“Last week when I was doing my homework, I moved my chair and moved the plug board at he same time, only to find that the power of my computer was unplugged,” says the designer. “I lost all of my homework that I didn’t save it. So, unfortunately I had to do it again. So I designed the folding-plug. It is powered only when folded 90 degrees to fully attach the board. Then the red stripe unfolded from hidden position indicates that the power is on. When it is folded to the power on position, it could be unplugged by unintentionally touch. This can also free us from unplugging the power frequently. What’s more, when the plug is some distance away in the corner, it can be done without reaching it by creeping into a narrow alcove.”
Despite its limitations, this power-saving flat plug design is a step in a better direction for power outlets that still seem stuck in the 20th century. Somehow, we’re still dealing with plugs that stick out way too far from the wall on nearly everything that needs to remain plugged in most of the time, from electric heaters to televisions. Perhaps connected smart homes will soon eliminate the issue of dimming or turning off our lights and appliances from afar, however.

The post Flat Folding Plug Saves Power first appeared on Dornob.

Try as we might to work with the shortcomings of expensive smartphones, laptop computers, and other gadgets made of stiff, fragile materials, they just aren’t very practical for day-to-day life. While Apple’s iPhones just keep getting larger (and still primarily consist of glass), smaller companies are sailing headlong into the future with bendable, foldable gadgets that won’t crack into a million pieces when dropped.

Dornob got a chance to see Royole’s game-changing new technology in person at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), where the company founded by Stanford engineering graduates officially debuted its proprietary flexible sensors. Derived from their development of next-generation AMOLED flexible displays, this new sensor technology can be used for all sorts of things, from transportation and robotics to smart home items and consumer electronics. And yes — the implications of this tech in the latter category are just as exciting as they sound.

The mass-producible flexible sensor technology is extraordinarily sensitive and precise, supporting multi-touch gestures, bezel-less design, and low production costs while operating on “unbreakable” displays that are said to be as thin as butterfly wings.

Royole’s CES showcase included a booth full of flexible touchscreen sensors that bent to mimic the contours of tiny robots, flexible display speakers for home entertainment and security, tablets, phones, and even clothing and accessories, making screens more or less seamlessly wearable for the first time ever. Sometimes renderings over-promise, but we can confirm that these gadgets are really just as pliable as they appear in photos.

Company founder Bill Liu was on hand to highlight the talk of the convention: the world’s first commercial foldable smartphone that’s actually a phone and a tablet in one. This “Flexpai” makes use of Royole’s Flexible+ platform technologies and boats a 7.8-inch AMOLED screen made of plastic with a 1440p resolution. A hinge along the back of the device lets you fold the entire thing in half. When it’s closed, you can use the Flexpai like a standard smartphone. Open it just a little bit, and it stands up on its own. When fully open, it blows the display size of other smartphones out of the water, yet it’s far more portable than standard tablets.

The FlexPai runs on a custom OS called Water (an extension of Google Android 9.0), and it boasts a fingerprint scanner, 16-megapixel wide angle camera, and a 20-megapixel telephoto lens. It’s also got a 2.8GHz octacore Snapdragon chipset and a 3,800mAh battery that can be juiced up rapidly thanks to Royole’s proprietary Ro Charge technology.

“Royole’s Flexible+ technologies have squarely put us in a leadership position in today’s ever-evolving consumer technology industry,” says Michael Williams, Royole’s Senior Director of Marketing.

“We are currently working with over 220 business partners worldwide to implement flexible displays and sensors in a variety of products that will reshape the world of consumer technologies.”

While Samsung unveiled its own foldable tablet back in November 2018, the lesser known Flexpai beat it to both CES and the global market. The smartphone is already available in China, with shipments expected to the United States and United Kingdom in the coming months. It costs $1,318 for 6 GB of RAM/128 GB of memory and $1,469 for the 8 GB of RAM/256 GB version.

The post Royole Debuts Game-Changing Flexible Sensors at CES 2019 first appeared on Dornob.

