Hasta La Ideas

We had the pleasure of meeting designer extraordinaire Michael Jelinek at the last Autodesk University, where he’d come a long way from home—the Czech Republic—to demonstrate his formidable rendering skills, using techniques he’d honed doing projects for clients like Nike and Volkswagen. Among other things, Jelinek—who’s served as a senior design consultant for Alias software—has a knack for cranking out imaginative vehicles that combine futuristic flair with old-school Syd-Mead-esque style.

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Here’s a trio of neat design concepts from Coroflotter Ming Cao, a Wuxi, China-based industrial designer with more than ten years in the game.

His Telescopic Door Handle, above, would be brilliant on public bathroom doors where you often have to knock to determine if someone’s inside. When you lock the door from the inside, the knob on the other side retracts, providing a clear visual and physical indication that you can’t enter.

Cao’s Cross Bamboo stool and light combine plastic and bamboo, the latter of which is abundant in tropical regions. It’s not clear if this is his marketing intent, but it would be cool to sell just the business ends of the pieces and allow the end-user to locate their own legs and chop them down to size.

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Two months ago, we posted about Local Motors’ Terra Prix 2085 design competition, a hypothetical ’round-the-world race set in the near future (read the full brief here). While it’s no surprise that there’s some overlap between the Coroflot community and that of Local Motors, we’re pleased to present a selection of Flotspotted entries, including winner Victor Acuña’s “Global Spirit Racing.”

Victor Acuña

Congrats on the win, Victor!

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The notion of designing a vehicle that is equally at home on a racetrack and on city streets is, in many ways, a fools’ errand: the criteria for each tends to diverge to the point of being mutually exclusive.

That said, designers will be damned if they don’t at least make an effort, and a couple of our more ambitious Coroflot members have made worthy attempts at doing so: South Korean Lee Jung Hoon has tackled my conveyance of choice, the track bicycle, while Tel Aviv’s Eyal Melnick takes on the “electric supersport motorcycle.”

(My commentary will largely focus on Lee’s “Cyclone”—I’ve only been on a motorcycle once in my life—so hopefully some of our more motor-inclined faithful can share their input on Eyal’s “Shavit.”)

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To make something look complicated and simple at the same time isn’t easy, but it’s an aesthetic that Vito Selma has nailed. Selma is based out of the central Filipino city of Cebu, and the Cebuano designer writes that “Simplicity governs my bursts of creativity, and simplicity dictates the complex contours I form my choice material—wood—into.”

Selma’s designs are distributed in roughly two dozen countries, and his impressive client list ranges from Saudi royalty to the Princess of Malaysia to some guy named, oh, Nelson Mandela. Not bad for a one-man shop, although technically Selma does have a partner—one that grows out of the ground. As described on Selma’s website:

…Wood occupies a very personal space in [Selma’s] world. He refers to it as his ‘partner’, implying an equal give and take of complications and accomplishment, a mutual understanding. The result is an unusually reflexive portrait of a boy and his wood: the material seemingly assimilates the literal ‘flow’ of Vito’s creative outputs and his inspirations, as can be found in his tabletops and much-reputed sofas.

Check more images of Selma’s work after the jump:

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