Design

Aiming to address the issue of “throwaway fashion” and its impact on the environment as landfill, students at Sheffield Hallam University have combined fashion design with engineering to create a dissolvable wedding dress. This truly "wear once" garment can be converted into five different fashion pieces before being dissolved in water leaving no environmental footprint. Read More

Some of you may recall our piece on Honda's Body Support Assist prototype last year. As a quick update to that story, those of you in the New York area will get a chance to see it in person as a part of the "Why Design Now?" exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution. Read More

When we took a look at Adobe Creative Suite 5 before its launch, the new features and improvements to InDesign definitely made us sit up and take notice. Adobe really only made a big thing of its improvements to interactivity and the fact it’s now able to export directly to SWF format for playback in the Adobe Flash Player. However, when we started digging deeper and played with the less publicized additions, we realized what a gem this upgrade really is. Read More

Some inventions struggle because they're too complicated to explain. The V-Lock, on the other hand, is gonna do great, because it's instantly understandable even without an explanation, hugely useful and forehead-slappingly simple. Everyone who's ever unlocked a door in the dark will understand the problem and designer Junjie Zhang's clever solution in a flash. We love it and we'll take a dozen please. Read More

There’s no doubt ladders can be unwieldy things to carry around - so much so that the ladder-carrying painter has become a staple of slapstick comedy. Unfortunately carrying a ladder around in real life is generally much less hilarious, although often just as chaotic. A young Israeli design student, Itay Laniado, has come up with a collapsible design that makes getting a ladder from point A to point B so you can get to point C a whole lot easier. Read More

It's ironic that I should be writing this on a 13 hour stopover at an airport doling out foreign notes for endless coffees in Starbucks to justify my use of their power socket and WiFi. What I really need right now is a comfortable fold-out rocking chair that converts my languorous rocking movement into electrical energy to power my laptop. If only such a thing existed! Well, it might not be too far away. The Empower chair won second prize out of 18 shortlisted designs showcased at the Greener Gadgets 2010 Conference... Read More

We’ve seen bikes with frames made out of aluminum, titanium, carbon fiber, and even IsoTruss tubes, but bamboo? Well yes, actually, we saw some here in Gizmag just last May. Back then, we were looking at some fairly basic city bikes built by Brazilian designer Flavio Deslandes. This time around the bamboo bikes are decidedly higher-end creations, built by Californian designer Craig Calfee, of Calfee Design. Although these bikes are definitely high-end, he’s also working on using bamboo to provide employment and cheap transportation for the people of Ghana. Read More

The latest in our long list of weird watch designs is the Aurora Watch concept by designer Jihun Yeom. The watch features a faceless design that indicates the time using lasers. A red laser specifies the minutes, while a blue beam indicates the hour. With the wearer’s hairy arm visible through the watch it means that it’s always a freckle past a hair until the bevel edge around the watch ring is tapped to activate the lasers. Read More

Last year when we did an extensive feature on Ducati’s motogp carbon fibre semi-monocoque frame, we lauded its groundbreaking technology. Now it seems the Italian powerhouse is so pleased with its handiwork that the semi-monocoque design looks set to replace Ducati’s trademark trellis frame on its road bikes in the future too. Read More