Rollable laptops, painless tattoos, and a flying car: Red Dot’s 2026 Best of the Best has range

Posted on by

Every October I do the same thing. I open Red Dot’s concept winners, grab a snack, and brace myself to fall in love with something that doesn’t exist yet. It works every time, and this year was no exception. The Red Dot Award: Design Concept has been celebrating unbuilt ideas since 2005, which makes it the closest thing design has to a crystal ball. Sometimes the ball shows you a gadget you’ll want next year, and sometimes it shows you something wonderfully ridiculous.

Best of the Best is the tier just below the Luminary, the award’s top prize, which has its own article. So everything below earned a standing ovation from a very picky jury. I’ve rounded up the winners that stuck with me, along with some opinions nobody asked for. Think of it as the pre-game and the post-game rolled into one. Settle in, because the lineup is a lot.

MobED Urban Hopper and MobED Golf by Hyundai Motor Company and Hyundai Genesis Global Design

Hyundai’s MobED began as a flat, four-wheeled robot platform with a clever self-leveling trick, built to haul cargo and follow people around. These two concepts put a rider on that idea instead. Hyundai Genesis Global Design, the in-house team, shaped them around what Red Dot calls a compact robotic mobility platform with multi-directional driving and modular applications. In the lead image, a slim upright column carries a handlebar and a glowing round headlight, perched on four chunky wheels like a very polite scooter. It looks friendlier than most robots I’ve met, which is a low bar, but a cute one.

The Urban Hopper handles city trips, while MobED Golf takes the same base onto the fairway, and the thumbnails show it carrying a golf bag. A soccer ball rolls through another frame, so Hyundai clearly wants this thing at play as well as at work. Modular applications are how one chassis stretches across all of that. Hyundai says the pair also picked up a nomination for the Luminary, the competition’s top prize. The real MobED is already pitched at business customers, and I’d happily see a rideable cousin parked outside my apartment.

Tangibook by Mao Chengjie, Zhao Chenyang, and the TRIZID and Ningbo University Team

Only a small fraction of printed books ever get a Braille edition, which leaves blind readers waiting on someone else to decide what they can read. Tangibook skips the waiting. It’s a portable, refreshable Braille reader that turns printed text into real-time tactile output, so a visually impaired user can pick up a book and read it independently, accurately, and privately. TRIZID Industrial Design in Ningbo built it with Ningbo University, and seven designers are credited on the project. In the main image, an upright post stands behind the display while a book lies open in the background.

The slab carries rows of Braille cells under both hands, with a dial and a few buttons on the right. Reading looks closer to running your fingers down a page than poking at a gadget. The thumbnails show it propped on a folding stand and tucked under an arm like a slim clutch, which suits something meant to leave the house. Refreshable Braille displays often cost thousands of dollars and usually depend on a phone or computer for their content. Tangibook goes straight to the paper, which cuts out the middleman and the waiting list, and I love a design whose best feature is letting you read whatever you want, whenever you want.

Aridge A868 by JuanMa Lopez, Wang Tan, and the Aridge Design Team

Flying cars have been “five years away” for about seventy years, so I’m trained to roll my eyes at them. Then Xpeng’s Aridge unit shows up with the A868, a six-seat hybrid-electric tilt-rotor, and I’m only rolling one eye. Red Dot describes it as a full tilt-rotor flying car built for efficient regional air mobility, mixing vertical takeoff, long range, and comfort for premium travel. Aridge, the flying car unit Xpeng rebranded from Aeroht, led the design with JuanMa Lopez and Wang Tan, plus a dozen more designers. Fourteen names on the credit list suggests nobody got to design the rotors alone.

In the top-down render, the A868 shows a white fuselage with a black belly, ARIDGE lettered across the wings, and six rotor pods spread over a forested coastline. Aridge claims a range above 500 km (310 miles) and a top speed over 360 km/h (224 mph), thanks to a hybrid-electric powertrain. Joby’s S4 seats five, so the extra seat here is a flex. Xpeng says the prototype has entered test flights, which puts it ahead of most renders in this lineup. Flying cars still run on promises, but a six-seater that actually leaves the ground wins back some of my eye-roll.

Norton Manx R by Simon Skinner and Norton Motorcycles

Superbikes have spent two decades growing winglets, stickers, and creases until they look like fighter jets that lost a bet. Norton went the other way with the Manx R, a wingless, decal-free V4 superbike from the British marque, now owned by India’s TVS Motor Company. Head of Design Simon Skinner led the project, with Gerry McGovern, known for his Jaguar Land Rover work, advising as Norton’s chief creative advisor. Red Dot calls it a modern, reductive take on the superbike, free from racing regulations and built around the road rider. That freedom shows in the silver-white bodywork, which sweeps nose to tail without a single decorative line shouting for attention.

