All Unitasker Wednesday posts are jokes — we don’t want you to buy these items, we want you to laugh at their ridiculousness. Enjoy!
We all know that bad body odour is bad manners — especially if you are living or working in crowded quarters. To cope with this, the company Tanita is marketing a gadget that detects how bad your body odour is.
The Tanita-ES100 costs about $125 USD and is about the size of an antique pocket pager. It works on the same principles as a breathalyzer for detecting blood alcohol content based on a breath sample. The ES100’s replaceable sensor is good for 2000 uses, or about a year for the average person.
The device is easy to use, simply turn it on, flip out the sensor and point it to a part of your body you think might be emitting too much odour. After about 10 seconds, the display will show your smell level on a scale of 0 (no smell) to 10 (extremely smelly). The device suggests that anything above Level 5 requires “smell care.”
The nice thing about the device is that it will also tell you if you have applied too much aftershave or perfume. However, there are a few unpleasant odours that it is not programmed to detect.
I can see this device as being helpful for those who may have lost their sense of smell due to injury or illness. I’m not too sure if it would be useful for anyone else though. Perhaps if I lived in a crowded city in a hot climate I’d think differently. I’ll leave it up to Unclutterer readers to decide.
Sejun Park’s Aalo does something most furniture brands do not. It focuses not just on settling, but on the relocating aspect too. Designed for a generation that often is on the move, whether to pursue their career or their calling, the Aalo range of furniture travels with you and lets you call multiple places home. Aalo’s unique assembly system also makes it hackable, reusable, and customizable.
“As a city dweller, I was moving between places quite often, which meant my space arrangements were frequently changing. Each time I struggled to find furniture items that would fit my new space perfectly, and there were no good options, “says Park, a former Lexus Engineer, “Customized furniture was simply out of my budget, and trying to create a DIY solution required time, money, and special tools. I began experimenting with various materials, manufacturing processes, and assembly mechanisms to come up with an easier and more versatile furniture solution. And that’s how Aalo got started.”
Unlike the biggest player in easy-to-assemble DIY furniture, IKEA, Park’s Aalo was made in a way that when assembled, is a functional piece of furniture, but isn’t permanently assembled. Aalo’s range of furniture is made from powder-coated aluminum pipe extrusions and joineries like L-shaped, T-shaped, and Y-shaped connectors. Assembling them together involves a DIY aspect that is swift and relatively intuitive. The ability to undo assemblies by simply unscrewing them means you can quickly disassemble parts too, and the lack of permanent fixtures like glue, nails, or screws means the furniture can be easily disassembled and transported to a new location where they’re assembled again.
The aesthetic of the Aalo series is perhaps a result of its unique USP… to be easy in terms of manufacturing, shipping, assembling, and disassembling, and to be a functional, robust product when in use. Its minimal styling makes it perfect for those subtly decorated, minimalist, functional apartments and lifestyles of today’s millennial nomads. The current series includes bookshelves, benches, garment racks, desks, all of which use the same parts, therefore minimizing waste during production, while also giving you the ability to concoct your own creations using the parts you own.
“Ultimately we want to provide furniture with an extended lifetime value, one more sustainable than other furniture brands that have somewhat became synonymous with the term ‘disposable furniture’. If you’re moving and have no use for an Aalo piece any longer, you can disassemble it, then reuse the same pieces to build something entirely different.”
Meet Aalo, a DIY furniture system you can reuse and adjust to fit your needs, wherever life might take you. Buy once, use it for life. Say goodbye to standardized furniture.
Their patent-pending system allows you to easily assemble and modify your furniture, for unique designs that moves and evolves with you.
Their interchangeable parts system is so easy and versatile, anyone can use it to build a DIY solution. Explore the endless possibilities.
Why shouldn’t your bathroom scale do more than just tell you your weight? The PEBBLE was designed with this question in mind and provides an innovative solution that might just make you wonder why this doesn’t already exist!
After showering, you can step on the scale and it will air dry your feet and sanitize with infrared light. The upward facing fans help you dry off faster and ensure you don’t carry excess moisture which can result in a number of unwanted health scenarios. Synced with the PEBBLE app on your smartphone, it will automatically upload and track your weight stats and give you daily, weekly and monthly status updates to maintain a healthy BMI.
Measuring at 9 feet wide, 12 feet high, and 16 feet across, the Mono Cabin is literally homely. I mean literally. Shaped like the icon for a home, this pre-fab cabin comes ready to live in, and can be carried and placed literally anywhere your heart desires.
Available in three styles, the Mono comes with an extruded profile and an option of having glass panels on the front and back (after all, it’s the view that adds to the beauty of the cabin), as well as incorporate a glass skylight. The 9ft.x12ft. floor space is ideal for a bed, sofa, and even a small work-table, and there’s even a 4-foot long deck at the entrance, for your early-morning coffee-drinking sunset-watching needs. The cabin comes with 6 pot lights and a plug-point, solid core insulation, and even electric heating, making life easy while you literally retire to the beauty of the nature around you.
Named after Aquaman’s weapon of choice, the Trident is an underwater scooter that uses two propellers to literally send you waterborne at speeds of up to 4.5mph.
Designed to be handheld (unlike the back-strapped Cuda underwater jetpack), the Trident comes with two handles that you hold on to, right between its two incredibly powerful propellers that are capable of 12 kgs of thrust. The Trident comes with two speed settings, 2.2mph and 4.3mph, and can go down till depths of nearly 50 meters (164 feet). It uses a 24V/6,000 mAh lithium battery that can run for up to an hour on a full charge. Enough to frolick with the creatures of the sea, as if you were the king of Atlantis. Oh, you can mount a GoPro on it too!
