Every Sodastream—every machine, every tank, every flavor pack, and every bottle—comes with a warning: "CARBONATE WATER ONLY." There's a reason for that, as even a cursory YouTube search shows: try to, say, turn wine into sparkling wine at home, and you're looking at a pretty epic fail. Sugars and alcohols in other drinks react differently—and more spectacularly—to being blasted with CO2 than just water. Try to use a Sodastream to carbonate some Hawaiian Punch and you'll spend the rest of the day mopping your ceiling.
But that's about to change. Sodastream, the Israeli maker of sparkling water devices, has just unveiled the Mix, a new, high-end carbonation machine. Designed by Yves Béhar's Fuseproject, the Mix connects to the Internet and can carbonate pretty much any beverage. Debuting at Milan Design Week this month, Sodastream is marketing the Mix to "foodies, trendsetters, and mixologists," but it can be used to do everything from making your own sparkling wine to recarbonating a flat bottle of soda.
And it looks good, to boot. With a splash of red and a body made out of brushed black metal, the Mix is designed to look as at home at a bar as it is next to a high-end espresso machine. An integrated touch screen lets you seamlessly swipe between different types of liquid, denoted with enticing images, from juice to alcohol. "I think at a party, any party, it's going to be a conversation starter," Béhar says in an interview.
Here's how it works. The Sodastream Mix accesses a database in the cloud, so it knows not just how much CO2 is optimal for any liquid, but how slowly or quickly it should be blasted into the bottle to carbonate it perfectly. So while another Sodastream model might go off like a packet of Mentos dropped into a soda bottle if you tried to carbonate anything besides water, the Mix will precisely squirt carbon dioxide into the bottle until it's carbonated perfectly. All it needs is to know what's in the bottle.
To do that, the built-in touch screen allows you to select from your favorite carbonation recipes with a swipe and a tap. The Mix also comes with a companion app, which runs on iOS and Android and lets you browse recipes in the cloud, and push them to your Mix. Sodastream says that this database will be consistently updated with new recipes, many of which the company will pull from the community. So if you'd like to make your own Yoo-hoo at home, the Sodastream Mix could well accommodate you.
According to Yaron Kopel, Sodastream's chief product innovation and design officer, the Mix started as Sodastream's attempt to expand beyond carbonating water, but it soon became a whole new kind of product. "People try to carbonate everything, but the Sodastream only does water, so we needed to reinvent it," he tells me by phone. "We decided if we were going to go that distance, we also needed to make something that was really enjoyable to use: a Sodastream for the 21st-century Internet-of-Things."
The Sodastream Mix will be on sale later this year. The price is not available yet.
In the world of art, architecture, and design, the golden ratio
has earned a tremendous reputation. Greats like Le Corbusier and Salvador Dalí have used the number in their work. The Parthenon, the Pyramids at Giza, the paintings of Michelangelo, the Mona Lisa, even the Apple logo are all said to incorporate it.
It's bullshit. The golden ratio's aesthetic bona fides are an urban legend, a myth, a design unicorn. Many designers don't use it, and if they do, they vastly discount its importance. There's also no science to really back it up. Those who believe the golden ratio is the hidden math behind beauty are falling for a 150-year-old scam.
First described in Euclid's Elements 2,300 years ago, the established definition is this: two objects are in the golden ratio if their ratio is the same as the ratio of their sum to the larger of the two quantities. The value this works out to is usually written as 1.6180. The most famous application of the golden ratio is the so-called golden rectangle, which can be split into a perfect square, and a smaller rectangle that has the same aspect ratio as the rectangle it was cut away from. You can apply this theory to a larger number of objects by similarly splitting them down.
In plain English: if you have two objects (or a single object that can be split into two objects, like the golden rectangle), and if, after you do the math above, you get the number 1.6180, it's usually accepted that those two objects fall within the golden ratio. Except there's a problem. When you do the math, the golden ratio doesn't come out to 1.6180. It comes out to 1.6180339887... And the decimal points go on forever.
"Strictly speaking, it's impossible for anything in the real-world to fall into the golden ratio, because it's an irrational number," says Keith Devlin, a professor of mathematics at Stanford University. You can get close with more standard aspect ratios. The iPad's 3:2 display, or the 16:9 display on your HDTV all "float around it," Devlin says. But the golden ratio is like pi. Just as it's impossible to find a perfect circle in the real world, the golden ratio cannot strictly be applied to any real world object. It's always going to be a little off.
It's pedantic, sure. Isn't 1.6180 close enough? Yes, it probably would be, if there were anything to scientifically support the notion that the golden ratio had any bearing on why we find certain objects like the Parthenon or the Mona Lisa aesthetically pleasing.
But there isn't. Devlin says the idea that the golden ratio has any relationship to aesthetics at all comes primarily from two people, one of whom was misquoted, and the other of whom was just making shit up.
The first guy was Luca Pacioli, a Franciscan friar who wrote a book called De Divina Proportione back in 1509, which was named after the golden ratio. Weirdly, in his book, Pacioli didn't argue for a golden ratio-based theory of aesthetics as it should be applied to art, architecture, and design: he instead espoused the Vitruvian system of rational proportions, after the first-century Roman architect, Vitruvius. The golden ratio view was misattributed to Pacioli in 1799, according to Mario Livio, the guy who literally wrote the book on the golden ratio. But Pacioli was close friends with Leonardo da Vinci, whose works enjoyed a huge resurgence in popularity in the 19th century. Since Da Vinci illustrated De Divina Proportione, it was soon being said that Da Vinci himself used the golden ratio as the secret math behind his exquisitely beautiful paintings.
One guy who believed this was Adolf Zeising. "He's the guy you really want to burn at the stake for the reputation of the golden ratio," Devlin laughs. Zeising was a German psychologist who argued that the golden ratio was a universal law that described"beauty and completeness in the realms of both nature and art... which permeates, as a paramount spiritual ideal, all structures, forms and proportions, whether cosmic or individual, organic or inorganic, acoustic or optical."
He was a long-winded guy. The only problem with Zeising was he saw patterns where none exist. For example, Zeising argued that the golden ratio could be applied to the human body by taking the height from a person's navel to his toes, then dividing it by the person's total height. These are just arbitrary body parts, crammed into a formula, Devlin says: "When measuring anything as complex as the human body, it's easy to come up with examples of ratios that are very near to 1.6."
