Core77

Core77 Weekly Roundup (9-8-26 to 9-11-26)

Rain Noe

Here's what we looked at this week:

Handsome, utilitarian pop-up furniture by industrial designer Tom Ducarouge.

ShiftLens: A system for 3D-printing lenticular objects.

These innovative Japanese kitchen scissors were designed specifically to deal with sauce packets.

Industrial designer Mauricio Romano's experimental linkage-based clocks.

Izzy Swan's diminutive VacQube revolutionizes workbench hold-down.

Flip: Flexible, flappable modular public seating by industrial design firm OMI.

The Bulldog Binder: Improving the design of the ratchet binder.

Oilstainlab's automotive-inspired Maniac Chair.

Americans invent yet another crazy-ass racing style: "King of the Hill."

Frequent Ikea assemblers will be thrilled: Skil now makes a powered hex key set.

A great design in need of basic improvement: This clamp-based tape dispenser.

A Great Design in Need of Basic Improvement: This Clamp-Based Tape Dispenser

Rain Noe

Here's a clever product idea from industrial designers David Suhami & Nitzan Shafat, a/k/a Scratch Design. ClampTape is essentially an A-clamp with a tape dispenser centered on the clamp's pivot point.

User reviews (here) state that the clamp is sturdy and stays in place while dispensing.

But the key problem is that it takes an odd size of tape that is presumably standard in Israel, where Scratch Design is based; standard 3M or Scotch rolls will not fit. Should the designers correct that, I imagine the product would sell like hotcakes in the American crafting market.

Skil's Powered Hex Key Set

Rain Noe

Lots of us have something like this in the toolbox or junk drawer:

Now Skil has designed a powered hex key set, the world's first. The head can lock at 90°, 135° and 180° positions, then your thumb does all the work. The push-button has both forward and reverse. The 4V battery is rechargeable via USB-C.

Lefties won't be pleased, as the tool has clearly been designed for the right-handed.

They sell two versions: A $50 basic unit that comes with 11 hex bits, though you can only store five onboard at a time.

The $70 kit comes with the basic unit, 11 hex bits, 5 Philips, 5 flathead and 5 Torx.

Autodesk's Aishwarya Balamukundan on Judging Core77's Fusion Forward Competition

Core Jr

Ask Aishwarya Balamukundan what excites her most in design right now, and she'll point to something almost invisible: the shrinking gap between having an idea and holding the finished thing. As Senior Director of Marketing for Autodesk's Design & Manufacturing portfolio, including Fusion, she's spent over 12 years watching that gap close, and it's a shift she's bringing directly to her role judging Fusion Forward: Design for Home, Core77's competition with Autodesk Fusion.

Aishwarya Balamukundan, Sr. Director of Marketing, Design & Manufacturing at Autodesk

At Autodesk Balamukundan leads product marketing, go-to-market strategy, and self-serve growth for Fusion, a platform used by makers, engineers, and manufacturers worldwide. Over her tenure she's built cross-functional teams at the intersection of product-led growth, competitive intelligence, and campaign strategy, including founding the company's first PLG team. As a juror, she's said she's particularly drawn to work sitting at the intersection of technology, education, and equity.

When asked to describe what excites her most about the design field, she says "That the distance between 'I have an idea' and 'I made the thing' keeps collapsing. Generative and agentic tools are absorbing the tedious middle of the process, so designers spend more time on judgment and intent. The interesting question is no longer whether you can model it, but whether you should."

That same clarity sharpens into a warning when she talks about what worries her. "That speed becomes the point," she says. "When it costs nothing to generate a hundred options, the temptation is to ship the first one that looks good instead of the one that's right. Volume is not the same as exploration, and taste doesn't scale automatically with output."

For entrants preparing their Fusion Forward submissions, Balamukundan's advice is specific: don't just show the finished object. "Show us the constraint you were working against, and how the design answers it," she says. "The strongest entries make the problem legible before they make the solution look good." She wants to see the tradeoffs entrants resolved, what they gave up to get there, and the evidence that shows their work actually landed, not just a polished final render.

Fusion Forward: Design for Home is now open for entries. Three categories to choose from, $9,750 in prizes. Deadline for entry September 28.

Americans Invent Yet Another Crazy-Ass Racing Style: "King of the Hill"

Rain Noe

I'm sure our overseas readers are shaking their heads. Yes, we Americans have done it again, inventing a new bat-shit style of racing. It was going to be hard to top the Rockford Speedway Figure 8 Trailer Race, where all participants had to drag a trailer.

