Here's what we looked at this week: The Keyaki To-Go Coffee Cup, made of turned wood, was successfully Kickstarted. Peter Ivy's stunning, minimalist Bottle S. Over-the-top, powered "computer cockpits" by Cluvens. Dyson carries over a crucial design detail for the WashG1, their first power mop. From this year's Goodwoof Barkitecture Charity...

Nuts-and-bolts industrial design is giving form to objects that improve millions of people's lives. And rarely getting credit for it. In fact, most of the people whose lives are improved by this object don't even know it exists. The internet in your homes or offices may reach you wirelessly, but it still gets to your building the old-fashioned way....

Imagine a time when tools were scarce, being difficult to manufacture. They were prized and owners were careful with them. Nowadays we've grown so rich, we'll buy multiples of objects that our ancestors would have killed to own just one of. We do this because they're easy to lose, or we scatter them around various life stations so they'll always be...

Designed for travel, Microsoft's Surface Arc Mouse is flat and unusable in its resting state. But when the user picks it up and bends it, it audibly snaps into its curved working shape. This transformation also turns it on. It's a clever piece of design, now in its fourth or fifth generation, depending on how you count the iterations. But just how does...

Sometimes design firms are commissioned to do concept work that never sees the light of day. As one example, Berlin-based agency XOIO was asked by Daimler to envision future mobility scenarios. The project yielded few images and is only published on XOIO's site, but I find these two shots, depicting "the inner city distribution of goods" in Paris in...

The Hauptbahnhof (central train station) in Freiburg, Germany, has a Twenty47 Marktplatz. This is a 24-hour facility filled entirely with vending machines, selling everything "from coffee to champagne, sandwiches to delicatessen menus, dog biscuits, bandages, cuckoo clocks, schnapps, condoms," et cetera. There's also some Amazon delivery lockers. And...