Argus Just Showed Up With 20 Eyes, 20 Legs, and No Rules

Posted on by

The moment you see Argus rolling across a college lawn, you feel a kind of awe that’s equal parts scientific admiration and mild existential discomfort. It doesn’t look like a robot. It doesn’t look like anything you’ve seen before, actually. It looks like a sea urchin crossed with a fever dream, or if you’ve spent any time on the internet in the last few years, it looks exactly like what happens when someone renders a biblically accurate angel and sends it out to navigate uneven terrain.

That’s not an exaggeration. The internet made the comparison almost immediately after Duke University’s General Robotics Lab unveiled Argus, and the parallel holds up. In the Book of Ezekiel, the ophanim, a type of divine being, are described as wheels covered in eyes, seeing in all directions simultaneously. Argus, named after the Greek mythological giant with a hundred eyes, does essentially the same thing, minus the divine mandate. It has 20 legs, each one telescoping and tipped with a camera, arranged at the vertices of a regular dodecahedron. No blind spots. No preferred orientation. No front or back.

Designer: Duke University General Robotics Lab

That last part is what keeps pulling me in, design-wise. We’ve spent decades building robots that mirror the logic of our own bodies: two legs, bilateral symmetry, a definitive forward direction. It made intuitive sense. We move front-to-back, so we assumed machines should too. Argus rejects that assumption entirely. The team at Duke built it around a principle they’re calling dynamic symmetry, which refers to how uniformly a robot can accelerate in any direction. Most robots are strongest and most efficient when moving the way they were designed to move. Argus has no such preference. It moves sideways, backward, forward, and diagonally with the same ease, which sounds like a minor technical distinction until you watch it roll through rough terrain, navigate around trees, and absorb collisions without losing its course. That’s when you realize how significant the gap is.

The design precedent here matters more than it might seem. Robotics has long borrowed from nature by mimicking the shapes that evolution produced: bipedal forms for humanoids, quadruped frames for terrain bots, insect geometries for swarm machines. But Argus is borrowing something different from nature. It’s borrowing from the radial logic of starfish and sea urchins, creatures that don’t have a front because every direction is equally valid. The Duke researchers describe Argus as an “existence proof,” a demonstration that a robot built for dynamic symmetry isn’t just theoretically interesting but practically deployable. Postdoctoral researcher Boxi Xia put it directly: “It produces a robot you can deploy in the wild, on uneven ground and in clutter, even in low-gravity settings.”

Low-gravity settings. That detail is doing a lot of quiet work in this conversation. The practical applications being discussed range from disaster response and search-and-rescue operations to planetary exploration, environments where the rules of conventional locomotion break down fast and all-directional agility becomes the difference between success and failure. A humanoid robot in a collapsed building still has to worry about which way it’s facing. Argus doesn’t.

I’ll admit the design is deeply strange to look at. It is not sleek. It is not elegant in any conventional sense. It doesn’t have the clean industrial confidence of Boston Dynamics’ machines or the deliberate anthropomorphism of recent humanoid models. It looks a little chaotic, frankly, like it was assembled by someone working from a very different set of aesthetic values, someone less interested in how the thing looks than in what the thing can do. And maybe that’s the point. Beauty in engineering doesn’t always wear the shape we expect. Sometimes it rolls across a lawn on 20 legs, sees absolutely everything, and changes the conversation entirely.

Argus is the kind of design that reminds you why robotics is still worth watching. Not because of what it looks like, but because of what it means for how we think about movement, perception, and the assumptions we’ve been quietly building into machines all along.

The post Argus Just Showed Up With 20 Eyes, 20 Legs, and No Rules first appeared on Yanko Design.

McLaren F1 Team celebrates 1,000th race start, as Oscar and Lando sport LEGO helmets at the iconic Monaco GP

Posted on by

McLaren is coming to the Monaco GP weekend, celebrating their 1,000th race start, and wants to do it in a special way, both on and off the track. The most iconic race in the Formula 1 calendar will see Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri sport the LEGO helmets for the length of the racing weekend at the Circuit de Monaco, which is exciting for F1 fans like me.

That celebration is going to reciprocate for McLaren and LEGO fanatics as they can own either of the two drivers’ brick version of the LEGO Edition helmet, of course, in a smaller scale. To top it off, the protective gear will come with the complementary minifigures of the chosen driver’s helmet. This is not the first time the two brands have collaborated, as we’ve already been petrified by the Life-sized LEGO McLaren P1 being driven around the Silverstone track, and the complementing scaled-down LEGO version for die-hard fans.

Designer: LEGO and McLaren

The collectible LEGO sets immortalize both the papaya team drivers in brick form, mirroring the details of the special edition helmets that’ll be worn at this weekend’s practice session, qualifying stint, and the final race at the winding street circuit by the duo of young drivers. Both of the LEGO helmets measure seven inches high, five inches deep, and 4.5 inches wide. Those dimensions remind me of the Ferrari drivers Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc LEGO helmets that had a similar buildable format and shape.

Both these LEGO sets are priced at $90 each and consist of 793 pieces. You, as a fan, can sport them on the standalone black display pedestal with the printed signature plaque. However, they are distinct in their look and feel, as both the McLaren drivers sport different aesthetics. That said, the special edition livery will be sported at the Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix, as well.

According to the LEGO Group’s Chief Product & Marketing Officer, Julia Goldin, “Our LEGO design team worked closely with the drivers and McLaren Racing to develop these special 1000th race LEGO helmet products.” He added by saying that “fans will be able to build the sets at home, creating a cool memento of racing history for display.”

43017 McLaren Mastercard F1 Team Oscar Piastri Helmet

For Oscar Piastri, the brand’s signature papaya is mixed with the Aussie F1 driver’s favorite blue. The helmet has intricate details such as his driving number “81” and the printed patterns that look absolutely stunning. The accompanying Oscar minifigure is handprinted in the hand-picked casual outfit by the talented F1 driver.

43023 McLaren Mastercard F1 Team Lando Norris Helmet

Last year’s world champion now has the number one driver number, and that is etched proudly on this peppy helmet design. It carries Lando’s iconic fluorescent blob design and the unique design elements of the 1000th Grand Prix livery on the real one. The design is co-created with the prodigy himself, and it looks absolutely stunning. Lando’s minifigure sports the handpicked look as well.

The post McLaren F1 Team celebrates 1,000th race start, as Oscar and Lando sport LEGO helmets at the iconic Monaco GP first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Colombian Roof Tile That Became a Desk Organizer

Posted on by

Most desk organizers are purely functional objects. You buy one because you’re tired of your keys ending up under a notebook, or because your earbuds have gone missing again for the third time this week. Utility is the promise, and usually, that’s where the conversation ends. TEJA, designed by Gustavo Rodríguez and Estefanía Agudelo of Estudio Gris in Medellín, Colombia, makes a case that it doesn’t have to.

The name is the Spanish word for a roof tile, and the reference is direct. Traditional clay tiles have shaped the rooflines of Colombian towns for centuries, their curved profiles doing exactly one thing extremely well: shedding water while creating shade. Rodríguez and Agudelo looked at that form and asked a genuinely good design question: what if you kept only what matters? The answer is TEJA. A lacquered steel surface that curves upward at both ends, resting on a solid natural wood base. The curve does the same job here that it does on a rooftop, just on a smaller, quieter scale. It keeps things from rolling away and, in doing so, gathers them.

Designers: Gustavo Rodríguez & Estefanía Agudelo (Estudio Gris)

At the center, a small circular platform rises from the surface. It’s a tiny detail that turns out to do a lot. Rings land there instead of disappearing into a drawer. An earbud case. A coin you keep forgetting to put somewhere intentional. The platform gives these small, easily lost things a designated home, and that specificity is exactly the kind of thoughtfulness that separates well-designed objects from well-marketed ones.

The piece works equally well on a desk or a dresser, which matters more than it sounds. A lot of objects are styled for one context and feel awkward in another. TEJA slides between the two without trying, because its logic is architectural rather than functional in the narrow sense. It organizes by shape, not by category.