When the Flex was unveiled in November 2018 at the Samsung Developer Conference, the presentation lights were dimmed to conceal the details of the phone’s design. Going to such lengths to protect its secrecy may have seemed melodramatic to those in the room, but Samsung has good reason to be cagey: they’re trying to be the first to go to market with a foldable device, working tirelessly to do outdo competitors like Huawei, Xiaomi, and Lenovo.

Working in conjunction with Google, the company hopes to start mass producing the Infinity Flex Display sometime in early 2019. It’ll run exclusively on an Android operating system, retaining the convenient size of a smartphone while equipped with all the multifunctional qualities of a tablet. Android will be building APIs that will allow users to operate several apps simultaneously and manage the difference in resolution between the device’s two configurations.

“We’re giving people the ability to run up to three apps simultaneously,” explained Justin Denison, Samsung’s Senior Vice President of Mobile Product Marketing, at the conference. “No swapping between apps, no closing one app to get to another. Just multitasking as it was meant to be. We call it Multi-active Window.”

The screen itself consists of a flexible backplane, protective coating, ultra-thin polarizer, shock-absorbent film, and cover display. The company explains that “the cover display is a fully functioning touchscreen that allows you to use your apps without opening the device. If you want a bigger screen, you simply unfold it to reveal the full 7.3-inch display.”

“We had to invent a new protective layer, in this case an advanced composite polymer that’s both flexible and tough,” added Denison at the conference. “We had to find a new type of malleable adhesive that [would] allow us to laminate the display layers together securely while enabling them to flex.”

Not only is Samsung working on a foldable smartphone, but they’re also looking at other ways to make their other devices more flexible for consumers, with an innovation pipeline that’s purported to include “rollable and even stretchable displays.”

In the coming weeks, the company plans to release an emulator APK to help developers test their apps for the Flex platform.

It’s interesting to see this device being labeled a “foldable smartphone” when in reality it’s more of a tablet that folds up into a phone. Either way, consumers are sure to be happy about having one less device to charge and maintain. Having the option to use the full tablet when needed but a smaller screen for quick and easy functions is something that everyone can get behind.

The post Could Samsung’s Foldable Smartphone Make Life Easier? first appeared on Dornob.

Lead architect Fouad Samara, whose eponymous firm enjoys a new office on the ground floor of the building, approached the project with a whole checklist of expectations. He wanted the building to have lots of light, a sense of spatial luxury, honesty in its use of materials, and functional flexibility.

The stack of luxury lofts addresses a need for dense high-end housing in the city while also contributing to the beauty of Beirut itself. The architects drew inspiration from traditional Lebanese houses known as “beit,” marrying their orderly and streamlined sense of purity with the flexibility of late modernist urban lofts in cosmopolitan cities like London.

“Functionally, we tried to fulfill the demand for flexible — truly and effortlessly flexible — small to medium size residential units in the heart of vibrant Beirut,” says Samara. “It was important for us to create an architecture that met this rising demand that also created an inspiring addition to the city, and an uplifting place to live.”

“I think this is what Le Corbusier was referring to in Vers Une Architecture, where I think he was yearning for not “another” architecture or “new” architecture as he was mistakenly interpreted, but for architecture as it had always been, and always ought to be — a relevant, ordered, and coherent architecture: a ‘modern’ architecture.”

Each apartment is double-height, fulfilling the architects’ desire for a spacious quality. Dark steel, pale wood, and exposed board-formed concrete give the structure a raw industrial character, and generous glazing opens each of the seven stacked units up to daylight and spectacular views of the city. But for Samara, the most crucial element was the ability to transform the interiors to meet the occupants’ changing needs, imbuing the lofts with a sense of home that’s often lacking in modern apartment towers.

Flexibility is especially poignant in fast-changing Beirut, which Samara calls “chaotic” in its constant evolution. If your apartment can shape-shift along with your life, you can stay in one place much longer, feeling a little freer to put down some roots.

Each apartment features two rooms or modules on a lower level and another two linked by a bridge on an upper level. Internal staircases and storage like built-in cupboards are located in the main open living space, while exterior staircases, elevators, and utilities are contained within a narrow space at the back of the building. But it’s those sliding walls that really make the Modulofts apartments so striking and novel, sliding right out of the apartment and into the air to create 16 different interior configurations.

