Kaiten or rotating/conveyor belt sushi restaurants were invented in Japan in the 1950s. More recently, a Japanese entrepreneur has put the concept on steroids, rolling out a chain of highly automated—and profitable—restaurants that go way beyond a mere conveyor belt. At branches of the Muten Kurazushi Sushi Restaurant, which has over 260 locations, technology serves the diners with minimal human intervention. It's the first one featured in this video:

There was a part edited out of the video above, which shows the crucial process of how the bill is tallied. That operation is revealed here:

It's no surprise that Muten Kurazushi is profitable in a country where conventional restaurants have struggled; as the Times reports, "just six servers and a minimal kitchen staff can service a restaurant seating 196 people, said a company spokesman, Takeshi Hattori." We also found this tidbit about the unintended benefits amusing:

"It's not just about efficiency," Mr. Hattori said. "Diners love it too. For example, women say they like clearing finished plates right away, so others can't see how much they've eaten."

Just two years old, the Brooklyn-based manufacturer Souda is already producing a range of innovative and unusual products. Back at ICFF for a second year — in 2014 they took home the "Best New Designer" award — the company debuted a minimal folding chair by Calen Knauf and Conrad Brown, and a second typology of their Kreten series. Made by casting concrete into a spandex mold capped with a plexiglass plate, Kreten side tables have a sculptural quality and a smooth, glassy top surface. Each shape is unique and infused with personality — the tables seem to bend, shift, and communicate when paired in small groups. They're available in short or tall sizes (short is a new addition this year), and Souda also has a Kreten Candelabra. Produced in red, mustard, and neutrals, the candlestick-holder seems equal parts undersea coral and arterial branch.

"The idea at its foundation was about the fluidity of concrete," says designer and cofounder Isaac Friedman-Heiman, when asked about Kreten's origins. "It's traditionally a very rectilinear material, very brutalist. We wanted to try and capture that fluid nature." Currently produced in small to medium batches, Souda is looking to manufacture the tables in larger quantities due to increased demand, and the "messy business" of concrete production at scale. They've recently started experimenting with custom shapes for select projects — designer Isabel Marant used several in a recent runway show — and speciality colorways for orders of 25 or more.

Fittingly, Friedman-Heiman explained that Souda is "like a revelation," translating loosely from the Japanese as "Oh yeah!"

Reclaimed wood is frequently touted as a resourceful way to reduce waste by reusing existing materials. What’s often missing from that conversation is how the reuse of these materials can also reclaim a piece of history, salvaging remnants of what came before and offering them a new meaning. That was the intention of Brooklyn’s Horse Brand Co. with its new Coney Island Boardwalk Knife, which uses shards of the famous boardwalk blasted apart by Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

“A lot of the boardwalk doesn’t exist anymore, so it’s a really nice way to stay connected with the people who have a relationship with that area,” says Thomas Callahan, founder of Horse Brand Co., which specializes in handmade, custom bike frames. Their online store includes a range of other utilitarian goods as well, from handmade copper flasks to embossed riding gloves. Many of the products are collaborations with friends and other small shops. The knife is one such item, made  with the Long Island City–based design and fabrication studio Surname Goods.

“The idea for making knives came from an obsession I had with wanting to create a tool that I could use out when I’m in the wilderness,” Callahan says. “I wanted it to also act as special object that added value to that extended task, something that I could have and I could know someone’s hands were on it, know how it was made.” The idea for using wood from the Coney Island Boardwalk came from his friend Steven Bukowski, one of the founders of Surname Goods, who had stumbled upon wood salvaged in the aftermath of Sandy (he was using it to create a set of Boardwalk Coasters).

Horse Brand Co. founder Thomas Callahan. Portrait by Michael Cooper

Callahan thought the wood would be perfect for adding a layer of meaning to the knife he wanted to make. Horse was already producing two variations of a standard camping knife, but none with a wooden handle. He sent over the specs, and once Surname confirmed that they had enough stock, the two studios began designing the knife last summer.