But it didn't matter if it was made up or not. Zeising's theories became extremely popular, "the 19th-century equivalent of the Mozart Effect," according to Devlin, referring to the belief that listening to classical music improves your intelligence. And it never really went away. In the 20th century, the famous Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier based his Modulor system of anthropometric proportions on the golden ratio. Dalí painted his masterpiece The Sacrament of the Last Supper on a canvas shaped like a golden rectangle. Meanwhile, art historians started combing back through the great designs of history, trying to retroactively apply the golden ratio to Stonehenge, Rembrandt, the Chatres Cathedral, and Seurat. The link between the golden ratio and beauty has been a canard of the world of art, architecture, and design ever since.
In the real world, people don't necessarily prefer the golden ratio.
Devlin tells me that, as part of an ongoing, unpublished exercise at Stanford, he has worked with the university's psychology department to ask hundreds of students over the years what their favorite rectangle is. He shows the students collections of rectangles, then asks them pick out their favorite one. If there were any truth behind the idea that the golden ratio is key to beautiful aesthetics, the students would pick out the rectangle closest to a golden rectangle. But they don't. They pick seemingly at random. And if you ask them to repeat the exercise, they pick different rectangles. "It's a very useful way to show new psychology students the complexity of human perception," Devlin says. And it doesn't show that the golden ratio is more aesthetically pleasing to people at all.
Devlin's experiments aren't the only ones to show people don't prefer the golden ratio. A study from the Haas School of Business at Berkeley found that, on average, consumers prefer rectangles that are in the range of 1.414 and 1.732. The range contains the golden rectangle, but its exact dimensions are not the clear favorite.
The designers we spoke to about the golden ratio don't actually find it to be very useful, anyway.
Richard Meier, the legendary architect behind the Getty Center and the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, admits that when he first started his career, he had an architect's triangle made that matched the golden ratio, but he had never once designed his buildings keeping the golden ratio in mind. "There are so many other numbers and formulas that are more important when designing a building," he tells me by phone, referring to formulas that can calculate the maximum size certain spaces can be, or ones that can determine structural load.
Alisa Andrasek, the designer behind Biothing, an online repository of computational designs, agrees. "In my own work, I can't ever recall using the golden ratio," Andrasek writes in an email. "I can imagine embedding the golden ratio into different systems as additional 'spice,' but I can hardly imagine it driving the whole design as it did historically... it is way too simplistic."
Giorgia Lupi of Accurat, the Italian design and innovation firm, says that, at best, the golden ratio is as important to designers as any other compositional rule, such as the rule of thirds: maybe a fine rule-of-thumb, but one that good designers will feel free to reject. "I don't really know, in practice, how many designers deliberately employ the golden ratio," she writes. "I personally have never worked with it our used it in my projects."
Of the designers we spoke to, industrial designer Yves Béhar of Fuseproject is perhaps kindest to the golden ratio. "I sometimes look at the golden ratio as I observe proportions of the products and graphics we create, but it's more informational than dogmatic," he tells me. Even then, he never sets out to design something with the golden ratio in mind. "It's important as a tool, but not a rule."
Even designers who are also mathematicians are skeptical of the golden ratio's use in design. Edmund Harriss is a clinical assistant professor in the University of Arkansas' mathematics department who uses many formulas to help generate new works of art. But Harriss says that the golden ratio is, at best, just one of many tools at a mathematically inclined designer's fingertips. "It is a simple number in many ways, and as a result it does turn up in a wide variety of places..." Harriss tells me by email. "[But] it is certainly not the universal formula behind aesthetic beauty."
The Sacrament of the Last Supper, 1955, Salvador Dali
If the golden ratio's aesthetic merit is so flimsy, then why does the myth persist?
Devlin says it's simple. "We're creatures who are genetically programmed to see patterns and to seek meaning," he says. It's not in our DNA to be comfortable with arbitrary things like aesthetics, so we try to back them up with our often limited grasp of math. But most people don't really understand math, or how even a simple formula like the golden ratio applies to complex system, so we can't error-check ourselves. "People think they see the golden ratio around them, in the natural world and the objects they love, but they can't actually substantiate it," Devlin tells me. "They are victims to their natural desire to find meaning in the pattern of the universe, without the math skills to tell them that the patterns they think they see are illusory." If you see the golden ratio in your favorite designs, you're probably seeing things.
Does driving in a car already make you want to horf? Fear the rise of the autonomous, self-driving car. According to research at the University of Michigan's Transportation Research Institute, self-driving cars will make more people car sick than ever before.
This calls into question much of the design thinking around self-driving cars, and nip the idea of them becoming the office of the 21st Century in the bud. U. Mich researchers Michael Sivak and Brandson Shoettle asked more than 3,200 adults in the U.S, India, China, Japan, Great Britain, and Australia what they would spend their free time doing if they had a self-driving car. More than a third of Americans said they'd either be reading, texting, watching movies, playing games, or working, and those numbers are similar or greater internationally.
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Designers, drawing on these same insights, have reacted accordingly. Automakers such as Mercedes, and design firms like RInspeed have envisioned cars where the front seats turn to face the back seats, creating a space for socializing. Ideo took this idea to its logical extreme and just put a conference room on wheels. But, Sivak and Schoettle says that self-driving cars shouldn't have seats that swivel to face each other, if they don't want their passengers to start blowing chunks.
Why would this be a problem? Well, if you're prone to getting car sick, you know that looking at screens, reading, or not facing forward can seriously exacerbate the onset of nausea, compared to just staring ahead. It all has to do with the brain's inability to anticipate the direction of motion that will be coming at it. That's usually only an issue for passengers, but if you've got a self-driving car, even the nominal "driver" can have his head in a book or a screen the whole ride.
Mercedes
"Motion sickness is expected to be more of an issue in self-driving vehicles than in conventional vehicles," Sivak said. "The reason is that the three main factors contributing to motion sickness—conflict between vestibular (balance) and visual inputs, inability to anticipate the direction of motion and lack of control over the direction of motion—are elevated in self-driving vehicles.
Rinspeed
Ultimately, Sivak and Schoettle recommend a few design tweaks to self-driving vehicles to lessen the chance of passengers getting car sick. In addition to facing forward, autonomous vehicles should have larger windows than regular cars, to give people as much peripheral awareness of the outside of the car as possible. They should also mount transparent video and work displays that require passengers to face forward.
