Today I’d like to introduce some conventional (and not high-tech) gadgets that that are facing extinction. One is a gadget for sharpening your pencils, while the other is a CD player that brings back old fashion tactility.

Glassy Pencil Sharpener

The reason why I love hand pencil sharpeners is that I like the feeling of sharpening a pencil. A delicate adjustment of how hard you press a pencil, how fast and how long you screw it all decides the sharpness of the lead, which an electric sharpener could never do.

I made this concept because I wanted to find a good way to improve the visibility of the point of the pencil while sharpening. The dome shaped convergence lens on top helps you clearly see the pencil lead. Also, wanting a user to enjoy the sharpening process, I thought by using a glass container, you can see the pencil crumbs gradually piling. I’ve heard some people love pencil crumbs, so a ball shaped dent makes the crumbs like a ball when seen from outside, which will be pleasing to look at. Usually the crumbs become just trash and make it filthy if not disposed regularly, but this way, I guess you can enjoy seeing it as sort of art on your desk.

Rolling CD Player

I just don’t want to lose the feeling of the volume dial and other switches of a record and CD player. Clicking and sliding the volume tab of iTunes just don’t make me feel that I’m really changing the volume. The comfortable touch of a beautifully designed dial will never be experienced on a desktop. (Am I being too analog?) By the way I’ve always wanted to own a Hans Gugelot by Braun. I’m wondering how I feel when pressing the neatly arranged buttons.

Anyway, I’ve come up with this CD player to get back those feelings. It’s really just a CD player with functions of only “play/pause”, “next”, “previous” and volume adjustment. You click the round speaker once to play, double-click to go next and triple click to go back to the previous song. The funny part is adjusting the volume. After you set a CD and make the player’s “mouth” open by rotating the whole body. The more you open the mouth, the louder it plays. Make the mouth shut to turn it off. This way, you can enjoy the comfy feeling of rotating the dial. I wouldn’t stop changing the volume for a while if I had this. And your kids would love this, too!

Necessity is the mother of invention, but when do you feel necessity? I always jot down something when I feel necessity or inconvenience and try to think of a fun way to solve it, which is kind of my hobby. And here are the ideas I found for some situations.

Super-Lazy Bookshelf

Almost every time I have a “It’d-be-much-better-if-there-were-…” moment, I find myself pretty lazy. For example: when I have to clean up the books on my desk, I don’t want to stand up from the chair to carry the books all the way to the bookshelf. So I thought of a way to put the books on the shelf by staying seated on my chair.

Put this bookshelf right next to your desk. By sliding the colored tag, you can specify which room a book goes into. Just slide a book down the slope after you read a book.

Black or White or Mixed

When I wanted white and black pepper mixed on my dish at dinner I came up with a pepper mill to grind only once for the mixed pepper. You can use this pepper mill with one hand and choose black, white or mixed by choosing the colors of the handles. You can also save some space for a little salt container you can put on top of the mill.

Sleepy Clock

When I’m sleeping I don’t want to open my eyes just to check out how much more time is left till the alarm goes off. Here’s an alarm clock with ears that move closer to each other with time. Touch the triangles and it tells you how much time there is left until the set time. Although you cannot know the exact time, you can feel how much more you can sleep.

I like merging completely different things into one, stealing a fun aspect of one item and adding it to another. Or even better, I love finding a solution to a problem from something that seems totally different from it. Thinking seriously of how to solve a problem (sometimes) leads me to the most fun moment of concepting. That’s why I can’t stop creating weird things, no matter what others say.

iAcqua

Anyway, this is a fountain + iPhone speaker stand + projector kind of fusion. Place your iPhone in the doc and use it as a faucet to run photos, songs and music as water. You can have fun with them on this transparent touch screen, but to have more fun, tilt the stand to spill the images on the floor (or just turn up the faucet). The projected images on the floor look as if they were spilled from the dish.

When you play music, you can see the visualizer working. Spill the visualizer on the floor and you see “full-screen” projected visualizer!

PMS Toaster

Another crazy combination is this toaster. I thought there should be a toaster like this: no matter how long/short it takes to toast a slice of bread, I don’t care… just toast it until it becomes my favorite color.

You just choose your favorite color first before toasting. Then it automatically stops toasting when the bread becomes the specified color.

Have you ever wished you wouldn’t have to waste time waiting for a train, bus or taxi to arrive? Every morning on my way to work I wonder if there were a way to solve this problem. I’m not going to wait anymore, but want to constantly travel towards my office. Here is my idea for making it possible.

If you have to travel 20 km on a train and the train runs at 80 km/h, it takes 15 minutes to get to the targeted station. But if you wait for the train for 10 minutes, it means it takes 25 minutes in total, which is on average 48 km/h in speed. 48 km/h? That’s slow! If you count the stations in between, the average speed becomes even slower. Yeah, the stations that the train stops at you never use. You waste some time there, too.

That’s not all. You may have to walk 10 minutes from the station to the office. If you’re unlucky, you have to go exactly the opposite way the train goes. You may think “Isn’t there a way to get off the train somewhere in between stations?”

So, what about a public transportation system that is constantly moving with a lot more exits?

There are people movers on the underground floor that move at various speeds. The outer the belt is, the faster it moves. Each mover has a different speed, but the speed transitions are so smooth that people can walk across them with no problems. The white center part, where you get on/off this system, does not move. If we could somehow make the outer most belt move as fast as a bicycle, it would be able to replace some crowded subways and buses.

There can be much more exits that can be built than the existing trains. Although it moves much more slowly than the current systems, you will never have to wait at a platform instead. No more packed cars. Getting on/off the mover is so easy and you can adjust the speed you want to travel at.

In short: it’s a mixture of a train, platform, underground street and people movers. I know I’m being crazy and impossible (again), but I would love to use this. Of course I know lots of electricity will be needed to make everything in this system work and there will be so many issues that have to be solved before installing this… but one thing I’m sure that will pay off: there will be no TRAIN accidents.

Hello world, my name is Mac Funamizu and I love to design and invent stuff. Every now and then the ideas move away from my Moleskin, towards the computer. Those ideas I will share with you through Johnny Holland. The first concept I’d like to share is an interactive desktop hygrometer and thermometer.

The clock interface
Everybody knows that you know what time it is just by glimpsing at a clock. Although the interface of an analog clock doesn’t perfectly visualize the amount of time in a day, people of (almost) all ages can tell the time pretty easily. And it’s just a representation of time, without using numbers.

Know it by feeling it
Yeah, we know that, but what about other devices with which you have to read numbers to know the result? Such as a temperature, hygrometer, speedometer, the remaining data in a USB memory stick, etc. Don’t we have another way to understand the numbers just as well as with a clock? Why do we always have to take a close look at a thermometer to only know one number? After all, does everyone need to know the EXACT number of the temperature? That may be the reason that data visualization exists.

For me it was the reason to create new products. I want to “feel” something by seeing the visualized numbers:

Left is humidity, right temperature.

Red circles become blue when the temperature becomes negative.