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Each month, Productsphere brings design professionals a wealth of innovative and inventive new products, organized around a central theme of particular relevance to the industry. After the jump, Metropolis’s editorial director, Paul Makovsky, talks about his Productsphere column in the October issue of the magazine.

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Browsing the MoMA Design Store’s new fall catalog this afternoon, I was struck by a photo of Peter Schlumbohm’s 1941 Chemex coffeemaker, which has long been a part of the museum’s permanent collection but is only now being sold through its retail arm. It’s a familiar enough object, and easy to overlook—but what a funny design! Read more…

The James Dyson Award won’t announce a winner until next month, but its PR team is already promoting one “especially innovative” product by an American design student. Nicholas Riddle’s Prio Paper Cast is a stabilizing cast made from intricately woven paper; intended for disaster-relief efforts, the cast is lightweight, ships flat, and includes easy-to-read triage straps with instructions for medical personnel. Riddle’s proposal is one of 20 to move on to the semifinals; its competition includes an intelligent fire extinguisher from France, an ergonomic wheelchair brake from Ireland, and a collapsible electrical plug from the U.K. We’ll report back when the winner is announced in a few weeks.

 
The Italian manufacturer MDM World announced this morning that its Estrema chair, designed by Massimiliano Della Monaca, has been certified by the folks at Guinness World Records as the (drum roll, please) World’s Lightest Chair. Made from a single layer of carbon fiber, Estrema weighs a mere 1.36 pounds. That is indeed very light. By comparison, Frank Gehry’s aluminum Superlight chair, for Emeco, weighs 6.5 pounds. Heck, some issues of Metropolis weigh more than 1.36 pounds. Despite its light weight, the chair can support about 220 pounds—impressive, but probably not enough for widespread adoption in the States, where the average adult male tips the scales at 190 pounds. 
 

Fanny-pack and belt-buckle-cell-phone-holster users, get excited! OFF! has just come out with a summer 2009 super-gimmick: a clip-on mosquito repellent for fanning the bloodthirsty beasts away one refillable disk (and two AA batteries) at a time. How does it work? Metofluthrin, a relatively new repellent chemical not intended for skin contact, is blown out of the bottom of the unit as air is drawn into the center, releasing a pesticide current around the user. According to most consumer reviews, however, product functionality is poor; and according to yours truly, the product design is heinous. The cobalt-blue extruded-plastic unit looks like a birth-control pack on steroids—a clunky, embarrassing accessory for your summertime get-up. Even if you’re into walking around with a glorified Glade PlugIn clipped to those cut-offs, the waist-height placement seems problematic for cookouts. Believe me, you don’t want to be the party-fouling picnicgoer blowing pesticide all over the fried chicken.

Ikea offers a full range of computer-friendly desks and workstations—but what if the Swedish furniture giant designed desktop hardware as well? That’s the question being asked by Niero Gonzalez on the WePC.com discussion boards, and he’s compiled a handful of amusing examples of the imaginary results. He’s joking, of course—or is he? Gonzalez writes that the idea is actually “quite practical” and that it would be relatively easy for a company to make “cheap, standardized housings for computer parts and let people click them together.” Maybe so—and certainly most computer hardware could use a dose of clean, simple design (Apple’s Braun fetish being the one obvious exception). But as someone who once spent an entire Saturday in “indescribable purgatory” assembling an Ikea bed frame, I ardently hope this day never comes.

When I first heard that Tivoli Audio, the Boston-based maker of attractive high-performance radios, was teaming up with the esteemed Italian furniture company Cappellini, I was pumped—I imagined some sort of fanciful cross between the spunky little SongBook and Stephen Burks’s Love tables (or, even better, Shiro Kuramata’s classic Revolving Cabinet). But the results of the collaboration, shown at a press lunch in New York yesterday, are underwhelming. The Cappelini Collection merely adds a couple of superficial embellishments—a high-gloss lacquer finish in three colors, and an embossed speaker grille—to two existing products, the NetWorks and Model One radios. The new models are undeniably handsome, but the seven layers of lacquer mean they will be significantly pricier too. Design hounds may have been willing to pay an added premium for that kind of pedigree at one time, but these days? A $599 radio seems extravagant enough.

New Yorkers, take note: frequent Metropolis contributor Julie Taraska and Design Within Reach PR maven (and occasional party-photo subject) Kimberly Oliver launched Product Placement last year as a way to foster meaningful discussions about product design. The latest installment takes place tomorrow night at Designtex’s downtown showroom, where Harry Allen, Andrea Ruggiero, Karl Zahn, MIO, and BOA of Object Interiors will each spend five minutes talking about the designated theme: sustainability. The $5 admission fee includes cocktails and “various surprises.” Full details at www.thisisproductplacement.com.

Above: Harry Allen’s Uruku packaging for Aveda

Design blogs are buzzing about Arizona State University’s “the Flo” toilet, which won silver in the “Breaking the Rules” category at the 2009 Northwest Design Invitational. It’s not the sustainable aspects of “the Flo” that are attracting the most attention, however. Instead, people are fascinated—and repelled—by the toilet’s form, which requires users to squat above a bowl placed 10 to 12 inches from the floor. Read more…

Even after our four-day live-blogging extravaganza, I ended up with scores of unpublished snapshots of worthy products and projects from this year’s ICFF. Herewith, one final show-and-tell from the 2009 International Contemporary Furniture Fair.

I’d been looking forward to meeting PARO, the cooing therapeutic robot seal from the Japan by Design exhibition, since we first wrote about it (her?) in the May issue. Finally, on Tuesday, I got some face time.

Cute enough to thaw even the most Javits-hardened heart. (Click here for a video of PARO in action.) Read more…