The book reveals that the room is located in a walled-off section inside Apple’s main marketing building and requires a special badge in order to enter or exit the room. The packaging designers inside are said to open hundreds of prototype packaging in trying to achieve the perfect unboxing experience.

“How a customer opens a box must be one of the last things a typical product designer would consider,” wrote Lashinsky. “Yet for Apple, the inexpensive box merits as much attention as the high-margin electronic device inside.”

One after another, the designer created and tested an endless series of arrows, colors, and tapes for a tiny tab designed to show the consumer where to pull back the invisible, full-bleed sticker adhered to the top of the clear iPod box. Getting it just right was this particular designer’s obsession.

What’s more, it wasn’t just about one box. The tabs were placed so that when Apple’s factory packed multiple boxes for shipping to retail stores, there was a natural negative space between the boxes that protected and preserved the tab.

It truly illustrates the obsessive attention to detail at Apple, something Steve Jobs was well known for. Jobs was said to have gone through more than 2,000 shades of beige to find the perfect one for the Apple II and even insisted that engineers make the circuit board inside the Mac look great although consumers wouldn’t be able to see it.

[via MacRumors]

Gigaom reports that Kickstarter raised almost $100 million for the various listed projects in 2011. Kickstarter launched in 2009 and the company reported that it increased the number of launched projects by 143% since 2010. Successful projects that landed the funding needed increased by roughly 203% in the same time.

Kickstarter says that more projects hit their funding totals in 2011 than were launched in all of 2010. In 2011, Kickstarter launched 27,086 projects and 11,836 of those were successful. That gave the site a project success rate of 46%. The most successful category was film with $32.4 million pledged; music was second with $9.2 million pledged. I wonder how well Kickstarter will do this year.

Ive had already been made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) back in 2005. Last year, reports suggested that Steve Jobs was in consideration for a knighthood of his own, back in 2009, but that the then-Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, turned down the suggestion after Jobs declined an invitation to speak at a political conference.

As for Ive’s recognition, the designer described it as “absolutely thrilling” and himself as “both humbled and sincerely grateful.” He is known to have shared a particularly close relationship with Jobs, with Ive holding “more operation power” than anyone bar the CEO himself at Apple. That was a conscious decision made to keep design a priority, Jobs told biographer Walter Isaacson.

The honor is not the only recent recognition made of Apple’s distinctive design. Last year, an exhibition of Ive’s hardware was put on show in the German Museum of Arts and Crafts, with over half of the 300 pieces being Apple products.

Reducing phantom power is a good idea, but this PumPing Tap outlet concept is something that I can’t get behind. I can only imagine how irritating it would be to have the outlet pop your devices plug out of the socket each time you turn it off. This would be especially irritating if that socket was behind a desk or couch.

The concept has a blue light around the outside of the plug when something is plugged in and using power. When the power draw stops, the ring turns red. Ten minutes after the plug is red a little circle pops out of the center of the outlet and pushes the plug out to stop power draw.

[via Yanko Design]

The rear projector system shoots the gauges and displays onto a curved surface touch display providing all the buttons and controls you might need. Mitsubishi says that it hopes to be using the concept dash in cars in the next decade. I don’t see that happening, touch interfaces for car controls are far from ideal. That half steering wheel won’t make it either, there is a reason steering wheel are round.

The entire system has 18 buttons that are on two keypads on each of the uprights of that wheel. A touch display to the right of the dash allows the user to enter handwriting or characters for input to the system. The system also uses facial temperature and heart rate monitoring to recognize a user and change seat position. This is not what we need if the government wants drivers to be less distracted.

[via DesignBoom]

Leung has some more artistically driven ideation in this project, such as how mythologically the carp (fish) is meant to symbolize such things as bravery and fortune, and that this carpet with its fancy “Carp Pet” title is meant to be a “humorous extraction of the carpet that reveals this intriguing little conversation piece of the floor.” On top of that, the carpet doesn’t look half bad without the table either! Might give you a headache every once in a while, but that’s the price you pay for coolness.

It’s the moire pattern that draws interference in your eyes, made plain with the table, and made impressive enough to catch the eyes of the judges at the last show this cool ensemble was featured in. This design is, believe it or not, the second Red Dot Design Award 2011 winner we’ve posted today. This carpet is not ready for mass production yet, and we’re sure mister Leung is looking for additional partners to make such a thing happen – what you see above and below is the final model on the other hand, just waiting to swim to greater glory!