But on Labor Day, Hudson Speedway in New Hampshire held their new King of the Hill race, a "thrill show [that] delivers holiday mayhem."

In this format, a pickup truck towing a car trailer leads the pack of entrants. The racers all vie to catch up to the trailer, drive onto it, and remain parked for as long as they can. You probably think you can guess what this would look like. I thought I could, and guessed wrong:

Here's the whole race—all five minutes of it—and I will say, it has a surprise ending:

Oilstainlab's Automotive-Inspired Maniac Chair

Rain Noe

Out of the corner of your eye, this might appear to be a midcentury chair.

But look closer, and you see a material no 1950s Scandinavian designer got to play around with: Carbon fiber.

The piece is in fact current. This is the Maniac Chair by Oilstainlab, a California-based outfit that produces the HF-11, a low-volume hypercar. (The chair is sold by House Dé Stains, the company's lifestyle brand.) Inspired by the HF-11, the Maniac Chair's shell is made out of a CNC-machined aluminum frame with a hand-laid carbon fiber shell.

There is no standard version of the chair; each is ordered bespoke, with clients choosing "trim levels" of differing textiles, colors and finishes. Additionally you can order it with or without a headrest and companion Ottoman.

The Bulldog Binder: Improving the Design of the Ratchet Binder

Rain Noe

Out here in the country, people commonly haul heavy things around on trailers: Tractors, skid steers, back hoes. Safely securing these items to the trailer is a must. This is typically done with chains that are drawn tight using this thing, which is called a ratchet binder.

As you ratchet the handle, rotating the central shaft, it draws the threaded eyelets on each end closer together, tightening the chain.

As time-tested as this tool is, it has a couple of design flaws. The big one is that the handle's range of motion runs perpendicular to the chains. That means that as you pull the handle, the chain naturally wants to twist. This can build up a dangerous amount of tension, and should you lose your grip on the handle as the chain untwists, you've got a heavy bar of metal coming at you with extreme force. Long-haul trucker Justin Clein learned this the hard way: After getting whacked in the head with a binder, he needed 20 stitches.

The second design flaw is that the threads on the eyelets are exposed. These can get clogged with road gunk and are susceptible to corrosion over time.

Following his accident, Clein resolved to design a better ratchet binder. He enlisted industrial design firm Ingenuity Design Group, and together they came up with this Bulldog Binder.

They call it "The world's first linear ratcheting loadbinder," since the handle has now been placed in-line with the chains. (They achieved this by using helical gearing.) This arrangement eliminates the twisting problem.

Secondly they've concealed the threads within the body of the tool, which features a sealed housing.

Both Clein and Ingenuity Design Group are Australian, but Clein traveled to the 'States to unveil the tool at last year's Mid-America Trucking Show. The response was positive and Clein's company, Universal Restraint Systems, is in the process of setting up distribution.

Here's how the tool works:

Kitchen Scissors Designed Specifically to Deal with Three Aspects of Sauce Packets

Rain Noe

Modern domestic Japanese cuisine comes with a lot of sauce packets. Curry, soup, miso, ramen flavoring, etc. all come in sealed foil pouches; with certain dishes, you boil the pouch itself to heat the contents, before cutting it open and adding it to your dish.

Japanese cutlery manufacturer Yaxell has designed these Squeeze Scissors specifically to deal with sauce packets.

The design is quite innovative—the blades actually have three different surfaces along their length, to serve three different functions.

The actual cutting edge of the blades is only the small area near the handles.

The middle of the blades has no cutting edge at all; this part is for squeezing every last drop of sauce out of the packet.

The tip of the blades are serrated. These are meant to serve as grippy tweezers, allowing you to extract a packet out of boiling water without burning your fingers.

The scissors are shockingly cheap, at least in Japan, costing just ¥900 (USD $5.75)!

Izzy Swan Revolutionizes Workbench Hold-Down

Rain Noe

Not too long ago, in order to have vacuum hold-down at your workbench, you needed an air compressor and earplugs. Those days are over.

This is the VacQube, a diminutive, quiet 12V vacuum pump created by inventor Izzy Swan.

The idea is that you drill a hole in your workbench and plug the VacQube's 1/4" airline into the bottom of it. When you drop its companion VacQseal—essentially a gasket—on top of the workbench and encircling the hole, now you've got instant holddown. You can also elevate the workpiece by using a VacQpod, a sealing riser.

Check out the demo:

The VacQube is currently up for pre-sale at $80.

