Yanko Design - Form Beyond Function

Fresh Air Made Easy

Posted: 21 Apr 2017 09:00 AM PDT

Achieving the best air quality is a fine balance of purification indoors and circulation with the outdoors. This can be problematic if you live in a smoggy area because the incoming air will always be less than suitable for breathing. Until now! The Connected purifier protects you from air pollution and particles even when your window is open.

The design quickly and easily transitions from a floor unit to a window unit in seconds. As a floor unit, it serves to clean air inside any room. When it’s time to get some “fresh” air, it mounts inside the window. Here, it pre-filters the air coming inside, ensuring pollutants and allergens never make their way inside!

Designer: NUYN

Use your phone all around the world!

Posted: 21 Apr 2017 06:00 AM PDT

Something really strange happened at Coachella this year. A man, christened the Smartphone Bandit, managed to steal close to 130 smartphones during the festival from unsuspecting patrons who went to attend the world’s most anticipated music gathering held in the Indio Valley, California. He was caught, thanks to Apple’s Find My Phone feature that some patrons activated and used to track the man down.

What happens at these festivals is that when a lot of people gather at a given location, phone services usually stop working, because the network providers can’t take the volume of pings from a concentrated area (here’s a great article that explains this phenomenon). When phones may be required the most, you’re usually left with a smartphone that shows no network service (basically a very expensive camera). The catching of the smartphone bandit was quite a stroke of luck, given finding network range in congested areas is near impossible.

The company GoTenna is solving that problem with its device, the GoTenna Mesh. A small device that’s a dream to carry with you, the Mesh pairs with your phone, giving it the ability to send out messages, make calls, share locations, in a completely encrypted format. Think of it as a much more advanced walkie-talkie that allows you to stay connected with friends or family, especially when it’s crucial, all around the world. The GoTenna connects to your phone using Bluetooth, and uses long-distance radio waves to boost your phone’s connection, allowing it to communicate with other GoTenna devices no matter where you are and/or how bad your cell-service is. Founded by siblings Daniela and Jorge Perdomo in the wake of the Sandy Hurricane, the GoTenna was envisioned to be a saving grace for all situations when phone communications would be down.

GoTenna currently has tens of thousands of users, including people working in public safety, the Department of Defense, and even humanitarian and disaster relief NGOs. Small, smart, and potentially life-saving, the GoTenna Mesh is available in pairs and is ideal for not just festivals and superbowls, but also for disaster struck zones and people who travel to remote destinations. It also works incredibly in foreign countries, allowing you to communicate with one another no matter where on earth you are! Go ahead, stay connected!

Designer: GoTenna

BUY IT HERE: $149 (Pair of Two GoTennas)

Build Your Fresh Air

Posted: 21 Apr 2017 03:00 AM PDT

Air quality varies from place to place as much as allergies vary from person to person… so, it makes very little sense that we all have the same purification systems available to us! Designed with this in mind, the TAC air purifier provides custom air cleaning to suit you and where you live. Oh, and it’s super cute.

Unlike other purifiers, it features unique filters, each dedicated to a specific type of allergen or pollutant. Live in a big city? Throw on the smog filter. Allergic to pollen? There’s a filter for that too. Simply layer the brightly colored filters to get just the right balance for you and your unique space!

Designer: Junku Jung

Too Cool for Stool

Posted: 21 Apr 2017 12:00 AM PDT

When it comes to stools, wood and metal are the most common material selections you’ll find. The ARTU stool combines both in a way that’s anything but common!

Architectural and atypical, it’s designer Alexander Zhukovsky’s answer to finding an unusual solution for this usual material mixture. Here, folded sheet metal in stark white meets natural wood. Unlike conventional designs, each material plays an integral part of both the leg and seat sections.

Designer: Alexander Zhukovsky

Eye of the Wagen!

Posted: 20 Apr 2017 04:10 PM PDT

The first ever engine-powered car was born as a direct successor to the horse-carriage. That’s why most cars back in the day had horse-carriage inspired designs. However, when cars evolved further, they began getting humanized. The horse carriage features started disappearing and the car began looking more and more ‘human’. The headlights started being interpreted as eyes while the grill became the mouth. Family cars looked happy, regular cars looked more serious, and racing cars looked aggressive. Headlamps that were interpreted as eyes then began taking that interpretation more seriously. Angel ring headlamps pretty much looked like the car was staring directly at you. Today, we’re looking at the next step for car headlamp designs. Probably the most eye-resembling headlight of them all, the Volkswagen ID Crozz headlamp is made up of tiny LEDs that light up to not just illuminate the road, but form a more pronounced eye-design.

With its outer eyelash and inner eyeball design, it’s no mistake that the car headlamps were designed to be the eyes of the car. The conceptual car’s headlamps light up in a way that looks like eyes opening. The headlights’ ‘eyeballs’ are also designed to follow you, looking at and interacting with objects as well as pedestrians. Other than the surreal headlamp design that we definitely feel is the the next step for automobiles (especially when they become autonomous and start integrating with voice assistants, becoming even more human than ever), the VW ID Crozz is said to mark the company’s foray into the all-electric market, in a bid to challenge Tesla. Currently in its conceptual stage, the ID Crozz was debuted at the Shanghai Motor Show this year as a part of VW’s ID range of self-driving zero-emission cars. VW has plans however, to bring the ID Crozz on the roads by the year 2020… so expect to see a lot of eyes (or eye-inspired headlights) on the road three years from now!

Designer: Volkswagen

This vase is a living Snapchat filter!

Posted: 20 Apr 2017 02:19 PM PDT

This vase turns everything into low-res, 8-bit-ish mosaic awesomeness! Using a rather cleverly patterned/faceted acrylic piece, the Pixel vase just warps your perception of everything behind it, turning real life into a bunch of pixels. It’s a clever technique that not only brings dynamism to something as static as a flower-vase, but also is bound to delight people who see it (especially for the first time)!

I can’t help but imagine the creative possibilities for something like this! Could this be the new evolved form of minimalism? Not actually being minimal, but rather taking something and ‘minimizing’ its resolution to make it seem pixelated. What do you think?!

Designers: Jaekyu Jung & JCH Works.

Dump the pump. These tires are airless!

Posted: 20 Apr 2017 12:00 PM PDT

First driver-less vehicles, and now airless tires. Innovation definitely gets rid of a lot of things!

Unlike most air-less tires that use a solid rubber composite tube, these tires actually do away with the tube itself, relying on a clever mix of design and physics to give you the airless tire! Bridgestone (the force behind these tires) has been experimenting with this concept since 2011, only recently demonstrating how effectively they could be used in cars. The wheels are made completely out of a recycled thermoplastic resin and are set to be available by no later than 2019.

Although I can’t help but wonder… imagine how psychedelic these will look while spinning!

Designer: Bridgestone