[via dornob]

The new design focuses on channel subscriptions that are listed in the left-hand column, with Google+ and Facebook feeds listed at the top that when clicked show videos shared by any of your friends or circles. This column also features other ways to filter your feed, curated feeds, suchas Trending channels, and also lets you pin any specific channel subscriptions to the list.

When a subscription or filter in the left column is clicked on, the corresponding videos show up in the center column, with the latest videos from the feed showing up first. The right column then features recommendations and ads. This layout is similar to what we’ve seen in both Google+ and Facebook.

Additionally, YouTube introduced new templates for these homepages, including Blogger, Creator, Network, and Everything templates that let you customize your page to best present your video content. YouTube will likely be introducing more social features that will further enhance discovery options and possibly even tighter integration with Google+.

[via TechCrunch]

Blair has also recently been honored via a lecture by the name of “Mary Blair’s World of Color – A Centennial Tribute” as given at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences by a collection of big contemporary names. On the panel for this lecture were Eric Goldberg who was a supervising animator for Disney’s “Aladdin” and the director of “Pocahontas,” Peter Docter who was the director of the movies “Monsters, Inc” and “Up,” and many more. This was not a woman who was destined to be forgotten.

Included in the gallery below is a small collection of Mary Blair works, most of them from Disney films. This sort of painting and illustration was to influence generations of artists and remains a staple in illustration teachings in design colleges today. Truly a master of her tools was Blair, and Google is good to note it! For more Mary Blair work, head to http://magicofmaryblair.com/ where there’s loads of prints to purchase and colors to look upon.

Ive had “more operation power” than anybody else at Apple bar himself, Jobs told biographer Walter Isaacson the Associated Press reports. Nobody else within Apple is capable of telling Ive what to do, he explained, with the design chief’s prominence being ”the way I set it up.”

“[Steve] took great pride in cultivating the expertise and commitment to excellence and creativity in the executive team” Gore explained, though it seems Ive will keep the final say in matters of design – issues that have certainly shaped hardware and strategy decisions in the past. Back at the CDMA iPhone 4 launch in January, Apple admitted that LTE had been left out because the first-gen 4G radios demanded too many compromises on the physical design of the phone.

The drive is the intercontinental Ballistic Design Missile allowing it to be called an ICDM sounding close enough to ICBM to keep the design working. Obviously, the design of this missile is the draw. The packaging doesn’t even appear to say how much storage is actually inside.

The nose cone comes off to reveal the USB connector. The downside I see is that if you use a thin notebook the fins may keep the drive from plugging in and sitting flat. It’s cool though and I would bet it has a small amount of storage. It doesn’t appear to be available for purchase at this time.

[via Technabob]

The shoe is dubbed the “Rapidprototypedshoe” and was made using the Objet multi-material 3D printing technique. The shoe designer was Marloes ten Bhomer. The shoe was printed in one build and has a hard heel and a flexible upper. The printing tech that Objet 3D uses can combine materials like rubber and rigid material into a single prototype that is used extensively in the footwear industry.

The wild looking shoe will be on display at an exhibition called Power of Making that starts today at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The part of this design that I find most intruding is the modular nature. I think a modular shoe with different heels and parts that can be changed would be a great way to get some of my wife’s shoes out of the closet and give me more than a tiny square for my stuff.

The current Amazon.com design is a dash of blue, some orange, light blue, and generally filled up with all sorts of things in every square pixel. A screenshot of the new design shows that the company will be pairing down the color scheme to simple gray tones, while throwing in lots more white space. It looks almost too bland and sophisticated when compared to the Amazon we’re used to.

The screenshots were first leaked about a week ago, but Amazon has finally confirmed today with the WSJ, that there is indeed a new revamped site coming soon. Some customers may already see the new design, but not everyone will. An Amazon rep says that the company will continue to roll out the new design to additional customers, but doesn’t have a precise date on when the new site would go live for everyone.

[via CNET]

The USA Today app was showcased in the portfolio of the company’s Art Director Robbie Dillon, who says that the design is in preparation for the Windows 8 release. However, that’s still several months away in 2012. Dillon also notes that the USA Today design will retain the look and feel of the Windows Metro UI to showcase the company’s content.

Similarly, the social travel app by software development company Jetstream also doesn’t stray far from the Windows 8 Metro theme. The company is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and boasts, “by the time most companies begin development on applications for a new operating system, we’ve been using it daily for months.”