“We kind of developed the handle together,” Callahan says, noting that the teams went back and forth with ideas to give the handle a bit more detail and further elevate the design. The final embellishment was an inlay in reclaimed ipê wood (also salvaged from the boardwalk), suggested by Surname Goods. Surname built a laser-cutting jig to quickly cut a large quantity of pieces, which were then inlaid and glued up into blocks of wood that are wrapped and shipped to Horse for manufacturing the final knives.

At the Horse workshop, Callahan cuts the blades from 3/32 sheets of high-carbon steel specifically made for steel tooling. The profile of the blade is cut and put in a jig, and the initial bevel is ground into each side. Then they are placed on an anvil and stamped with “Horse” on one side and “USA” on the other. The blades are placed into a heat-treating oven up to 1550 degrees Fahrenheit and left there for 15 minutes before being rapidly dipped in oil. “When it’s up at that temperature, the molecules kind of relax and then you shock it in oil and the molecules tighten up into a really tight crystalline structure on a molecular level, and what that does is make the material very, very hard,” Callahan explains. “The reason why we want it to be hard is because we want it to be able to cut through hard materials, and having that hardness in a material is going to allow you to maintain a sharper edge, so you can cut through other steels and softer steels.”

Inside the Horse workshop. Photos by Michael Cooper

Next, the blade is placed back in the oven at 450 degrees for two hours to heat-treat it, relaxing the molecules just enough to make it super durable, but not so hard that it’s brittle. Then it’s taken out of the oven and cooled to room temperature before being faced on a grinder. The actual grind of the knife is a Scandinavian grind, a specific style consisting of a flat surface that goes all the way down to the cutting edge—making it easier to sharpen in the field. The final edges are ground on another jig, then honed on a stone, before finally being tested by stroking the blade with leather to ensure that it’s shaving-sharp.

Once he’s received the glued-up blocks of inlaid wood from Surname Goods, Callahan prepares them to become handles by riveting them to the blade using brass and nickel pins. The handles are then shaped down to fit comfortably in the hand and oiled with a Danish oil that acts as a protectant for the material. After two coats of that, Callahan and his team add three coats of wax that is then buffed out to give each knife nice finish, also using the metal protectant T3, developed by Boeing, to prevent oxidation of the steel and protect the blade.

Using reclaimed wood has another unexpected benefit for the design shop. “The ipê wood is really great for the same reason why it was chosen for the boardwalk,” Callahan says. “It’s very weather-resistant and very stable—not susceptible to rot and mold, because of the chemical makeup of the wood.”

Horse and Surname Goods already have another knife using the reclaimed wood launching soon, sans inlay. Callahan says that this version will provide a sleeker option to its more ornate counterpart, and hopes that both products will extend the life of the Coney Island Boardwalk as it is rebuilt. “You can carry that with you and it’s meaningful,” he says.

As their name implies, XYZ Cargo cycles are built on a Cartesian grid. 

They're intended to be easy to put together, easy to repair and easy to customize. And the square-tubed cycles, which come in both bike and trike variants, feature something rather unusual up front, as you can see below. Let's start with the bike:

XYZ CARGO BIKE uses a completely new steering design, resulting in a flat layout of the whole cargo space as well as better handling characteristics. No unnecessary frame parts limit the possibility to carry large pieces of cargo with XYZ CARGO BIKE. Compared to cargo tricycles, XYZ CARGO BIKE is more lightweight and slim, and thus easier to drive.

While I've never seen that kind of steering mechanism before, the similarly-unusual one on the trike has some precedent and is called Ackermann steering, originally designed over a century ago for horse-drawn carriages.

Unlike traditional three-wheeled cargo cycles, the XYZ CARGO features a so called Ackermann-steering, which is usually only to be found in cars. This makes the XYZ CARGO easy to control even at high speeds and the maneuverability under heavy loads stays smooth.

