There is nothing terribly smart about creating furniture around a charging station. It’s just that it needs to be done. So often we designers design for how we lived our lives twenty years ago and not for how we live our lives now. The Bedford Smart Recharge Station recognizes your needs: pay bills, hold the mail, store notes, charge your stuff. If I had one of these simple pieces of furniture I would now have hours of my life back that I spent searching for where I’ve put my phone.

Charging: Bedford Smart Recharge Station is Something Your Wife Would Like

I’ve been meaning to write about this small Finnish company for quite some time. You need a fabric for your design that incorporates a kind of 80s collage DIY aesthetic? This might very well be the designers to look at. Their fabric work suggests industrial wastelands, flowers juxtaposed with grainy penwork of enlarged Maurice Sendak children’s books, and gritty abstract lines.

I saw Kritine’s work at the recent ICFF, and I loved these dished because they redefine the way we eat by simply experimenting with the form of the ancient bowl and plate. The sculptural manipulations suggest possibly picking up the a bowl rather than dipping into it (as an example). As well, the plateware accentuates the food not as a backdrop but as a participator in the food the same way Frank Gehry’s Bilbao museum engages its art.

kristine morich: Landscape Tableware

I recently received an email from this company: Paradoxy Products.  I believe they were writing to make me aware of their chess set, but to be honest I only wanted to write about their DecisionPaper. What is it? It’s a note pad with a cut directly in the middle of the paper. What does it do? It helps you make decisions. It’s similar to flipping a coin. What you do is think of a question that may lead you to a yes or no answer. Simply write “yes” on one side of the paper and “no” on the other side. Now rip the paper and the side with the most amount of paper is the decision you make. It’s a game of chance, but a fun game. If the decision is, ” should I get married to my fiance or should I cheat on her with he sister?” you may consider another more rational method of decision making. Otherwise, DecisionPaper is as good of a way as any to make decisions.

Alright. I’ve fallen for it. The Swiss Army brand has moved into shoes and I’m in. The shoes, lead by Established Brands, have been expertly produced with the expected simplicity, ease of use, and signature red color that is important to give it that Swiss Army feel. I grew up owning a Swiss Army knife, and I never thought much of it except that it was just so damn cool. And it’s this sort of child like deep mental bond that pulls me in to the lust for these shoes. What makes these shoes cool if you took the logo off? Well, their still light weight, well made, rugged, and thoughtfully designed, but quite frankly, if they had a Payless logo on them then I wouldn’t be writing about them.

Tear a piece of paper from your notebook. Crumple it up. Now begin to curve the piece of crumpled paper into the form of a vessel. What you get is a vague resemblance of what Paper Thin, a collection of ceramics by Agata Nowak, is all about. The amazing thing to me is a crumpled piece of paper is just that: paper. It’s not clay. When you start to warp and distort clay into what looks like crumpled paper while simultaneously mimicking the thinness of paper what you end up with is an understated ceramic virtuosity that ranks up there with Chuck Close’s photo-realistic paintings. That is, these objects mimic the natural form as naturally as possible as to become an obsession in recreating exactly what the eye sees in a medium unrelated to the original object. The end result is a deep appreciate of how rigorous each artists’ technique tells the story of the object.