Available in different sizes, metals and colors, these lab-grown diamond studs bring a sparkle to your ears. Also available loose and in other settings, Lightbox Jewelry’s stones are unlike other diamonds. Natural diamonds are unique and formed some 100 miles below ground one to three billion years ago, due to unique temperature and pressure conditions, and eventually pushed toward the ground through volcanic activity, but lab-grown diamonds are made using technology to replicate that natural process. Lightbox crafts them at their high-tech lab outside of Portland, Oregon using a Chemical Vapor Disposition (CVD) chamber, where a small slice of an existing lab-grown diamond is placed, gases are inserted and heated by microwaves. When the gases turn to plasma, it enables the lab-grown diamond to grow. It’s a linear and precise process, with a carat-sized stone growing in a month or so, and a two-carat stone growing in two months. Different gases create clear, pink or blue stones. Once grown, the stone is treated like any other: it gets cut, graded, polished and set. These blue 1.5-carat diamonds look fresh and clean in their 14k white gold setting.

To say that I’m a huge reader is an understatement. I am both addicted to collecting books and to actually reading them (although not all that I buy have been read, to be honest). Reading non-fiction books is not a problem for me. The challenge is retaining all the information that I get, organizing them, and getting back to them later on when needed.

Designer: Possibility Design

This is the problem that the folks at Possibility Design were trying to solve for a startup based in Germany and what they have come up with is a product concept for a digital highlighter called Quo. Basically, it’s a device that you can use to highlight important passages or chapters in a physical book that you’re reading and convert it to a digital file that you can store on your phone or tablet, or laptop. Not only that, but there are also other tools that you can use to further understand and organize what you want to save from that book.

The design for the Quo tries to recreate what an analog highlighter actually looks like and can even be clipped to the book like a bookmark. They wanted to recreate that experience of highlighting something in the book so that the learning curve for using the device will not be steep. Aside from just scanning the sentences that you will highlight, the device and the app that is connected to it will let you save and organize what you need. They also mentioned a dictionary and translator in case what you’re reading is not your first language. There’s also a record function that they did not go into detail but we assume that it can record your personal notes while you’re reading.

To further bridge the physical with the digital, they also came up with a collaborative platform so you can connect with other book readers. It may work like with what Amazon and Goodreads is doing for their Kindle readers where the notes that you choose to make public can also be read by people reading the same book. There are not much details about how the app will actually work but for now what we’re seeing is what it can do on paper.

This is a pretty interesting product for heavy readers like me who would like to keep a database of all the important information that I get from reading mostly non-fiction books. The design of the actual Quo highlighter is more functional but in terms of aesthetics, I might mistake it for my airconditioner remote when it’s lying around my house. But I would rather have a useful device with many tools to choose from rather than a pretty one that doesn’t really do anything.

The post This digital highlighter may be the new must-have for heavy readers first appeared on Yanko Design.

Buda Castle’s new visitor centers and Infopoints, accessory buildings to Hungary’s Buda Castle grounds, are entirely clad in reflective material, immersing visitors in the grounds’ natural surroundings.

No one can say what a modern accessory building should look like when they’re built for 13th-century castles. There’s a fine line between an accessory building that looks in harmony with its larger residence and one that resembles it a little too closely, only to repeat the same note.

Deisgners: BLOKK & Hello Wood

Up to the task, architecture studios BLOKK and Hello Wood collaborated to design new visitor centers and information hubs called Infopoints for Buda Castle’s grounds in Budapest, Hungary. Taking a blank canvas to its most extreme end, BLOKK and Hello Wood struck harmony through mirror-cladding and simple, geometric silhouettes to pay homage to Buda Castle without stealing the show.

Buda Castle, the first royal residence on Castle Hill, was built between the years 1247 and 1265 by King Béla IV of Hungary. Throughout the years, Buda Castle underwent several reconstruction phases including one following the Siege of Buda in 1686 and one following the castle’s occupation by Nazi Germany during World War II. Considering the castle’s textured history, modern architecture studios, BLOKK and Hello Wood had to get creative.

Located near the Palace of the Buda Castle, in its Palace District, the visitor centers and Infopoints each roughly cover 30-square-meters and fit in with their surroundings by responding to them. Looking to the castle’s shape for inspiration, the visitor center’s architects found unity through a cuboid body and a high-pitched roof, similar to the castle’s. Then, the Infopoint, which functions as the castle ground’s information desk and souvenir shop, keeps a cuboid shape without the pitched roof, similar to a street vendor’s pop-up shop.

