Hasta La Ideas

Acclaimed Norwegian studio Snøhetta collaborated with lighting brand Ateljé Lyktan to design the Superdupertube – an innovative office lamp made using extruded hemp and sugarcane bioplastic. The hemp-based lighting is a contemporary update of Ateljé Lyktan’s Supertube which is an office light from the 1970s. It was made from extruded aluminum.

Designer: Snøhetta & Ateljé Lyktan

“[The Supertube] had finished production in 2010 or something like that, so it was iconic but sort of forgotten,” said Snøhetta partner Jenny B Osuldsen. “And it’s a tube. It’s not rocket science but it is what you need for a smart lamp in an office.” “We really loved it and think it has a lot of possibilities, so we wanted to upgrade it to a new level,” she added. The lighting design is made from hemp, and it can be industrially composed.

The extrusion technique used to create the original Supertube was developed in the 1960s, and both brands wanted to produce a lamp that was inspired by and pays tribute to the original design. But, at the same time, they wanted to lower the carbon footprint of the lamp and picked the most sustainable material they could find, which is hemp – a material known for being renewable and durable. They experimented with different materials, before finally picking hemp bioplastic to build Snøhetta’s first office lighting design.

Snøhetta and Ateljé Lyktan sourced the hemp used for the lights from the Netherlands, as the quality of the hemp from Swedish farmers “wasn’t quite there yet”, according to Gadd. The hemp used for the lighting design was sourced from the Netherlands, as they believed the quality of hemp from the Swedish farmers “wasn’t quite there yet”, according to Gadd. The hemp is then mixed with polylactic acid bioplastic which is derived from sugarcane, wood cellulose, and other minerals to form a fossil and gas-free composite. This material is then extruded to form the main body of the lamp, which also includes injection-molded louvers and side covers. The electric cables are covered in linen fabric. The lamp can also be composted in an industrial composter, or even recycled and transformed into pellets to build more lamps.

The post Snøhetta Creates An Innovative & Compostable Light Made From Hemp first appeared on Yanko Design.

Designed to extend the range of delivery from specific hubs, the DJI Express can easily make short inter-city commutes to deliver cargo and supplies without needing a semi-truck or even a dedicated driver. Perfect for smaller cities located next to bigger ones, the drone takes on the role of a delivery-agent, helping easily and rapidly cover large distances to complete deliveries.

Designer: Qingsheng Meng

The DJI Express UAV concept, created by China-based Qingsheng Meng, explores a different format from the drones you’re currently used to. Unlike most quadcopter-shaped aerial devices, the Express takes on the shape of a winged eVTOL that can fly longer distances like your regular airplane. However, significantly smaller than most airplanes, the Express UAV, as its abbreviation suggests, doesn’t have any humans inside it. The unmanned aircraft is controlled entirely remotely, relying on a combination of sensors for route-mapping and obstacle avoicance, and a rather massive camera unit on the tip that allows the remote pilot to look around as they maneuver the craft.

The drone’s design can functionally be split into a few distinct groups. You’ve got yourself a winged aircraft with propellers on each side. A high-definition camera mounted on a 2-axis gimbal on the front allows the drone to ‘see’, while the body of the aircraft houses a battery module on top, and the cargo payload at the bottom. Finally, a tail with a dedicated propeller helps with steering and stability.

A close-up of the top shows you the drone’s detachable battery, which comes with an easy-to-pull-out handle for swapping battery cells during a delivery cycle. However, the drone has its own charging port too, allowing you to charge said battery packs – a feature that can be used while the drone’s grounded for a significant number of hours. In front of the battery is a flip-switch that lets you set the drone to auto or manual, hinting at fully-autonomous flying capabilities thanks to the intelligent obstacle-avoidance sensors on the top as well as the bottom of the craft.

The DJI Express UAV’s design also has a rather well-ventilated fuselage that allows wind to rapidly cool the motor and batteries during flight. Cool air passes through the UAV’s body, helping maintain optimal temperatures during flight and keeping the battery healthy over longer journeys. Given the UAV’s fan-made conceptual nature, there are really no concrete details of its size or capabilities, although DJI does have a delivery drone in its enterprise roster – the Flycart 30. That being said, the Flycart still has a quadcopter-style design that severely limits its range and ability to deliver cargo over inter-city commutes.

The post The DJI Express UAV Drone Helps Easily Deliver Cargo Over Inter-City Journeys first appeared on Yanko Design.

Around 2.25 billion cups of coffee are consumed on a daily basis, and even if a fraction of them are produced in Keurig or Nespresso machines, those are a LOT of coffee pods that get thrown in the waste after they’re used. Keurig’s finally tackling this persisting problem with the K-Round, an alternative to the pod that’s biodegradable, plastic-free, and still manages to produce a great brew. The K-Round is essentially a compressed disc or puck of coffee grounds (sort of how your local barista tamps down coffee into a puck), bound together with plant-based materials like cellulose. The K-Rounds go into Keurig’s upcoming machine, the Alta, which can process these rounds, extracting coffee from them without leaving you with a throwaway plastic and metal coffee pod like your regular Keurig machine currently does.

Designer: Keurig

Every company reaches a level of scale where it suddenly becomes difficult to sustain growth, and Keurig’s CEO Bob Gamgort mentioned that the company had reached that point. Creating great coffee is easy, but that isn’t precisely what Keurig does. The company creates great ‘single-serve’ coffee, helping users brew exactly one cup at a time instead of an entire pot and then having to either consume more coffee than needed or throw the rest. The company pioneered the single-serve coffee movement, and now, in order to grow even further, has realized that generating more waste in the form of use-and-throw pods isn’t particularly tenable.

