Design WOO

So you’re snowboarding. You’ve got your Burton board, your Burton nopattern jacket, your Burton snowpants, Burton long underwear. But what’s missing! Your gloves! Oh just slap on a pair of Burton gloves, right? WRONG! You need some music, just use an iPod right? NO WAY! Put the music and the gloves (and the cellphone for that matter) all together. It’s the HR Burton music and voice communication gloves!

Oh joy! How I’ve always wanted to talk on a two-way radio through my gloves! Yes! Everyone whose ever snowboarded, skied, sled dogged, etc, knows how bundled up you really need to be to avoid the cold. We live in the future now, so people not only wish to board down a hill all nice and toasty, they want to talk to their friends and listen to their music on the way down too!

We’ll here’s that all. All of it in the gloves. Whip em out.

Designer: William Mazuel

Specs-wise, it’s really up to a designer’s imagination; that’s the advantages of concepts. Realistically speaking, playing around with the materials used in an innovative way is kind of restrictive. Radio FM follows the norm of an object by appearing to be this rigid ceramic piece, but in reality the body is an enigmatic fluid PVC sail and is flexible. The controls are cleverly hidden underneath the device and simple; a button to switch it on and a dial to tune in the frequency. Can anything get simpler than that!
Quick Facts:

· FM frequencies reach from 87,5 till 108 MHz.

· The radio is portable because it operates on 3 penlight batteries. (included)

· Limited series of 50 pieces @ € 150 each.

Designer: Jasper de Leeuw for Leeuw & Vormgeving

It’s a wooden log and a radio. That ain’t all folks. It’s also solar powered and if Mr. Sunshine isn’t happy that day, there’s a dynamo powered by your finger. I love the giant wooden rotary dials to change stations and volume. The old school retractable antenna nostalgically tugs at my heart too. Sure I have no idea what station I’m changing to but it looks like an ewok crafted it so I totally approve.

BTW, 80% of the radio is oak. The rest are radio components. Treehuggers might like it… or will they hate it since it’s made from a tree? Hmmm

Designers: Solène Le Goff & Christophe Gouache

What is life without color and what is design without innovation? Addressing the two is the Hélio DAB Radio. The design uses colorful solar Grätzel panels that are transparent and add a bit of psychedelic creativity to the room. The Grätzel solar panels get their color from vegetal ink, upping the green quotient. The LED panel and Speakers compliment the radio and are in sync with the form. It’s the sort of thing we would love to bring home!

A short text about The Grätzel technology:
“A new generation of solar cells has been born: thin, colored, translucent and even flexible. The source of this revolution is EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne), where Professor Michael Graetzel, inspired by plant photosynthesis, began to use molecules from colorants to transform the sun’s light into electricity. His work drew heavy praise from the scientific community, resulting in a World Technology Award. While many other technological developments have followed, designers need to take advantage of the extraordinary potential of these “dye-sensitized” solar cells.”

Designer: Léa Longis

Irrespective of the huge influx of the portable entertainment systems in the recent past, Radio has been an extensive as well as reliable source of entertainment systems, offering a huge variety of programs to the listeners. Giving a makeover to the traditional radio, Danish designer Kenneth Lylover has come up with a portable wireless internet radio with an innovative interaction that minimizes the steps required to find and listen to internet radio stations. Dubbed “Globe I-Radio,” the entertainment system is finished with touch and pressure sensitive Eleksen conductive fabric with a printed world map, which helps the users to navigate, select and enhance the exploration of radio stations available from around the world.
To turn the radio on, all you need to do is rotate the upper ring with your finger, and choose the genre by selecting the color, which change s with a mild tap of your finger onto the ring. Users may navigate the globe, printed on the surface, and press it with finger to get tuned to a particular radio station around the globe. The The Globe Internet Radio makes the technology transparent and the product more attractive for users who just want to listen to the radios.