Constructed atop four steel-framed modules, which were lifted into place by a crane, the buildings are easy to assemble and transport. The visitor center’s and Infopoint’s mirror-cladding was chosen for its modern appeal and subtle reflection of its surroundings.

The Hello Wood team describes the choice behind the structures’ mirror-cladding, “Aiming for a booth that stays low-key in the atmosphere of the Buda Castle resulted in the use of reflective, glassy material and an almost perfect cube. Not even a visible door handle, the so-called Mirror Pavilions look natural in the setting of this historic place.”

While the two different structures keep different silhouettes, the outdoor cladding and interior paneling remain congruent. In contrast to the cold, metallic feel of the exterior mirror-cladding, the interior walls of each structure find warmth and brightness with natural pine plywood paneling. Then, an overhead skylight drenches the indoor spaces with natural light, emphasizing the structure’s homogeneous appearance.

An internal skylight brightens the Infopoints’ natural pine plywood paneling and creates a warm retreat in contrast to the cold, reflective exterior. 

The architects at BLOKK and Hello Wood found harmony between the Buda Castle and the Infopoint structures by keeping the accessory building’s shape similar to the castle’s.  

The post These mirrored visitor centers were built in harmony with a 13th-century castle to reflect the castle grounds first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Museum of Other Things is an online collection of DIY solutions from 20th-century Russia. During the Cold War and for years afterwards, resources we Americans take for granted were difficult to come by in Russia. These objects are the workarounds that creative Russians came up with.

Water Boiler, by Oleg Baichurin

Baichurin was a college student in the ’80s. In the dorms, to boil water for tea, he spliced a plug and connected it with two razor blades to form a circuit. He and his dormmates would then drop this into a jar of water, and could boil 3 liters in 2-3 minutes.

“At that time it was difficult to buy such small water-boilers,” he writes, “so for us [this] small water boiler was a real luxury.”

Doormat, by Aleksey Solomkin

Solomkin and a neighbor would drink beers on their own porches—then throw the caps into each other’s yards. As the caps piled up in his grass, Solomkin tried to find a use for them.

“I’d seen a neighbor’s porch that had these same kind of bottle caps, flattened out, all over. They served two functions: they stopped you from slipping in winter, and during the muddy season they got rid of the mud on your boots so that you didn’t track a load of dirt into the house. The problem was, though, that I had a stone porch, so there was no way I was going to be able to hammer bottle caps into it.”

Solomkin’s brother, who worked in a factory, brought him a plastic sheet from the factory that had a grid of holes drilled in it. Solomkin then used wood screws and rivets to hack the caps and plastic into a doormat.

Rat Trap, by Vasilii Shiskov

“We caught rats with this,” writes Yekaterina Shishkov, showing this object created by her husband, Vasilii. “This was after the war, after the occupation. [Vasilii] did everything himself — the house, the stove. How else? There’s no money. Did it all himself – everything for the house he did himself.”

Sieve, by Igor

Igor was building a house, and for materials he needed to separate stones from damp sand.

“I came across this thing that was used to store eggs, and I thought I might be able to use it to sift the sand. I tried it at first without the box, without edges, but it was very slow. Then I made this box, hooked it on, and it started to sift. No kidding. It worked pretty well and I used it a lot. Almost a whole bucket of sand fits in there, then you shake it, and all the stones stay on the top. It was wet sand, remember, and had damp lumps, but they didn’t plug up these holes.

“This was exactly the kind of sieve we needed. It was a one-off thing, made for a specific moment in time.”

Calculator Case, by Andrei Drozdov

The explanation for this one really surprised me.

“This is just a regular Chinese calculator; I paid a dollar for it. But this box is made of iron. I made it in my student days, when a calculator you bought for a dollar was a valuable thing. But they were disposable; you couldn’t change the batteries.

“And that was the reason why such heavy iron boxes for them began to appear. They stopped the buttons from getting pressed accidentally and turning the calculator on.”

Drozdov says that he made the case by flattening the metal using his father-in-law’s hammer and anvil.

There’s more to see here.

Zojirushi teamed up with PAC-MAN to create a limited edition stainless steel mug that pays homage to the classic game. Available in either black or silver, the mug features an array of utilitarian elements: an electro-polished SlickSteel interior to repel corrosion and stains, a flip-open lid with a safety lock to prevent spills, as well as double wall insulation to ensure hot or cold drinks maintain their temperature. Holding up to 16 ounces of liquid, this portable mug is as functional as it is nostalgic.