Underneath sits an all-new 1,200cc V4 making roughly 200 horsepower, backed by semi-active suspension, Brembo brakes, and an 8-inch TFT touchscreen. Fixings stay hidden while the mechanical bits stay on show, so the machinery does the decorating. The slatted tail with its glowing taillight looks more like a luxury coupe than a motorcycle, which fits the McGovern influence. It also took Bronze at this year’s IDEA Awards, the first combustion-engined production sports motorcycle to do so. Most superbikes want you to love the spec sheet, and this one wants you to look first, which suits a very old brand starting over.

MaxArt by the Lenovo Design Team

Lenovo has a habit of turning concept laptops into real ones, and its vertical rollable is the proof. The ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable used a pair of motors to stretch a 14-inch screen up to 16.7 inches, and it launched from $3,499. MaxArt is the sequel, billed by Red Dot as Lenovo’s second-generation rollable laptop, led by designer Yang Peiyin with a nine-person design team. The brief pairs AI-powered productivity with expandable display technology and a transparent design that shows off the engineering. In the renders, the screen climbs out of the base like a periscope and leaves a tall, portrait-shaped canvas behind.

The closed laptop is the sneaky part, since its lid hints at a bright strip of screen showing the time. Open it up and you still get a ThinkPad-style keyboard with the red TrackPoint nub intact, which tells me Lenovo knows which details its fans would riot over. Anyone who has ever wished for just a few more lines of code or one more document window will see the appeal right away. The first generation proved the idea could survive a production line, so a second pass is a fair bet to sharpen it. MaxArt is still a concept, but it already has a shipping older sibling to vouch for it.

CX Microdot Tattoo Applicator by Ferdinand Kohle, Shaoyu Wang, Hemal Dias, and CipherX

Tattoo machines have buzzed the same way for over a century, and the sound alone keeps plenty of people out of the chair. Ferdinand Kohle, who has a needle phobia himself, founded London startup CipherX to fix that. The CX Microdot Tattoo Applicator is the handheld tool behind it, designed under Kohle with Shaoyu Wang and Hemal Dias. Red Dot says it enables precise, pain-free application while making tattoo creation more accessible, safe, and inclusive. Instead of a needle gun, a single-use patch of dissolving microneedles carries the pigment, and the applicator presses it into the skin.

In the photo, the applicator is a matte black grip shaped a bit like a flashlight, pressed against an upper arm while the other hand steadies it. Dutch microneedle specialist uPATCH built the internals, and CipherX shaped the exterior and the overall experience, so it looks calm rather than clinical. The patch stays on for about 15 minutes, then peels away, leaving a permanent tattoo behind. CipherX says the tiny needles don’t reach as deep as a traditional tattoo needle, which is why it doesn’t hurt. For now it’s a London affair, with trained staff applying small designs, so American needle-phobes are waiting on an expansion.

Smart Insulin Kit by James Melia and BLOND

Just before this, a tattoo applicator promises to take the sting out of needles, and the Smart Insulin Kit goes after the daily routine around them. People who take insulin often repeat that routine several times a day, usually with gear that looks like it escaped from a clinic. BLOND, the London studio founded by James Melia, set out to make something calmer. Red Dot calls it a connected insulin management system, pairing a smart pen, a multifunctional storage case, and an AI-enabled app to simplify dosing, treatment administration, and diabetes care. It’s still a concept, so nothing here is on a shelf yet.

Smart pens already exist, with the InPen launching in the US in 2017 to log doses and send reminders, but many still look like medical gadgets with an app bolted on. BLOND, ranked the top design consultancy in Europe and the Americas by Red Dot, treats pen, case, and app as one family. The render shows a brushed metal pen with a slim dose display next to a pale case holding four small tips, all in matching soft gray. The thumbnails add a charging tray and a hand pressing the pen to skin. It reads like a fountain pen set, which is a lovely way to carry a daily routine into public.

