Yanko Design - Form Beyond Function

How Industrial Design Reinvented the Spork

Posted: 18 Apr 2018 10:52 AM PDT

Designed not only for utilitarian reasons but to also allow you to be an absolute foodie wherever you go, the Morsel was named for its ability to let you eat every last morsel of food kept in front of you. Designed in the spork format, the Morsel is made out of BPA free plastic, but what’s really unique is its rubber edge around the specially designed spoon that lets you virtually get every molecule of food off your plate, bowl, or from inside a jar.

The Morsel’s design is conducive to use both indoors and outdoors. Its unconventional, edgy shape looks playful and the colors stand out both in the kitchen as well as the rustics. Its unique shape allows it to work as a spoon, a spreading knife and even a spatula, getting into the hard-to-reach corners of cups, jars, and bags. The Morsel comes in two sizes, with the larger one giving you a substantial handle to hold onto as you eat, or even cook. The Morsel can take its fair share of temperature, allowing you to do everything from toss salads bacon strips on the griddle. Use the spoon for spreading and scooping, the fork for piercing, or the fork’s rugged edge for cutting through food. When you’re done, literally wipe your plate clean with the spoon’s spatula edge!

Designers: Alex Thomsen & Zac Rubenson

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Scrape every last bit of food, every single time. More food in your stomach, less cleaning, and less waste.

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A Speaker for the Fashion-Conscious

Posted: 18 Apr 2018 08:30 AM PDT

If you were to search ‘speaker’ into any design website, it would soon return a multitude of speaker designs, but CARABINER goes beyond being just another Bluetooth speaker.

Taking its inspiration heavily from conventional and often utilitarian carabiners, its most obvious and striking design feature is the thin tube which surrounds the speaker. This ‘carabiner’ allows the speaker to be easily hooked onto your bag or other belongings; by doing so it becomes more than a Bluetooth speaker, it becomes a fashion accessory.

Designed to resemble a speaker as little as possible, the front face features no perforation or fabric, yet CARABINER is still able to boast 360° sound. While the form was a very important factor for this product, the usability hasn’t been compromised; the small module where the carabiner secures is home to the power and volume controls. You’d be forgiving for thinking this was a fashion accessory as opposed to a Bluetooth speaker!

Designer: Hyunseok Kang

Glasses made from recycled phone-screens: Yay or Nay?

Posted: 18 Apr 2018 06:13 AM PDT

It’s a heart-sinking feeling when you pick your phone up from the floor to see a crack running right across the screen from one corner to another. You’re faced with two choices. Live with the cracked display, accepting its imperfections because nothing in life is truly perfect… or get the glass on top swapped for a brand new one. There isn’t much you can do with that broken piece of glass once it comes off your phone… that’s until now.

Pentatonic is converting disposed phone glasses (a large-scale yet less publicised waste problem) into literal glassware. Partnering with waste management firms that carefully sort through and separate the glass, Pentatonic melts them, and forms them into tumblers that are food-safe, dishwasher friendly, and let’s not forget, absolutely scratch resistant!

Kitchenware by GorillaGlass… has a nice ring to it.

Designer: Pentatonic

A Light, Inspired by Light

Posted: 18 Apr 2018 05:37 AM PDT

Lights are a fairly familiar sight on Yanko Design, but none of them can quite compare to the Lightning Lamp. The soft, rounded and simplistic form of the cloud combined with the angular, sharp and aggressive shape of the lightning bolt creates a striking design. The simplistic approach that designer Jiyoun Kim took to the design allows the lamp to become a subtle feature in any room.

Embodied within Lightning Lamp’s playful form is a more serious message that influenced this design. “Being struck by a thunder out of the blue sky” is an old Korean Phrase used to describe people confronting unexpected, catastrophic events. This lamp encompasses the message of overcoming unforeseen challenges throughout your lifetime by changing your outlook.

The combination of a unique design and a powerful message creates a visually stunning and meaningful lamp that would be a great addition to any room!

Designer: Jiyoun Kim

Wishlist: Assisted Cooking Concept Kitchens From Electrolux (Part 2)

Posted: 17 Apr 2018 11:17 PM PDT

Showcasing their creative bent with amazing concepts, Electrolux is out to woo you with their innovative Assisted Cooking Concept Kitchens at the EuroCucina 2018. You can view Part 1 here. In the words of Simon Bradford, “a range of explorative kitchen concepts that demonstrate assisted cooking to help people get the most from their kitchen experience,” are being showcased.

With moving times, home appliances are being integrated with IoT and are minimal in design. There is a shift in the role of materials as well and an increase in interaction between the chef and the product. As we witness various new ways that technology has entered our kitchens – in the form of Alexa or Google Home, it’s important to see how appliance makers adapt to the innovations.

Part 2 features the remaining four of the eight inspiring kitchen concepts.

Designer: Electrolux

The Electrolux IceCaddy makes and stores 4kgs of pure transparent ice cubes. The intuitive sensor detects when you are running low on ice and automatically make some more. Designed to be perfectly crystal clear chunks, the cubes of ice add a dash of sparkle to any drink.