The bedrooms can be self-contained by the walls or opened to the main space at will. Occupants can shift the layout for all sorts of purposes, making certain areas feel cozier or enlarging them to host gatherings. As they transform their homes individually, they also transform the look of the building as a whole, so it rarely looks exactly the same way twice in one day.

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The versatile Stickybones model is designed to help both professional and aspiring animators hone their skills. Professional animators conceived of Stickybones, which they describe as “super-flexible and extremely intuitive.” Their goal, they explain, is “to help everyone easily create instant-art in a fun and tactile way. Or use it to create a stop-motion animation or even to aid your own art as an artist’s figure-drawing manikin.”

When they say Stickybones is “super-flexible,” they aren’t exaggerating. The model’s patent-pending joint system lets you fine-tune its movements and pose it in a number of different stances. The joints are all pre-tensioned, interlocking, snap-to-fit ball-and-socket parts that you can pop apart and put back together.

The level of detail put into Stickybones is astounding: the model’s hands have even been articulated, right down to the tiny fingers. Talk about precision engineering! That’s right, it is engineering. As a matter of fact, the Stickybones team uses engineering-grade polymers to make sure that each joint is durable and can withstand constant movement without suffering too much wear and tear.

Plenty of the model’s features have gotten rave reviews from the animators who’ve taken the time to experiment with Stickybones. Want to make a character do handstands? No worries, because the Stickybones has magnets in its hands. If you want to take things to a new level entirely, check out the magnets in the model’s feet, which let you suspend it from beams or bars to achieve gravity-defying poses. Since Stickybones, like the rest of us, spends a lot of time on its feet, its toes have been double-reinforced. Try posing it on a single toe!

The Stickybones‘ head, neck, and shoulders are all double-jointed, allowing you to finesse movements with subtle, realistic poses. These smooth “micro-movements” are exactly what makes the Stickybones an animator’s dream. The materials used “are slick enough to give you smooth motion, yet sticky enough to hold your poses,” the inventors say. Want your model to bend or twist sideways? You can do that, too, thanks to its articulated mid-section.

The designers are currently working with their mold-makers and engineers to put the final touches on the models and release them to the general public. In the meantime, they are also coming up with a range of accessories, including a “Fly-Rig” that allows you to launch the Stickybones up into the air and a magnetic performance stage on which you can set up whole scenes of Stickybones characters.

While Stickybones is the perfect tool for stop-motion animators, it’s also a great way to analyze body mechanics, study different lighting effects and techniques, and make thumbnail storyboard panels. It will also be a useful learning tool for teachers everywhere. As with the model itself, the options are endless.

The post Stickybones: Rapid Posing & Animation Made Easy first appeared on Dornob.

An Israeli designer living in the forest has taken inspiration from his environment for a series of lamps that latch onto bars and poles like vines growing up the branches of trees. Eran Rozenfeld observed the way that these fast-growing plants thrive by essentially becoming parasites, drawing support and nutrients from their supporting structures. Experimenting with flexible materials to achieve a similar effect in a practical product, Rozenfeld settled on heat-manipulated PVC.

The PVC Parasites series is comprised of four unusual lamp designs, each using the plastic pipes to mimic the gripping action of vines. Heated with an industrial fan heater, the temporarily flexible PVC is twisted around the base and allowed to harden in place so that it holds on without the need for any glue or connectors.

“At first, I focused my research on closely observing my living environment, with an emphasis on taking trips to the Ben Shemen Forest. There I looked for different connections between living creatures in the forest and inanimate objects like rubbish, or the connection between different stones and plants,” Rozenfeld told Telavivian.

“I sorted out the different connections in diagrams, and the research drew me to focus on different parasites in the forest: natural parasites and ‘industrial parasites’, meaning the rubbish. That’s how I got to the PVC tubes, of which there is plenty in the forest. I simultaneously worked at home and made a lot of attempts to connect between the materials (tubes in different sizes and raw or processed wood). I made the connections by heating the tubes with a bonfire and sort of fixed them onto the wood in different ways. For instance, the tubes can grasp the tree branches and the plastic can be inserted into the clefts at the trunk of the tree.”

