Industrial design operates around limitations, and that’s part of what makes design so engaging. But occasionally we see designers, inventors and/or corporations unfettered by budget or restraint. Here are the most extreme pieces of design we’ve witnessed this year.
Porsche Design’s P’8951 sunglasses are freaking machined out of aluminum.
Single-use footwear: Designed for competitive runners, Adidas’ ADIZERO Adios Pro Evo 1 sneakers run $500 and are only meant to last for one race.
Tim Drier, a veteran scientific glassblower, creates insanely complicated, beautiful booze-mixing vessels.
A company called Breylon sells this curved monitor that you sit in the middle of; it’s meant to give you the immersive experience of wearing VR goggles, without the goggles.
Samsung rolled out this more conventional Odyssey OLED G9 ultrawide curved monitor with a 32:9 display.
Industrial design consultancy Whipsaw designed these 9-foot-tall monitors; they’re the gaming machines that you see in casinos.
Cloud RC sells this force-feedback cockpit for driving an RC car, in case that dinky remote’s not cutting it for you.
Dwarfing that is this 650-lb. Zero Gravity Workstation by ErgoQuest.
The Magic Fort is a 430-square-foot tent. You’re meant to park your Tesla inside it, to air-condition the thing. So much for the great outdoors.
Here’s (probably) the biggest thing you’ll ever see blowmolded: This gooey blank getting turned into a 10,000-liter water tank.
Royal Caribbean’s bananas Icon of the Seas cruise ship doesn’t look like it should float; the monstrosity is almost 1/4-mile long.
Las Vegas saw the debut of the Sphere, a $2.3 billion, 336′-tall, 516′-wide structure covered in 580,000 square feet of LEDs.
We’ll end with some extreme-in-the-right-direction examples. The Japanese town of Kamikatsu’s Zero-Waste sorting facility, as well as the town’s microbrewery, repurposed hundreds of discarded windows to build out their structures.
And showing how difficult it is to go zero-waste, Kamikatsu sorts their rubbish into 45 categories.
Source: core77