Ice Cream Cone-Shaped Yarn Packaging by Li Xingguo, Ding Zhiyong, and ShenZhen YUTO Packaging

Somewhere in a craft aisle, a row of yarn skeins has been handed waffle cones and told to look delicious. ShenZhen YUTO Packaging, led by Li Xingguo and Ding Zhiyong, turned ordinary balls of yarn into scoops of lemon, blueberry, and strawberry, and honestly, I want a double. Red Dot says the design pairs playful aesthetics with practical function, thanks to one-sheet forming construction that gives you tangle-free dispensing, secure storage, and sustainable packaging in one integrated design. Yarn’s biggest crime is turning into a bird’s nest the moment you look away, and this cone politely refuses to let that happen.

Each cone wears a waffle diamond pattern, and a little paper band arches over the scoop like a handle, with lettering running along it. The kraft brown with pastel yarn is the exact color pairing of a summer afternoon, minus the sticky fingers. Everything folds from a single sheet, which is a very tidy way to be eco-friendly. The thumbnails show the cones lying down with bright stitch markers spilling out, so the cone keeps doing its job long after the yarn is gone. Soft serve for knitters has no calories and no brain freeze, and I’m already picking a flavor.

Bloomy by Qiu Qi and the Dalian Minzu University and Beijing City University Team (Peter Zec Prize Winner)

The Red Dot: Peter Zec Prize honors designers under 30, and this year it went to a camping stove shaped like a flower. Bloomy comes from a student team at Dalian Minzu University and Beijing City University, led by Qiu Qi with faculty advisor Kong Hao. Red Dot describes a portable stove inspired by a blooming flower, with a modular design that shifts between compact storage and stable cooking configurations. In the lead image, four black petals splay from a central stem topped with a knurled knob, like a flower that learned to hold a pot. I did not expect to call a camp stove pretty.

Camp stoves live with a permanent trade-off, because packing small wants everything folded and stable cooking wants everything sprawled. Bloomy settles it with petals that fold in until the whole thing becomes a smooth capsule, then open out into a wide, steady base. A woven cord wraps the stem for texture, and the matte black finish gives it the look of a gadget a gear nerd would keep on a desk. The Peter Zec Prize is the Luminary’s counterpart for young designers, which makes Bloomy the top Next Gen concept of the year. Next time my ramen goes wrong outdoors, I’ll blame the chef instead of the flower.

The post Rollable laptops, painless tattoos, and a flying car: Red Dot’s 2026 Best of the Best has range first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Tiny Home’s Bed Rolls Onto the Deck So You Can Sleep Outside

Posted on by

A bed on wheels is the defining feature of the Atlas, a park model tiny home by Zook Cabins. Open its glass garage door, roll the sleeping platform onto the deck, and the bedroom becomes an outdoor sleeping spot. It’s an unusually literal approach to connecting a small interior with its surroundings, without asking occupants to settle for a view through glass.

The dimensions deserve a closer look. Atlas measures 12 feet wide and 32 feet long overall, but that includes the deck and roof overhangs. Its finished interior occupies 233 square feet, with a separate 10-by-12-foot deck. That distinction matters: a substantial portion of this tiny home’s footprint is deliberately given over to outdoor living.

Designer: Zook Cabins

In Zook’s published imagery, vertical timber cladding wraps a compact volume beneath a gently sloping roof. Black window frames and the gridded garage door punctuate the wood exterior. The deck sits directly in front of that glazed opening, making it integral to the layout rather than a porch attached wherever space allows.

The garage door measures eight feet wide and seven feet six inches high. Manual operation comes standard; Zook provides space and an outlet for a side-mounted opener. Raising it creates the opening needed to move the bed outside. The mechanism also introduces a conspicuous piece of garage hardware into an otherwise restrained, wood-lined room.

Inside, the single-level arrangement keeps sleeping and everyday activities in one main space. The bed doubles as a daybed, while a small table is attached to its rear. A fold-up dining table seats two, with folding canvas stools stored near the entrance. These choices suggest a retreat for short stays, where furniture can accommodate different activities without requiring separate rooms.

Clear-coated birch plywood finishes the walls and ceiling, paired with vinyl plank flooring. The kitchenette includes flat-panel cabinets, a laminate countertop, a black granite sink, and a four-cubic-foot refrigerator with freezer. The bathroom gets a five-foot shower base, glass shower door, vessel sink, and toilet. The shower’s specified length is worth noting in such a small interior, where the practical necessities could easily have been squeezed into leftover corners.

Atlas belongs to Zook’s park model range, which the manufacturer positions for campgrounds, retreats, and getaway cabins. Buyers still need to prepare the site and arrange utility connections. Zook offers these homes through a quotation process, so the model’s appeal shouldn’t be confused with a complete, ready-to-occupy property purchase.