Both bike and trike can be modified to carry larger/taller loads (though obviously the trike can do heavier duty):

The cycles are currently produced only in Hamburg and Copenhagen, but the company's hope is that "All persons should be able to access XYZ CARGOs in a way, that fits both their means and their needs." To that end,

The XYZ CARGO project is pioneering new and fairer methods of production and distribution: We ask ourselves how to give access to XYZ CARGOs to as many people as possible and how to do this in a fair and symbiotic way. We wouldn't try to get the biggest profit, but balance a fee for our work with the costs and the time we have invested….

We offer a range of ways to get hold of a XYZ CARGO: we sell readymade, assembled cycles and we arrange workshops for those who want to build their XYZCARGO themselves. Finally people can also build their XYZ CARGOs from scratch on their own, according to [our Creative Commons license].

If you're interested in setting up production of XYZ Cargo cycles in whatever part of the world you're in, they're looking for collaborators. Learn more here.

Stuff comes in boxes, and we throw away or recycle most of those boxes. But every once in a while you buy something—fancy chocolates, an expensive bottle of booze, an Apple product—that comes in a box so nice that you can't let it go. Boxes of that sort are created by people like Louise James.

Artisan and bookbinding technician James runs The Binding Studio, a New-Zealand-based shop that produces custom boxes, books and portfolios. While James' capable fingers appear to be the main tools used, she's also got a cool variety of hand tools, stationary machines, implements and jigs that she uses to produce her pieces.

Here she is (with assistant Iranna Ashton) cranking out some bespoke boxes for a client:

And here's what goes into a custom book, from initial sketch working out the math to the finished product:

James has enough experience and skill—just about 15 years' worth—that no matter what you need, she can work out the design and turn it around in a couple of weeks, whether it's a run or a one-off. "There are no standard products," she writes. "Size, colour, embellishments, are all decided by you!"

Many areas of design are already saturated. Want to get into furniture design? You've got thousands of competitors to contend with. But if you can bring your design talent to bear on an undiscovered niche, as the aptly-named Jim Cash has, you stand to make a mint.

Cash wasn't even a designer, but a commercial construction and real estate developer. He was also a wine collector. And at some point he realized that wine cellars aren't typically designed with ergonomics in mind. As Cash explained to Forbes,

I had a typical wine 'rack' in my basement with individual square openings that you insert the bottle in with a 'cork out' orientation. Having been frustrated for years with having to pull out one bottle after another, rotate it so the label is 'right side up' so I could read it, and then put it back in the rack, often scraping or tearing the label in the process, I said to myself, I just want a drawer that I can pull out that will reveal four, five or six bottles that are already right side up.
My thought at the time was that I would just go out and buy it. But [I found] that there was nothing [like that] on the market….

Thus Cash set about designing better ways to store wine, ways that would strike a balance between density of capacity and ease of viewing the labels. The series of systems he came up with were such improvements over the accepted ways of doing things that he started a company, Revel Custom Wine Cellars, to produce them on the open market.

Today Revel has billionaire customers like Richard Branson and celebrity clients like Brangelina. In the video below, you can see what sets Revel's designs apart:

Most of you watching the video were likely be struck by how do-able it all seems; in other words, it's not like these design concepts required Masters degrees from Delft to come up with—I'll remind you that Cash had no formal design background—it's just that no one bothered applying some very basic design principles to the area of wine cellars.

So I encourage any of you entrepreneurial designers to look around you and think: What needs designing, that no one has really addressed yet? (Bonus if you can think of something that primarily rich people own.)

As a product designer, it seems crazy to me that no one's really figured out the SLR camera lens cap thing. Which is to say, where do you put the cap while you're shooting on-the-go? "I hate that lanyard/hanging lens cap solution," pro shooter Mike Cinquino (of the self-shot video tips entry) told us. "It just gets in the way." My own dalliance with photography was brief, but when shooting I always wore a T-shirt with a breast pocket to drop it into. I've seen others clip it to a backpack strap. There doesn't seem to be a consistent solution.

