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Apparently the 2011 Red Dot Design Concept has brought us with many innovative designs, except for those we’ve introduced before, the Adjustable Radiation Flashlight is another one we’d like to show you. It could shift between concentrated spot-light and wide flood-light modes, based on its flexible plastic plate which contains about 40 individual lights. Hence even though it is designed as one light, the gadget is actually something serving as several different types of lights.

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2D or 3D, currently almost all designs are seemingly to face that question. But actually it’s not that difficult to make a decision, because one could become both 2D and 3D at the same time. The Keyboard Wall is rightly a good example. It’s constructed with thousands of keys collected from old computer keyboards, creating a 2D image when you view them from the front while offering 3D pleasure as well since you can feel their unique shapes.

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Not only designers, but also the scientists are pursuing things claimed to the “world’s first”, “world’s largest” or “world’s smallest”. However, the researchers are doing that not to set a new Guinness World Record but to make technology serve people better. Put forward by German physicists from University of Stuttgart and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, the world’s smallest heat engine is only a few micrometers wide, almost the same size of a human hair! That’s really incredible, but you can check out the link below for details if you’re interested in the engine.

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Foldable, portable and practical, the ‘Radler Trail Camp’ by Timberland is a lightweight and water-repellent shoe quite suitable for outdoor activities. It is especially excellent for the foldable design, featuring a zipper along its sole so that the shoe can fold along its center when not in use. With that unique feature, even with simply one bag you can take almost ten pairs of shoes at one time, as they take up really small space indeed.

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It’s a vest, and also a scarf, to keep you warm in the winter in two different ways.

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So, you’re preparing for the up-coming Christmas and busy with choosing gifts and wrapping papers? Let’s show you something wonderful: the QR Code Christmas Wrapping Paper. Designed by UK-based studio, these creative wrapping papers are available in three patterns, each one printed with many various QR codes that embody unique meanings. If you’d like to check them out, simply scan the codes!

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The cold winter makes you suffer but you don’t know why? Well, according to scientific researches, the reason that people feel lack of energy in winter is because they lack enough bright white daylight. So in order to help people get fully energized in winter, the SEQINETIC “sun” glasses are created, offering bright light to beat the winter blues. But will that really work? Let those who have tried the glasses to tell us the answer then.

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Time again it proves not everything useful should be high-tech, because quite often we see practical gadgets of low-fi tech, just like the Macro Lens Rubber Band made for cellphones. It’s a stretchable band capable of expanding to a diameter of up to 16-inches, thus to convert any mobile phones into a macro lens.

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Honestly I don’t know who invented brushes, but I know clearly it is Valencia-based designers CuldeSac that will push brushed onto a new level, one that may feature evolutionary value. In this creative collection, each brush and roller comes with a unique function, allowing the users and artists to do something that used to be difficult or impossible to them, such as painting on the ceiling or stamping out distinctive patterns with a brush.

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Because of higher and higher social pressure pushing us forward to survive, we humans are actually suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder, one symptom of which is to ask ourselves repeatedly whether or not we’ve turned off the electricity or locked off the door… Stop that, as our life can become easier, if with the help of Off- Door Handle. It’s a 2011 Red Dot Design Concept winner, allowing users to switch off gas supply and electricity by rotating the dial and flipping it back to activate them. So how do you like the concept?

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Why and how could there be trees that grow into the amazing shapes as horses?! Honestly that’s what I thought when I met these sculptures, until I know they’re actually constructed with driftwood and oak. So incredible! When creating, Heather Jansch used an underlying steel frame that has been coated in fiberglass, attached wood onto the frame in certain shapes and then colored needed parts of the wood. The hooves are usually made out of bronze or lead, in case that the sculptures may get blown away in windy days. As a result, with great passion and hard work instilled into these art pieces, each sculpture turns out impressively good, seemingly very similar to real-life horses.

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Wheelchair users, although with the aid of others, may usually get bothered by the difficulty of getting on and off a car when they need to go on a travel. So why not just change their wheelchairs into an electrical vehicle so as to solve the problem? With that in mind, some designers have created the WHILL, a device that can clamp onto the wheels of an existing manual wheelchair and to power it with electricity. Each circular “hub” contains a 24-volt motor, powered by a lithium-ion battery pack. The battery reportedly takes two hours to charge, offering a range of approximately 30 kilometers with a speed that may get up to 20 km/h. When needing to change the directions or adjust the speed, the users can easily accomplish those tasks via an operation of the curved control section that connects two “hubs”.

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At Design Miami 2011, Denmark-based BIG Architects and Kollision + Schmidhuber & Partner have collaborated to show us something quite futuristic, and that’s actually a city paved with a digital interactive surface for mobility. The new urban design aims to liberate streets from existing pedestrian and vehicular boundaries, so as to improve flexibility in public spaces. During the Design Miami 2011, what we saw was only a very small part of the future urban, which is a 185 square meter LED installation with 3D cameras to track the movements of passer-by. The data was processed, after which colorful patterns would appear on the LED screen, along with an arrow that indicates the right way of the vehicle.

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Within quite a few days we’ll step in a new year, so at the same time we should get some new keyboards. Designed by Russia-based Art lebedev, the Optimus Populyaris & Optimus Mini Six are compact keyboards and control panels that configure with many options, which can be adjusted according to the user’s needs. If you haven’t gotten used to the standard keyboards on market, you now have a chance to customize your own special ones.

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Measuring merely four inches thick, this solid-oxide fuel cell (SOFC) can generate electricity from gasoline to diesel fuel to natural gas, featuring a power-to-size ratio that’s 10 times better than other fuel cells, and thus it’s really a high-efficient fuel cell that may surprise the users. Of course there’s still disadvantage of the SOFCs, which is that you have to heat the fuel cells up to 600 degrees to get them to work. But with further development on the SOFCs, we bet they’ll soon come to the market to serve us better.