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For those of us raised to drive stick, there is nothing like the thrill of working the clutch and shifter of a powerful car. But in the 1990s Ferrari reckoned their customers would prefer F1-style paddle shifters, and the stickshift was jettisoned. Now, w

This would be difficult for Gen Z to picture, but in the days of landline phones, those were the key source of remote-person to at-home-person information sharing. It was common in the 20th century to have a dedicated memo pad next to the house's most pro

We think of 21st-century objects as being hi-tech. But here's a low-tech one that's growing in popularity, thanks to the rise of identity theft: Privacy stamps. Invented in the 2000s, they use ink cartridges to roll gobbledygook over printed text, obscuri

Japanese overdesign is alternately hilarious and inspiring. ID students should be forced to study it. Because Japanese overdesign is about seeking out even the slightest inconvenience experienced while using an everyday object, then designing a solution f

Doing a lot with a little: Nendo's Toru, an electric kettle for Alessi, perfectly reconciles gesture with form. Taking advantage of Alessi's distinguishing metalworking techniques, which is the origin of the company, the stainless-steel body is shaped sim

China's Unitree produces both humanoid robots and dog-bots. Now they've scaled up the former, into something that a driver can climb inside (albeit quite awkwardly). They've just unveiled their GD-01, "the world's first production-ready manned mecha," the

A group of freshmen at the Olin College of Engineering built this autonomous self-balancing bicycle: Students Justin, Pia and Arylan designed a spinning "reaction wheel" that sits just fore of the seatpost; a sensor housing sits behind. A drive unit sits

In Germany, the font you'll find on license plates is called FE-Schrift. Image by Wassim Chouak on Unsplash FE-Schrift was designed by German typography professor and designer Karlgeorg Hoefer. It was applied to license plates starting in the 1990s as a r

Toulouse-based Compagnie La Machine is, strangely, a street-theatre company with an internal design-build firm. They create kinetic machines in their workshop, and incorporate them into their performances. As one example, in the café of their Halle de la

To their peril, the fields of architecture and industrial design increasingly prize novelty over function. Frank Gehry's design for the Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health-which was designed to treat people suffering from neurological conditions-famously mad