A Plate Designed Specifically for Ikea Meatballs, by Architect/Designer Gustaf Westman

Ikea has teamed up with Gustaf Westman, a Swedish architect who defected to industrial design, on an unusual line of tableware. This has yielded the holiday-themed VINTERFINT serving plate, designed specifically to serve the company’s famous meatballs:

“For so many in Sweden, there’s no Christmas without meatballs,” says Gustaf Westman. “This plate is my interpretation of that tradition. It’s a simple, fun idea designed to honor the meatball, but it works perfectly for so many other things, too.”

While it looks like it’s plastic, it’s actually made out of feldspar porcelain. (Feldspar is a mineral, and feldspar porcelain is more durable and chip-resistant than soft-paste porcelain or bone china.)

The $25 plate is part of the larger VINTERFINT line, which includes plate/bowl hybrids of various sizes and a cup and saucer set.

The line will be released in Ikea stores on October 1st and online on October 3rd.

Meta Unveils New Ray-Ban Display Glasses, with Wrist-Based Gesture Control

Google and Apple have smartphones. Meta doesn’t, and they’re hoping to wrest that smartphone out of your hand with their new display glasses.

The newly unveiled Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses feature a high-res, in-lens color display that can show you messages, notifications, navigation guidance and even real-time language translation. A built-in camera can capture images or video. It can also serve as a music controller, connected to your phone (which Meta probably hopes you’ll leave in a pocket or bag).

The trick with this kind of interface is, how do you control it? Meta’s designers think they’ve cracked it with the included Meta Neural Wristband, which uses electromyography (EMG) to detect muscle movements; it picks up on tiny finger gestures and movements, allowing you to scroll, select buttons, and “press” them.

The company notes that the glasses are available with prescription lenses.

The glasses and band will retail for $800, and are scheduled to be released on September 30th.

A Stick Vacuum that Automatically Empties Itself

The stick vacuums popularized by Dyson and others are convenient and lightweight. But by design they don’t have large dust containers, so must frequently be emptied. Some users find the emptying act, where you open the bin over a garbage can, unpleasant as it typically releases a poof of dust into the air.

Chinese electronics manufacturer Roborock has done away with this. Their H60 Hub Series features a prominent, tower-like charging dock.

Once you plug the vacuum into the dock, it automaticallly sucks the dust out of the vacuum and into the dock’s integrated 2-liter dust bag. It takes about ten seconds, and the company claims the bag is good for 60 days’ worth of vacuuming, though the actual figure surely depends on how dusty your house is.

Aside from the dock, Roborock’s offering is similar to a Dyson: It’s got the green dust-illuminating laser, nine cyclones, and filters you can wash at a sink.

Of course, this increase in convenience comes with trade-offs. The dock’s prominent presence in the room might be unwelcome, and there’s more stuff that can potentially break. It also requires buying Roborock’s dust bags, which are $32 for a six-pack.

The H60 Hub Series runs $600.

Industrial Designer Wins 2025 Ig Nobel Prize

This month Boston University hosted the 35th annual Ig Nobel Prizes, which highlight scientific research done on decidedly unserious subjects. There is no design category, but this year we got something close: An Engineering Design Prize, awarded to Indian industrial designer Vikash Kumar and student researcher Sarthak Mittal.

The prize-winning project is essentially about how shoe racks stink.

Image: BBiDDac on Unsplash

Kumar is an assistant professor of design at Shiv Nadar University. While traveling and staying in youth hostels Mittal, a student, observed that guests often left their shoes outside of shared hostel rooms—as a courtesy, as most people’s shoes smell bad. Mittal and Kumar then collaborated on the research paper “Smelly Shoes — An Opportunity for Shoe Rack Re-Design.”

“This paper is focused on understanding the good experience part of any design, and presents a pilot study conducted to understand how foul smelling shoes affects the good experience of using a shoe-rack.
“…Limited research has been reported on understanding how the foul smelling shoes affects the overall experience of using a shoe rack.
“…This paper posits that…foul smell affects the users’ experience of using shoe-racks, and re – ports a pilot study conducted to understand the severity of the problem.”

Mittal is not an ID student, and this wasn’t an ID project, just a research paper; so there’s no actual prototyping or mock-ups to show. Instead, the paper concludes that shoe racks should be designed with a built-in deodorizing feature, like bacteria-killing UV lighting. Yet they found nothing like this exists on the market. So, entrepreneurial designers among you, here’s your next Kickstarter idea.

Just add UV

This Brazilian Invention Straightens Scrap Rebar for Reuse

We now use more concrete than ever in our built environment, and that concrete is held together with rebar. When structures outlive their usefulness and are demolished, the rebar can be extracted and recycled. However, the recovered rebar needs to first be cleaned of contaminants, either through grinding or the use of chemical solvents. Only then can it be melted down in a furnace.

All of those steps take a lot of energy and resources. It would be better if the rebar could simply be reused in a new construction project, rather than melted down, but recovered rebar is often mangled into unwieldy shapes.

Brazilian company JP Botelho Machines is here to fix that problem. They develop machinery to make spent construction materials usable again, and their flagship product is this Rebar Recycler:

“We’ve created an alternative to using [virgin] metal, offering a new opportunity to achieve virtually the same results, but at a lower cost. Rebar recycled by our machine can be used to manufacture water tank towers, equipment towers, trusses, railings, columns, poles, and more.”

At present, the company only distributes within Brazil.

Their machine reminds me of another southern hemisphere invention: This Australian fence post straightener.

Core77 Weekly Roundup (9-15-25 to 9-19-25)

Here’s what we looked at this week:

This simple but elegant bent plywood MT Chair is by industrial designers Rafa Peris and David Guilmain, a/k/a Pecadora.

The BoxBlayde, a powered boxcutter, makes short work of cardboard.

From Danish design studio Moebe, a low-tech, height-adjustable wall lamp made with a minimum of materials.

See the design sketches behind Matthias Pleissnig’s crazy furniture pieces.

Adults Don’t Play, by Spacon and +Halle, is an interactive public bench with user-adjustable seating.

A fantastic industrial design case study: Creating a custom orthotic, fast, with Formlabs.

Designer/architect Müge Kahraman’s mirrors inspired by baggage claim conveyor belts.

Industrial Design student work: Aleš Urbancík’s clothes rack with fixed, collapsible hangers.

Hybrid footwear design: Teva’s ReEmber Camp Slip On combines the best parts of a slipper and a boot.

These two young designers invented the ball pit for Ikea in 1970.

Here’s how they clean the balls in a ball pit. (Also, some nasty ball pit stories.)

Tiger’s new angled-blade blender design: Gamechanger or gimmick?

Stonemore’s modern, anti-package-theft mailboxes.

The ForgedAir is a comfortable, lightweight, sound-transparent full-face respirator.

Paul Cocksedge’s beautiful “Critical Mass” marble table.

Form follows function: Ticket rails. These are the perfect object.

You’ll be pleased to learn that these steel coat hangers belong to “a holistic system of objects for living.”

A handsome take on ticket rails: Biglow Woodcraft’s Gravity Bars.

Industrial design case study: Spanner helps out with the Freearm, a parent-invented device for tube feeding and IV infusions.

A Handsome Take on Ticket Rails: Biglow Woodcraft’s Gravity Bars

Hey, so that ticket rail we looked at yesterday? While I still think it’s a perfect object, I’ve just stumbled across a rather elegant, different take on it. Brent Biglow, an architecture school dropout turned furniture designer/builder, makes ticket rails out of wood.

Biglow has rebranded them Gravity Bars, in a nod to how gravity works with the internal glass marbles to hold them in place. (We explained that in the ticket rail post.)

His company, Biglow Woodcraft, offers them in Cherry, Maple, Walnut and White Oak, in both 20″ and 32″ lengths. Prices range from $67 to $149 depending on species and length.

If you’re curious as to how they’re made, Biglow shares his process:

Industrial Design Case Study: A Parent-Invented Device for Tube Feeding and IV Infusions

The FreeArm is a portable, bendable device that serves as a helping hand for tube feeding and IV infusions. It was invented by Will and Misti Staley for their son Freeman, who was born with complex medical needs.

“You’ll be sitting on the couch at home trying to feed your child and hold the gravity syringe at the same time, but then you have to reach over to get the milk,” Misti said in an interview with MGA Homecare, “but maybe you’ve forgotten the medicines, so you have to walk over to the other side of the kitchen to get them, all while you’re still holding your child and the gravity syringe.” Misti and Will subsequently rigged up prototypes in their garage.

Sadly Freeman passed away, after months of treatments. The Staleys knew that other families had kids with the same needs as Freeman’s, and set out to make their design available to the masses, in Freeman’s memory. They succeeded in getting a v1 out on the market, and when they decided it needed further refining, they turned to industrial design consultancy Spanner.

FreeArm

The FreeArm is an FDA Class 1 Medical Device that helps make tube feeding easier by enabling better mobility and reducing pain points for users already contending with a complicated medical condition.

