Hasta La Ideas

Three years ago Michael Abramson was at a nightclub in Boston. Shortly after taking a sip of his drink, he knew something was wrong. It was his first drink of the night but “started to feel much more like my 15th drink,” he reported. Before he knew what was happening, the suddenly legless Abramson was being thrown out of the club, presumably for being overintoxicated; his friends had to carry him out, and he remained unconscious until the next morning.

Abramson had been “roofied,” having drank from a cocktail that someone had spiked. It’s possible he was the target of a potential robbery, or that the drink was intended for someone of the fairer gender—shockingly, some 400,000 women are rendered unconscious and subsequently raped each year after unwittingly ingesting GHB, Rohypnol or Ketamine, colloquially known as “date rape drugs.” (And that number only reflects the cases that are reported.) Even worse, you don’t need to be Walter White to whip up a batch of GHB—it’s easily created out of commonly available chemicals, and the resultant drug is odorless, flavorless and colorless, making detection just about impossible.

Abramson, who had studied engineering in his undergrad years, resolved to make it detectable. After enlisting the help of two of his former professors from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, he formed DrinkSavvy, a company dedicated to producing cocktailware—cups, straws, cocktail stirrers, and drinking glasses—that would change color in the presence of date rape drugs.

The team successfully worked out the chemistry, and next month DrinkSavvy’s first batch of drinking straws and 16-oz. plastic cups will begin shipping. The first recipients will be the crowdsource backers that helped launch DrinkSavvy through IndieGogo, where a modest 50 large was enough to get the initial products manufactured. The company expects to have units ready for sale to the general public by 2014.

Here’s a demonstration of a prototype:

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Ben Mesker’s Jokerboxes combine three of my favorite things: Industry-specific tools, objects designed to hold stuff, and the DIY ethos. Director of Photography Mesker has 20 years of shooting experience, and after the first 15 years, he had built up a steady list of “common problems found on sets everywhere.” No stranger to a table saw, the handy Mesker then set about designing a portable, ultra-utilitarian way of having all the necessary grip equipment close at hand, as a way of solving those problems.

Mesker’s solutions are called Jokerboxes, and while they outwardly resemble the de rigueur apple boxes found on every film set, they contain far more functionality. You need to see this explanatory video—in the following three minutes, you are going to witness an absurd amount of clever design thinking.

You catch those shots of Mesker hand-drafting? Sure to bring back some memories for a subset of us.

By the bye, Mesker has penned an article about an early on-set experience that shaped the way he approaches projects. While the central character is “The Fastest Gaffer in Pittsburgh,” the lesson could well be applied to many a creative field, like industrial design, that requires technical acumen. Read it here.

Hit the jump for some cool shots of the Jokerboxes.

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Here’s yet another badly-acted, supposed-to-be-ironic infomercial, but this one belies a clever product design. The Jar-with-a-Twist is a structural package design that operates like a deodorant stick, elevating the interior base as the user cranks. Have a look:

The cited three cents per unit in additional cost is something I’d gladly pay for the convenience of being able to get every last drop of the jar’s contents. I love the brilliance of simply molding threads into the surface. And as someone who hates waste, I’d love to see this package design mechanism applied to, well, everything. How many millions of gallons of shampoo/toothpaste/mayonnaise/you-name-it must we throw out each year, simply because it’s not practical to extract all of it?

The Jar-with-a-Twist concept was developed by this small team of guys and is currently patent pending.

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We’ve seen umbrellas stuck into car doors; optimized for wind resistance; slapped onto bikes; and the design potential for this simple device is so great that we even ran a series on umbrella innovations earlier this year (here’s Part 1, here’s Part 2). The umbrella is one of the longest-lived objects I can think of (and a great example of early design). We know the Ancient Greeks and Egyptians had parasols for sun blockage, and that the Chinese had developed a collapsible umbrella design as early as 21 A.D. But who came up with the idea of the umbrella in the first place?

The amazing photos here, captured by Indonesia-based photographer Penkdix Palme, make you wonder: Was the umbrella’s invention biomimetic in the sense that we saw an animal doing this and then emulated them? Or is it simply common sense that early man, caught in the rain, seeks to block it by holding a deflective object above their head?

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The GRID-IT organizer first caused a stir when it hit the market some years ago [Ed. Note: including a2011 Core77 Design Award], and for good reason: It was an affordable and clever way to bring order to chaos, lighting up the pleasure center of many a small-tool- or gadget-organizing geek. The seemingly-randomly-placed elastic straps, as chaotic-looking as they are, belie the object’s ability to swallow whatever you want, in whatever order you want it.

My only gripe with the thing was that it was somewhat awkward to pull in and out of bags, with accidental friction causing some items to snag or shift, thus ruining my organizational OCD masterpiece. For that reason I stopped using mine. But Cocoon Innovations has now finally integrated the GRID-IT into its own bag, the SLIM.

Available exclusively through their website and Apple, the $80 SLIM is kitted out with de rigueur materials–water-resistant ballistic nylon and waterproof zippers–but it’s got that sweet GRID-IT built-in behind the front flap, while the secondary compartmant closer to your back holds your laptop/tablet. It ain’t gonna hold your gym stuff, but for folks like me who are fans of slim bags (it’s just 3.5″ thick) this is looking like a home run.

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