Comfortable and compact, David Rowland’s 40 in 4 chair was designed with such close engineering tolerances that, as its name implies, forty could be stacked in a four-foot-high space (at a 45-degree angle on a special trolley). Conceived to provide flexible seating for public spaces and compact storage, the slender, lightweight, wire-rod chair won a grand prize as the best single object at the XIII Triennale in Milan in 1964, the year it was first produced. It has since become extensively adapted for domestic as well as institutional use. (more…)

Saburo Funakoshi was one of the first professional designers to enter the Japanese tablewares industry after the war, joining the Hoya glass company in 1957. These sleek architectural oil and vinegar bottles, which Funakoshi derived from a set of crystal sake containers he designed in 1958, elevated Hoya to the first rank of modern utilitarian glass producers. Spare, elegant, and without applied ornament, they appealed to a popular conception of a technological or industrial society; their design expressed a pure geometric aesthetic that was international in character, one transcending locality. (more…)

One of the century’s most innovative fabric designers, jack Lenor Larsen came to international prominence in the 1960s for the technical and formal ingenuity of his designs. For the United States pavilion at the XIII Triennale in Milan in 1964, Larsen created a light quiet interior of white synthetic fabrics, including an undulating canopy of stretched nylon; he received a gold medal as design director and commissioner of the pavilion. (more…)

This advertisement made for Apple’s the Mac Book Air is really subtle. The slogan says “Paper thin”. If you look closely at the side of the notebook you see some blood, making people believe the user had a papercut. I have doubts this is an official campaign by Apple. (more…)

With the Time Table in your living room never again will you have to squint at the cable box, or wander over to the microwave to see what time it is. It uses a thin electro-luminescent film to turn the entire top surface of the table into a subtle and tasteful digital clock. (more…)

A model of how nature and consumption are connected, the Pay it Back kitchen island is a sink, table and composting area. As the green box fills up, hte compost is used along with waste water from the sink to feed a climbing plant on the side of the unit. The life of the plant is dependent on how well you adopt to ethical living. (more…)