Hasta La Ideas

If you’re an obsessive pet owner like me, then you’re probably always thinking of ways to make your pet happy! Ensuring your pet feels safe, secure, and comfortable at home is every pet owner’s priority. We want to make sure they always feel loved and truly at home! It’s important to create an environment where they feel completely safe to let their guard down, while also managing to stay active and playful. Interactive tech designs are one way of keeping our pets busy, content, and jolly! Tech products for pets are a whole new ballgame these days. From IoT pet devices that use smart technology to let you interact with your pet while you’re away to AirTag collars that let you use Apple’s ‘Find My’ feature to keep track of your pets – these ingenious gadgets are all, you need to take the best care of your beloved pets!

1. The DogTag

Say hello to DogTag – a pet-collar tag designed by the fine folks at Studio Proper that houses an Apple AirTag within it. Designed to work with dogs as well as cats, the DogTag lets you easily keep track of your furry little friend when they’re scampering about outdoors or even playing hide-and-seek with you inside the house. Relying on Apple’s powerful ‘Find My’ network, the DogTag lets you be able to keep track of your pet no matter where they are. You can create no-go zones for them, knowing if and when they scale your fence and jump right into your neighbor’s prized flower-bed… and if they decide to play hooky right before bathing time, you can easily ‘ping’ the AirTag inside the collar to give up your furry little monster’s location, or use the Find Nearby feature to help guide you to them!

2. MeowMate

Designed by Joint Technology Co, MeowMate is the perfect companion for your cats when you’re away! The adorable little gadget basically follows your cat around all day (it simply replaces you), and helps you keep an eye on them! It features a 1080p ultra-clear video quality and HD voice intercom, allowing you to watch and hear your pet clearly and sharply. It also boasts real-time delay monitoring compensation to ensure a high synchronization between images and sounds. You simply have to download the MeowMate app on your smartphone, switch on the MeowMate device, and scan the QR code at the bottom of it, to connect it to the app on your phone. You can then control MeowMate on your smartphone, and move it about as you please. It allows you to remotely interact with your pets, and help stay connected with them.

3. Migo

Migo is short for ‘amigo,’ which means ‘friend’ in Spanish. Each component of Migo communicates and connects to one another via Bluetooth, which allows for remote interaction between dogs and their owners. The system’s main appeal is the collar since it comes equipped with a tracking system, temperature sensor, heart rate monitor, audio output, and an LED flashlight. Owners can also have all eyes on their dog at home through the camera unit that functions as a traditional surveillance camera. The camera even comes with a speaker so that owners can speak to their dogs whenever anxiety levels seem high.

4. The PETKIT Eversweet 2 pet water fountain

The PETKIT Eversweet 2 pet water fountain has been equipped with a circulation system that infuses more oxygen into your pet’s water for a fresher and better taste! It ensures that your beloved pets always have access to clean and fresh drinking water. Moreover, the pump automatically shuts off, when it detects that the water levels are depleting. It even has a window that lets you observe the water level, so you’re always informed about your pet’s water consumption. An LED light lets you know when it’s time to fill up the fountain with more water! It also keeps you updated about the dispenser’s working status.

5. The Link Smart Collar

Do you wish you could track your dog’s location in case of emergencies but don’t want to embed a tracker in his or her body? The Link smart collar offers an alternative, more pet-friendly solution with its removable GPS. However, the Link is for more than emergencies – it includes features that improve your pet’s health and quality of life every day. So, what does the Link do? The collar itself holds the GPS tracker and a LED light for visibility during night walks. Additionally, with the Link companion app, the product can log your dog’s physical fitness, vet records, and other stats related to his or her health. Basically, it’s a FitBit for your pet – keeping them happy, healthy, and safe.

6. The PetSafe 900-Yard Remote Trainer for Dogs

The PetSafe 900-Yard Remote Trainer for Dogs is perfect for those naughty little puppers and doggos who love to run out of sight! The trainer helps to call back your pet with three different kinds of stimulation – audible tone, vibration, or 15 levels of static. You have to simply attach the nylon collar to your pet, and use the remote to call them back, whenever they waver off! The remote has been amped with a backlit, large font display, and well-positioned buttons. In fact, you can even train two dogs with one remote!

