Inspired by Jenga, this modular coffee maker stacks everything you need in a sleek appliance

Posted on 12/10/2021 by Shawn McNulty-Kowal

Inspired by the build of Jenga towers, Cenga is a modular, handmade coffee set with a grinder, dripper, and canister included in a single unit.

Since coffee shops closed due to the pandemic, we’ve brought the coffee shops home–grinders, drippers, travel mugs, galore. With so many supplies needed to make a cup of coffee, storing our at-home coffee shops becomes the hard part.

Piled together like a Jenga tower, Cenga is a handmade modular coffee set conceptualized by a team of designers to bring home everything you’d find in a cafe.

Starting from the top of Cenga, a grinder for coffee beans funnels the grounds into a dripper before heating up some water and dripping that into a canister to serve. Inspired by the stacking method of Jenga blocks, the team of designers combined that with a modular build to optimize the product’s storability and portability.

Cenga’s initial inspiration was found in its portability, allowing users to enjoy coffee shops in the comfort of their own kitchens or even on the go. Narrow by design, Cenga can slip into any kitchen cabinet and still have everything you might need for a hot cup of coffee. The color scheme of Cenga also fits into almost any kitchen. The ribbed glass grinder and translucent coffee canister give Cenga a cozy personality and a fresh look.

Since COVID-19 closed down so many cafes, we’ve been itching for that cup of coffee graced by a barista’s touch. With Cenga, we’re one step closer to having all the joy of an actual cafe stored in a single kitchen cabinet. Stacked into a single unit like a Jenga tower, Cenga comes with a grinder, dripper, and coffee canister.

Designers: Joohyung Park, Seonghwa Lim, Eojin Roh, & Jihye Park

Cenga comes as a single unit for ultimate portability and storability.

Broken down into four parts, Cenga is a modular coffee maker inspired by the build of Jenga blocks.

The ‘NeckBook’ is a maverick laptop concept that lets you adjust the height and angle of its display

Posted on 01/09/2021 by Sarang Sheth

While laptops are lauded for their portability, their biggest caveat is that they often aren’t too ergonomic. You can either make a slim, lightweight, portable machine, or you can make one that’s ergonomically designed keeping human factors and proportions in mind. That notion, however, is being challenged by the NeckBook, a maverick laptop concept created by JooHyung Park, with an adjustable display.

The NeckBook, as its name should rather aptly suggest, is a laptop that has a display with a ‘neck’. Unlike conventional laptops that connect their displays directly to the base using a set of hinges, the NeckBook adds a sliding rail (or a neck) between them. Once you flip open your lid, as you would with any conventional laptop, the NeckBook lets you pull the display upwards, adjusting its height. The display slides up and down the neck, and can swivel left and right too, giving you an infinite amount of control over your viewing experience – something a regular laptop can’t.

The ability to adjust your laptop monitor’s height is an absolute game-changer, because laptops are notorious for causing neck strain over time. A desktop monitor often sits at a height, allowing you to keep your neck straight, while a laptop monitor sits much lower (since it’s attached to the keyboard) causing you to unnaturally bend your neck. NeckBook aims to eliminate this problem by giving the laptop a neck of its own. You can easily pull the display up to your eye level so you don’t need to bend your neck anymore, and when you’re done, slide the display back down and shut the laptop. At least on paper, it’s a remarkably useful feature that gives you the best of both worlds – portability and ergonomics.

Without getting too deep into the technical aspects of the design, what the NeckBook proposes is theoretically pretty easy to execute. Companies have experimented with swivel displays plenty of times in the past – if you remember the weird ‘convertible laptop’ phase around 2015 – albeit with little commercial success. My only real gripe with the NeckBook concept (apart from the fact that it’s not real) is that the laptop’s neck has been given what feels like too much prominence. The neck in this concept is a utilitarian detail, and highlighting it on the outside not only reduces the laptop’s smooth/sleek aesthetic, but it also imparts an industrial appearance to the laptop. A neck that sat flush against the laptop’s lid, or was concealed inside a potentially thicker lid, would probably really help seal the deal on this idea, which my currently deformed neck could really use right about now.

Designer: JooHyung Park

Richard Branson, Elon Musk and Jeff Besoz need to get their hands on this space-friendly luggage!

Posted on 19/07/2021 by Chi Thukral

Space tourism is currently a race and a status symbol amongst billionaires but it won’t be long before it becomes the next big travel trend…of course, the ticket costs will be out of this world for most of us, but we can still get the appropriate luggage and daydream! Astroneer is luggage designed keeping in mind the possibility of space travel becoming a popular ‘exotic’ destination in the future. Even if you aren’t going to space, the way bags are handled at the airport might make this NASA-level luggage an investment worth considering.

Travelling in zero gravity at insanely fast speeds already induces so many changes in our bodies despite training and protective suits – can you imagine what would happen to the belongings in your bag? Exoplanet exploration requires luggage that can survive with you. “We didn’t want future travellers to carry a crumpled carrier, with harsh conditions, rugged terrain and differential atmospheric pressure,” said the designer duo and made sure that Astroneer is modular and has no volume constraints – once again, something we on Earth could also use. Astroneer comes with bags of different sizes that can all compactly be packed into one unit. It also has increased liquidity in the environment with the suspension of wheels so that you don’t have to carry your bags even though they might be lighter in outer space, roll with it…literally. The CMF is carefully chosen for the concept to provide visibility in an environment where it is difficult to check the contents inside by giving electric signals to the glass which lets you adjust the transparency of the luggage – this might just be my most favorite feature yet. It also has internal environmental controls to protect your belongings!

So while Richard Branson went to space, he certainly missed out on having the coolest suitcase at baggage claim. Maybe by the time its our turn to take off, we can get an Astroneer in custom colors!

Designers: JooHyung Park and Sunjin Baek