Flip: Flexible, Flippable Modular Public Seating

Rain Noe

This Flip public seating concept is by London-based industrial design firm Of My Imagination. The idea is to provide more comfort for waiting areas when they're not full. To that end, individual seats can be flipped out of the way, and a fold-down table on their underside can be deployed.

Flip's design allows each seat to rotate individually along a continuous mechanism, offering a tailored seating arrangement to suit varying needs and situations. The seat is meticulously engineered to balance rotation angles with ergonomic comfort, ensuring a practical yet adaptable seating experience.

The idea was actually inspired by the pandemic, when OMI's designers spotted public seating that had been retrofitted with signs to enforce social distancing. In their thinking, Flip "provides a future-proof solution, allowing seating to adjust seamlessly without disrupting the visual harmony of the space and adding functionality for travellers."

This is just a concept, and no production plans have been announced.

Experimental Linkage-Based Clocks

Rain Noe

Mexican industrial designer Mauricio Romano works for Meta, but keeps his skills sharp with self-directed projects on the side. One such project is this mechanical exploration of clocks that use linkages rather than gears:

I know these are just concepts, but I think it would look super cool if the linkages were nearly the same shade as the background. Just barely visible from a color perspective, allowing the clock hands to pop.

Handsome, Utilitarian Pop-Up Furniture by Industrial Designer Tom Ducarouge

Rain Noe

I'm really digging these utilitarian furniture pieces, by Paris-based industrial designer Tom Ducarouge.

They're made from sheets of 25mm Baltic Birch plywood with a roundover profile on the edges, what look to be 3mm brackets made of steel or perhaps aluminum, and exposed socket-head cap screws.

They were designed for New Balance's Marseille Running House, a pop-up space built to support runners of the Marseille-Cassis half-marathon.

The mountain-like profile cut into the table legs are meant to echo the Col de la Gineste, a limestone pass that runners ascend from Marseille and descend towards Cassis.

With any luck, these pieces made it into a New Balance store following the pop-up's closing.

ShiftLens: A System for 3D-Printing Lenticular Objects

Rain Noe

Let's say you're designing a switch that must change color when a user activates it. You'd typically think of integrating an LED. But researchers at MIT have developed a low-tech, no-electronics-required way of accomplishing the same. Their process, called ShiftLens, is a way of 3D printing lenticular objects.

The idea is that you've got an outer lens layer of transparent material. Beneath that is a pattern layer printed in contrasting colors, in stripes that correspond with the linear lenses of the top layer.

Moving the lens layer yields the following effect:

The actuating mechanism needn't be a switch:

In this example, they've applied it to a cylindrical object, with the use case being a chemical container that lets you know when it's properly sealed:

"With our system, an object can tell you whether you are using it properly, without the need for sensors or any complicated electronics," says grad student Yunyi Zhu, of MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). "The interactive display is mechanical, so you can create a self-contained, multistate, interactive device that a user can control very intuitively."

Zhu and her team developed a design tool that integrates with Rhino and allows the user to apply the ShiftLens process to their own designs. With any luck they'll release it as a plug-in, though they've not announced any plans to do so.

Core77 Weekly Roundup (8-31-26 to 9-4-26)

Rain Noe

Here's what we looked at this week:

A new immersive gaming speaker set-up: OXS's Thunder Pro Max system features a "Satellite Neck Speaker."

Genesis' new luxury electric SUV has no B-pillar, no start button, radiant floor heating.

In Denmark, 3D-printed student housing.

PÉPET: Masae Nagao's kinetic paper pets.

Chois: 3D-printed modular furniture components, you supply the dowels.

Blue Star Crafts' Retro Mini Pochade Box.

Multiple fantastic UX details in this saute pan lid by industrial designer Sebastian Bergne.

Which folding bicycle design has the best UX?

Studio Gorm designs a better doorstop.

Qingshan's Turtle Stool is an unusual rolling stool for the Chinese market.

Real object or AI?

Industrial designer Lisa Klingersberger figures out how to make Ikea's iconic blue bag fold down compactly.

The Helton: The James Brand's handsome, designey alternative to the Swiss Army Knife.

Clever improvisation: How to keep your car going on just three wheels.

Clever Improvisation: How to Keep Your Car Going on Just Three Wheels

Rain Noe

Here we see footage of the Baja Mongolia offroad racing event. The vehicle is a UTV fielded by the GTHub team out of Ulan Bataar.

Now look at it from the other side:

Mid-race, they destroyed their vehicle's front left suspension, severing the connection to the front left wheel. Somehow they found two logs, and used the now-useless front tire and spare tire as counterweights to keep the vehicle going.