Located on Rivington Street on Manhattan's Lower East Side, Streit's Matzo Factory has been pumping out as much as 900 pounds of matzo an hour to feed New York's Jewish community for almost a century. After 90 years, though, Streit's is closing-up shop, shutting down its Manhattan factory and moving off the island, probably to New Jersey. It's just another working-class landmark, disappearing beneath Manhattan's insane push toward extreme gentrification.
A new series by photographer James O. Holmes documents Streit's last days. Holmes first came to New York in 1984, a time in which, he says, Manhattan was still "filled with old cramped neighborhoods and kooky factories and workspaces." During his years in the city, Holmes says, he grew especially fond of Streit's, where you could see, right through the first-floor window, the matzo being cooked, and where, if you were lucky, a yarmulke-wearing Streit's baker might break off a still-warm piece of matzo and hand it to you through the window with a wink.
1st Floor Cutter
When Holmes found out that Streit's was closing down its loopy factory to build something saner and more cost-efficient in New Jersey, he approached the managers to take some photos, documenting its last days. In many ways, Holmes was perfectly suited to the task. His last series was The Booth, where he documented the last days of the manned projection booth as it was slowly but surely killed by digital.
Although the mood of Holmes's photos is somber—a reflection of the photographer's own feelings about the factory leaving Manhattan—Streit's Matzo Factory is bright, sunny, and slightly surreal—kind of like a Jewish Willy Wonka's. "It's a crazy Rube Goldberg machine in there," laughs Holmes. Spread across four buildings and six floors, a maze of pneumatic tubes zip around everywhere, while strange conveyor belts carry flour and matzo meal disappear through holes in the ceiling, or the floor. Because of this unusual layout, Holmes spent five weeks shooting his series. "I was still discovering new things on my last day of shooting," he remembers.
Farfel Holding Tank
This unusual layout is a large part of the reason Streit's is moving out of Manhattan. Along with its weird array of fantastic matzo-making machines—some of which are more than 80 years old, and which have been kept patched together with a "Frankenstein-like" array of parts, according to Holmes—the Streit's factory, like Wonka's, is simply not very efficient. Likewise, Streit's two 75-foot ovens, which can bake 900 pounds of matzo an hour, aren't burning as hot as they used to, and the factory is even missing obvious features like loading docks. By selling the four buildings the Streit's factory is located in, Streit's can afford to open a whole new, top-of-the-line matzo-making factory somewhere else, like New Jersey.
That's good news for Streit's, but bad news for Manhattan's diversity (and charm). "There's just so few places you can see factory workers and machines in Manhattan anymore," Holmes complains. "That's very sad to me. New York is becoming a less varied, and more homogenous environment. The diversity is going away. It used to be a melting pot. Now it's an island of banks and residential high rises." Streit's may survive, Holmes says, but a part of New York will not, because this wonderful factory, its crazy armada of machines, and its unique, 90-year influence on Manhattan's culture will be irrevocably lost.
You can see more of Holmes's photography work here.
Adidas has formally launched what it calls the lightest, fastest soccer cleats ever, the adizero 99g. And there's a reason these red and gold cleats look like they're molten from atmospheric re-entry: their exceptional lightness was inspired by NASA technology.
A "concept car" shoe from Adidas's Innovation Lab, the adizero 99g has been in the works for the past two years, and has an almost numerological fetish with the number '9', which is what strikers are referred to in the soccer world, positionally. It's only available in 299 limited edition pairs, each of which is a men's size 9. Why only a size 9? Probably because it's the only size that would come in at an eponymous 99 grams. "It's not a mainstream cleat for everyone," notes Adidas representative Caitlin Albaugh.
The adizero 99g first started development four years ago, during which time Adidas became interested in a space-age material used by NASA. Ultimately, it was rejected for use in a soccer cleat. Over the next four years, Adidas tested hundreds of materials for something similar, eventually settling upon a polyester mesh, covered in a 1mm polyamide nylon protective layer, and reinforced by a semi-rigid skeleton. The result is a cleat that weighs roughly half of what a normal soccer shoe does.
Adidas says that the adizero 99g has been rigorously tested for tear strength and abrasions by world famous soccer players like Real Madrid striker Karim Benzema and Bayern Munich defender David Alaba.
"Player feedback is at the heart of everything we do in soccer, and the reduction of weight is important to players as weight is a powerful driver for speed," say Adidas product manager Hazim Kulak in the adizero 99g press release. "This reduction in weight assists players in performing to the highest level and continues Adidas's commitment to being on the cutting edge of technology in soccer."
299 pairs of the limited edition Adidas adizero 99g will go on sale on April 15 at Soccer.com. They will cost $300 a pair, although again, they only come in a size 9, so the mighty and puny footed need not apply.
In 2013, upon accepting his Nobel Prize for Economics, Yale professor Robert Schiller said: "The most important problem that we are facing now today, I think, is rising inequality in the United States and elsewhere in the world." He was talking about income inequality, and Schiller advocates—as many economists do—progressive taxation to help reduce the gap between the rich, the not-rich, and the poor, by increasing the former at a higher percentage than the latter.
How's America's current tax system doing at reducing the income gap? Using Lego as a visual aid, David Wessel of the Brookings Institution, one of America's oldest think tanks, shows exactly how good a job taxes do at leveling the income playfield in America. Spoiler: it doesn't.
In the video, Wessel splits up all tax-paying Americans into five separate Lego piles, with each Lego representing $10,000. Each pile represents how much income each quintile of Americans earns, on average: the lowest-earning 20% averages just $14,248, compared to $306,320 for the highest-earning 20%. But these are just averages: if the 1% of highest earning Americans was broken out into its own pile, Wessel says, their average $2 million-plus income per year would equal a pile over 200 Lego high.
To show how incomes are adjusted after taxes, Wessel then builds smaller Lego piles in blue. The piles are all smaller, sure, but even so, the average after-tax income of the top quintile is $229,360, 17 times that of the bottom. And that gulf is even worse compared to the 1%, where the average after-tax income is $1.34 million in taxes, which means the top 1% earn approximately 97 times as much as the lowest quintile.
Obviously, the goal here isn't to eliminate income inequality through taxation, just reduce it to sane levels. Whether or not these levels are sane is up for debate, although let me point something out: in 1963, the income tax rate of the richest Americans was 91%. It's now 39.6%. True, that's still more than anyone else in America pays, but if income inequality is at an all-time high, and taxes on the rich are at a historic low, is the government really taking enough Legos away from the rich kids' toy boxes?
