Hasta La Ideas

Our personal cars are honestly very important! We need them to commute from one place to another, and in traveling to and fro different locations, I’m pretty sure we end up spending a substantial amount of our day in them. Hence, maintaining the health and safety of our car is quite crucial. But no matter how much care we take of our beloved cars, there’s always a risk of our car breaking down or encountering some issue or the other. In such scenarios, it’s critical to have a handy collection of tools that can come to our rescue. From EDCs to nifty accessories, these products will support your car in the best way possible. Nifty, portable, and highly functional, these designs will help you escape the trickiest emergency situations safely!

The WYN Bullet is one of those rare examples of EDC that was designed to save lives. Smaller than your finger, the WYN Bullet is a spring-loaded glass-shattering tool that helps you make a quick escape/rescue by instantly breaking a car’s toughened glass. Whether you’re inside your car trying to get out, or outside the car trying to save someone on the inside, the WYN Bullet’s one-push system can instantly shatter toughened glass panels, giving you swift entry into a locked car in emergencies. Toughened glass is exceptionally difficult to break through, by design.

The highlight of the KIMBLADE NANO is its use of CNT (Carbon Nano Tubes) in the wiper blades. The blades themselves are made of silicon, but sport a thin layer of CNT at their tip that allows the wiper to clean the glass with sheer perfection and minimal degradation over time. The silicone and CNT blades last MUCH longer than traditional rubber blades do, and they sport a rectangular edge that’s much more efficient at picking up and sweeping water away from the glass windshield. The rectangular edge is perhaps the most important bit of innovation in the KIMBLADE NANO. Unlike other wipers that use a squeegee-style flat surface, the KIMBLADE NANO’s rectangular edge makes a more precise edge contact with the windshield.

This car charger is a lifesaver. No, not because it’ll power your phone when you’re desperately low on battery and you need to use Google Maps… but actually because this bad boy is your ticket to surviving a car crash. While the Ztylus Stinger serves its purpose as a car charger with two 2.4 ampere USB ports, it also includes a spring-loaded glass breaker and a seat-belt cutter hidden away in its incredible design. The spring-loaded glass breaker is actually concealed within the charging pin itself. Just grab the charger tightly and press it firmly against the glass. The spring triggers the breaking pin and the glass shatters instantly without the need for any force or even repeated striking. The Seat-belt cutter’s blade is placed strategically to ensure you just cut the belt and not yourself. The blade is incredibly sharp and slices through the belt’s fabric like a knife through butter.

With a newly detailed base that features a wide cross-shaped design, increasing its stability, the CrossJack is the same old jack in a slightly new but noticeably safer design, thanks to its stable base. The CrossJack’s design prompts one to wonder why car-jacks don’t already have wide bases. Its redesign is simple but effective. A collapsible set of plates sit at the bottom of the CrossJack that opens up into a wide cross, giving the jack a spaced-apart, four-point base. This wider footprint prevents the car from being accidentally knocked off the jack and landing on the ground, injuring anyone who may be working on it. The CrossJack’s tweaked design sports a base that’s nearly half an inch thick, and made of stainless steel, giving it a rugged sturdiness that makes the jack safer than most. When you’re done, the jack folds up to occupy exactly the same amount of space as any regular jack would.

Designed by a team of engineers and innovators, The Norshire Mini has some very compelling reasons to make it your must-have gear in the car. The cylinder shape earns it the required brownie points, as this is what makes it easily stow-able It hosts a tiny OLED display and capacitive touch, to make it easy to operate. The display showcases the current tire pressure and then the setting with which you want to inflate the tire with. Some of the intuitive features include a built-in microcomputer that measures the tire pressure when hooked to a tire.

This has to be one of the most compact key organizers that let you stack keys the way you want – car keys, bike keys, house keys – anything you carry often with you stays in your pocket in the most practical way possible. Named the Rhinokey EDC key organizer, it comes with loads of other multitools to get you through your general EDC needs. It can help you with screwing, prying, opening bottles, and wrenching when needed. Plus it has a bit holder, file, and ruler for those times when you just wish you had one of these tools. Very mindfully designed, the EDC key holder comes with a mini light to open the door lock in the dark without having to fish for your phone to do the task. You’ll never lose your car key again with the Rhinokey EDC key organizer!

TeslaAir admittedly sounded like a redundant product at first, but begins making sense when you realize how truly contaminated the air inside your car can actually get. Air that enters your car’s cabin via the HVAC is passed through a HEPA filter, that catches any dust and dirt, but given how it works primarily with air that’s coming from other cars’ exhausts, the HEPA filter only does so much. After a while, its ability to filter out pollutants degrades, leaving you to breathe air that may contain carbon monoxide, bacteria, viruses, microfibers, and pollen. TeslaAir is an external purifier that was designed to do the job your car’s HEPA filter stops doing every couple of thousand miles… and it doesn’t need filter replacements as your car does. It just needs to be wiped down with a tissue every 2-3 months.

