If someone asks you “What does 3D printing have to do with nuclear fission,” you can confidently answer “Nothing.” But recent strides made by, surprisingly, a government-backed lab, show that 3D printing can be used …
A Titanium G-Shock Watch with a Hand-Hammered Finish
Well, this is bananas. Casio somehow got a master craftsman to hand-hammer the finish of 500 G-Shock watches. These G-Shock MR-G watches are made of DAT55G, an ultra-hard titanium that’s notoriously difficult to machine. The …
Better UX Than Roadside Flares: LED-Equipped Lizard Flares
When a new technology emerges, smart industrial designers think about how it could be used to improve or replace incumbent products. Ideally, products built around the new technology would be attractive; failing that, they should …
The Petersen Museum’s Exhibition on Wedge-Shaped Cars
Marcello Gandini would have loved this: L.A.’s Petersen Museum has just opened “The Wedge Revolution,” an exhibition dedicated to wedge-shaped cars. The history of the automobile is full of high points and heydays: the formative …
Shadow Tool Staging Systems: More Efficient Than Drawers
The tool storage system for most mechanics looks something like this: It’s been widely accepted that drawers are the way to go. However, industrial mechanic and engineer Kelly Benes reckons that hunting through all of …
A Beautiful, Bizarrely Tiny EDC Folding Knife
From a product design perspective, the EDC market is fascinating. Here you have people lavishing design attention on objects that would be, for me as a non-EDC person, worthless in real life; yet some of …
How You Can Make Even a Pencil Sharpener Go Viral
A pencil sharpener is the last thing I expected to see go viral on social media. But Chinese office products manufacturer AFMAT has followed a common formula used these days: Design a product with a …
Horl’s Scissors Have an Unusual Feature Designed to Make Sharpening Simple
Like all edged tools, scissors go dull. Re-sharpening them requires tools and skill, and is probably beyond the capabilities of your average household user. Horl, the German company that makes the clever sharpening object we …
Yamazaki Home’s Magnetic Tape Dispenser
This slick little piece of steel is a magnetic-mount tape holder. It can hold smaller-diameter tapes (like electrical) on the inner fins, and larger-diameter (duct, packing, blue) tapes on the outer fins. The gap in …
A 2×4-Sized Smartphone
Since their inception 18 years ago, the trend has been for smartphones to get bigger each year. But that’s only in two dimensions, width and height. Users want bigger screens, but what they don’t want …