The Electrolux AirGarden is a stylish and innovative ceramic hood. Its designed to keep the kitchen air fresh and doubles up as a handy storage unit. It also features a handy herb garden for you to pluck from, keeping ingredients near!

The Electrolux Clean Cut Knife and Board Washer is perfect for lazy chefs. The concept provides maximum hygiene and blends effortlessly into the existing work surface. What we love is the ease of operation and that you can clean something as intense as a chopping board and knife, in a jiffy.

The Electrolux FlexiBurner gas hob lets you place any size pan anywhere on the hob surface and the burner adapts the flame accordingly. What this means, is that you can use any-size pan and have optimal heat for them. Many dishes require a certain kind of utensil to cook in, and often we get restricted because of the hob configuration. The FlexiBurner removes this problem completely.

If you are presently in Milan, then do drop by EuroCucina 2018 and see these concepts in-person!

Tactile+Versatile: Wacom’s digital eraser is better than a stylus

Posted: 17 Apr 2018 05:30 PM PDT

Take any stylus you find, and it closely resembles a writing instrument. It’s never been anything visually more than a pen or a pencil. Yonghwan’s Wacom Normal Series concept brings diversity to that approach. The conceptual series come as a set comprising a stylus, that looks like the one we’re all too familiar with, and an eraser that isn’t mounted on the reverse end of the stylus, but is rather a separate entity, opening up the gates for a new product, interaction, experience, and language. The eraser, a thing of sheer beauty, is much more versatile than the stylus, coming with three ways to use it. Based on an amalgamation of different eraser shapes, the digital eraser (let’s call it that for now) comes with a slanted flat head, and a rounded backside, allowing you to use its tip for erasing sharp lines, the entire flat edge for wider sharp strokes, and the rounded part for a soft eraser effect. What’s more, they’re also pressure sensitive.

Truly mimicking an artist’s instruments, the stylus and digital eraser together open a wide number of possibilities, giving the artist more freedom to use the digital format as they would a traditional setup. The two instruments come together as a set, with a case that also doubles up as a stand for the stylus… partially because you’re not going to be using the stylus’ back end as an eraser, while the true reason being you’re probably going to want to play more with the eraser’s brilliant new experience!

Designer: Yonghwan Kim

Rietveld’s Beugel Chair gets a contemporary tribute

Posted: 17 Apr 2018 03:36 PM PDT

Probably the most innovative and avant-garde designer of his time, Rietveld’s furniture designs were ground-breaking both visually and from a production stand-point. Even 90 years later, his chairs look as fascinating as they did back in the 20s and 30s. Ninety-one years after Rietveld’s Beugelstoel chair was designed (and produced in 1930), Cassina pays tribute to the chair with a modified version that makes the chair a slight bit sleeker and lighter by using 15mm tubing instead of the original 18mm. It also boasts of “a more ergonomically correct line, conferred by the use of state-of-the-art 3D technology”. Made from two bent pipe structures with a simple molded plywood seat joining them, the Beugel Chair of 2018 pays homage to a designer whose vision was truly a century ahead (in his 130th birth year), and a chair that was arguably the first to use thin, bent metal as a structural base.

Designer: Gerrit Thomas Rietveld (Redesign by Cassina)

HTC’s vision for AR is our most sensible one yet

Posted: 17 Apr 2018 01:19 PM PDT

Augmenting reality can be tricky. So far we’ve worked with screens, trying to layer objects over the world as we perceive it, and that’s incredibly challenging because A. transparent screens haven’t really become mainstream (or cheap) yet, and B. real-time motion tracking is a computer’s worst nightmare and one of its biggest hurdles. While our vision of AR has been limited to display-screens and reflections, HTC and Swift Creatives may have paved an easier way for layering objects onto our world in a way that is easy, and more importantly, useful. Their answer? projectors.

A projector, by its definition, layers a projection on an object, so working with a projector that can simply project onto an object makes more sense than having a transparent display in front of your eyes that creates objects that seem believable, but can’t keep up with your head’s randomized movements. However, with HTC’s AR Lamp, it’s a lot like projection mapping. The lamp maps relevant materials and objects onto the world in front of you. Take for instance working at a kitchen counter-top. The AR Lamp works a lot like IKEA’s parchment paper, giving you bespoke guides and information you may need. It actively tracks your progress, updating as you go. (I imagine the AR Lamp could be an absolute gem of a device in training doctors for operations too)

Yes, while a lamp’s projection may not necessarily be as 3D as, say, something you would view from a Hololens, it’s much more useful, and less intrusive too. The fact that it isn’t body-mounted or worn, gives it a lot of freedom to be state-of-the-art and useful, rather than amateurish and wearable. The lamp allows for collaboration and communication with other people remotely through a live feed, and even comes with smart-voice recognition, letting you talk to AR-projecting device (probably a first of its kind… most AR devices are computers with controllers, and not smart-gadgets.) Its clean, Nordic design language allows it to fit seamlessly into all homes, changing lives and upgrading the meaning of the smart-home forever… and yes, it works as a lamp too.

Designer: Swift Creatives for HTC