Rubber Shelves, ingenious bookshelf design by Luke Hart for The Sculpture House.

This rubber bookshelf can solve problem of accommodating any kind any size of books with its flexible properties. We don’t have to worry about storing any size of books anymore, it seems we already have our answer when having these rubber shelves. It has a simple design and yet it looks uniquely stylish when it stretches.

René Lee is a RISD industrial design BFA candidate who has designed some really nice solutions to a variety of problems, including Mbrace, that transforms a regular paper grocery bag act as a stand alone recycling receptacle with an economic use of materials.

Companies from Google to Comcast to Electric Imp are trying to connect home devices and appliances to the web, but the internet of things remains more of a complicated, distant dream than a reality. Spark Devices wants to start off simple, with one of the most used items in your house — the light bulb.

Spark Devices launched on Kickstarter with a working prototype of what it calls the Spark Socket. All a user needs to do to get their lights on the web is screw a regular light bulb into the Spark Socket and screw that into a regular light fixture. They can then control their lighting — on, off, and dimming — through an iOS or Android app, which opens up entirely new avenues for home lighting. Users can schedule their lights when they’re away, set them to slowly turn on in the morning, and even set them to flash when someone calls their phone.

“[The Spark Socket] was inspired by my dad, who’s deaf and uses lights for notification,” Founder Zach Supalla told Wired. “At first I wanted to solve a specific problem he has. Now that he uses a cellphone for text messaging, he’s very difficult to get a hold of when he’s at home and takes his phone out of his pocket. However, once I started working on it I realized that there was a lot of potential for broader uses by providing an open API.”

Backers can pre-order Spark Sockets for $60 apiece, and the company is trying to reach $250,000 on Kickstarter.

During Anton Alvarez’s first year at college, the Swedish-Chilean designer set out on a self-directed period of trial, error, and documentation he dubbed 120×120–120 days of creative research coupled with 120 photographs that followed his progress. “When I started, I didn’t have any goal or plan,” he tells Co.Design. The result is a log of iterative concepts revolving around how to join pieces together, showing the unique evolution of an individual’s ideas. In the end, the momentum was overwhelming, and Alvarez wanted a way to keep his flow going. “The decision to make the thread-wrapping machine was to enable me to continue but in a different way–the tool was like something that sums all the experiments together.” The nifty contraption securely joins component parts without the use of hardware.

After testing out an initial hand-held version, he developed a larger second model, which he then adjusted to the current incarnation, and it’s a pretty remarkable feat of engineering. When the machine starts spinning, fibers from one of eight thread-cones travels into a thread tensioner, then gets coated with cheap, strong, PVA glue when the actual wrapping takes place.

It’s flat-out fascinating to watch the colorful filaments build up as a functional object emerges between the hands of the makers, and Alvarez himself is still figuring out how to harness the thread-wrapper’s potential. “At first I was not doing furniture; I was trying to freely work with the new tool and see what was possible with it,” he says. “There are many different tricks that I am starting to learn, and am constantly developing my skills in this craft.” As far as its future, Alvarez hopes go test new limits and dabble in an even more ambitious field. “Eventually, I will grow out of the machine and make a new one that is more appropriate for the next step–architecture.”

The PURE Water Company is a Norwegian company, established in 1997 with its head-office in Norway. In addition to our business activities in Norway, we also provide our products and services in the UK and the rest of the Scandinavian countries.

PURE Water has developed a special system that utilises the municipal water supply network to give our customers drinking water of the highest quality.

The technology behind the PURE Water system was developed in close cooperation with global leading suppliers to the breweries and beverages industry.

The 90° vase by Cuatro Cuatros (Four Fours) is based on an illustration of an optical illusion called the ‘Penrose Triangle’ where three lengths of square cross section are joined to form a triangle. The illusion of continuity is accomplished by ‘false perspective’ where the image displays ambiguous depth. An opening on the top of the vase accepts stalks of flowers which are are fed with water stored inside the tubular construction of the vessel. Cuatro Cuatros describes the 90° vase thusly:

Is this an impossible triangle?
The interposition, orientation and perspective create a contradiction of the space that makes us perceive something that is not. It comes from the Penrose experience. 90 ° is a vase that, based on a drawing, has been converted to a geometrical shape with volume. Depending on the point of view, both ends coincide and make it look like a closed figure.

Objects that seem like half-finished sketches of candle holders, vases, bowls and bottles won British designer Maya Selway second prize in the Object category of the Interieur Design Awards at the Interieur design biennale in Kortrijk, Belgium, last week.

Each object in the Kishu collection is carefully weighted at its base to support its lopsided structure. “I worked for a long time to get the balance just right,” Selway said.

The delicate pieces are made from oxidised copper, and the vase also has a shallow silver dish for holding water. The bottles and bowls are purely decorative, but the candle holder and the vase can be used as shown.

Selway trained as a silversmith and jeweller at Camberwell College of Arts in London and Bishopsland near Reading, and has also worked making props and building sets for theatre and film.

The Flux Chair is the product of industrial designers Douwe Jacobs and Tom Schouten from Amsterdam where the name comes from the mixture of flexible and luxury. They wanted to create a foldable chair that would take up as little space as possible but also have the mobility of going around in everyday places.

Through their inspiration from paper sculptures, the Flux Chair was born. Douwe folded a tiny, elegant, paper scale model of a chair and even though it was from a single sheet of paper, it was surprisingly strong and completely unique.

Get a Flux Chair at the LFW shop.