Hasta La Ideas

If you’re looking to buy a bag, or are designing a bag and need to see a wide cross-section of product for inspiration, check out Rushfaster. The Australia-based online retailer (located in Glen’s hometown of Sydney) is like that friend you have who’s a bag aficionado and has a closet full of only the best stuff.

Rushfaster offers a heavily-curated selection of brands from around the world—Booq, Gravis, BuiltNY, InCase, Mandarina Duck, Superdry and more—and stocks every conceivable permutation of bag and carry-thing: Laptop bags, luggage, messenger bags, backpacks, wallets, iPhone and iPad cases, you name it.

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It’s a rich-world problem for sure, and while Having Too Many Shoes Syndrome used to be the domain of women, I’ve visited the apartments of just as many guy friends and encountered that shitstorm of kicks cluttering the vestibule. If you’re a collector like Turtle from Entourage with access to movie-star funds, you have a special closet built to house them, but most of the people I know just have them scattered about.

Though not a shoe-collector myself—at one point I lived with more dogs than I had pairs of shoes—I’m digging the Shoe Trap.

It’s nothing more than a modular system of boxes lined with foot-funk masking cedar, clear front doors and rubber grips on the bottom so you can stack ’em, making your own little shoe skyscrapers. They’re like Lego for Imelda Marcos (or Turtle, if he wasn’t living on Vinnie Chase’s dime).

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One way to make a product is to start with the design, then source the materials for it. Another way is to start with a material and try to think up products that need it.

Pennsylvania-based Just Ducky Products falls in the latter category, having developed a proprietary polyurethane formula that they’ve spun into a line of products. Their material, when formed into straps, can stretch up to double its length while retaining “memory” of its original length. They’ve also developed a type of poly-coated webbing, sans stretch. Both materials will not crack, break or split, and unlike rubber they can stand up to oil, salt water, chemicals, and the elements.

The applications thus far: Bungie cords, tie-down straps, spider-like flex webs, dog collars, dog leashes, and more. I only wish they’d come to us first for a design comp….

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It’s ironic that manufacturers in America, a country with just 200-something years of history, have already started to mine their industrial design past while auto manufacturers in a country like Sweden, which has been around since the Middle Ages and has way more history, look only forward. A case in point: Ford’s Mustang, Dodge’s Challenger and Chevy’s Camaro are all re-makes, but you won’t see Volvo bringing back the P1800.

For a while, though, it looked like the P1800 would return, just not from Volvo. AutoExpress first reported that Swedish designers Bo Zolland and Mattias Vocks were collaborating on a reboot of Volvo’s iconic coupe.

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Redesigning a grand piano is pretty ballsy. The form factor and overall lines are pretty firmly entrenched, and the types of people who’ll pony up for one aren’t known for their embrace of radical redesigns. Then there’s the challenge of trying to break the lines already seared in your head from viewing an object with such an established form.

Still, I do believe Polish designer Robert Majkut has pulled it off with his Whaletone Piano. Using the unlikely inspiration of an imprecise dream he had after a daytime whale viewing, Majkut set to work:

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