On Sunday, Hillary Clinton announced her bid for presidency with a big blue 'H' connected by a red arrow pointing right. It's pretty obviously supposed to symbolize Clinton's ability to cross the aisles to get things done, or something, but it soon became a weird design Rorschach test, which the Internet interpreted as everything from the signage on a Carnival Cruise Ship to (duh!) 9/11.
If just one little 'H' can cause all that pandemonium, imagine what a whole alphabet can do! Designer Rick Wolff has taken Hillary's campaign logo and turned it into an entire typeface, called (appropriately enough) Hillvetica. If you thought that red arrow was enraging on an "H," wait'll you get a load of it on a Q, and ampersand, or a question mark!
Sadly, Hillvetica isn't a computer downloadable font yet, but Wolff has started a crowdfunding campaign to get it off the ground. Donate to make Hillvetica a reality on GoFundMe by clicking here.
The stats of most films read in footage shot, actors cast, and dollars budgeted. Not Chase Me, a new short by French animator Gilles-Alexander Deschaud. The world's very first 3-D printed film, Chase Me's stats are far more esoteric, and can be measured in liters of resin used (80), number of 3-D prints produced (2500), and hours of non-stop print time elapsed (6,000+).
In Chase Me, a girl walks through a magical forest, singing. During her stroll, her shadow evolves into a monster who chases her through the woods. According to Deschaud, the movie (which is not yet available online, for fear of disqualifying Chase Me from entering any festivals) is a story about "embracing your fears, and turning them into something beautiful."
Traditionally, stop-motion animation is sort of like slow-motion puppetry. An animator will take a figure, often made of clay and a wire, and move it just a little bit every frame, giving the appearance of movement when the film is played at 24 frames per second. It's laborious, time-consuming work, but compared to Deschaud's work, it's a walk in the park.
Each frame of Chase Me required its moving components to be separately printed out on a FormLabs 1+ 3-D printer. Unlike a traditional stop-motion puppet, the figures in Chase Me aren't malleable by hand, meaning that every time a figure moved, Deschaud had to totally replace it with a slightly different figurine. Every figurine was printed with a 100 micron resolution, and were minimally finished after being printed, mostly to remove the support material.
Given the scope of the project, we asked Deschaud if he, as an animator, had been afraid of 3-D printing before he started the project. "I think it's quite the opposite," he tells Co.Design in an email. "I'm really fascinated by 3-D printers. It's just so beautiful to see a printer take something you created virtually and transform it into something you can hold in your hands."
Deschaud says that Chase Me was easily the most laborious project he's ever undertaken, requiring almost two years to shoot and edit the film (and it's only a few minutes long). That's a prohibitive amount of time to spend on such a short project, even in the slow, methodical world of animation. Nevertheless, Deschaud thinks that 3-D printing is going to be an invaluable tool to stop-motion animators, who will be able to leverage its possibilities to create bigger, better, and more complex animations—even if they're not quite as nuts as Deschaud, and decide to print out every frame of their movies themselves.
There's just nothing that looks quite like Kong, now available on Google Play and the iOS App Store. So what is Kong? It's a social network for animated selfies. The third app from Path, the company behind the eponymous iPhone-only social network, Kong's color pallette is a rainbow blast of Miami Vice style neons and pastels. The UI design elements seem to reference mid-century California design, the low-fi pixel graphics of '90s online BBSes, an even the opening credits of The Brady Bunch.
But before you roll your eyes, actually try it. Because it might be the most legitimately fun and inventive social network to come around for ages. And I say this as a convert, who, within 24 hours, has gone from being a Kong denier to blasting my wife with increasingly crazy selfie GIFs throughout the day. And, in theory, I hate selfies. (If you had my face, you probably would too.)
From the moment you load the app, Kong plunges you right into a frenetic kaleidoscope of your friends' animated selfies, with the tile in the top left corner reserved for your own face. You can change the filter on that box by swiping left or right (options include Black & White, Motel Peephole, Rainbow Starburst, and Warhol), and enter text into your frame just by tapping on it. There's only one button, which records a few seconds of selfie, then speeds it up, loops it, and adds it to the pool of whatever channel you're in, or else shares it to other social networks or apps as either a video or animated GIF. It's simple, giddy, and unrepentantly silly fun.
"The genesis of Kong was that we wanted to make an app that was all about faces," says Path founder Dave Morin. "The idea was that your face is one of the most powerful methods of communication available to you, even more so than words in the real world, but it's one that goes mostly unused online. So we asked ourselves, what would a social network that used faces as the central unit of currency be like?"
Video selfies might seem like a limited form of expression, but Kong really breaks them out into their own colorful online universe. There's no end of different channels you can join in Kong, each one dedicated to their own unique genre of selfie. Go to #uglycry and you'll find nothing but GIF after GIF of people crying like cartoon characters, whereas #emoji might be where you go when you want to take a selfie with a poop emoji balancing on your tongue. #bradybunch is just a bunch of Kong users looking around at the selfies around them, whereas #halfies is like a game, where you try to match up your face to the person next to you. And if you have an idea for a different kind of channel, you can create it at any time. Critically, there's also private channels, so you can also set up a back room just for you and your friends to share zany, embarrassing mugshots with one another, without any strangers wandering in.
According to Morin, Kong's development was as idiosyncratic as the app itself. The app has a real digital-first feel to it, which Morin says is due to the fact that it was designed entirely in code, instead of mocked-up in something like Photoshop. Kong's also super fast. The selfies it records are tightly compressed, which Path learned from its previous apps was absolutely critical to helping an app gain traction in regions where bandwidth is more limited. The team also locked in a beta community super early, and made their feedback the single-most driver of the design process.
For example, based on feedback, each Kong user's UI has its own unique color, which is generated from their username, so no one's Kong app looks exactly the like. Likewise, after early tests resulted in certain users taking over certain channels in Kong by posting an endless barrage of selfies, Path tweaked the service to only let people post one selfie to each channel. Post another one, and it writes over the last one.
But the most important thing about Kong's development, says Morin, is that the app was built from the ground up to adapt to the crazy ways people would be using it. "We've learned with our other apps that if you're going to create a network that is open and porous to the rest of the Internet, you need to design it to evolve in response to how users are hacking is," he tells me. So in a way, now that Kong's been released to the public, Kong's design process is really just starting. I can't wait to see how it evolves from here. (Can you tell I'm a fan? Follow me on Kong @drcrypt!)