7. The Ebo Catpal

The Ebo Catpal is a robot companion that serves as both a cat sitter and a favorite toy. It’s essentially a mobile security camera that can follow your pet through the house like a Roomba. Similar to a Roomba, the device has sensors to detect obstacles in the vicinity. It also will automatically return to its charging station when low on battery. The camera’s feed is accessible through a mobile app, similar to many home security systems. It also serves a second purpose … let’s be honest, what owner can resist snapping close-ups of their pet’s hijinks? For this reason, the Ebo’s camera records high-resolution footage, which you can save, edit, and post to social media. You can add cute stickers to an image, or even create gifs.

8. Puro

Puro is a multi-functional, autonomous robot that does…a lot. It implements three distinct modes: play, clean, and air purification. In ‘play’ mode, Puro tosses dog treats when your pet is left alone in order to help alleviate some of your dog’s anxiety. Once the treat is tossed and your pup is munching, Puro enters ‘clean’ mode and vacuums over any fallen crumbs. From there, Puro operates as an air purifier to neutralize odors and suck in loose hairs or strands of fur. One of the many features that come with Puro is the smart cleaning function. Similar to the smart robot vacuum, Puro meanders around your floor in order to collect dust, dirt, hairs, and fur, avoiding your pup and other household items along the way.

9. TrickyPaw

TrickyPaw is a smart hunting toy that’ll keep your cat busy and playful! It functions as the perfect companion to your pet, and helps your cat stay healthy, active, and happy by helping them engage in their true hunting nature. You can use the gadget’s companion app to control it in real-time! The toy has been amped with an intelligent automatic mode, as well as nine programmed escape routes for the prey. It even comes with nine different sound effects, that you can keep switching between! TrickyPaw also emits LED light patterns, for your cat to chase!

10. Mopet

Mopet is a pet-friendly e-scooter with an integrated storage compartment so small dogs can come along with you on rides in a secure crate. There aren’t many options for dog owners to get around cities with their little pup in tow. Resolving to pulling their dogs on leashes or stowing smaller pups inside bicycle baskets, the options are either inconvenient or unsafe. Providing a solution for dog owners to crate their dogs around with them, Mopet is an electric scooter design that integrates a spacious and secure storage compartment where owners can keep their dogs while they scoot around from place to place.

The post Top 10 pet-friendly gadget designs that use tech to help you take the best care of your furry friends! first appeared on Yanko Design.

Dutch designer Frederik Roijé and practice Chris Collaris Architects have completed a house clad in black-stained timber near Amsterdam, with a projecting terrace overlooking the Markermeer Lake.

Located on a dyke in the village of Uitdam, the home is called House with a View and was designed for Roijé’s own family as a space to “enjoy the landscape as much as possible”.

A large open living, kitchen and dining space sits on the first floor, beneath the exposed pinewood structure of a steeply-pitched roof. Its shape and black-coloured cladding were informed by the houses and barns typical to the Waterland municipality.

This pitched form intersects with a more contemporary rectangular form at its southern end, which extends the living area and creates a covered terrace space projecting outwards towards the lake.

“[It is] a house that fits within the contours of the historic buildings, but with unique contemporary features,” explained the designers.

“The structure of the house has partly remained visible in the interior… Due to the rectangular element in the house, the living space has areas with straight walls and ceilings…the space is high, and amorphous,” they continued.

This large living area is designed to create two different atmospheres at either end of the home. At the front is a more intimate seating area next to a wood-burning stove, with a window looking out at two garden spaces on either side of the street.

At the rear of the home, a more open space is organised around a large kitchen island, overlooking the lake through sliding glass doors.

The dining table sits between these two areas, positioned where the rectangular form intersects with the pitched volume, and is illuminated by a thin skylight.

A pine wood staircase passes a large square window as it leads down to the more private ground floor, where the home’s three bedrooms and bathrooms are positioned.

The interiors have been finished using lamps, chairs and tables from Roijé’s own collections. Black steel and mahogany window frames reference the exterior colour, and contrast the pale beams of the roof structure and concrete floor.

“To make the atypical typical was the greatest challenge of this house,” said Collaris. “[Roijé] has been an inspiration to me for years with his product designs, which in my view are atypical typical as well. They are turning your mind on things you thought you already knew.”