But hopefully, not all Windows 8 apps will end up looking just like Windows 8 itself. Microsoft did reveal that developers can use HTML 5 and JavaScript to create their Windows 8 apps, but it’s not clear how much freedom they have to go beyond the efficient but slightly boring Metro UI.

The Windows 8 interface for tablets was first demoed back in June, but a more in-depth preview is expected to take place at the upcoming Build developer conference. It’s also been rumored that Microsoft may giveaway developer builds of Windows 8 as well as early hardware that supports the new platform.

It uses a hubless wheel and is intended to be used along with a car. I guess the idea is that you could park your car and then ride the A0 to your final destination. It looks terribly uncomfortable with its little slightly padded seat. If this looks like a design concept to you, check out the video to see it in action. The A0 is small enough to fold and fit into the trunk of a car.

The bike has integrated day lights and has a sensor to turn on a headlight and brake lights when needed. There are no details offered on how far the A0 can go on a charge, how long it takes to charge, or how fast it can go. There is also no indication on when or if this device will make it to market.

[via Core77]

The battery charge mode will recharge the battery for the bike when the rider is pedaling. The battery-power mode will scoot the rider along with no effort, and the battery assist mode makes pedaling a bit easier when you feel lazy. The frame of the bike is said to be made from a carbon fiber-reinforced polymer.

The battery on the bike also powers the headlight and taillight plus an iPhone dock for your smartphone. Rather than chains, the bike uses what appear to be friction wheels to push the tires a long. There is no word on a price or if the product will leave the concept stage.

[via Inhabitat]

This watch has very clean and classic lines with little to bling it up. The watch has a black band and face with white markings and hands with a red second hand. It shows the date as well. The face of the watch flips up to reveal a compass underneath. The case is made from titanium and the crystal is AR-coated sapphire.

That liquid compass in the bottom is removable, will work in both hemispheres, and has mirrors to make it viewable. Those mirrors click into place to let you see the compass from the side when the watch is on your wrist. It is water resistant to 50-meters. Pricing on the watch is unannounced, but it won’t be cheap.

[via Uncrate]

Other than the old-fashioned looks of the bike, the big feature is that it has four wheels. The wheels are touching side-by-side so it still looks like a two-wheeler. The bike is a limited edition with only 12 being made. The bike is built in the US and has a hand crafted leather seat. The rims that hold the dual tires are custom made.

The handles and the frame insert are also covered in the same leather. The laser engraved number in the 12-unit run is printed on the seat. If you want your own version of this bike, you can get it for $2,950. That makes it about half the cost of that wooden bike I mentioned before.

[via Born Rich]

When the concept is folded flat against the wall, the plug sends power out to whatever the device is. When you flip the plug up the power is turned off. The design is cool and would certainly eliminate having to fumble for one of those cord switches or reach under the lampshade to turn a light off.

The downside I see is that once you plug this cord in behind furniture reaching it to turn the device on or off is going to be very hard. The cord reminds me of something Apple would design. The designers are Huang Guanglei, Wei Min and Jiang Zhongbiao. The concept plug only sticks out of the wall 1cm when tuned on.

[via YankoDesign]

It looks a lot like the clouds that were produced in the 60′s when the military was testing bombs. The lamp is really cool and you can even order yourself one from Shapeways assuming you have a deep wallet. The lamp is very expensive at $1495. The plastic material is white and is said to be strong and flexible.

The light part comes separately, you can cram the bulb inside, and it makes the center of the cloud glow. I really like the design of the lamp and if it were a fraction of that price, I’d totally buy it for my desk. Would you buy this lamp?

[via LaughingSquid]

The name of the item is Concrete Building Blocks and as the name suggests the blocks are made from concrete like a block you might use for a retaining wall in your backyard. The blocks look really cool and you buy them in sets of six. Each set will cost you $8.50. As you can imagine the blocks aren’t as uniform as the real LEGO bricks made from plastic and they don’t appear to fully snap together.

The concrete blocks are designed to look just like the 2 x 4 LEGO bricks you played with as a kid and might still play with today. Each brick measures 1 5/8″ x 3/4″ x 1/2″. The seller of the Concrete Building Blocks also notes that the bricks vary in color and texture. It appears some of them might be missing corners too.

