition to your résumé! People pay much closer attention to projects that win awards or gain accolades, and there’s a dramatic increase in your chances of getting featured on various portals across the world!

Head to the Asia Design Prize website to know more! They’ve just announced their 2017-18 winners. You can find our favorites below!

Oren Geva’s 2C3D camera for the blind is a beautiful, innovative product that takes 3D images, allowing the visually impaired to capture, record, and more importantly, feel their photographs!

The ORBIKE Vending Machine by LiuYeQuan and LiYanrong is sure to catch your eye even if you don’t ride bicycles! The donut-shaped machine rests half above and half below the surface, with rotating pods that dispense bikes and biking accessories to users/members, while also displaying its wares in a beautiful, eye-catching, and dynamic format. Loving it!

The Revolve Wheel took the internet absolutely by storm and is widely known as a design that has “reinvented the wheel”. Andrea Mocellin’s wheel redesign allows your traditional wheel to fold up into something 1/6th its original size, opening up a wide variety of possibilities, including making folding bikes and wheelchairs much more compact than before!

A personal favorite and also the winner of Evolo’s Skyscraper Competition, the New York Horizon by Yitan Sun & Jianshi Wu has a very Inception-ish way of making Central Park bigger, and removing those ugly skyscrapers from around it. Line the entire park with mirrors and you’ve got an infinity park that pushes the skyscrapers to a distance, making your skyline look cleaner, and the park look endless! Conceptual, for obvious reasons, the NY Horizon as an idea seems quite interesting and borderline sci-fi! I imagine it would confuse the hell out of the birds though.

Fan Shizhong’s Life Slide is a no-brainer award winner, honestly. Also bagging an A’ Design Award, James Dyson Award, and an iF Design Award, the Life Slide makes evacuations much easier to execute, by allowing people stuck at high altitudes to slide away from disaster. A much more feasible and safer option than an airlift, the Life Slide is MUCH faster than a ladder, which means the ability to save more people in less time!

Travel Instagrammers are Going to Freak Out About this Wearable

Posted: 06 Mar 2018 12:30 AM PST

While Snapchat is at it again with a new round of picture-snapping sunglasses (stop trying to make Spectacles happen, it’s never going to happen!), we’re really feeling the direction that FITT360 is going. Rather than put on an uncomfortable set of specs that nobody wants to wear (why do you think people have been flocking to lasik?), FITT360 is a neckband wearable that rests comfortably on the shoulders to provide not only forward facing photography but a panoramic view of the world around the wearer!

The first of its kind, it captures the entire 360° so you can truly relive the moment you’re in. Equipped with Bluetooth and SNS, you can live stream your experiences or save up to 90 minutes of recording time and export it in 360 or 2k photo/video later. Better yet, you can create and share your own stunning VR experiences so others can walk in your footsteps.

Designer: Junse Kim of LINKFLOW

Creative Crustacean Contraptions!

Posted: 05 Mar 2018 04:00 PM PST

There are a handful of companies that make products playful, exciting, and emotive. Kikkerland is easily one of them. It has an inventive style, and its products are designed to be lovable!

Take for instance the Crab. Most people look at Swiss Knives and see multi-tools, but not Kikkerland! The Crab puts a visual twist on the multi-tool, transforming it entirely into a crustacean in a way that seems almost natural, and something you’d expect from a child’s mind.

The Crab comes with a beechwood body and 6 multitools, comprising a pair of scissors, a bottle opener, a 3/16 flat head screwdriver, a can opener, a mini knife, and a rope saw. Fold them up to make the multi-tool look compact, like a meditating crab. The minute you need a helping hand (or claw), unfold the crab’s many arms and it’ll show you just how useful it is!

Designer: Scratch Design for Kikkerland

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A legacy updated!

Posted: 05 Mar 2018 02:09 PM PST

Rolls-Royce is more brand than car. Yes, they make some stunning automobiles (sometimes painted with real diamonds), but they’re selling you the idea of luxury rather than a product). The company is known for its large, unassuming cars, with their perfect paint-jobs, stellar interiors, and the Spirit of Ecstacy, but what if they were also known for their automotive design??

Ivan Venkov thinks RR needs an aesthetic refresh. Their work is remarkable but is far from contemporary, he says. The conceptual RR Coupé builds on the design of the Silver Cloud, but gives the entire automobile a series of visual tweaks that make the car look like Rolls-Royce 2.0. Take for starters the headlamps, that opt for the angular, aggressive approach as opposed to Rolls-Royce’s standard horizontal headlamp. All the curves are indicative of flowiness, that deviate from the blockish designs of Rolls-Royce. The result is a car that may be body-heavy, but looks aerodynamic thanks to the use of flowing lines (that side profile steals my heart!).

The rims of the concept car get a chariot-like appearance, saying luxury without literally having to, and my personal favorite is the little lady on the front. The Spirit of Ecstacy gets her avatar updated too. While the older statuette was probably the most flowy/organic thing on the entire car, with the billowing clothes, the new Spirit is definitely more edgy and sculptural, looking modern/contemporary, rather than something you’d see in a museum.

Every inch of the RR Coupé is redesigned, from its remarkable continuous taillight to the angular headlamps, to the Spirit of Ecstacy. What’s remarkable is that even though so much has changed, the Rolls-Royce flavor isn’t lost. If nothing, it’s enhanced, and holds the ability to capture more hearts, don’t you think??

Designer: Ivan Venkov

A cup of jet-engine brewed coffee!

Posted: 05 Mar 2018 12:00 PM PST

Coffee and jet-propellers are both synonymous with energy and vigor. Apparently, that’s enough to combine the two into a product that looks as powerful and strong as the brew it produces!

The Aviatore Veloce is a quarter-scaled recreation of a jet engine… that also makes espresso! Slide open the top, place your coffee grounds and water in their respective areas and power the machine and the Aviatore Veloce uses its high-pressure brewing system to prepare single servings of espresso (or even tea if you swap the coffee grounds for tea leaves).

The Aviatore Veloce is even made from aerospace-grade aluminum alloy, stainless steel and aluminum bronze to give it its authentic feel. Limited to just a 100 pieces, I imagine the Avaitore Veloce is perfect for boardrooms at Boeing and Airbus… of for someone who really needs a jet-engine coffee maker to ‘turbocharge’ their morning! If you’re into this sort of thing, boy do we have the perfect chandelier for you!

Designer: Superveloce