The designers of the Emissary Camera Bag believe they have one. It's perhaps excessive, but pretty: They've milled concentric rings into a chunk of aluminum, thereby creating a nifty universal lens cap holder, and have stuck the thing onto the side of their handsome bags.

Another nice little detail is the bag's locking lever, which was modeled after the film-advance lever of old-school cameras. It looks to provide a pleasant tactility.

Here's a closer look at the bag and some of its features:

At press time there was 22 days left to pledge, but the project has already been successfully Kickstarted; and I'm guessing these guys tooled up in advance, because they're saying they can deliver by August. Currently available prices run from US $238 on the low end to $382 for the full leather version.

Now, some questions for those of you that shoot on-the-go: Would you use this lens holder/bag combo? And where do you currently stow your lens cap?

Last week a couple of contractors in a cherry picker repainted the orangeish-yellow support brackets for the Walk/Don't Walk signs on my corner:

It never occurred to me that those colors are regulated by the government, but of course they are. And as the Washington Post reports, our government doesn't mess with Pantone; instead they've got their own internal system, sexily named Federal Standard 595C - Colors Used in Government Procurement.

The government started trying to regulate colors around World War I--you can read a lengthy history on the process here--and today the hues of everything from aircraft carriers to highway signs to post office mailboxes all boil down to just 650 color chips.

11120 OSHA Safety Red

12243 DoT Highway Orange

13415 School Bus Yellow

14066 DoT Highway Green

15095 Post Office Light Blue

20059 Forest Service Sign Standard Brown

You can view all of the chips here, but only some of the colors are listed with names, and some of those names are unmistakably American in style--like "15450 Air Superiority Blue." For real.

For descriptions of what colors belong to what objects, as we've listed in the six samples above, you'll have to click here. At that latter link you can also order physical chips, and boy, going after government contracts ain't cheap--they cost 50 freaking dollars per chip, or you can order the whole set for $1,250.

But, if you're just creating some in-computer renderings and trying to get the exact shade of green the Department of Transportation uses on their highway signs, you can just hit the link above and use Photoshop's handy eyedropper tool.

This video is entirely in Spanish, but it doesn't matter what language you speak—you'll grasp it. It's a clever workaround for when you're trying to remove a hex-head bolt and don't have the correct socket or wrench size handy, but do have some other materials:

I had avoided watching this video because I assumed it was clickbait, but I was wrong. What we have here is a fascinating look at what happens when your brain is forced to re-write one of your body's physical routines.

You know how it drives you nuts when they change the keyboard shortcuts in your favorite design software? Or have you ever accidentally broken a glass in the kitchen and instinctively wished you could press Command-Z in real life? Programmed by routines, our brains can easily be tricked into reaching for things that aren't there.

So what we have here started out as a welder playing a prank on an engineer. The engineer is Destin Sandlin, the man behind the SmarterEveryDay educational channel, and the prank was to reverse the output of a bicycle's handlebars. Simple premise, but it really starts to get funny when Sandlin learns to ride the new type of bicycle—then loses the ability to ride a regular bicycle:

In July of this year, camping goods company Sea to Summit will release their full line of collapsible X-Pots. 

By combining an aluminum base with a silicone body, the company has created pots that compress flat; a steel ring embedded in the pot's lip gives it the ridigity needed for the lid to nest within it securely. The silicone will be fine, as long as you keep the open flame away from it and focused on the base (and ensure that there's liquid inside before you fire it up). And the lid, perforated at one end, does double duty as a strainer.

The X-Pot will be available in three sizes: 1.4, 2.8 and 4.0 liters. Sadly, the company's demonstration video has horrific and amateurish audio, but at least you can see the product in action:

Seriously, guys, invest in a lavalier microphone. As an example of what proper audio sounds like, have a look at Backpacker Magazine presenting your product: