Tag Archives: Ki-Beom Hwang

This Modular Café lets your ‘pick and choose’ your kitchen appliance, delivering an easily customizable station to brew your favorite coffee!

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One of the things I miss the most is the smell my neighborhood coffee shop entices with. While our lifestyle is returning to normal, I still don’t feel comfortable entering crowded places, including the aforementioned coffee shop. With the idea of a modular café – the designers prefer to call Oblige – we can decrease the load from our kitchen and get the best of what the café down the street promises. How do you ask? By creating one sleek appliance, you can easily install it anywhere in your home without worrying about connecting multiple power/water outlets to keep it functioning!

Meet the Oblige, an entertainment space where homeowners can depict their personal traits by customizing the modular appliance to their individual lifestyle or living space. The modular cafe intends to go beyond the idea of the basic functions the appliances in your kitchen perform. The designers behind Oblige feel setting up a café at home is inconvenient for now because it’s not easy to set up space with all the appliances required. Connecting them all to water and electrical sources is another headache. Simply thinking of brewing a good coffee – you need a list of appliances – from your coffee grinder, the pod-maker, espresso brewer, milk frother, and more, depending on your choice!

Oblige lets the user select and combine an appliance (ice maker, soda maker, water purifier, coffee grinder, espresso machine, kettle, and oven) as per their convenience and preference. If the need arises, users can combine more modules to cater to their extended demand while retaining visually similar aesthetics. These products club up together with a simple mechanism in the bottom; adding and removing them or installing the café setup on modular furniture outside the kitchen is feasible as Oblige will work on one power and water supply connection, irrespective of the interconnected modules needed in the setup.

If you’re looking to achieve a café-like experience, to quench the urge of working out of a Starbucks, an Oblige can really oblige you through the setup one day. It’s the designer’s vision to partner with furniture and lifestyle companies going forward to deliver, say, a LEGO-style modular café for your apartment someday.

Designer: Soo Jung Hwang, Seongyong Lee, Ki-Beom Hwang

This 4-in-1 smart home appliance is the only butler you need

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Quarantine has really shown me that I could never be a butler should I ever plan to switch careers, in fact, I could use a butler to manage all the chores as I work from home. This is the part where I fall in love with Mr. Alfred – no, not Batman’s butler but a smart home appliance that serves as a humidifier, dehumidifier, air purifier, and vacuum. I think this confirms that all men are truly not the same!

Mr. Alfred is a conceptual smart air-management system that looks like an elegant bar cart – the gold rails add a retro finish while the muted grey body gives it rich yet subtle aesthetic. Instead of having four home appliances, you can just have one that does it all while saving space and upgrading your interior game. Mr. Alfred is designed to provide solutions for healthy air in your space by sensing the quality. It is precise and targeted at keeping your space clean. The sleek appliance is made of six important parts – the main body which is responsible to store and charge the detachable parts, a drone that monitors the space, a robot vacuum, an air purifier, humidifier, and dehumidifier. Fun fact: the three air-management parts rest on the robot vacuum that makes them portable.

The rails of the main body help with putting the air-purifier, humidifier, and dehumidifier on the robot vacuum when being used. After the job is done, all parts return to the main body to be stored and recharged. Mr. Alfred also includes a cleaning tool kit with brushes and sprays. The physical form of a trolley was used to match the image of a butler. The wheels make it easy to move around the house and the minimal style lets it become a beautiful furniture piece when not in use. Mr. Alfred has been an iconic butler forever and now it lives in the form of this smart concept design…now only if it also had a feature to shine a symbol in the sky.

Designer: Dawn BYSJ, S-W K, Ki-Beom Hwang, Dong-Jun and Citrine H

This playfully unique wireless charger isn’t a pad or a dock

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Designed with a toyish charm that totally makes charging much more entertaining as an activity, Mr. Charger isn’t shaped like your usual pad or phone-dock. In fact, it looks like a simple-minded lad sitting on the pier with his legs dangling above the water. Place your phone upside down and Mr. Charger on top, and he simply whiles away his time, while your phone gets charged. You’ll almost not want to lift him up to use your phone, lest Mr. Charger get disturbed.

However, if you DO want to go ahead and use your phone, the Mr. Charger can be flipped on his side and used as a prop-stand. Not quite as entertaining, but it provides the dual purpose you need. Mr. Charger is clearly emotional design done right, and this achieves a couple of rather interesting things. It humanizes the charger, making you perceive it as an entity in itself rather than just an accessory… and it also makes charging your phone a lot more entertaining, as you watch Mr. Charger sit quietly, content in his own little world, as the smartphone underneath him gets charged. Besides, Mr. Charger packs a clock into his tiny two-legged body too. Available as both an analog clock (that uses the watch face as Mr. Charger’s face) and as a digital clock that turns the seven-segment display into a set of happy little eyes, Mr. Charger is a rare wireless charger that actually makes charging your phone less of a drag and more of a playful pastime!

Designers: Dawn by SJ & Ki-Beom Hwang

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