Crafted from metal, Handy is an open-source tool designed to keep you safe and germ-free. Its simple design allows it to easily slip onto your fingers like brass knuckles, giving you a great degree of control. Hooks on the opposite end come with protruded dots for easily pressing buttons on a keypad or elevator, while the hooks themselves act as useful devices for pulling open doors, twisting handles, or even carrying bags. When all’s said and done, just slide Handy into your pocket, or better still, attach it to your keychain using its dedicated keychain-hole. Handy comes in two sizes, a larger one that’s open-source and 3D printable, and a smaller one that you can pre-order on designer Matteo Zallio’s website.

The ZUS Smart Vehicle Health Monitor Mini consistently monitors the health and condition of your car! You can plug the device into the OBD II port of your car. It connects to your smartphone, allowing you to keep a check on your car and all its systems from the gadget’s accompanying app. It instantly alerts you if there is an issue with your car, so you can fix it straight away! The device also informs you about any future problems your car may encounter.

Designed to add a creative, custom touch to your license plate, Licensy is like a bumper-sticker, but classier. The frame for your license plate comes with an additional 2 slots, allowing you to mount and display images of your choice to other people on the road. Be it a family photo, an inspirational quote, allegiance to your favorite sports team, or a flag of your country or state. Licensy’s license plates give you the ability to add a personal touch to your automobile. The plate covers are patented by the US government and are completely street-legal. Licensy’s custom-covers come with a special weather-proof, break-proof standardized plate-holder. The holder sits around your license-plate, while also providing the ability to hold two custom art frames on the sides. You can customize these frames with a photo or artwork of your own, which then gets handled by Licensy’s artists. Once approved, the artwork gets printed on a substrate with fade-proof ink and covered with a scratch-resistant clear cover. Both the holder and the art frame are made from eco-friendly materials resulting in zero impact on the environment.

For more essential and innovative accessories for your car, check out Part 1 of this post!

Franny Choi explores queerness, femininity, identity and autonomy as an Asian American woman in Soft Science, a book of poems that often center on futurism and technology in a remarkably human manner. While cyborgs feature as a vehicle for otherness, Choi also uses them in many other nuanced ways. Rhythmic and melodic, her poems enthrall readers.

Imagine if Bath and Body Works merged with your bathroom accessories – that instead of cluttering up your shelves with a gazillion bottles, your showerhead holds a complete spa experience. That is the promise hs² studio’s Lab224 Watercare Showerhead brings to your bathroom.

The bathroom can be a space of zen, the one part of your home that is a sanctuary where you cut off from screens and just be. The showerhead’s aurora-colored aesthetics showcases the filter of choice. You can choose from anything between creating a sensuous spa experience to using a microfilter to ensure you only get the purest water contacting your skin. Whatever your skin’s problem/concerns, you can have your favorite add ons – aloe vera, tea tree oil, vitamin supplements – it’s a DIY care package in a tiny handle-sized package. The sprinkler plate had microholes that give you a gentle yet powerful stream of bath, adding to the overall luxury of your bath experience.

Sleek, minimal, with aesthetic highlights just enough to accentuate your bathroom, the Lab 224 showerhead is a next-generation solution to bathroom of all sizes. Given the number of ideas we get in the shower, I genuinely believe we must amplify our bathroom experience to help our brain destress and let the creative juices flow.

Designer : hs² studio

Dezeen promotion: new approaches to architecture, landscaping and interior design were discussed at the Archipelago: Architectures for the Multiverse conference in Geneva.

The three-day event, which was broadcast online, took place from 6 to 8 May. It was organised by the Geneva School of Art and Design (HEAD) and the Geneva School of Engineering, Architecture and Landscape (HEPIA).

Titled Archipelago: Architectures for the Multiverse, the hybrid conference brought in-person and online participants from the architecture, interior design and landscape design industries together to discuss intersections across the disciplines through performances, film screenings, talks and workshops.

The first day of talks was titled: Do We Need to Build?

The Archipelago advisory board: Sepake Angiama, Marina Otero, Catherine Ince, Natacha Guillaumont, Nicolas Pham, Matevz Celik, Lev Bratishenko, Anton Belov, Javier Fernandez Contreras, discussed current design practice, focusing on newly visible methodologies.

The task challenged the board to question the assumption that architects, landscape designers and interior designers need to produce physical material.

The theme for the second day was: Understories – What Remains Hidden in Plain Sight?

It focussed on under-represented systems and knowledge across design disciplines via a series of four key conversations.

