Paul Cocksedge’s Beautiful “Critical Mass” Marble Table

This incredible marble table is by Paul Cocksedge, the British industrial-designer-turned-artist.

There are no fasteners involved; the pieces have been carved in such a way that their weight holds them fast to the others.

Cocksedge created at least two of the tables for his solo exhibition, Critical Mass. It’s on now at the Objects with Narratives gallery in Brussels, through November.

I will say, I love Cocksedge’s work—but can’t stand the way his videos are edited. They somehow make my ADHD worse. I’d like to be able to focus on the objects he creates, without the constant jump cuts and text overlays. The work deserves better.

Transforming Industrial Legacy into Urban Interface

In Munich, just south of the Ostbahnhof, an industrial district has been reimagined into a new kind of urban fabric. The Werksviertel, a 2025 Core77 Design Awards Built Environment Honoree, developed by Steidle Architekten of Bavaria with designer Johannes Ernst, is neither a wholesale replacement of the past nor a singularly branded development. Instead, it operates as an urban interface—linking parkland, residential neighborhoods, and commercial areas into a coherent but flexible quarter.

With a focus less on spectacle and more on framework, Ernst and the team at Steidle Architekten show how adaptive reuse, incremental growth, and programmatic diversity can work together to produce an urban environment that is both grounded and open-ended. In doing so, the project demonstrates how architecture can shape not just buildings, but the very conditions for collective urban life.

Birds eye view of The Werksviertel by Steidle Artchitekten,

The design team resisted the impulse to erase the site’s complexity. Existing activities and structures were not treated as obsolete but as assets. The strategy was to cultivate, consolidate, and update what was already there, while layering in new programs that would expand the quarter’s capacity to host diverse forms of life. This gradualist approach acknowledges that urban vitality is rarely achieved through top-down planning alone.

Combining apartments, offices, hotels, hostels, fitness facilities, retail, and cultural venues, the project emphasizes diversity at multiple scales. These insertions were not conceived as isolated typologies but as components of a macroeconomic composition, designed to attract a wide range of tenants and sustain long-term viability. Public space plays a central role, with plazas, courtyards, and open event spaces designed to accommodate everything from casual gathering to large cultural programming. This layered spatial strategy ensures that the Werksviertel can absorb change—a constant in urban environments—without losing identity.

Check-out all the Core77 Design Awards 2025 Built Environment Honorees here.

If you’re developing an innovative space, product, service, or, communications program we invite you to showcase your work in the 2026 Core77 Design Awards—Call for Entry opens January 2026.

New Design for Comfortable, Lightweight, Sound-Transparent Full-Face Respirator

I own a 3M FX full-face respirator that is invaluable for certain tasks.

The protection is excellent. However, the mask is uncomfortably hot and cumbersome, it can fog up in certain conditions, and if you want to communicate with someone while you’re working, you have to take it off; no one can hear you with it on.

A Canadian company called ForgedAir has designed an alternative that addresses all of these pain points. Their eponymous product features a single large filter across the mouth that provides easy breathability, 95% filtration for particles 0.1-0.3 microns, and sound transparency around 87% (versus 58-62% from competitors, according to third-party testing).

It’s also incredibly lightweight at just 170g (6 oz). My 3M model weighs over three times that much, at 570g (20.1 oz).

Another welcome aspect to ForgedAir’s design is that the visor can quickly be removed. That comes in handy if, for instance, something splashes across the visor and you want to quickly wipe it off, then continue working.

The visor also won’t fog, as it sits off of your face. It doesn’t provide the full-face seal of the 3M, but having lived with that model for over a decade, I’d take that trade-off.

The respirator can be purchased separately for USD $55, or with the visor at USD $75. That’s shockingly inexpensive. (I paid $100 for my 3M FX back in 2014, and I just checked the 2025 price, which is now $264!)

The replacement filters for the ForgedAir are also cheaper, at $10 for a 3-pack (cheaper if you buy in bulk); for my 3M, which takes pairs of filters, 3 pairs run $15. If I had to buy it all over again, I know which way I’d go.

Tiger’s New Angled-Blade Blender Design: Gamechanger or Gimmick?

Every once in a while, a company sweeps into a longstanding product category with a radical new design. Sometimes it’s flash-in-the-pan. Other times it’s Dyson with its transparent dustbin and cyclonic vacuum tech, or Keurig with their single-serving coffee pods. Those were initially dismissed as gimmicks, but within a matter of years, competitors piled in to copy them and the categories were forever altered.