Black timber was used previously by Chris Collaris Architects for its Tiny Holiday Home in a nature reserve near Amsterdam, designed in collaboration with i29 Interior Architects.

The studio has also built a black wooden cottage with an exaggerated roof in Amsterdam.

The photography is by Onahazymorning.

The post Chris Collaris and Frederik Roijé complete lakeside home in the Netherlands appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen has teamed up with the Canadian Centre for Architecture to premiere three short films about Japanese architecture. In the first video, architect Erika Nakagawa shares her vision for a skinny residential tower in Tokyo. Tune in from 3:00pm London time.

The first film, named A Neighbourhood in A House, guides viewers through a scaled model of the conceptual five-storey building designed by Nakagawa.

Proposed for a site hemmed in by tall neighbouring buildings, the structure seeks to demonstrate how small and dense sites in Tokyo can be utilised.

The three short films being published this week are part of a series called Models Talk, which was produced by the Canadian Center of Architecture (CCA), a research institution and museum in Montreal.

The series also spotlights recent architecture projects by Japanese architects Kazuko Akamatsu and Kumiko Inui, which each tackle unique urban issues.

They are available to watch in Japanese with English subtitles.

Nakagawa’s proposal that is showcased in A Neighbourhood in A House is named the Tower and Onomatopoeia. One of the key elements of its design that is highlighted in the film is its main facade, which is composed of a series of staircases.

While providing access and escape routes, the architect imagines these stairs to be occupied by residents and used as “a sequence of gardens” or a roji – a neighbourhood alley in Japan.

“We wanted to let the residents’ enjoyment of life manifest itself on the facade,” Nakagawa said.

“I wanted to make the stairs work as a kind of garden for the neighbourhood.”

Nakagawa graduated from Yokohama National University’s department of construction in 2005, before achieving her masters in Fine Arts and Architectural Design from Tokyo University of the Arts in 2007.

She opened her eponymous studio, Erika Nakagawa Office, in 2014. While practising as an architect, she is a lecturer at Yokohama National University, Hosei University, Shibaura Institute of Technology and Nihon University.

Another key element of the tower’s design that is highlighted in the video is its experimental structure, which Nakagawa presents in a series of life-size architectural models.

As it would not be possible to erect scaffolding on the site to construct the building, parts of the tower would be prefabricated and then assembled on-site from the inside.

Nakagawa said that several structural elements are also designed to “participate in the activities of daily life”. For example, she imagines exposing H-beams that would usually be hidden so that they can be used as metal shelving in the residences.

The three-part Models Talk series was produced by the CCA in collaboration with architectural curator Kayoko Ota and director Studio Gross, an architectural design firm.

It was created for the CCA c/o Tokyo programme, which is run by the institution with Ota to “develop research and projects, and to facilitate public engagement in Tokyo”.

On 8 December, the CCA will be hosting a live conversation at 8:00pm Montreal time to discuss the film series and the urban issues it addresses. CCA’s director Giovanna Borasi will be joined by Ota and Studio Gross, as well as all three architects featured in each video.

Attendance is free and registration is open here. To find out more about CCA c/o Tokyo, visit cca.qc.ca/tokyo.

Partnership content

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

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Power banks have become a must-have accessory for their portability and convenience to juice up your mobile device on the go. Now taking a leaf out of that book, a designer has visioned a desktop appliance, which is functionally a cool mug warmer (to keep the beverage inside at a drinkable temperature) and comes with a USB slot to charge your phone or a smartwatch like a power bank!

There is nothing that meets the pleasure of a steaming hot coffee or tea while working. You get an extra kick to stay productive for a few more hours. However, there are times when you tend to forget and that hot beverage is left to become a cold brew sitting on the table. This is where a cup warmer like the one conceptualized by designer Dadaism J comes into the equation. The functionality of this cup warmer is to keep your compatible cup heated from the bottom to ensure the beverage inside remains at a particular temperature. This ensures you don’t have to sip on cold brew when your mug should have had a piping hot beverage. When I came across this cup warmer, I did a little search and found that this domain is not saturated at the moment, not many recognizable brand names have entered the category, meaning there is time and requirement for innovation and this cup warmer with charging functionality does deserve to see the light of day.