The first session, titled Territories of Intervention, invited Daniel Zamarbide, Charlotte Truwant, and Justinien Tribillon to investigate Geneva’s urban context and borders. Moderated by Meriem Chabani, it aimed to question “how the city is entangled in larger myths of nationality and place,” the organisers said.

This was followed by a conversation titled Extractive Systems, in which Sofia Pia Belenky, Francesco Sebregondi, Manijeh Verghese “sought to unearth systems and traces – capitalist, imperialist, extractivist – exposing and challenging forms of embedded exploitation”.

The third session, titled Other Stories, was moderated by Ala Tannir and brought together Silvia Franceschini, Cruz Garcia and Nathalie Frankowski from Wai Architecture Think-Tank and Dele Adeyemo, exploring “narratives within architecture, landscape and interior design that are traditionally positioned at the margin”.

The final conversation, titled Planetary Narratives, was moderated by Elise Misao Hunchuck and gathered Jane Mah Hutton, Marco Ferrari, and Rania Ghosn. It “considered stories that play out at a global scale, ones that implicate multiple materials’ flow across time and space,” the organisers said.

A selection of films exploring capitalism, the climate crisis, indigenous knowledge and colonialism, by Dele Adeyemo, Design Earth and Joar Nango were also presented.

The theme for the third day was: Interdependency – New Disciplinary Narratives.

The first session, titled Kinship and Advocacy, gathered Adrian Lahoud, Esther Choi, Charlotte Malterre-Barther and Marie-Louise Roberts to question how expectations and boundaries in design and architectural disciplines change when collaboration and kinship are placed at the forefront of the design process.

“Panellists related personal experience to their work and discussed the role that shared ritual plays in fostering kinship,” the organisers said.

The second conversation of the day, titled Working With, explored “how practitioners are changing their working ways to offer new possibilities for interdisciplinary exchange.” The conversation gathered Céline Baumann, Mathias Echanove from urbz, and members of Geneva-based Collectif Galta.

The third session, titled New Roles, New Practices, “sought to build upon the previous three days of insights to imagine new paths for architects, landscape architects, and interior designers,” the organisers said. The conversation was moderated by Ala Tannir and brought together Pooja Agrawal, Ann Lui and Mariana Pestana.

The conference concluded with a roundtable discussion that gathered the event’s moderators and students at the organizing schools to explore the creation of new pathways within educational institutions to benefit future designers.

The three days of discussions took place alongside custom-built scenography designed and produced from locally sourced wood and stone by faculty and students from HEPIA and HEAD. After the conference, the structures were dismantled and the materials were returned to their original place.

The talks programme was also enhanced with digital workshops for students selected as part of an open call for participants.

“The workshop programme happened online – with sessions exploring the conflated realms of physical and digital realities; the creation of new worldviews through maintenance and repair; and new ways to co-exist and care for each other from the human to the microbial level,” the organisers said.

“Archipelago could not have been the intense and fruitful experience it was without the participation of all of the panellists, workshop leaders, filmmakers, and moderators both in-person and virtually,” the organisers said.

“It could not have happened without the efforts of the production team, the scenography team, and the facilities staff at the Geneva School of Art and Design.”

“The Archipelago Team would also like to thank the students and faculty members who were the foundation of the event since its conception.”

For more information on the event, visit The Archipelago: Architectures for the Multiverse’s website.

Partnership content

This article was written by Dezeen for HEAD and HEPIA as part of a partnership. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.

The post Archipelago conference investigates urgent issues in architecture and design appeared first on Dezeen.

Designed as a response to several restrictions imposed during the lockdown, the NIKE AIRBUDDY is a conceptual drone that ‘spots’ you while you exercise. It can be carried around via a shoulder-strap located on the base of the drone, and can be deployed anywhere. Once in the air, the drone connects with your Nike Fitness App and tracks your performance, giving you a comprehensive breakdown of your routine at the end.

The drone embodies a clean, sophisticated design language, with 4 rotors branching out of a capsule-shaped body. The drone’s body is outfitted with a single camera that acts as a watchful eye, observing every movement you make like a trainer would. This would hint at the fact that the drone doesn’t come with any obstacle avoidance, so it’s best used in open fields (as opposed to densely forested parks or the woods). The AirBuddy does come with a light-strip located right in front of its camera, which means for the most part it can see what’s in front of it, avoiding obstacles as it flies forwards. Just in case the drone suffers wear and tear, the AirBuddy’s modular design solves this problem as the propellers are detachable and can be easily replaced with newer parts if they ever do get damaged.

The AirBuddy is a conceptual drone designed by South Korea-based designer Cheolhee Lee. It features a customizable design that allows users to choose their own color-ways to match their workout-garments and gear, and although conceptual, sounds like quite a flex from a company that has always been at the forefront of innovation, having also worked on laceless shoes in the past, which were recently upgraded with the world’s first-ever hands-free shoes!

Designer: Cheolhee Lee