It’s always good to end the week on a high note – and more often than not, insane garage inventor Colin Furze ends up somewhere in the top three of our highest notes to end the week on. For his latest stunt, “The Furze” – somehow still alive – created a Firework Rocket Launcher that somehow resulted in the most epic and manly way of removing one’s own socks. Says Furze: “Who would have thought its best use was removing socks haha, this is a cool build inspired by a video game and brought to life by my good self in my shed.” https://youtu.be/JcFh177fqu0 Of course, it wouldn’t truly be a…

A team of Harvard researchers have recently designed a new self-actuated material that is tunable for different architectures – or in other words, a material that can flatpack a design and pop it back into its 3D form when needed. The thin-walled three-dimensional structures – which can withstand the weight of an elephant when folded flat – can be used to make foldable and reprogrammable objects of arbitrary architecture, whose shape, volume and stiffness can be altered and continuously tuned and controlled. Inspired by an origami technique called snapology, the structure is made from extruded cubes with 24 faces and 36 edges. Each of these cubes can be folded along their edge…

Although simple in functionality, few writing or desk tools have been reimagined quite as much as the humble pencil sharpener. Whether your Prismacolor-sharpening technique consists of microwaving the pencil for 8-seconds before hand sharpening to avoid lead breakage, or if you prefer chiseling away at an old carpenter’s pencil with a gardener’s knife, there really is no wrong method so long as it results in a sharp lead point. More recently, this was the topic of a design school project at the Design and Art of the Free University of Bolzano, where faculty members Claudio Larcher, Eugenia Morpurgo, and Alvise Mattozzi put 20 young designers up to the challenge of…

With so many cool things coming out each week, it can be hard to wade through all the rock-awesomeness. With ‘Cool Tools’, we’ve done the hard work for you. This week we saw a new (free) writing app that deletes all of your words once the time goes off (!!), a new collection of pet furniture designed for walls and corners, a GPS iPhone app that lets you download the entire state of California to be used offline, instructions for making an edible iPhone case and more… Ready? Let’s go! This week we look at: DESIGN Cubic Pet Goods by Nendo Japan “The majority of pet products for dogs are…

Presented by We’ve given you a quick overview of Onshape, but wow, there is so much more. More than I thought actually. It’s hard to keep up when they’re releasing new features every three weeks. But that right there, that is just one thing that makes Onshape such a powerful 3D modeling platform.

Since founder Eric Singer created the first hardwood wayfarer sunglasses style in 2009, Portland, Oregon-based Shwood has only continued to push the boundaries of what’s possible for materials in sunglass frame design. Particularly, sunglasses made from natural materials that are continuing to resonate with the outdoor enthusiast market. Since creating the original hardwood frames, the company’s design and fabrication team have gone on to create frames made from everything from vinyl records and Louisville Sluggers to newspaper and stone. More recently, the company has been experimenting with what just might be their most wildest concepts yet: sunglasses made from osprey feathers and desert sugar bush flowers. Says Shwood: “Inspiration is…