Fetish
Cuff Link
"Information is a material like any material - wood, paper, plastic," says Tad Toulis, a senior designer at Palo Alto, California-based Lunar Design. This is the idea behind Blu, a concept jacket made of digital fabric. Riffing on work done with fashion houses like DKNY and tech giants Motorola and Hewlett-Packard, the Lunar team spec'd out a flexible (and tailored) screen with a high-speed processor and a 24/7 wireless connection. The project extends the clothing-as-advertisement idea beyond the static T-shirt, turning wearers into mobile TV commercials. Blu also opens up new uses, like clothing-as-navigation device. This bike messenger's jacket displays a street map and tracks its wearer's progress via GPS.
Blu: concept. Lunar Design: www.lunardesign.com.
Table of Contents
"There isn't necessarily a problem with a regular table," Thom Faulders admits. But the principal at Berkeley-based Beige Design reengineered the coffee table all the same. Containers suspended underneath the Undercover Table hold oxygen, water, a whistle, a paper jumpsuit, a radio, a space blanket, a photo album,and a book - totemic survival gear in the earthquake-prone Bay Area. The frame serves as a roll-cage shelter, and its removable poly-carbonate top doubles as an emergency stretcher. "We were trying to take something very everyday and banal," says Faulders, "and create this whole world inside of it."
Undercover Table:available now.
Upward Mobility
Forklifts rarely qualify as objects of high design, but Teams Design's prototype RXX is a welcome exception. The clever carrier overcomes, quite literally, the biggest problem with older designs: poor forward visibility. The carbon-fiber and steel cabin of the RXX rides up with the fork as the load rises, so that the driver's view is never obstructed. Teams also replaced the standard single, heavy battery with small gel power cells distributed throughout the truck to improve balance. Three cameras on the truck's backside deliver rearview images to an in-cabin monitor. As Paul Hatch, president of the German company's US division points out, "the true beauty of this product isn't just its looks." The sleek workhorse will be built by industrial equipment manufacturer Still.
RXX: available 2002. Teams Design: www.teamsdesign.com.
All Thumbs
Cell phones get smaller and snazzier, but the same old push-button interface continues to be a bottleneck when it comes to text capability. Psychiatrist-cum-designer Jeffrey Smith's Thumbscript system offers a neat workaround adapted for mobiles by New York-based Smart Design. Each Roman letter (or Asian character) is formed by tapping a quick keystroke sequence on the phonelike nine-point grid. PDA pals take note: Thumbscript is 25 percent faster than Graffiti, and it works with remote controls.
Phone: prototype. Smart Design: www.smartnyc.com.
Light Maneuvers
Standing lamp, ceiling light, wall sconce - traditional fixtures are too immobile for a modern life on the move. The Baladeuse, in contrast, was designed to "surf the chaos," according to its creators, Izumi Kohama and Xavier Moulin, of Tokyo-based ixilab. A fluorescent bulb surrounded by a squishy polyurethane gel and encased in PVC film, the luminary can be hung on a bedpost, slung over a door, or draped over a shoulder as you walk around the house (as far as the extension cord will allow, at least - our only complaint). The Baladeuse is the first of ixilab's new Interspace household accessories. The brief: Products should serve the person as a user rather than as a consumer. In other words, buy now, play later.
Baladeuse: available 2001. ixilab: www.ixilab.com.
Bleacher Seat
It's time for your washer to come out of the closet. "Traditionally the machine is stored in a very tiny and wet space," says Kohei Nishiyama, founder and CEO of elephant design. "But our designers wanted to put it in the living room." Part of a collection called cuusoo kadin, or imaginary electric appliances, the translucent, doughnut-shaped machine is fashioned out of soft rubber so that it can double as a vibrating seat. Designed for elephant by Japan-based Klein Dytham Architecture, the Deluxe glows as it cleans. Like all of elephant's concepts, the washer will go into production when enough people register for it at the company's site.
Deluxe Washing Machine: concept. elephant design: www.cuusoo.com.
Tenderizer
It defies logic that the bathtub - a place we enter stripped of all but our natural cushioning - is so damn hard. Looking beyond the traditional wood, steel, ceramic, and stone, the Italian collective A. Brizzi B. Riefenstahl C. Crosina M. Bellomo used advanced manufacturing techniques and forgiving polyurethane resin to make their line of bathroom prototypes soft and comfortable. "Plastic has had an enormous evolution in the last 30 years," says designer Babette Riefenstahl. "Today it's very resistant and has the advantage of being more economical." Slipping into this 6.5-foot-long soaker, however, is pure luxury.
Soft Bathtub: prototype. A. Brizzi et al.: email babette2@libero.it.
