Dedicated to inspiring designers, inventors & the creative spirit in all of us.

I have compiled a few kitchen gadgets reminiscent of those brightly colored, action-packed kids toys we all grew up loving. Bon appetit! 

This is the Gyoza Maker, a dumpling maker from Bandai. Very similar to the rolling machines many of us used as kids for molding Play-doh, this kitchen gadget is targeted for 8 to 12 year old girls.  Looks cool and makes cooking with mom and dad fun.

Eating cherries with the pit is like eating a watermelon with seeds; who wants to do that! This fun cherry pitting gadget makes pressing out pits easy as ever using the same action as an old-school Swingline stapler. And to top that, you can see through it via the clear acrylic design.

Stamping out robots has never been easier. This revolving cookie cutter gadget lets you twist the features of the shape until you create the ultimate cookie robot. You can create up to 64 unique robot shapes.

Another brightly colored, toy crazed kitchen gadget – this machine, Pasta Pasta, transforms your dough into a variety of fun, homemade shapes. Yeah, not such a great idea to run pasta through the kid’s Play-Doh machine, so I would upgrade to this gadget.

Safety orange is a good color for this cheese shredder. This gadget looks a lot safer to operate than any other shredder I’ve used. Its almost hands-free design makes it easy to grip, press and push-pull your way to turning any block of cheese into a fluff of shredded cheese goodness.

These fruit and vegetable savers are what every kitchen needs. Save the other half of any fruit or vegetable by placing them cut side down onto these strap down freshness savers. Consumers can use these to cut off exposure to oxygen in the hope of buying more time, rather than more produce.

Homemade is always better than store bought, so why not create your own frozen fruit treats? These nesting frozen fruit and juice molds look quite similar to the mini candy rings we all remember from growing up.

As we have seen, extruding shapes can be fun. This is another way to squeeze out creative shapes for any of those soft foods you can’t resist playing with.  The multiple heads create ribbons, ropes, and ribbed extrusions.

Why cut food into favorite shapes when you can actually grow it in that shape? This cucumber mold makes it possible to grow your cucumbers into hearts and stars. Yeah, it may take a while, but who else is going to be able to serve up heart-shaped cucumbers at the family picnic?

The Pet Rock, Slinky and Rubik’s Cube: three toys we all grew up loving. How better to close out this post than with a Rubik’s Cube themed pepper mill. Oh yeah, you know how it works; just twist, twist and twist some more. And no, it does no good to peel off the stickers and rearrange them to make the pepper fall out, that trick doesn’t work on this one.

The Scottevest claims to replace the fanny pack as the best way to travel with all of your electronics and accessories. Shown above with an inside-out view as well as an X-ray view of it all packed up, you can see how this lightweight jacket keeps you from looking like ‘that guy’ with the fanny pack. Loaded with over 20 hidden pockets, it has a hidden highway for earbud wires to travel through the fabric to the collar and a see-through micromesh for viewing and operating your iPhone. Pricey, but it looks like a better designed way to manage all of your travel goods.

The new Xeros washing machine system uses about 1 cup of water, compared to the gallons we are accustomed to using for regular loads of laundry. Xeros technology uses reusable nylon polymer beads to agitate your clothes during the wash cycle; nylon polymer has an inherent polarity that attracts stains and can absorb them from slightly dampened garments using around a cup of water. What a great, eco-friendly design!

Designers often deal with materials with a ‘let’s worry about that later’ attitude. We firmly believe that in order to come up with innovative solutions it’s an absolute must to think about materials right from the beginning of projects.

                                                              -Chris Lefteri Design

I was recently introduced to the website of Chris Lefteri, known for being one of the best authors concerning new and existing materials. A great resource when considering the materials of your next design, Lefteri has published a number of PDF printable resources as well as books for students and designers.

By using strong imagery accompanied by detailed explanations of materials you may or may not already know, Lefteri makes sense of every material imaginable. He even references some everyday objects to help explain those unpronounceable materials and chemical compounds we read about but that never really sink in. Invest some time to peek into what may be one of the most comprehensive collections of knowledge concerning materials today.

According to this article, Twitter may be the great-grandchild of the Notificator, born in England in the 1930’s. This public messaging system allowed users to post messages for two hours behind a glass window for a small fee. Once a coin was dropped, a strip of paper with your hand-written whereabouts, appointments or place of destination could be left for all to see. 

The ‘Notificator’, as it was known, seems a lot like what people are doing today;  short messages, set behind glass, left for all to see. What a clever invention of its time and a funny thing to know, that Twitter is a little older than we may have thought.