The strongest design decision is giving the bed somewhere else to go. Outdoor sleeping will depend on weather, insects, and privacy, but the option changes how the deck can be used. For a small getaway, that’s a more specific proposition than simply adding another oversized window.

The post This Tiny Home’s Bed Rolls Onto the Deck So You Can Sleep Outside first appeared on Yanko Design.

You now pair your old iPod with AirPods thanks to this Motherboard swap

Posted on by

When Jobs pitched the iTunes Music Store to studio execs, he pointed at Napster as the model. Napster won because it was easy, so Jobs set out to build something just as easy that was also legal. The result was a marketplace for individual tracks, or ‘singles,’ which pretty much rewired the audio business, and the iPod (already on shelves since 2001) became the pocket for it. More than two decades later, the iPod is making a comeback. Sure, the retro wave is real, and a new generation wants music without TikTok notifications, but that same crowd also wants to live through an era when music could be owned, stored, and played offline.

The catch is that an iPod plays audio just fine (if you can find a working one), but it can’t talk to Apple’s own AirPods. Sprout, a new replacement motherboard from London studio Certain Things, fixes that for the iPod 3rd generation, 4th generation, and iPod mini, and AirPods bring their noise cancellation with them. The case, screen, and wheel stay exactly as Apple made them, while USB-C charging, Wi-Fi, and a microSD slot for up to 2TB join the party. That 2TB works out to roughly 500,000 songs, which is a lot of owning. A Crowd Supply campaign is coming, with pricing still TBA.

Designer: Certain Things

Same Body, New Brain, Zero Soldering

Sprout’s board is cut to the shape of Apple’s original, a flex that tells you how much homework went into this. It measures 2.19 x 3.86 x 0.06 inches (55.5 x 98.0 x 1.6mm) on the 3rd and 4th generation, and the mini board is even slimmer. You open the iPod with a screwdriver and a plastic pry tool, lift out the old board, and reconnect the original ribbon cables to the new one. The monochrome LCD is driven natively, so the screen looks like it always did, chunky pixels included. Installed, the whole thing weighs less than the original iPod, which is a sentence nobody expects to write about a mod.

Zac Builds soldered a generic Bluetooth transmitter into an iPod Video’s headphone circuit, which works but asks for steady hands and a tolerance for tiny wires. Boxy Pixel’s kit needs hardly any soldering and keeps Apple’s motherboard in play, but its machined aluminum shell with glass panels costs $155 plus $13 for buttons and switches. The finished iPod also comes out chunkier than the original, which is a fair trade for haptic feedback and wireless charging but a hard sell for purists. Sprout takes the invisible route, where the iPod looks untouched and only the internals know what happened. For anyone who loved how these things looked in the early 2000s, that keeps the nostalgia fully intact.

Bluetooth, a Proper DAC, and Two Flavors of Sprout

Bluetooth is the headline, and it lets AirPods and any other wireless headphones or speakers pair with an iPod 3G, 4G, or mini. Wired listeners get a CS43131-class DAC from Cirrus Logic, the chip that turns digital audio into the analog signal your headphones play, feeding the original 3.5mm jack. Files drag and drop over USB-C in MP3, AAC, ALAC, FLAC, or Opus, so iTunes never gets invited to the party. The 3rd and 4th generation boards target 40 hours of continuous Bluetooth playback on a 2,500mAh cell, a full workweek of desk listening between charges. The mini aims for 20 hours on a 1,200mAh cell, and a microSD slot up to 2TB retires the aging hard drive.

Sprout Pico runs on a Raspberry Pi RP2350, a small microcontroller that wakes instantly, and plays your own library and Wi-Fi podcast downloads on all three iPods. Sprout Pi, offered for the 3rd and 4th generation, adds a Compute Module Zero, a tiny Raspberry Pi computer, for Spotify, Apple Music, AirPlay, and custom apps. The studio calls the streaming features working proofs of concept as of September 2026, so launch features may differ. The firmware is written from scratch and adds Cover Flow, a 2007 Apple trick, to a monochrome iPod, alongside Podcasts and Search. On Sprout Pi, a Linux computer hides underneath, and demo clips labeled apps show a classic Mac and a PlayStation.