Enter the K-Round, a puck of compressed coffee that achieves a few things. For starters, it does away with the pod entirely, using only plant-based natural materials in its design. The K-Round is entirely biodegradable and leaves no waste apart from a small leftover disc that can easily be composted or discarded with natural waste. But more distinctly, the K-Round reinvents the perception of the pod by allowing users to have a sensorial experience BEFORE the coffee is even brewed. Most coffee pods are shrouded in mystery – nobody knows what’s in them or how they work, and all you really have is a label on top that tells you what’s inside the pod. The K-Round on the other hand, is much more sensorial. Users can actually look at the pod and see how coarse or fine the grounds are, or if they’re light or dark-roasted. The pods also give off a distinct coffee aroma, helping prepare you for the brewing/drinking journey you’re about to embark on, all while keeping the process relatively simple – place the pod in the machine, shut the lid, hit the button, and voila! Barista-level coffee brewed in mere minutes.

The K-Rounds are essentially just roasted/ground coffee that’s been compressed into the shape of a puck, and bound together using a plant-based coating of cellulose and alginate (the same stuff used to create those bursting pearls in boba tea). Different variants also have sorbitol, a form of sugar that’s 50% as sweet as sucrose, and is non-fermenting (you don’t want the coffee turning into alcohol in the pod). The engineers at Keurig Dr. Pepper (yes, that’s the name of the company, I didn’t know they were co-owned either) developed the K-Rounds to be space-saving, shelf-stable, and entirely plant-based, while still ensuring that the resulting coffee tastes great and doesn’t have any underlying undesired flavors or aromas. Their inspiration for the puck shape came from the way baristas tamped down coffee into pucks before loading them into coffee machines. The pucks come in a variety of sizes, depending on the type of brew. Espressos are smaller and flatter, while other ‘larger’ brews like double shots or tall cold-brews result in taller pucks. The K-Rounds currently only work with the upcoming Keurig Alta coffee machine, which can apparently identify each puck and automatically adjust temperature, water-level, and brew time accordingly. Notably, the Alta is designed to be backwards compatible too, and will accept the older use-and-throw K-Cups coffee-pods too. The Alta and K-Rounds don’t have an official date – Keurig says it’s still fine-tuning the two based on consumer feedback. If you want to be a part of the beta test, Keurig’s inviting coffee aficionados to sign up on their website.

The post Keurig Just Killed The Coffee-Pod With Their New Biodegradable Compressed Coffee Pucks first appeared on Yanko Design.

We have become very dependent on our computers, including the ones we keep in our pockets, but these powerful devices come with very harmful impacts on our health and lifestyle. Never mind the poor posture and negative social practices we develop through the use of computers and smartphones, even the very screens we look at affect not just our eyes but also our sleeping patterns. E-paper displays like E Ink have long been praised for their eye-friendly technology, but the old generation of these screens were so bad that they were good only for text that barely changes, like those in books. E Ink has thankfully evolved significantly over the years to the point that you can now have a portable monitor that combines E Ink and color to give your eyes a break when using laptops or smartphones.

Designer: Dasung

E Ink devices are getting larger and more complex as seen with the variety of color E Ink readers moonlighting as powerful Android tablets now available in the market. Despite their benefits in terms of comfort and power savings, E Ink screens are still significantly slower and show considerably fewer colors than even the most basic and cheapest LCD panel. That’s why selling an E Ink monitor for regular computer use sounds almost outlandish if not impractical, but that’s exactly the proposition that Dasung has been making with its line of Paperlike Color E Ink monitors.

The new 12-inch Paperlike Color takes that idea to a whole new level by making that E Ink monitor portable. It has a 12-inch screen that has an impressive 2560×1600 resolution, but only if you’re viewing black and white (or grayscale) images and text. The E Ink Kaleido 3 technology that it uses is able to display only 4,096 colors and usually at half the resolution, so it won’t exactly be mind-blowing. Of course, that’s the price to be paid for a screen that won’t tire out your eyes, at least not as much and as often as regular monitors.

The Paperlike Color (12-inch) also has other benefits, like an extremely light and slim profile made possible by having no battery at all. E Ink uses very little power, only when changing what’s being displayed, so it won’t drain your laptop or phone too much. Then again, if you will be using it like a regular monitor, that means content will be changing a lot, which would nullify this benefit and possibly produce visual artifacts. That said, companies that use color E Ink have strategies to address and improve the speed performance, but not to the same level as LCDs and OLEDs.

And therein lies the biggest question mark on this curious design, whether the benefits far outweigh the costs, both figurative and literal. Reading mostly static content and text is definitely more pleasurable, but it will only make sense if you use it on the side as a second monitor for your laptop. But then, it won’t really help you give your eyes much of a break if you’ll be using the laptop’s regular screen most of the time anyway. The E Ink monitor could be a nice external display for your smartphone, but that would run into the same limitations as color E Ink eReaders today. And with Dasung’s typical pricing, the Paperlike Color (12-inch) will probably be out of reach for many computer users, limiting it to a few enthusiasts who might find a place for it in their workflow.

The post Dasung introduces a portable color E Ink monitor for eye-friendly computing anywhere first appeared on Yanko Design.

Japanese manufacturer Toyo Steel originally designed this M-8 for factory use. The steel box is for storing screws and other small parts.

It’s manufactured by drawing, with a purposeful draft angle on the sidewalls: “The M-8 has its tapered shape in order to make it easier to scoop small parts by hand.” That also makes the boxes easier to nest.

The innovation here is that they have small flip-over wings on the short ends, allowing you to stack them:

The company reckons even non-factory-workers will find these handy, and has re-marketed these for domestic use.

It comes in its natural steel color and black, as well as the moss green shown above.

They’re a damn sight better looking than plastic containers, and will surely last longer, but the price is dear: These run $84 a pop.