La prise de vue minimaliste de la photographe canadienne Chiara Zonca sur les dunes de sable du désert d’Oman est tirée dans les quelques secondes de lumière juste avant que le soleil ne plonge sous l’horizon. Intitulée «Tread Softly», la série met en valeur la nature abstraite du sable et ses motifs complexes, créant des formes surréalistes et architecturales qui semblent d’une certaine manière futuristes.
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Here’s another Japanese design that skirts the line between “Good gosh that’s clever” and “Do we really need this?”
By utilizing thin, perfectly-cylindrical leads, mechanical pencils obviate the need for sharpening. But if you were to zoom in on the tip, you’d see that even the narrowest lead can alternate between blunt and sharp as it wears down. And apparently there’s a market of really anal-retentive end users who require a razor-sharp point at all times. Hence Japanese writing utensil manufacturer Uni designed the Kuru Toga, a mechanical pencil that rotates the lead in place, always presenting the pointiest bit to the writing surface:
An internal rotating gear?!? How do they think this stuff up?
In the first of two exclusive video interviews with Christo, the artist explains how the giant London Mastaba installation on the Serpentine lake is the culmination of over 60 years of working with stacked barrels.
The temporary London project, which is 20 metres high and consists of 7,506 barrels, was unveiled last month. But the artwork has its genesis in experiments made by Christo, 83, and his late partner Jeanne-Claude in the fifties and sixties.
“I was born in Bulgaria and I escaped from the communist country to the west on 10 January 1957,” Christo explains in the movie, which Dezeen filmed in London. “I met Jeanne-Claude in November 1958 and we together fell in love.”
“We lived in Paris in between 58 and 64,” he continues. “I was so poor, I had no studio and I was living in one room. I started working with little cans, tin cans of industrial paint. From the cans of the smaller size, I moved to the smaller sized barrels. I rented a garage outside of Paris when I started working with real barrels.”
In 1962 he blocked a Paris street with stacked barrels in a reference to the Berlin Wall that was erected the previous year.
“I was worried the third world war would start,” Christo says. “The Soviets took over Budapest during the revolution [in 1956] but I escaped and there was a big turmoil. I remember I was very scared that they would run over West Germany and come back to Paris and I proposed to do my artistic Iron Curtain in the smallest street, in the Rue Visconti, of the left bank of Paris.”
Christo and Jeanne-Claude are perhaps best known for their giant fabric artworks including Surrounded Islands, which involved floating pink fabric around two islands in Miami’s Biscayne Bay, and Wrapped Reichstag, which saw the controversial German parliament building in Berlin wrapped in fabric in 1995, prior to its refurbishment by architects Foster + Partners.
But stacked barrels, and the mastaba form, have been a constant theme in the duo’s work.
“The mastaba is a very old geometric form,” Christo explains. “The first urban civilisation that we know of, when people left the countryside and built houses, towns and villages, was found in the area called Mesopotamia, which is today’s Iraq.”
“Archeologists discovered streets and houses made of mud and in front of these houses there was a bench to sit,” he continues. “The benches had the form of a flat surface to sit, with of course two vertical sides for your legs and two slanted sides so that the mud bench didn’t fall down. People in the middle east, they’re telling the name mastaba.”
In the mid sixties, Christo and Jeanne-Claude had the idea to float a giant mastaba of barrels on Lake Michigan in the USA, but the idea was never realised. When Serpentine Galleries artistic director Hans Ulrich Obrist approached Christo about bringing an exhibition about the barrel projects to London, the artist saw the chance to revisit the idea in London.
“I saw the opening of the lake from the bridge and thought: ‘let’s do the mastaba here’,” he says, referring to the view of the Serpentine lake from a bridge close to the Serpentine Gallery.
“The mastaba on the Serpentine lake is built [from] 7,506 barrels,” Christo explains. “It’s 20 metres high, the slanted wall in the water level is 30 metres and the vertical wall is 40 metres and that is the most magical proportion of that structure.”
“All of the colours are chosen exactly with how the lake is situated and the greenery of the gorgeous park,” he says. “You can see on the vertical wall, we have a deep red, almost bordeaux, deep blue and mauve. The slanted wall has red and the between the ribs are white.”
Christo and Jeanne Claude have been planning to build a mastaba since the 1960s, but the London Mastaba is their first. Photo: Dezeen
“This magic force of how the mastaba reacts to the sun and the light is always in some ways strange to the landscape and in some ways extremely attractive to the landscape.”
Christo is working on an even larger mastaba for Abu Dhabi, which will be 150 metres high and consist of 410,00o barrels if realised, making it the largest artwork in the world.
Like all Christo’s projects, the £3 million cost of the London project was raised by the artist himself by selling drawings and related artworks.
“We never do commissions. This is why in all these years we realised very few projects. This project was three million pounds. From the engineering, to the workers, to the materials” he explains.
“The barrels were fabricated in Holland, we needed to pay the trucks, we need a factory, we need to hire workers and we pay for that. All of these things, all the quality, all the decision is done because it’s our money.”
Christo’s London Mastaba is at the Serpentine in Hyde Park, London until 23 September 2018. Photo: Dezeen
“There’s no money back,” he concludes. “We have something back, Jeanne-Claude was saying, it’s better than any money: we have the Mastaba.”
Christo’s London Mastaba is at the Serpentine in Hyde Park, London until 23 September 2018. The exhibition Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Barrels and The Mastaba 1958-2018 is at the Serpentine Galleries until 9 September 2018 and is free to visit.
This movie was filmed by Dezeen in London. All artworks featured in the film are copyrighted by Christo. Archive images are courtesy of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Serpentine Galleries and National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. A full list of photography credits is included at the end of the film.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
All Unitasker Wednesday posts are jokes — we don’t want you to buy these items, we want you to laugh at their ridiculousness. Enjoy!
