Core77

Here's what we looked at this week: Tortoise Gear's super-easy-to-install add-on clip for Swiss Army Knives. Better UX for farmers and off-roaders: The Tuff Jug Ripper Cap solves a tricky fueling situation. Industrial designer Eduardo Blanco's Cartesian pencil holders. Industrial designer Hsinhung Chou's simple, versatile, "Handy" mobile furniture piece. A Bauhausian take on the coat rack, by industrial designer Steffen Kehrle. User feedback yields a useful study object made of brass.

Once upon a time, if the soles of your shoes wore out, a cobbler could attach fresh soles. Nowadays, once your sneaker soles wear out, you junk them. Tires are the same. It's insane that we have to throw out a tire because that tiny percentage of material around the perimeter has worn down, but that's the established convention. Even worse, tires are a major source of microplastic pollution.

Remember that "egg drop" ID school project? For the uninitiated, the students design a vessel to hold a single egg. The vessel is then dropped off the roof of a building, and the egg is meant to survive the fall. Red Bull's Flugtag (German for "flight day") event is a much more exciting version of the egg drop. In this international competition, teams design and build an engine-free flying craft. Each team has four crew members and one pilot.

This Wedge Coffee Dripper Set combines low-tech coffeemaking with traditional Japanese metalwork. Made by Totetsu Ironworks, the components feature a baked-on Japanese lacquer finish. The height adjustment uses a simple wedge mechanism. The cone is stainless steel, and everything else is iron. These run $120 (not counting import duties, taxes and shipping).

Every spiral-bound notebook or sketchbook I've ever seen had the bindings on either the long or short edges. But Japanese stationery brand Inkaren produces these Diagonal Ring Notebooks, which use a lot less material for the binding: The design was "born from breaking free from the unconscious limitations of how the rings should be attached," the company says. "The diagonal rings don't get in the way when writing, and the pages turn smoothly.

BMW has unveiled their new eighth-generation 3 Series, featuring their Neue Klasse design language. The exteriors evoke the calm, clean design language of the Neue Klasse concept car from a few years ago, so no surprises there. But the cockpit is quite the radical departure from conventional ones. As Tesla and Volvo have done, the designers have jettisoned the central instrument cluster.

British ID consultancy Tangerine and Buzz, an Australian manufacturer of airline products, have collaborated on several concepts to make long flights more comfortable. "We wanted to proactively rethink the Premium Economy experience and explore what could emerge from collaborating with creative minds from a parallel sector," explains Sam Blank, Buzz's Director of Innovation and Product Strategy.

In the early 1950s, Chicago-based industrial design firm Painter, Teague and Petertil won an interesting commission: Design the world's first portable transistor radio. Texas Instruments had worked out the miniaturization, then partnered with electronics brand Regency to create a consumer product. All they needed was an ID firm to give their technology a consumer-friendly form. The design team got to work, and the Regency TR-1 hit the market in 1954.

Ever since the Anglepoise lamp's introduction in 1933, desk lamps typically cantilevered the light source outwards from the base. Roughly four decades later, Ettore Sottsass threw this convention out with his irreverent Valigia desk lamp. There is no counterweighted base, just four legs that support the lamp head as if it's a tabletop. The form demands commitment, sitting directly above whatever you're reading.

Reading a book is very different from studying a textbook. With the former, you flip through pages at whatever pace you read. With the latter, you leave the textbook open to a particular page while you take notes, transcribe, or re-read text in order for it to sink in. For this latter situation, Japanese stationery company Kokuyo detected a problem. In 2022, the company sought feedback from junior high and high school students on what their study-time paint points were.