How many kids, fascinated with the mysteries of space, have plastered glow-in-the-dark stars, planets, and moons on their bedroom ceiling? For people like me, it's our first memory of taking an interest in interior design. Unfortunately, the stick-on stars become a little tacky past around 8th grade, but Calico Wallpaper is about to make outer space in your bedroom cool again: they've just released Inverted Spaces, a line of sophisticated wallpaper designs based on NASA imagery.
Calico Wallpaper is Nick and Rachel Cope, a husband-and-wife design team who specialize in bespoke wallpaper. By combining digital design and printing technologies with traditional artisanal methods, the Brooklyn duo's goal is to return wallpaper to the status of art that it enjoyed in previous eras. For Inverted Spaces, Calico wanted to "celebrate the infinity that has surrounded us since the dawn of mankind" with a custom-made, panoramic universe on wallpaper.
The end product is the result of a collaboration with Amsterdam's BCXSY concept design studio which started in the summer of 2014 with a trip to the Netherlands. Together, the two studios took NASA satellite images of the Big Dipper, the Orion Nebula, and other starfields, then flipped the colors of stars against infinity to dabs of metallic gold and silver on an ivory background
Inverted Spaces debuted at Salone del Mobile in Milan as a panoramic, non-repeating mural of the universe in negative. Going forward, Calico Wallpaper will be selling Inverted Spaces to customers directly. Unlike normal wallpaper, Calico's designs aren't sold by the roll, but as a custom installation for each client. So if you want to slap Inverted Spaces on a wall, it will cost you around $32 per square foot.
Like most offices, the New York Times holds a lot of meetings. Editorial meetings, ad sales meetings, design meetings, you name it; all centered around a table seemingly for no other purpose than to have something to congregate around, take notes on, and—at worst—idly tap while bored meeting goers drift off into daydream.
So the New York Times decided to give its table a purpose. The Listening Table by NYT Labs (think here the New York Times' own in-house equivalent of MIT's Media Lab) is a smart conference table that is always listening to the conversations happening around it. And when users sit at the Listening Table and tap their fingers on it, they're not bored: they're dropping bookmarks, which the Table then collects into a transcript of the meeting's most important moments.
Francis Dzikowski/OTTO
The goal of the Lab within the New York Times, says the Labs' Creative Director Alexis Lloyd, is to look at emerging technologies and behaviors, and then build them out into "tangible artifacts of the future that are relevant to news and media."
For the Listening Table, the Lab found itself to drawn by the rise of pervasive electronic ears that can understand human speech, as seen in Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, and even dedicated products like the Amazon Echo. In particular, the Lab wanted to see if it was possible to design an object that not only heard what was being said around it, but knew when what was being said was important or not.
At the same time, though, it was critical that the Listening Table not be viewed as a "sneaky spy," Lloyd tells me, but a system with its "values built right in." In other words, its industrial design is built to communicate that it's an object to be trusted.
When people meet around the Listening Table, they immediately know it isn't like a normal table. A large, omnidirectional microphone is integrated into the tabletop, and a ring of LED lights gently pulses to indicate, like Frasier Crane, "I'm listening."
If that makes you uncomfortable, you can flip a switch—the only switch on the table—and it'll stop. But if you do let the Listening Table eavesdrop on your meeting, there's no need to take notes. Every time someone taps the table's subtle capacitive strips, the Listening Table makes a note that what was just said is important, and at the end of the meeting, it sends out a machine transcript of the 30 seconds on either side of each tap, tagged with a list of about three keywords or phrases that the Listening Table thinks might have been most relevant to the conversation.
Francis Dzikowski/OTTO
This functionality has a couple of benefits. For one, it means that as long as one person at a meeting is paying attention, the Listening Table can automatically give good notes. And if you miss a meeting, the Listening Table makes it easy to catch up with what was discussed.
But the Listening Table only listens ephemerally, forgetting what is said around it after four weeks. It's designed to forget, says NYT Labs maker Noah Feehan, who was of critical importance to the creation of the Listening Table. By having just a four-week memory, users don't have to worry that the Listening Table might betray their trust in unexpected ways: say, by turning over a lifetime statistical report to your boss on how many times you made a good point in the last year's worth of meetings. The Listening Table is there to make your life easier, not give you one more surveillance system to worry about.
Correction: An earlier version of this article misspelled Noah Feehan's last name, and did not properly establish who he was at the NYT Labs. We also corrected a slight grammatical error in a quote attributed to Alexis Lloyd. We apologize for the confusion.
Strapped to the bottom of your car like a colostomy bag full of dinosaur goo, oil filters are disgusting. Worse? They're biohazards. Because they're disposable, Americans go through Americans throw out more than 400 million oil filters every year, each still containing between 4 and 8 ounces of dirty oil that can leech into the soil or bleed into our water supply. "Oil filters are just biological nightmares," says Dan Harden, president and principal designer of Whipsaw, a Silicon Valley-based industrial design and engineering firm.
The Hubb Lifetime Oil Filter is something different. Designed and engineered for mass production by Whipsaw based upon technology created by Hubb, the Lifetime Oil Filter is a stainless steel oil filter that you never have to throw out. It doubles the amount of time you can go between oil changes by maximizing both filter size and filtration efficiency, and it improves any car's fuel efficiency by a minimum of 2%, according to Whipsaw. All with a sleek industrial design that looks like someone just broke a piece off a race car, and dropped it in your engine.
Oil Filters: A Necessary Evil
Oil filters have always been a necessary evil for the automotive industry. The earliest automobiles didn't have them, which meant that impurities could build up in an engine over time and make it break down, sometimes catastrophically. In the 1920s, the first disposable oil filters were introduced, and today, most oil filters are made out of paper pulp, which we're told to discard, on average, every 3,000 miles.
These filters have a lot of problems, though. Almost every filter on the market used what's called a bypass filter. All oil filters need to have a bypass valve, to make sure that an engine is never starved for oil, even if the filter is having a hard time filtering the oil. In most filters, this bypass valve is open 90% of the time, blasting unfiltered oil right into your engine. So oil doesn't get cleaned once every cycle; it's only over a long period of time that your oil truly gets filtered.
Then there's construction. Almost all oil filters are made out of paper pulp, which makes them cheap to produce, but also inefficient. You can't control the size of the holes in a paper filter, leaving the size of the particles you catch up to chance.
Efficient, Convenient, And Beautiful
Hubb's Lifetime Oil Filter is fiercely efficient. Made of a surgical stainless steel mesh that resists corrosion, the Hubb's filtration holes are designed, through Whipsaw's tests, to spec at the average size of the impurities that flow through your engine. That means it's not only designed to sweep out more impurities per cycle than a regular filter, it's also meant to prevent perfectly good filtration holes from getting clogged up.
