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.

This has to be one of the most useful pieces of furniture I’ve seen in a long while. It’s called the Doc System, and it folds from a sofa into a bunk bed. I’m, of course, being heavily biased because of the recent arrival of my first child. Here’s the deal, my wife and I own a one bedroom apartment in San Francisco. Space is at a premium here, so I’ve been search for just such a piece. Now would I really use a convertible modern piece of furniture like this? It depends upon how lazy you are. I’m lazy, so in the end, this piece would just stay a sofa or a bunk bed ninety-nine percent of the time.

Marcel Wanders, uber designer of the past five years, has created this recent addition to the stable of fantastic, high-concept lights for Flos.  The concept is to take an old school chandelier and treat it as it were in a haunted house with some overzealous spiders which had made the most lethal web imaginable. The result is a lamp tightly wrapped with a thin, white fiber that, I’m assuming in Marcel Wander’s opinion, looks a bit like a Zeppelin which is the name he gave the piece. From the image I’ve shown, I don’t see it, but explore its profile and, in fact, you have a Zeppelin. As witty as Mr. Wanders is with his designs I’m surprised he has not come out with the much heavier limited edition which he might call the “Lead Zeppelin”. Just a thought.
http://www.flos.com/singlelamp.jsp?back=14956&lamp=63416

Arik Levy has created a design that takes recycling to new levels while also creating an opportunity for those magazine hoarders out there to remain fashionably clutter free and still keep their magazines. We all know these people. Usually they are older single people who have saved every magazine for the past forty years because they think they might use them again some day. Well, Arik Levy’s simple Stool Wrap will allow these mentally challenged people to simply get rid of all their chairs and strap up their magazines. Sure, you could just use twine to get the same effect, but then that would not be designed by Arik Levy now would it?

Flatpack is a tufted wool rug by Big-Game, a Swiss and Belgian design house. The rug concept was born from the idea of taking a simple cardboard box and flattening it out so that each tab of the box spreads to make a rug.  I like this simply because it exploit an already interesting form of the box. I guess where I fall a bit short with liking this design entirely is I was really hoping you could turn this fabulous rug into a box, so in a sense, the rug could easily carry itself along with whatever you want to put into it. The design ends up being visual mimicry rather than functional mimicry which somehow slightly degrades the design in my mind.

This past weekend, The New York Times had an advertising supplemental that was a slick magazine devoted to the watch, a dying breed of product design. Probably my favorite of the watches was the Bell & Ross BR01-97. It is, quite frankly, one of the ugliest watches I have ever seen, but there is no denying its incredible precision and craftsmanship. I guess the reason I love this watch so much is it really sticks to its 4 tenets: water resistance, readability, precision, and performance. No where do they claim to focus on beauty. These 4 things are the mantra. Designers, engineers, and fabricators look to this with laser focus. Beauty is not in this equation. It’s too abstract. And like many Swiss modernists that have come before Bell and Ross, the beauty is the product of following these four tenets.