This I believe for a fact because the mug warmers currently available on the market come with an induction plate to place your mug. It aims to maintain a specific temperature of the beverage for you. Dadaism’s design just betters on the idea with the inclusion of a USB port on the front, which can be used to charge a mobile device simultaneously. There is also a small digital display on this colorful mug charger – it’s designed in three lovely colors – that shows you the temperature at which your beverage is being heated. Presumably, the cup warmer with a charging function also has an adjustable timer and auto shut off, which is common in the cup warmers already on the market.

While this cup warmer is primarily designed for your workstation, it has to connect to an electric socket for power. Given the niche functionality, this could also be useful in the outdoors to heat your mug of water or coffee at a camp per se, and when required also juice up your phone so you can remain connected even when you’re in areas off the grid. For this, the cup warmer will need to be battery-powered or even solar-powered; hope Dadaism would consider my suggestion for the prototype!

Designer: Dadaism J

The post An incredibly cute cup warmer that heats your drink and charges your smartphone is the new winter essential first appeared on Yanko Design.

London studio Pearson Lloyd has worked with design and 3D-manufacturing studio Batch.Works to create pen pots, trays and a mobile-phone stand made from discarded food packaging for office brand Bene.

The collection, called bFRIENDS by Bene, was 3D-printed from recycled polylactic acid (PLA) sourced from food packagings by Batch.Works.

It marks the first time that Pearson Lloyd has designed a 3D-printed product, though the studio has long used the technique to envision other projects.

“Up to now, we have always used 3D printing as a development tool for our projects,” Pearson Lloyd co-founder Tom Lloyd told Dezeen.

“The technology has changed in nearly 20 years from an exotic and expensive tool that we used to replace hand-carved form models, to an engineering tool to test physical parts, and now to an affordable way of prototyping rapidly with the studio,” he added.

“We run two desktop printers that cover most of our needs, and go out to more specialist companies for larger or more precise parts.”

The studio’s designs for the bFRIENDS collection, which features organic, undulating shapes reminiscent of corals, came about because it wanted to eliminate the hand-finishing aspect and reduce the 3D printing time.

“To achieve this, we chose to develop a formal language where the print head never needs to lift off and relocate during the print,” Lloyd said.

“This led us to design each product as a single line that traces all functional elements within its perimeter,” he continued.

“The challenge of creating individual pen holders led in turn to the squiggle line that weaves in and out around each pen. Once we had developed this idea, the language for the whole range quickly followed.”

The collection comprises five items – two pen pots, a stand and two trays – and is made from 100 per cent recycled PLA by Batch.Works, which sources the bioplastic material from Europe.

“Our PLA is made from consistent sources of food packaging waste collected in the Benelux region and turned into filament by our material partners Reflow who are based in Amsterdam,” Batch.Works founder and CEO Julien Vaissieres told Dezeen.

The studio says the production of the desk accessories, which are made from materials diverted from landfills, is close to net-zero and represents a step towards more circular production.

“We are really proud of the fact that the products made at our new Amsterdam site are as close to net-zero as you can imagine,” Vaissieres said.

“Our factory is powered by electricity derived from wind power, our machines are literally steps away from where our raw material is produced, and our staff get to work by bicycle.”

PLA is a bioplastic that is derived from cornstarch rather than petroleum, making it a more eco-friendly alternative to regular plastics.

“In terms of material we are fully aware that even when using a biomaterial like PLA, there is a huge amount of energy and water that goes into the production process,” Vaissieres said.

“That is why we work so closely with our material supplier to only use material that is already in its second cycle. Intercepting waste that was bound for landfill and transforming it into valuable products.”

Once the products have been used, they can be recycled again as PLA. Batch.Works is also working with Bene to create a take-back scheme, allowing users to either send the products back to Bene or drop them off at a Bene showroom.

“Everything in the range has been designed with end of life in mind from the offset,” Vaissieres said.

“Each product is mono-material and mono-colour, enabling us to utilise the material to produce new products further down the line.”

The recycled translucent PLA is coloured, but the colour accounts for just two per cent of the makeup of the material, according to Vaissieres.

“When we collect products back as part of the circular scheme they will be separated into their colours before being reprocessed into new material,” he added.

Pearson Lloyd has previously designed the multifunctional PORTS Storage shelf and various other products for Bene, while Batch Works also used recycled plastic for its collection of lampshades for lighting brand Plumen.

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