The other benefit of holes that don't clog up so quickly: less engine power is required to force oil through the holes. Whipsaw tested local police departments, delivery trucks, and other moving vehicles, and calculated that the new design allows for a fuel economy savings of 2.4%—not an insubstantial when gas prices average $2.39 per gallon.
The filter has a sleek, industrial look, which was pretty much just accidental. "The form follows function," Harden says. "The beauty comes from the materials, the efficiency, the lack of embellishment. It's a machine aesthetic that, in itself, is timeless, because it's as efficient as we know how to make it."
What all this means for consumers: The filter needs "replacing" less often—you can get away with 12,000 or more miles, compared to a regular oil filter's 3,000 to 8,000 miles. Those air quotes are because it doesn't need to be replaced: you can just wash it out with biodegradable soap, or—soon enough—get it swapped out at a Jiffy Lube or other oil changing station near you, in under half an hour.
But It'll Cost You
The downside: Hubb Lifetime Filter costs $89, about four times as much as a regular oil filter now. Whipsaw insists that the filter will last 50 years—longer than the lifespan of your car, so you can just screw it out and bring it to your next vehicle. The Hubb Lifetime Oil Filter is available at select automotive centers.
Ever try to cook while using your laptop or your iPad to read a recipe, watch a movie, or Skype? You're probably still cleaning eggy fingerprints from the keyboard. Thankfully, a new invention from MIT Media Lab could make navigating a device while your hands are otherwise occupied much easier by turning your thumb nail into a tiny trackpad.
It's called NailO, and it's really not much more than a smart sticker you put on your thumb nail, like nail art. But the sticker is really a sandwich of circuits comprising a touch sensor, battery, and Bluetooth radio. Stroking your nail while it's connected to your MacBook could make the screen scroll up or down. You could also pair it with something like a Philips Hue to automatically adjust the light, or even use the NailO to type serendipitous messages into a device. (Although you'd better be good at Morse Code.)
According to Cindy Hsin-Liu Kao, an MIT graduate student in media arts and sciences, NailO was inspired by the stickers many women apply to their nails, especially in her home country of Taiwan. "It's a cosmetic product, popular in Asian countries," Kao told the MIT Press Office. "When I came here, I was looking for them, but I couldn't find them, so I'd have my family mail them to me."
Right now, like much of what comes out of Media Lab, NailO is just a concept. It can recognize about five different gestures with 92% accuracy, but the team feels they can do better: imagine if your keyboard or mouse failed you 8% of the time. There's also an issue with false positives in the NailO's current incarnation, which the team hopes to fix by requiring users to deploy a long activation press before the NailO recognizes your gestures.
The NailO will be presented at the upcoming CHI 2015 Conference in Seoul, South Korea. NailO's inventors intend on continuing to work on the concept until its ready for prime time. Who knows? Maybe the next time you decide to wear some nail art, it'll do more than just make you look ridiculous: it will control your iPhone.
Flatland, a novella about talking shapes and lines exploring a multiverse of different dimensions, has long been beloved by sci-fi fans, physicists, and mathematicians, but never really had an edition worthy of the words themselves. That's something Epilogue Press hopes to change. Now on Kickstarter, the San Francisco-headquartered small publisher is taking pre-orders for a collector's edition of Flatland, along with a companion app that allows users to explore the weird world of fourth-dimensional geometry.
Contained in a beautiful slipcase, the Epilogue Press edition of Flatland will come as a hardcover, foil stamped with the book's title and a tesseract in metallic silver on black. A Tyvek cover and spine, as well as a sewn binding, keeps this edition of Flatland durable, soft, and supple, according to Epilogue founder Chris Lauritzen. The book's chapter headers are printed in Futura, which was chosen because it is a "clean geometric typeface," while the novella's text is set in Baskerville, a typeface that is contemporary to Flatland, and give it a classic 19th-century feel. Epilogue's edition contains all of Abbott's original illustrations, as well as a new illustrated appendix that helps clarify some of the more mind-bending concepts in the text.
Written in 1884 by Edwin Abbott, the novella is one part geometry lesson, one part treatise on parallel dimensions, and one part parody of Victorian norms in which the narrator, a square, meets a circle who claims to actually be a sphere visiting from Spaceland, a three-dimensional world. Sphere explains that the inhabitants of Flatland only see him as a circle because they can not perceive the dimension above them. Although skeptical at first, Square's mind is eventually opened to the existence of not just a third dimension, but a fourth, a fifth, and so on.
Lauritzen says cheap editions of Flatland have been plentiful since the book first slipped into the public domain, but they're just that: cheap. "There's already a large community of people who love Flatland, but there wasn't an edition that people could love just as much." So Lauritzen decided to make the Flatland edition of his dreams.
But Epilogue's edition of Flatland doesn't aspire just to be the most beautiful print edition of the classic work. It will also come with a companion web app, called the Library of Shapes, designed for Epilogue by Jono Brandel and Aki Rodic. This will not just function as an e-book version of Flatland in its own right, but will allow users to see what different characters from Flatland look like in two, three, and even four dimensions.
"There's a lot of sensational takes about the role of technology in publishing today, but I don't think print is dead or that digital is the devil," Lauritzen tells me. "We just wanted to create something that sat nicely between the two, and that could be a catalyst to a broader interest in geometry and alternate dimensions."
Epilogue Press's edition of Flatland is now available for pre-order on Kickstarter, starting at $45.
Many of us learned our ABCs in elementary school from big alphabet posters tacked up by our kindergarten teachers on the walls. New from Pop Chart Lab, the Alphabet of Typography is like that poster, but for aspiring typographers instead of aspiring readers.
Printed on 100-pound archival stock, the Alphabet of Typography uses the ABCs as a primer on the terminologies of type. In the Alphabet of Typography, A isn't for Apple; it's for Axis, Apex, Aperture, and Ascender. C, M, Y, and K, meanwhile, are set apart in their own colors (cyan, magenta, yellow, and key or black), to represent the four-color printing process. Although the design seems simple at first glance, there's actually a lot to discover here. Kerning, glyphs, line spacing, leading, diacritics, swashes, and more are all covered.
It's a great poster for type-loving adults, but it'd also be a great thing to hang in your kid's room if you'd like him or her to grow up just as literate about the way letters are designed and printed as they are about the letters themselves.