Open Source Gives Sprout Legs

Schematics, board layouts, and the bill of materials (the full parts list) will be released under CERN-OHL-S v2, while firmware lands under MPL-2.0 and documentation under CC BY 4.0. That documentation includes reverse-engineering notes on the iPod’s display, click wheel, and headphone connectors, so the next tinkerer starts with a map. All of it is due on GitHub before the campaign ends, so anyone can poke at it. Guy Dupont’s 2021 sPot is the obvious ancestor, a Raspberry Pi Zero W inside a 4th generation iPod that streamed Spotify but kept only the case and click wheel. Sprout keeps the original monochrome screen and a working headphone jack, which turns a clever one-off into a repeatable design.

Moonlit Market’s Classic Connect 2 covers the 5th, 6th, and 7th generation, so the 3rd, 4th, and mini finally get their own project. Sudo, the $249 player betting on a wheel and a library you own, is a new device built to feel old, while Sprout is an old one made to behave new. You supply the iPod (cheaper in these overlooked generations), and no price or ship date has been announced. Launch updates are available through Sprout’s Crowd Supply page, where the project is listed as launching soon. Jobs sold the world on easy, legal music you could own, and the best way to keep that promise now might be an old iPod with a new brain.

 

The post You now pair your old iPod with AirPods thanks to this Motherboard swap first appeared on Yanko Design.

380,000 LEGO Flowers Spill From an Oil Tank and Never Wilt

Posted on by

An old oil tank makes an absurdly good vase when the flowers arrive by the hundred thousand. At TANK Shanghai, LEGO Botanical Wave sends more than 380,000 brick-built blooms spilling out of a former oil tank and across the plaza. Created by LEGO as part of its Bloom Exhibition, the installation gives an industrial structure the improbable appearance of having sprung a very colorful leak.

Looking at a spectacular installation and feeling creative yourself are two different things. That gap is the problem this exhibition tackles: it gives visitors something to make, rather than only something to photograph. Alongside the outdoor wave, an indoor experience invites people to build their own LEGO flowers. I like that the invitation doesn’t depend on arriving with an artist’s confidence.

Designer: LEGO

The wave stretches roughly 98 feet and covers about 8,600 square feet. In the exhibition photographs, ribbons of purple, pink, red, orange, and yellow descend from the building before curling into crests across the ground. White blooms gather along the edges like foam. The name feels well earned: the flowers follow the movement of water, with upright falls at the back and breaking waves out front.

That decision does more for the design than the enormous flower count. A flat carpet of blooms could have delivered plenty of color, but the raised forms give the installation a shape you can read from a distance. Close-up photographs reveal recognizable roses and other individual flowers packed across those surfaces. The pleasure, for me, is that shift in scale, from a broad sweep of color to hundreds of small constructions.

I also appreciate that the tank remains plainly visible. Its pale shell and the straight edges of its facade make the curving flowers look even more exuberant. Covering the whole building would have lost that relationship. Here, the suggestion of an overflow gives the structure a role in the composition. It’s a much more playful use of an old tank than simply treating it as a backdrop.

Inside, the exhibition expands beyond that single visual joke. Where Blooms Begin includes 18 artist installations combining LEGO botanical elements with materials including metal, textiles, and mirrors. One kinetic work, created by Ian Douglas-Jones and designed and produced by Atelier INDJ, pairs moving LEGO bouquets with a mirrored framework. It’s a useful reminder that these familiar pieces can be a material for other designers, not just a finished arrangement.

The participatory area uses a 360-degree wraparound screen, and visitors can scan the flowers they’ve built into a shared digital floral display. I’m usually more interested in the physical making than the screen that follows it. Still, the connection makes sense here: a small contribution joins a larger composition, echoing the many individual flowers outside. The digital experience has a clear relationship to the thing people actually made.

Of course, this is also a brand exhibition. Bloom Gallery places 18 botanical arrangements in everyday settings, and a pop-up shop sells LEGO flower sets. The sales pitch isn’t difficult to spot. I don’t think that cancels the design’s appeal, although I’d rather see people leave wanting to make something than feeling they need to buy the exact display.

The Bloom Exhibition runs from October 1 through October 29, 2026. Outdoor areas don’t require reservations, while the indoor exhibition requires booking through LEGO’s WeChat mini program. That distinction matters because the activity that gives the spectacle its participatory side is inside. A photo of the flower wave tells only part of the story.

For me, the takeaway is refreshingly modest. Nobody needs 380,000 flowers in the living room. But the installation makes a persuasive case for giving a familiar object an unfamiliar job, then letting people try the idea at their own scale. An oil tank becomes a vase. A handful of bricks becomes an afternoon’s project.

The post 380,000 LEGO Flowers Spill From an Oil Tank and Never Wilt first appeared on Yanko Design.