In addition to mimicking the mechanical actions of vines as they grow up other plants, the designs reflect the persistence that can enable some forms of life to survive and thrive, even in the harshest conditions. The series includes a floor lamp with a hanging fixture, a minimalist wood clamp lamp, a table lamp with a classic shade and a tube lamp. All of the designs are available for sale on Etsy.

“Design is the search for another way to do basic daily activities and the creation of new habits of operation,” reads the designer’s website. “Using elements from different worlds for the purpose of the product with the help of form, mechanism, color and technology.”

The post PVC Parasite: Lamps Clamp Onto Poles Like Vines first appeared on Dornob.

We’ve all struggled at times to find the most comfortable sitting position in a chair. It makes sense: we’re all individuals with different physical characteristics, needs and ideas of what comfort means. Designer Kirsi Enkovaara solves the problem of the one-size-fits-all approach with her uniquely customizable and flexible chair, which she calls “The Body.”

The chair is six meters long overall and made of a canvas material stuffed with rice. The semi-rigid structure allows you to mold the chair into a position that is comfortable for you – and then it stays in that position. At the same time, the material is flexible enough to support the curves of the body.

The designer encourages us to move away from “learned cultural norms” like how to sit in a chair and instead listen to our own bodies tell us which position is most comfortable.

Endlessly moldable and re-shapable, the Body encourages users to find comfort and security in any way position (and their bodies) desire.

More from the designer

“‘The Body’ chair encourages a person to find their choice of sitting position by discarding learned cultural norms, trusting in their own body to create the most individual way of sitting. The structure of ‘The Body’ is made from canvas and rice, allowing it to be formed into reconfigurable rigid structures. ‘The Body’ chair has been exhibited extensively throughout Europe, most recently during Bratislava Design Week.”

About Kirsi Enkovaara

“Kirsi Enkovaara is a Finnish designer. She based her studio in Peckham, London after graduating from the Royal College of Art, Design Products in 2014. She has exhibited extensively through Europe, recently exhibiting in Helsinki Design Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum and Somerset House. Her work has been featured in the front runner publications such as Dezeen, Wallpaper*, Interni and Frame Magazine. Working at the moment with my homeware brand Nkdware from 2019 onwards.“

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Stretchable silicone designed to be child-safe, this fun DIY fort making kit encourages children to assemble anything from small fantasy structures to full-sized play spaces out of natural materials in their environments.

Designed and created by Christina Kazakia, Stick-lets are a simple but powerful and versatile toy made to stimulate the imagination.

The colorful Fort Kit contains various sizes and shapes made for joining two or more sticks or branches. Strong, durable and weatherproof, they can be left outside as part of temporary construction projects.

And, of course, the connectors can be saved and the wood is naturally recyclable, reducing environmental impact and encouraging outdoor play. They can also be attached to bamboo branches, fences or other found objects.

“STICK-LETS® were invented by industrial designer and mama of two, Christina Kazakia, while studying at Rhode Island School of Design. Her passion for play-based learning and nature empowered her to create tools to help reconnect children with the great outdoors. Her fondest memories took place immersed in Mother Nature –– building forts, exploring the forest and nurturing her imagination. She hopes today’s children will reflect on similar experiences later in life. The business launched in 2012 and the studio is based out of Philadelphia, PA.”

“One by one my friends and I went around the dinner table sharing our favorite childhood memories. It quickly became apparent that they all took place in the great outdoors. This realization made me wonder if children today will have similar stories to share when they are adults. Will today’s youthful experiences become memories that illicit a yearning for days of unstructured activity, unsupervised play, and risk-taking- much like ours did? Will these memories incite a need to preserve our natural resources if today’s children are not provided the same opportunity to love and appreciate nature? These are my concerns and the driving force behind STICK-LETS®. “

The post Build DIY Forts with Stick-lets first appeared on Dornob.