If most travel magazines are like a tired "Wish You Were Here" postcard, the new Afar is like ripping a bespoke, hand-lettered sign off of some exotic city wall, then bringing it back in your luggage. It's not just typographically beautiful, but it has a life of its own.
Although it has been published since 2009, Afar magazine's new look was orchestrated by Elizabeth Spirdakis Olson, a 36-year-old creative director who came to the magazine from Bon Appétit. According to Olson, she took the job specifically because she was offered free reign to rip it apart and redesign it from scratch.
"I had a lot of problems with the old version," Olson tells me. "The photography was excellent, the stories were good, but neither were being showcased in the best way."
The biggest pet peeve Olson had about the old Afar revolved around the typography, which lacked imagination. Olson's redesign ups Afar's cred amongst type lovers with a blend of bold new digital fonts and tactile, hand-drawn lettering.
The two new digital typefaces Afar mostly leans on are Austin, a serif by Commercial Type, which Olson says can go from super readable to super funky according to its weight, and Fort, a sans-serif by Jeremy Mickel Both Austin and Fort, though, are contrasted and complemented by calligraphy for things like headlines, pull-quotes, and sub headers, provided by a pool of freelance artists.
"My work has always integrated digital and hand-drawn type, so I wanted to bring it to Afar," says Olson. "That tactile quality of handmade type makes what you're reading seem more personal."
But maybe the biggest design change to come to Afar spawns from Olson's belief in the magazine's original mission. Although Afar always ostensibly set itself apart from the competition by putting the emphasis on experiential travel, in practice, the magazine didn't look that much different on the newsstands from other, more destination-oriented travel magazines. When Olson came onboard, she and the magazine's photography editor re-dedicated the magazine to the idea that even destinations as well-trodden as Tokyo, Rome, and Paris can feel unexpected, as long as you aren't afraid to come from it from a starkly different angle.
For example, an article on the Hawaiian island of Kauai might be expected in other travel magazines to start with a photo of a beautiful beach and some sort of tired reference to paradise. In Afar, this article begins with a hand-lettered manifesto about "chefs and cowboys, chickens and mongooses" over an image of a honeycomb. A short spread about eating in Buenos Aires is a whimsically illustrated infographic centered around a piece of raw steak, skewered on the tines of a fork. It makes for a substantially different take, where even tired destinations can seem fresh again.
Olson hopes the new Afar better encapsulates the magazine's mission to showcase the passion, energy, and excitement of travel. "Afar is about immersing yourself, wherever you go," she tells me. If early feedback is anything to go by, the redesign appears to be working: not only has the new Afar been nominated for seven design awards by the Society of Publication Designers, but ever issue has outsold the previous year's on the newsstands. The Afar.com homepage, which has seen a similar redesign, has seen similar success, seeing a 192% increase in monthly visitors year-over-year.
Correction: The original version of this article referred to the Sport typeface by Jeremy Nichols. It has been corrected to the Fort typeface by Jeremy Mickel.
Hewn out of the mountains of Northern Tuscany, Carrara marble has been used for everything from the Trajan Column to Michalengelo's David. It's one of the most timeless materials around. Comparatively, there's nothing timeless about a PlayStation 4 controller, a Bluetooth speaker, or a smartphone charging station. They're ephemeral in the way that only technology can be.
CoulisseFilippo Protasoni
It's this contrast that Italian design house Clique explores in its second collection of beautifully carved marble objects as modern day tech accessories, each of which strives to capture the tension between the timeless and the ephemeral. Unveiled last week at Milan Design Week, Clique teamed up with T&D Robotics to use advanced three-dimensional scanners and carving techniques to create each of these beautiful objets de tech.
ChicheraFilippo Protasoni
There are six objects, each rendered in marble. The Asola is an LED table lamp with built-in USB charging ports. The Chichera is a charging station for smartphones and tablets made of marble and cork. The Coulisse is a suspended Bluetooth speaker, whose height can be adjusted using a fabric cord. There's also Din, a digital clock that uses the transparency of marble to turn its Carrara finish into a digital clock face, and the Joy, a charging station for a PlayStation 4 or Xbox One controller. Finally, there's the Apollo, a marble dome that you can put over your Wi-Fi router, accented in beech wood and cork.
Clique's second collection will be available for sale in the coming months. Given the irreplaceable nature of Carrara marble, it's natural to wonder about the ethics of using a resource like marble to make accessories this frivolous. Then again, all of our gadgets are filled with elements infinitely rarer than marble, that we throw away every few years without thinking about twice. Maybe the point here is to make us think twice about the precious materials we toss in the trash every day.
Imagine strapping on a virtual reality headset, then using your hands to pick up a sword and swing it around your head. Imagine a hazard team able to defuse a complicated bomb from a mile away, just by controlling a robot's hand as effortlessly as your own. Imagine painting a picture on your computer just by waving a brush in front of your screen. Or, if you prefer, imagine using a computer like in Minority Report, whisking away pages and files just by grabbing them with your hands.
Handpose, a new innovation by Microsoft Research, could make all that possible, giving computers the ability to accurately and completely track the precise movement of your hands through a Microsoft Kinect, right down to the finger wiggle. While not the first project to make progress in this space—a Leap Motion 2 hooked up to an Oculus Rift can already do this—Microsoft's software innovation promises to be faster, and it can work from as far away as across the room, on existing hardware or, eventually, on mobile phones.
Using the Handpose software, the first thing a user does is scan his or her hand by holding it up in front of the Kinect to create a 3-D model. In the lab, the process currently takes about a second, which is less than it takes an iPhone Touch ID sensor to accurately measure your fingerprint. Once the system has created a 3-D model of your hand, Handpose allows you to control it on the screen in real-time, at around 30 frames per second. From there, you can use the on-screen hand as if it was a doppelganger of your own.
The Microsoft Kinect was relatively good at detecting your body gestures from the start, says Andrew Fitzgibbon, principal researcher in the machine learning and perception group at Microsoft Research Cambridge. That includes the motion of your legs, your head, and your arms. But one area where the Kinect and other motion and depth-sensing devices are rubbish is figuring out what you're doing with your hands.
"It can tell roughly where your palm and wrist is, but that's it," Fitzgibbon tells me. At best, it can tell if you're waving at it, but can't even do something as simple as detect if you're doing a thumbs up or thumbs down. "We believe that if you could accurately track the positions of a user's hands, right down to the angle of every knuckle and every digit, we believe motion-sensing technology would give rise to a whole new class of user interface." Fitzgibbon calls this new class of UI a Direct Physical Interface: one where users could interact with virtual objects just by reaching out and grabbing them as if it were physical.