Someone Turned the Beats Pill Into a Diglett, and Now the Official Pikachu Version Looks Boring

Posted on by

Pokémon turned 30 this year, and every brand with a product page seems to want a slice of the cake. Polaroid’s Pokémon cameras and the Fitbit Air Pokémon Sleep edition came first, and now Beats has joined in with a Pill. The speaker launched October 15 at $149.99 with Pikachu and Mimikyu across the grille, a gray body, and a Poké Ball charm on a matching lanyard. It’s a perfectly nice object. I’ll confess, though, that I looked at that gray capsule and thought a better Pokémon was sitting right there.

Courtyard.io shared a concept that makes the case, and it turns the Pill into Diglett. The brown grille wears glossy black eyes and a raised pink nose, and the whole thing rises out of a sculpted pile of gray rocks like it just popped out of a tunnel. A second render stacks three Pills into a Dugtrio on one shared mound. Diglett has been a capsule with a face since 1996, so this is the rare mashup where nobody has to squint. Consider this my case that the Pill’s best Pokémon was Gen 1 all along.

Designer: Courtyard_io

Diglett already has the Pill’s silhouette

Diglett is a head on a mound, which makes it a capsule with a face. Courtyard.io’s render keeps the Pill’s rounded cylinder untouched and wraps it in a clay brown grille, so the perforated mesh reads like packed soil. The Beats “b” sits low on the body in copper, just above the rocks, and the three-quarter shot shows the lighter tan side band running down the edge like a seam in the dirt. Nothing about the form had to bend to fit the character. That almost never happens in a collab, and it is the reason this concept looks so convincing at first glance.

The official Pokémon x Beats Pill takes the opposite route. It keeps a gray body, prints Pikachu and Mimikyu on the grille, and adds a Poké Ball charm, the first charm Beats has ever bundled with a Pill. That is a graphic on a speaker, and a handsome one. Beats has also done character Pills before, a history Apple’s Oliver Schusser cited when the 2024 model launched. A Diglett Pill would simply bring that idea back with a Pokémon attached, which is a much shorter walk than it sounds.

The glossy eyes, the pink nose, and a rock base that doubles as a stand

The grille is matte and finely perforated, while the eyes and nose are glossy, raised pieces that catch the light like a vinyl toy. That sheen difference gives the face a collectible-figure look without a single printed graphic. The rock base adds a third texture, a pebbly gray sculpt that gives the speaker something to stand in and sells the burrow illusion. Courtyard.io embossed its name into one of the boulders, which is a tidy way to sign your work. Every surface has a job, and none of them are shouting.

Picture the real hardware under that mesh. The 2024 Pill claims 24 hours of battery, so a Diglett could play through a full backyard party and still have juice for the next morning’s coffee. Its IP67 rating means dust-tight and able to survive a dunk in about three feet of water for 30 minutes, which suits a Pokémon that lives in dirt. At 680 grams (about 1.5 pounds), it is light enough to carry out to the garden. A speaker that hangs out in the flowerbed makes more sense to me than a gray one with a Poké Ball dangling off it.

The Dugtrio render and what Pokémon collabs could learn from it

The Dugtrio render stacks three Pills on a single rock mound, each with its own startled face and copper “b.” Beats currently pairs two Pills at a time, in Amplify Mode for more volume or Stereo Mode for left and right separation, so the third head would need a firmware update and a little optimism. At the official Pill’s $149.99, three speakers come to $449.97, which is one and a half pairs of the PUMA Suede Pikachu at $300 each. Dugtrio’s whole identity is being three Diglett, which makes it the one Pokémon where buying three speakers feels like a feature. I’d happily make that trade for a bookshelf trio that gets guests asking questions.

Most of the recent Pokémon collabs work by decoration. Polaroid wrapped a camera in Poké Ball patterns, Fitbit added a sleeping Pikachu label, PUMA bent a Formstrip into a bolt, and Beats printed two characters on a grille, all of it charming and most of it surface treatment. Courtyard.io’s Diglett goes the other direction by letting the object’s own shape do the talking, and the renders live on Courtyard.io’s X page for anyone who wants a closer look. The franchise has had a capsule-shaped character since 1996, and Beats has had a capsule-shaped speaker since 2012, so this introduction was overdue. Pikachu will always sell, but Diglett would get the laugh.

The post Someone Turned the Beats Pill Into a Diglett, and Now the Official Pikachu Version Looks Boring first appeared on Yanko Design.