[via Etsy]

The bike is made by Lagomorph designs and it is one of the best-looking bikes I have ever seen. The bike is a single speed though so it might not be up to the hardcore riders needs. Other features include aluminum dropouts and fittings that are custom made by the company. The bike also uses high-end components in the build making it suited to the wealthy rider.

The rims the bike uses are strong and the brakes use titanium hardware. The company also allows the buyer to customize the bike as well. The frame, forks, headset, and stems are available individually for $3,500 and the full bike will cost $6,000.

[via Born Rich]

This is a flash drive and it’s inside a tube that requires a combination to open. That is some cool physical security and the locking style reminds me of a bike lock. The designer used CAD software to design the works and then actually built the parts. It appears to be made out of brass or some other material that looks like brass.

The rings around the cylinder rotate to set the correct combination and then the lid comes off to allow the flash drive to be used. I have seen locks like this on the market with a digital keypad before. The designer also notes that he is working on another version that has no steampunk elements in the design.

[via

Designers Azusa Murakami and Alexander Groves are both graduates of the Royal College of Art and have made up a very odd collection of sunglasses from human hair. The hair is bound into the frame of the glasses in a resin material. The designers say that the frames are biodegradable too. The glasses come in several styles and have different color lenses.

The glasses were a project to explore sustainable fashion eyewear. I will say if I didn’t know that hair was what was used inside the glasses I wouldn’t have guessed it. The hair looks like the plastic is swirled and striped inside. The design of the glasses is green and no harmful substances are produced during the manufacturing process. Would you wear glasses with strange hair inside them?

[via Dezeen]

The Solar Sinter was completed in the middle of May and then Kayser and his creation headed out into the Sahara desert in the area of Siwa, Egypt to put his creation to the test for two weeks. The concept worked and creates a cool process that can be harnessed for the design and creation of 3D items that people need. The device uses solar energy to turn the sand into a form of glass.

The Solar Sinter uses open source ReplicatorG software, which is a 3D printing program. The finished project is on display at the Royal College of Art graduate exhibit right now. Check out the video below to see the solar Sinter in action.

[via Creative Applications]

DARPA crowed-sourced the design of the XC2V military vehicle as a way to study the viability of designing military vehicles in this method and to see how much faster it would be than traditional design methods. This vehicle is a multipurpose ground transport that can take soldiers into and out of combat and can be converted to use as a medical transport too. The final design looks really cool and reminds me more than a little of an open desert trophy truck. The coolest part is that the crowd-sourcing really worked and worked very well. The company chosen to make the prototype you see in these photos is Local Motors.

The vehicle dubbed Flypmode won the XC2V competition and was given a 14-week deadline to build the first prototype. Local Motors didn’t need that long to get the bulletproof vehicle into the real world from the concept stage. The only thing I see that I have to wonder about is the exposed tires on the concept and the exposed engine bay on the front of the vehicle. They seem very susceptible to enemy fire.

[via Dvice]

People will be able to visit the clock and will enter via the rugged cave you see here. You can see in the photos of the giant silver colored gear just how large the clock will be. The design of the clock will allow it to make a different bell ringing sequence each day for the next 10,000 years. The construction team is carving five chambers into the mountain to celebrate certain anniversaries of the clock. The chambers will be for the 1-year, 10-year, 100-year, 1000-year, and 10,000 year anniversaries. The one-year chamber has inside a special orrery that highlights humankind’s first century in space.

The clock will activate and run the special orrery once per year on a pre-determined date at solar noon. The team will build the animations for the fist and tenth anniversaries, but will leave the 100, 1,000, and 10,000 for future generations to decide. The build team will provide the mechanical interface into the chambers that will provide the future builders with power and the correct clock triggering events. How awesome is this project?

[via 10,000 Year Clock]

Artist Chris Burden has constructed the coolest Hot Wheels track that I have ever seen. From looking at the thing, I don’t see anything that might have come out of a Hot Wheels box. Even the track looks custom made to me. The kinetic sculpture is called Metropolis II and has 1,100 Hot Wheels cars that zip around the streets of the giant city continuously. Each of the little blurs you see in the photo are Hot Wheels cars that are roughly 2-inches long.

The artwork took the artist and a team of ten assistants four years to build and is installed in Burden’s studio. When my son saw this, he wanted to know if we could make on in his room. I know him, after the four-year construction process, he would walk through it like Godzilla and crush it.

