If I could've had just one pair of scissors back in my design school days, when we all needed to work with a great variety of materials in a single day, it would've been these Fiskars' Cuts+More Scissors.
In addition to your basic scissoring function, there are cutouts for wire, twine, and even rope:
The sheath has a packing-tape cutter on the bottom edge, and on-board sharpening slots to hone the scissor edges:
A bottle-opening notch will open beers (or what looks to be bottled Windex in the photo) so you can take the edge off before class:
Finally, you can detach one half of the scissors and the other half now becomes a titanium shank. (The company literature refers to it as a knife, but I know a shank when I see one.) Perfect for post-crit score-settling; ask your mouthy classmate if he wants to tell you that "your chair design doesn't seem like a good representation of dialectical materialism at all" to your face.
If I told you you had to design a two-sided remote control, how would you deal with the problem of accidentally pressing buttons on the bottom while you're trying to interact with the buttons on top? My first instinct would be to spec out an internal gyro so that the device knows which side is up, and negates the down-facing buttons; but Astro Studios, the firm behind the Boxee and its two-sided remote, solved it through "simple physical design":
One side is very simplified and pure with play and pause buttons and a four-way navigation pad. We placed those controls in the center of the remote, which keeps your hands away from those buttons when you're using the QWERTY side, which you hold like a phone when you're text-messaging. It took a couple mockups to dial in the right proportions, but it's actually quite comfortable -- the physical design itself is what keeps your hands away from the areas you don't want to use.
You can read more about the design of the Boxee, including Astro's interesting decision to waive initial fees in exchange for Boxee equity, atFast Company's interview with Astro.
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Herman Miller's Select line has recently reinterpreted the Hang-It-All, the iconic coat rack by Charles and Ray Eames. The Eameses originally designed the Hang-It-All in 1953 for children's rooms, with brightly-painted maple spheres for the knobs; the welded wire frame was produced using mass production techniques they'd perfected while working on their wire table and chair legs.
The update renders the HIA modern with solid walnut balls and a powder-coated black frame. The 14 knobs total mean one unit should be enough for the average singleton or couple's entryway hanging needs, but for a cooler visual effect, families or offices that have the wall space can gang up a bunch of 'em in a row.
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The name of Asus' media center laptop is as unwieldy as the actual machine: The NX90JQ-A1 is a 9.4-pound beast with Bang & Olufsen speakers that stick out of the side like ears.
The screen is an absurdly huge 18.4 inches, widescreen of course, and the highly reflective polished aluminum surface is cool to look at--but probably shouldn't be touched or used in environments with overhead lighting, which only knocks out 99% of potential users.
Two other interesting design features: 1) See those little black rectangles to either side of the keyboard? Those are dual touchpads that work in tandem, i.e. you can be "mousing" with the left one while button-clicking with the right one. 2) Having speakers mounted on the screen, while unwieldy, actually fires the sound towards your own ears, unlike the keyboard-mounted speakers of most laptops, which shoot the sound straight up.
If you're interested in learning more, PC Mag has a review of the NX90JQ-A1 (will you Marketing guys please give this a better name?) here.
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We like to see designers really exploring the properties of the materials they use in their product designs, and Netherlands-based Vacu Vin has put silicone to good use with their PopSome Candy & Nut Dispenser. A cleverly-designed lid forms an airtight and watertight seal with a protrusion in the bundt-pan-like bowl; pull on the lid's "upper lip" and it pops up into a spout. Check it out:
The PopSome was awarded a 2010 Good Industrial Design Award (not to be confused with the Japan Industrial Design Promotion Organization's Good Design Award; this one is conferred by a Dutch organization called Designlink).
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