Those adjustable desk lamps that let you direct the light just where you want it are great for illuminating your workspace, but they lack a certain element of grace. The Fluida lamp from Italy-based design duo Studio Natural is a functional and beautiful way to light up your desk.

The lamp consists of a ribbon-like strip of LEDs between two small magnetic blocks. According to the designers, people like the objects they use more when they have frequent physical contact with them. You can bend it, stretch it and otherwise manipulate its shape to your heart’s desire, directing the light exactly where you need it.  The arc of light also produces a nice diffused effect.

Fluida’s light can be directed by snapping the two magnetic blocks together, creating a balloon-like shape, or separating them, creating a bridge shape.

The Fluida’s blocks can be arranged in a multitude of ways, from stretched wide apart to clipped together with the ribbon slightly twisted. The light from the LEDs is softer than the illumination from a super-focused traditional light bulb, but still bright enough to illuminate your important documents.

This clever lamp design won Honorable mention at the Compasso d’Oro ADI
ADI Design Index Selection as well as the Young & Design Award for its innovation and beauty.

“Fluida is a flexible led lamp to adapt to different uses of desk. Table lamp at indirect light formed by flexible strip with led connected to the two bases. Thanks to the magnets the two bases joint each other in multiples positions modifying the direction of the strip led and creating every time different lights performance.”

“Studio Natural is an awards winning multidisciplinary creative studio
which focuses its research on product design, graphic design and art direction. Founded in 2012 by Alessandro Paoletti and Marco De Santi, from 2016 opens another office in Spain.”

The post Flexible LED Lamp Bends + Twists first appeared on Dornob.

Bookcases are generally one-size-fits-all affairs in theory, but in practice the space between each shelf is either too much or too little. This flexible bent wood design adapts dynamically with each volume added or subtracted.

Dubbed “Chuck” by German designer Natascha Harra-Frischkorn, the constituent bent wood shelves are only a few millimeters thick, and each layer flexes to accommodate the volumes between the sheets. That makes the design ultra-customizable, whatever your personal book collection might look like.

Minimalist metal end caps hold the ultra-slim bent wood planks in place but allow them to shift as needed in the space between. The result is sculptural, interactive and functional at the same time.

“At first glance a simple wooden wall shelf, at closer inspection a shelving system made up of flexible wooden planks that is adapting to the objects it preserves and displays. Chuck consists of six wooden planks with two stainless steel locking collars placed at the ends. Chuck allows to experience intermediate room, to exploit the possibilities of the elements and to design individual room. The planks of wood can be lifted separately in order to display your favorite items. Depending on the quantity when filled, the planks stretch out and the wall shelf takes on a different shape.”

“The storage element with the name ‘Chuck’ is a flexible wall shelf made ​​of 6 wooden planks and two stainless steel collars. It is a combination of flexibility, stability and gravity. The result is an individual, convertible clearance for the small but important things in life. Since I got such an amazing feedback for Chuck from all over the world, I worked very hard over the last month. I found some great german local manufacturers, did plenty of excessive testing with new materials and such. I am proud to announce that Chuck is in production now and it can be ordered over my webshop. Thanks for all your support! More details can be found on my website.”

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While most desk lamps are predictable and a bit boring, these two are anything but. They begin from essentially the same starting point: a lighted silver-colored tube. But from there, they go in different directions to deliver two almost unbelievably unusual lamps.

The PizzaKobra is a sleek flexible tube that starts out as a flat coil (kind of like a pizza) and extends upward until it looks like a cobra that is ready to strike. It can take on any number of shapes and positions thanks to its flexibility, allowing it to shine a light wherever it’s needed.

The Paperclip Lamp is exactly what it sounds like: a lamp that looks just like an over-sized paperclip. Like the PizzaCobra, its body is flexible and can be repositioned again and again, taking on whatever position gives the best light quality. Thanks to its original paperclip shape, it fits in perfectly with office interiors.

The post Bending Brightness: 2 Unusually Flexible Office Desk Lamps first appeared on Dornob.