Whether this new type of blender from Tiger, a Japanese appliance manufacturer, is a gimmick or not remains to be seen. For now, it’s generating both buzz and rave reviews.

The Tiger SLB-A10U blender features a unique 45-degree blade arrangement. The company says that the angle “mixes thoroughly upward and downward,” providing smoother blending results with less prep work required. Frozen foods don’t need to be broken up in advance, for instance, nor do whole fruits and vegetables need to be pre-chopped.

With the incumbent design, “when the food and the blade are horizontal, the blade rotates as if it were cutting the skin of an apple,” the company writes. “As a result, blenders with horizontal blades have a tough time processing whole fruits.” Tiger reckons their design blends much more efficiently:

“It can powerfully crush vegetables and fruits into small pieces with its strong cutting ability to crush whole ingredients. The diagonal structure creates a water flow that engulfs the ingredients, resulting in a smooth finish that is pleasant to the palate. It’s also capable of pulverizing ice and frozen fruit, which many standard blenders warn against.”

Tiger’s new blender may have also come along at just the right time, from a marketing perspective. These days there’s no shortage of (paid) smoothie-crazed health influencers thrilled to have a shiny toy to show off, and that undoubtedly helps drive sales.

Speaking of sales, buckle up for the price: The blender will set you back $400.

Stonemore’s Modern, Anti-Package-Theft Mailboxes

A company with no history called Stonemore is selling these anti-package-theft mailboxes.

Boxy and made of powder-coated steel, they’re meant to be anchored through the base to a concrete pad. Up top is a letter slot. Below that is a package door, behind which is a hinged floor that drops your package into the compartment below:

The package door also has two metal spring clips, where you can place outgoing letters.

Packages too big to fit through the hinged opening can instead be inserted directly into the compartment below, (if you’re willing to give your carrier a key or the code). To retrieve your mail or packages, there’s a full-length locked door on the back of the unit.

Shown above is the Hudson model, which runs $430. Below is their less-expensive $300 Cali model, which I think looks better.

Lastly, for those who regularly receive large packages, they offer an Aspen model for $400 that only has a single lid, up top.

The only thing I’m not crazy about is the flat top. Looks cool, sure, but water or snow will just sit up top.

Here’s How They Clean the Balls in a Ball Pit

Ball pits, invented by designers Charlotte Rude and Hjördis Olsson-Une for Ikea in 1970, went on to become wildly popular. Fast food restaurants, amusement parks, play centers and community recreation facilities have all featured them.

To the wary parent, they seem like hotbeds of germs. Anecdotal stories (like these or these on Reddit, from people who worked at facilities with ball pits) of the slapdash way they’re cleaned—or not cleaned—don’t help the rumors:

– “A place I worked with a ball pit would just load up the balls in mesh bags and have one of the janitors drive through a car wash with the balls in the bed of their truck.”
– “I worked at this play place called Catch Air. We would clean the balls individually by hand every few weeks. Really shitty job.”
– “Sometimes little kids being little kids, there will be someone who’d poop or throw up in the ballpit. And a messy job too, its almost guaranteed you’ll get covered in it if you are the lucky one who goes in to fish out every ball.”
– “Babies will also chew and sneeze on everything, including the balls in the pit.”
– “When I worked at Chuck E Cheese we had a late night scheduled every six months to clean the ball pit. We would empty them all into bus tubs and run them thru the giant dishwasher. They smelled VERY strongly of urine, as I recall.”
– “Worked at McDonalds for years. The only time the ball pit got cleaned was when kids started coming out with poo on them.”
– “If you think they are nasty under normal circumstances, wait until they have about 12 years of dust sitting on them. The kind that gets sticky after awhile … Yeah it was as disgusting as you are picturing it.”

That said, ball pit cleaning machines do exist, and responsible facilities like TQ Playtopia in Oklahoma City use them regularly.

“Our amazing cleaning crew uses Tuesdays to deep clean the entire playground, and sanitize EVERYTHING,” the company writes. “Every ball from every pit gets run through our ball washer- that alone takes 5 hours!”

Here’s what the machines do:

Hybrid Footwear Design: Combining the Best Parts of a Slipper and a Boot

Up until now, a slipper and a boot have been opposite pieces of footwear, functionally speaking. Slippers are soft, easy to pull on and made for padding around inside. Boots are stiff, require onerous lacing and are made to provide traction on rugged terrain.