Based on the learnings of an initial V1 product, FreeArm’s founder wanted to resolve product and feature issues while delivering a more feature-rich version that better reflected the company’s brand and client base.

Problems to solve
– The V1 device suffered from parts breaking in the spring/hinge area
– The V1 device felt flimsy overall and especially the hook feature to which feed bags were attached
– The V1 device was not able to securely clip smaller sizes of syringes
– The V1 design was un-branded
– The V1 device felt sterile, lacking a human touch

Design updates
Spanner’s foundation for redesigning the device was to first understand the client base and user personas. Then we proposed an iterative series of design concepts to integrate FreeArm’s branding and humanize the product.
We jointly assessed manufacturing and usability pros and cons to down-select to and execute an optimized design concept that could accept the addition of an additional hook feature.

“It was a joy to work with Spanner on the creation of our new FreeArm Muscle clip. Every detail was thought through with user experience as our number one priority. We now have a clip that works wonderfully for our customer’s needs and is whimsy and fun with the subtle nod in shape to our octopus mascot Ollie. We love it!!” — Misti Staley, CEO & Founder, FreeArm

Engineering solutions
Working closely with the FreeArm’s founder and integrating the inputs from supply chain partners, Spanner resolved the engineering issues by evaluating the nature of the failures in the V1 device before increasing the wall thickness of clip parts, redesigning the hook feature, analyzing the tolerances, and eliminating interferences that previously constrained the range of motion.
Reconciling the device’s mode of operation with manufacturability considerations, Spanner identified the best approaches for key feature changes to accommodate smaller syringe sizes.

Manufacturing considerations
Spanner considered the tooling and inventory investments already made toward other parts in the assembly that mated with the redesigned components, thereby eliminating needless incremental tooling expenditures, eliminating inventory scrappage, and mitigating assembly and validation issues.
Spanner then provided manufacturing consulting to successfully ensure that the design intent was faithfully carried forth by East Asia partners from the New Product Introduction through Mass Production.

Program outcomes
– Enhanced product and feature robustness
– Incorporated client-desired features
– Increased compatibility with syringe sizes
– Redesigned for aesthetic & branding

Project team
– FreeArm: Misti Staley
– Spanner: Alyssa Kinoshita, Torence Lu
“Partnering closely with Misti to help unfold her vision of a friendlier daily-use medical device was our delight and honor. Understanding and appreciating the challenges of tube-feeding individuals and their families provided us additional inspiration and motivation to explore and execute design concepts and to enable the design intent and engineering quality into high-volume manufacturing. We have been so thrilled to see the positive market reaction to the new design.” — Spanner Senior Product Designer, Alyssa Kinoshita

We’re proud to enable the vision to come to fruition and to be a part of their story — and their clients’ stories, too. Learn more at https://freearmcare.com/

You can see more of Spanner’s work here.

D/Partment’s Steel Coat Hangers, Metal Bags and Concrete Trays

D/Partment is a Berlin-based brand that designs “a holistic system of objects for living.” What does that mean? For one thing, it means coat hangers made out of 2mm stainless steel:

The description reads “Laser cut with screws for additional strength.” That sentence makes about as much sense as their lifestyle imagery.

Another gem in their collection is this Metal Bag.

It’s anyone’s guess as to what the bag’s made of: Under “Material,” the product description reads “1030 stainless steal” (sic), and under “Product information” it reads “2mm aluminum.” Whatever it is, the “bag” weighs 4.1kg (9 lbs).

Oh, and don’t worry, the underside of the handle is padded with leather-covered foam. Because, ergonomics.

There’s plenty more product, but I’ll end with their Concrete Tray. The 5kg (11 lb) vessel is a great way to carry their steel hangers from room to room, fulfilling the promise of that “holistic system.”

The hangers are $115 for a three-pack, the bag is $719 and the tray is a bargain at $58.

Form Follows Function: Ticket Rails

I first learned about ticket rails as a teenager working in restaurants. I consider them the perfect object: Functional, minimal, and elegant in their simplicity.

If you don’t know what they are, they’re used to hold paper tickets in restaurants. All you do is slide the ticket up into the slot, and it’s held fast. You can move the ticket side-to-side or pull it back out with no damage to the paper.

The body is just an aluminum extrusion, with the front face angled at the bottom. That’s because inside, there are marbles or ball bearings.

The angle on the face causes the marbles to press towards the back of the rail, which holds the paper in place. The contact points of the marbles on the paper provide just enough pressure. Plastic caps at the end hold the marbles in place.

As an adult I bought two from a restaurant supply store. I use them in my shop, to hold plans and shop drawings. They’re way faster than using tape or push pins and they don’t mar the drawing.