The problem is extraordinarily complicated. Fitzgibbon says that for any motion-tracking system to be able to identify what the hand is doing, it needs to be able to detect 30 different points on the human hand. That doesn't sound like much, but how those 30 different points move together spawns trillions of possible combinations. To brute force the calculation would take an "infinite" amount of computing power, says Fitzgibbon, and that's ignoring the fact that the Microsoft Kinect can't actually see all of your fingers, because many of them are hidden from the sensor during certain gestures (for example, crossing your fingers, or folding your folding your hands). So even inaccurate hand gesture recognition is brutally slow.
What Handpose's algorithm does is vastly speed up a computer's ability to accurately recognize hand gestures, up to 10 times faster. It does this by using what Fitzgibbon calls particle swarm optimization, an algorithm that reduces the Kinect's trillions of initial guesses about where your hand is into a pool of 200 likely guesses. That is then further refined until it finds a good enough match.
Fitzgibbon reckons the difference between existing hand-recognition systems and what Handpose can do is the difference between using Graffiti on Palm OS back in the mid-'90s (essentially, a symbolic language of crude gestures that didn't actually mimic what it's like to write with a pen) and modern handwriting recognition systems, which can understand cursive, calligraphy, and more.
Fitzgibbon is cautious to note that Handpose isn't ready for retail, yet. He says Handpose will probably be good enough for totally accurate hand gesture recognition when it's twice as fast as it is now. When that happens, he says, expect it to change our interactions with everything from computers, video games, virtual reality, television sets, and robots.
And as for when that will be? "I think it was Bill Gates who once said that you overestimate what you can do in a year, and underestimate what you can do in 10," Fitzgibbon laughs. "So let's say somewhere in the middle, maybe five."
No one likes being jabbed with a needle. Some people can't stand it at all. According to research in the Journal of Family Practice, at least 20% of Americans have needle phobia, and as a result, many skip critical preventive procedures like vaccines and flu shots. That's a public-health problem.
But painful injections might soon be a thing of the past. Along with fellow students Andy Zhang and Mike Hua, 19-year-old Rice University computer science undergrad Greg Allison has invented the Comfortably Numb, a new device that makes getting an injection practically painless.
About the diameter of a quarter and less than two inches long, the Comfortably Numb is a small 3-D printed canister that attaches to a hypodermic needle. A small amount of water and ammonium nitrate (the same ingredients found in commercial cold packs) are suspended inside the Comfortably Numb's canister. Twist the Comfortably Numb, and the seal between these two ingredients breaks, which causes a metal plate at the bottom of the device to rapidly become cold. When attached to a syringe, the device numbs the skin by cooling it to 4.5 degrees Celsius (about 40 degrees Fahrenheit) right before the needle plunges into it.
It's fast, efficient, and disposable. Even better? Because no chemicals ever touch the body, it's like a bandaid from the perspective of the F.D.A. It doesn't have to pass the same sort of regulatory hurdles a needle or other medical devices might face, Allison says.
The Comfortably Numb project came out of Rice's freshman engineering design class, Engineering 120, the premise of which is to task students with solving the problems of real-world clients. In the case of the Comfortably Numb, the client was Dr. Mehdi Razadi, a cardiothoracic surgeon at the Texas Heart Institute whose day-to-day life involved applying a lot of injections to the face and groin, both of which can be extremely painful. Razadi asked the class to design a device that numbed the skin before injection.
Recognizing the long-term promises of such a device, the Comfortably Numb team figured out a solution after working with advisors and sketching out numerous designs, then used Stratasys and FormLabs 3-D printers to rapidly prototype their design. Since the students didn't want to jab classmates with needles to test the Comfortably Numb, they instead used a pen pressed into the skin of about half a dozen volunteers to simulate the pain of getting a shot. These are hardly clinical trials, the Comfortably Numb designers say, but they're confident that their device lowers needle pain at least two points on a 1 to 5 pain scale.
The Comfortably Numb won the Best Freshman Design Award at Rice's Engineering & Design Showcase, and a provisional patent on the design has been filed. Next up, the team is looking to try to miniaturize the design even further, as well as see if it can be brought to market. "We're really committed to this idea," Allison tells me. "In the real world, we see this making injections more comfortable for everyone, especially those who fear them most."
One drawback: Cost. Allison and his team reckon that the Comfortably Numb canister could be brought to market for about $2—significantly more expensive than your average needle and syringe, which is, on average, around 35 cents. But for doctors who have to give a lot of injections, the Comfortably Numb team thinks that it'll be worth the extra cost.
Another issue: It's being punctured by needles, not the relatively small pinch, that's the true source of most people's needle fears, so whether or not the Comfortably Numb can actually cut down on needle phobia rather than just needle pain remains to be seen. Here's hoping.
If you've ever wanted your apartment to look like the set of a Fellini film, the MoMA Design Store has you covered. On May 1, the Design Store is launching a collection of 32 fun and feisty tabletop pieces by some of Italy's design greats, encompassing everything from reissued design masterpieces to more contemporary works by the current torchbearers of the Italian design world.
Curated by design impresario George M. Beylerian, the new collection focuses on the ritual of eating, as passed through the minds of Italy's best design talent. There are far too many items in the collection to fully detail, but here are a few of our favorites:
• The Squared Circle Bowl by Ettore Sottsass was originally designed in 1958, after Sottsass came to New York to work for American designer George Nelson. The Italian designer was struck by the wild-to-his-eyes shapes and colors of U.S. traffic lamps.
• The Forcola Candle by John Mascheroni takes its shape and its name from the oar lock of a Venetian gondola, which is different from other oar locks because, unlike most rowers, Gondoliers face forward as they row.
• The Ping Pong Cocktail Trays by Mico Magistretti. These charming white trays made out of melamine are inspired by the ergonomics of the ping-pong paddle.
• Andrea Branzi's Profile Vase "straddles the dimensions," according to Beylerian. It's a whimsical design that is equal part drawing and sculpture.
There are many more objects in the collection, so check them out in the slide show above. They are also surprisingly affordable, ranging from $10 to $100, so if you ever wanted to jump start a molto Italiano designer kitchen, the Design Store's new collection is a good place to start. All items are now available on Momastore.org.