[via Make]

The two wheels in the design have a little cockpit between them where the operator would sit. The risk with the diwheel design is that the driver might end up like a hamster that suddenly stops running on their little hamster wheel and spin around uncontrollably with the wheels rather than remaining stationary. Typically, with diwheel designs the drivers just end up rocking around though, which can be a bit uncomfortable I would imagine.

The diwheel created by the students uses computer hardware along with special software to control the movement of the wheels and the movement of the frame to maintain a smooth ride with no rocking or spinning around for the driver. The vehicle the students designed can hit a top speed of 40km/hr and move up an incline of no more than 12-degrees. The special stability system is called Electric Diwheel with Active Rotation Damping or (EDWARD).

[via Physorg]

The first video of of a robot that can juggle five balls at one time. The bot was made by three master’s students from Czech Technical University in Prague. It has three linear motors inside with one for each arm and the third for the central ball deployment system. The hands of the bot move up and down quite nosily and juggle the balls like a pro. The bot uses a feedback loop and a high-speed camera to fine tune the trajectories of the balls so they can be caught.

The other juggling bot is different in that it uses no cameras and has a pendulum design. It does no sensing of the ball location as it swings back and forth. I don’t think you can really call it juggling since this bot only uses one ball.

[via Spectrum]

A concept shredder called the bridge designed by one tenth design for a company called takumi has surfaced and it is very cool. This looks like some sort of shredder that Apple would sell with an industrial design and bright white color. The cool part is that the shredder is its own unit and will sit on most trashcans you already have.

When you aren’t shredding things up you can store it in a drawer or on your desk. It needs no AC cord since the shredding mechanism is powered by batteries. It appears that the batteries are four AA size cells. From the warning images on the top the thing won’t shred paperclips or staples. My big shredder will chop up those items. The tapered design is to allow the shredder to sit on top of the trash bin or wedge inside of it.

[via Designboom]

Rams, however, disagreed with Starck, telling his fellow designer that “I don’t feel so, and for me it’s a compliment.” “It’s a compliment that they use the basic thinking about what design can be, and how to use new technologies” Rams suggested, “and that is what I tried also, especially with my main work for the company Braun.”

Ives apparently invited Rams to a clandestine visit of the Apple design studios, though he doesn’t reveal what, exactly he saw during his time there. The impact of his work has certainly been felt by Ives, who is quoted in the foreword of an upcoming book on the designer, Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible. “So profoundly good is his design of music players, cameras and kitchen tools” Ives says, “that it somehow transcends their technical capability.”

There’s plenty more video over at Co.Design and it’s well worth watching if you’re at all interested in industrial design.

Those are cases of beer in bottles. Considering Germany is the home of Oktoberfest, I am not surprised this passes for art. The artist is Cyprien Gaillard and his piece was meant to illustrate the point “Preserving a monument goes hand in hand with destroying it.” The most important bit for fans of the brewski may well be this; the pyramid was made from cases of Efes beer in bottles that was imported from Turkey.

The boxes formed the steps of the pyramid and people at the museum were cut loose to climb the pyramid and open the boxes, then get hammered. From the after shots in the gallery, it looks like they did a very good job. One thing about this bothers me. There was free beer at a museum, people were encouraged to drink their fill, and there are hoards of unopened cases left in that pyramid. Add that to the fact that there are no reports of riots sparked by what football team was the best of who would win the F1 championship this year and I call BS.

[via Fastcodesign]

You can’t really tell when all the chairs are docked together just how many of them make up the design. When they are all apart, there is a bunch of individual chairs to make things work. There are ten of the chairs that nest together to make the whole and each of them is a slightly smaller representation of the next.

The chairs nest together so you can sit on the whole thing using groves that slide together measuring half an inch to an eighth of an inch wide. I wonder how long it took to design and build the chair. I bet she could sell these to rich folks for some big money if she was inclined.

[via Colossal]

Other watches have to use a battery to get the power to operate. The watch designed by Julien Moise needs neither battery nor winding power to operate. This watch has an interesting turbine looking wheel in red that circles the face of the watch. When the wearer wants to know the time they blow on the turbine and it generates enough power to make the watch show the time on the digital screen. That is an interesting way to operate.

I would assume the watch would need some sort of battery inside too. If it didn’t have continuous power you would need to keep blowing on that turbine while you set the time when you want to know what time it is. That wouldn’t work well. The design is cool, it looks like something geeks, and collectors of odd watches might like. I bet people around you would think you odd when you blow on your watch. If you want to see more about the watch, check out the video below.

