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

With cold weather all around us, many people who use touch interface devices are going to find that they will have to shed a layer to check email, answer a phone call or navigate their MP3 players. Instead of taking off your gloves, try creating a conductive pad on your finger tips.

These gloves can be purchased, but what is the fun in that? Try making your own gloves with a few simple items. Using your ordinary gloves, you can create an extraordinary interface to communicate between your fingertips and your electronic touch surface device. 

You can order a sample bobbin of conductive thread for a small amount of money compared to the cost of a large spindle. Instructables even has an article about creating conductive glue if you choose to go that route. The idea is to create your own active conductive surface with a little creativity and know-how. The possibilities are limitless.

These dorm room speakers say they will pack a punch, using a pop out accordion design to expel superior sound. A nice addition to an MP3 player or laptop computer. Any electronic device that clicks, slides, pops out or transforms grabs my attention.

Thinking outside of the box has been used so many times to describe an approach toward design. I really do think that the designers who worked on this touchpad case were thinking outside of the box. When slipped onto the bottom of an iPhone, this tactile guide gives boundaries to your fingertips, allowing for more than just a visual line between pressing a ‘D’ and an ‘S’ on your QWERTY touch keyboard.

With Halloween right around the seasonal calendar, a lot of people are going to begin designing their own costumes. I have found a few creative costumes for your enjoyment and inspiration — some cute, some scary, and some just really clever.  

Construction machinery  dinosaur with a cage   baby monster  baby Nacho Libre  chicken crossing the road  Indiana Jones video game monster  iPhone vending machine  Bumblebee

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.

This IPhone app drafting template is pretty sweet. Use it to storyboard that awesome app you think is going to turn the world upside down. The reflective metal material is reminiscent of the Apple brand, but I think that the old-school, green plastic drafting template would be way better.

With all of the talk about the new iPhone coming out soon, and everyone taking a bite at what may be the next iPhone, concept designs like this are popping up. I hope this is a joke, because having something like this go to market would just be an example of lazy design.

Do you think that you would have been excited to see a phone like this come out in 1996?

I will wait for the real thing, trying to ignore the speculative hype in the meantime, in the hope that Apple reveals a new device that is nothing short of revolutionary. The interface and function of the mobile communication device is not dead. We are not at a stopping point in how we can design and redesign the communication device as we know it. Simply extruding the length of the iPhone will be the demise of Apple as the leader in communication technology design. One day, the Apple iPhone will be the Beta or cassette of yesterday. I just hope that day doesn’t approach prematurely because of a failed design like this concept of the G4.