This ReEmber Camp Slip On, by California-based footwear brand Teva, takes the best of both. It’s soft and features a quilted upper for warmth, a grippy rubber outsole for traction, a cushioned footbed, a collapsible heel if you just want to jam them on, and a single strap if you need a little more fit.

Though designed with campers in mind, it will also appeal to those who live in suburban or rural areas. There are plenty of times when you need to step outside for just a moment, like retrieving a package at the end of an icy driveway, or traveling a gravel path to the garden, where these would be just the ticket.

They run $80 and come in whole-number sizes only. Both men’s and women’s versions are available.

Who First Invented the Ball Pit? Two Young Ikea Designers, in 1970

In 1968, Charlotte Rude and Hjördis Olsson-Une were two young graduates of Sweden’s Konstfack University, where they had studied art and design. The two moved to Älmhult, Sweden, where a glassworks was located; having caught the material exploration bug at design school, the two wanted to experiment with glass.

The pair had very little money and shared an apartment. To furnish it, they bought inexpensive leftover particle board from a nearby construction site, and built pieces they designed themselves.

Älmhult was also where Ikea had opened their first store, back in 1958, and was where their headquarters were based. Some of Rude and Olsson-Une’s neighbors worked for Ikea, and when they saw the designers’ self-created furniture, encouraged them to try to sell the designs to Ikea. The neighbors introduced them to Ikea manager Gillis Lundgren.

Lundgren didn’t buy their designs. Instead he offered them full-time jobs. The duo accepted, and soon began designing furniture.

In 1970s, the Ikea store in Stockholm suffered a fire and needed to be rebuilt. The brass decided they may as well add a large play area for children. The task of designing the play area fell to Rude and Olsson-Une, who were then Ikea’s youngest designers. The two designed a sort of indoor playground filled with pillows, ropes and platforms.

But “the biggest star of the play area,” according to Ikea, “was the ball pit.”

The idea came when Charlotte and Hjördis were opening boxes containing a new type of protective packing material. It consisted of small plastic balls, and reminded Charlotte of the then wildly popular bean bags that kids would sit and lie down in.

They imagined how one could jump and swim around in a sea of balls if it was deep and wide enough. However, these balls were too small. Children might put them in their mouths and choke. At the time, plastic was growing fast as a material, and the young designers soon found lighter and bigger multicoloured balls to use.

A huge wooden box – deep enough to jump into – was built with particleboard and filled with thousands of balls. When the play area opened in 1971, the ball pit became a huge hit. Kids loved it, and families were soon rushing to IKEA to let their children try out the new invention. Later in the 1970s, ball pits of all sorts started popping up in everything from amusement parks to fast-food restaurants, but the ball pit in the Stockholm IKEA store in 1971 was likely the first one in the world.

Rude and Olsson-Une didn’t stay at Ikea for long; after just five years, in 1973, they moved to Copenhagen to pursue graduate studies at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. They took on freelance design work–and apparently faded into obscurity. I can find no record of their work after their time at Ikea.

Industrial Design Student Work: A Clothes Rack With Fixed, Collapsible Hangers

IThis unnamed project is by Aleš Urbancík, an Industrial Design student at Tomas Bata University in Zlín, Czech Republic. Urbancík is rethinking the way clothes are typically hung on a hanger, and finds this method, for which he developed a mechanism, more desirable:

So how does that work with a closet rod? It doesn’t. Urbancík’s project is the entire rack, where he’s decided he doesn’t want loose hangers at all, for aesthetic reasons:

“The project includes an innovative solution for hangers, which are fixed to the rack and, using a movable part of the hanger with a locking mechanism, make it easier to hang clothes. Fixed spacing between the hangers guarantees an aesthetic appearance even after hanging the clothes.”

As a real product this might be a tough sell, but I like the exploration (which is what design school is for, after all).

Unusual Objects: Mirrors Inspired by Baggage Claim Conveyor Belts

I don’t consider air travel pleasant, so I’m always surprised when I see airport-inspired furniture; it’s the last experience I want to remember. Turkish designer/architect Müge Kahraman, however, sees beauty in baggage carousels, specifically in their serpentine conveyor belts. Thus her line of Baggage Claim Mirrors.

The two full-sized mirrors are called Baggage Claim O and Baggage Claim I, for obvious reasons. The tabletop unit is called Baggage Claim M, either for “medium” or “makeup.”

They’re available in six colors through Kahraman’s brand, Living Cult, though no prices are listed.