[via Yanko Design]

With only 258 square feet, a bed that stays out all the time would take up the bulk of the apartment. The dudes bed slides under the balcony outside which is raised from level with the apartment. The kitchen, closets, and toilet are all part of the wall on the right side that is covered with cabinet doors. When those doors are pressed all the stuff you need to actually live is revealed. The apartment has a toilet in a little closet near the front wall that is private.

This isn’t the apartment for an obese person for sure. The guy made the shower part of the living space. You would have to be a very neat person, not prone to cluttering things up as I am, to live there. The place actually has more space than you think it does when you watch the video. Check it out below to see what you think. Could you live in such a small space?

[via Geekosystem]

Luna is described as the world’s first personal robot that integrates three features that are important. The bot is expandable via expansion ports, is fully programmable with open standards, and is affordable. Exactly what Luna would cost to build or buy isn’t mentioned and affordable to one man is expensive to another. The hardware the makes the robot work isn’t noted in the press release for the design.

I would imagine it is a small PC in the base powered by Linux or another free open source OS that controls the robot. “We conducted an exhaustive search for a design studio who could deliver exceptional design within the context of a technical and engineering challenge that is inherently entailed in bringing world’s first personal robot to market.” said Fred Nikgohar, CEO of RoboDynamics. “With SchultzeWORKS, we found a partner who has enabled our company to articulate an exceptional visual and artistic design, while simultaneously helping us mitigate the stringent technical and quality standards contained within Luna. This ability to work both within an artistic and technical framework is indeed a rare gift that Dave and his team brought to the table for us.”

[via SchultzWORKS]

The hours are on a small dome on the top of the watch that rotates to a glass window so you can clearly tell what hour it is. The minutes are on a dial that scrolls around a larger window on the front that reminds me of a windshield. The minutes are marked in five-minute increments so the watch is quite accurate. The movement inside is based on a Swiss ETA automatic and is presumed to be wound for power.

The watchcase is titanium and is 40mm wide and 55mm tall. The crystals for the window are made from sapphire, and the watch is water resistant to 30-feet. The strap is made from rubber and apparently, 100 of the watches will be made this year. The price per watch will be 6,800 Swiss francs, which is a bit over $7,800 in the states. Check out the video below to see more about the cool watch.

[via ablogtoread]

The clock comes in white or black versions and has no numbers on the face. The hour hand has a large white circle on it, and the minute hand has a smaller circle with a black center. The idea is that the clock looks like a solar eclipse. The hands are so large that you will only get the approximate time though so this might not be the thing for the habitually punctual. That red dot is roughly at the 12 setting on the clock.

As the time changes the two hands near the eclipse spot giving the clock its name. This is an interesting design. Taking the circles out of the equation, it reminds me of a clock made from an old speaker and a Roomba. The design is a concept form right now, but I can see this thing in a fancy home office with modern decorations.

[via Design-milk]

The bot stands about 3’3″ tall making it roughly the size of a five-year-old child, and it weighs 19.5 pounds. That weight is without the netbook that acts as POLYRO’s brain. The bot has two arms that each have three degrees of freedom. It’s head can nod and the eyes can blink. The eyes are stereoscopic as well, the bot has 11 Robotis Dynamixel servos in the current design, and those eyes are webcams.

The netbook used for the brain of the bot runs Linux and all the parts, netbook included, to make the robot were under $2,000. The designer of the robot is Tim Payne, and he hopes that other people will help with the project and extend the capability of the bot with things like facial recognition. The designer is also hoping the arms will get more degrees of freedom and perhaps speech synthesis will be added.

[via Plastic Pals]

That sounds complex and technically, it likely is very complex. All we really need to know to appreciate the beauty of this radiator is that the quantum glass heats up and radiates that heat when an electric current is passed through it. The key thing that allows this is a very thin metal coating inside the glass that emits the infrared rays when electricity is passed through.

If you are the minimalist sort, this is the radiator for you. It was designed by designers from 5.5 Designers and was developed for a French company called Saaza. The official name is Matières à Chaud, which means Hot Matters in English. The glass used is half an inch thick, and you can see it’s decorated with sticks and such, which appear to be used to hold the glass in place. The radiators will be offered for sale at about $3,640 each.

[via Fastcodesign]