The moment that might surprise you most is what happens when you place three of them together. Side by side, they read as a roofscape, a miniature version of the reference they were born from. The designers didn’t plan that effect. It emerged from the object’s own internal rules. That’s the mark of a design that was thought through past the obvious. Most things only reveal their full intention under a single set of conditions. TEJA shows you something new when the context shifts.

It comes in six colors: terracotta, white, calm green, blue, mustard, and beige. The first three are kept in stock; the last three are made to order. All of them are handmade in Medellín. I have a soft spot for the terracotta, partly because it’s the most honest color for an object inspired by clay tiles, and partly because that warm, muted orange reads beautifully against both light and dark surfaces without fighting for attention. The calm green and mustard are equally considered. None of the six feel trendy in the way that becomes awkward in two years.

Estudio Gris won the DesignWanted Award in Italy in 2026 with CLU, their umbrella stand, which suggests that TEJA isn’t a one-time gesture. The studio seems to have a consistent interest in translating familiar forms into objects that hold meaning without being decorative about it. That’s a harder balance to strike than it looks.

The wider question TEJA raises, at least for me, is why we keep settling for objects that only work and never mean anything. We spend a fair amount of time at our desks and dressers. The things that live on those surfaces become part of how the space feels day to day. A desk organizer that carries a genuine reference to Colombian vernacular architecture, made by hand in the city where its designers live and work, is a different kind of object than a generic tray from a home goods store. You don’t have to think about that every time you drop your keys into it. But it’s there if you do.

The post The Colombian Roof Tile That Became a Desk Organizer first appeared on Yanko Design.

Belkin Just Fixed the Nintendo Switch 2’s Biggest Battery Problem

Posted on by

Battery life has always been the quiet asterisk on handheld gaming. The Nintendo Switch 2’s internal battery offers roughly two to six and a half hours, depending on what’s running, which is plenty for a short commute but not enough for a long flight or an afternoon away from an outlet. Most players either play conservatively or keep a cable nearby. Neither approach is especially graceful.

Belkin’s Charging Grip for the Nintendo Switch 2 takes a different approach to the problem. Rather than asking you to stop and plug in, the grip attaches a 10,000 mAh magnetic power bank directly to the back of the console, turning the Switch 2 into a more capable device without fundamentally changing how it feels to use. The power bank snaps on magnetically and charges through a built-in USB-C cable at up to 30W, delivering up to 1.5 times the console’s original battery capacity.

Designer: Belkin

What makes the design considered is what it doesn’t break. Joy-Cons still detach from the console normally without removing the grip first. The Switch 2’s built-in kickstand still deploys. The console still docks without modification. Each compatibility point matters for anyone moving fluidly between handheld play on a train, tabletop gaming across a table, and television sessions on the couch.

The ergonomic side adds something beyond the battery. Handheld gaming on the Switch 2 in its stock form is functional but not generous in how it fills the hands, particularly over long sessions. The Charging Grip’s non-slip handles extend the form to something closer to a conventional controller, distributing the weight more evenly and making sustained play noticeably more comfortable. The ergonomic benefit is there regardless of how much charge the power bank has left.

An LED display on the grip shows the remaining power bank charge, so there’s no guesswork about whether it’s worth detaching before a trip. The power bank itself detaches magnetically when you’d rather not carry the extra weight, which keeps the grip useful on lighter travel days too. Available in Black and Olive, both colorways match the restrained aesthetic of the Switch 2 rather than drawing attention to the accessory.

Belkin made the grip from recycled plastic and ships it in 100% plastic-free packaging, a material decision that adds environmental consideration without affecting physical quality. The 10,000 mAh power bank also works as a standalone unit, giving the grip an afterlife if the console ever changes or needs replacing. It’s one of the quieter but more thoughtful spec decisions in the package.

The Charging Grip for Nintendo Switch 2 is priced at $99.99 and is available directly from Belkin in two colors. For a device whose most consistent criticism is how quickly its battery disappears under demanding games, an accessory that meaningfully extends that runtime while improving ergonomics makes a straightforward case for most people who use their Switch 2 regularly outside the house.

The post Belkin Just Fixed the Nintendo Switch 2’s Biggest Battery Problem first appeared on Yanko Design.