Core77

Anker Bak and Takumi Kohgei's Gorgeous Gaze Highback Chair

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\From a distance, this might appear to be a Scandinavian Midcentury classic that you missed.

But a closer look reveals something startling: What appears to be a gigantic slotted screw, the likes of which you'd never see fully exposed in that era.

In fact the chair is modern, by Danish designer Anker Bak and Japanese manufacturer Takumi Kohgei. The Gaze Highback Chair comes both with and without armrests, and the armrest version reveals even more metal:

In this collection, steel is not relegated to a traditional secondary role but is used to highlight functionality with unprecedented openness, where the construction is not hidden but defines each piece's identity.

The warmth of wood beautifully complements the precision of steel, reflecting Bak's desire to create a series where Nordic and Japanese minimalism and aesthetics are expressed openly, with nothing concealed within the design.

The modular nature of this series allows for personal customization. You can choose between chairs with or without armrests, between soft upholstered finishes and a lighter, natural woven rattan option. These choices enable all pieces in the Gaze collection to seamlessly integrate into any space.

The name "Gaze" captures the soul of the series: An invitation to linger, observe, and appreciate one's surroundings in deep comfort, whether you spend a brief moment or an entire day in the chair, whether it faces the calm of nature through a large window or sits on a covered terrace.

Bak also designed a companion footstool:

Both are made of Oak, and upholstered with fabric by Kvadrat.

Unitree Develops Production-Ready Mech Suit

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China's Unitree produces both humanoid robots and dog-bots. Now they've scaled up the former, into something that a driver can climb inside (albeit quite awkwardly). They've just unveiled their GD-01, "the world's first production-ready manned mecha," the company says. It's both drive-able and autonomous (or at least remote-controllable).

The demo video is straight-up weird. First off, they're branding it as a "civilian vehicle." Imagine a city full of people commuting like this:

Secondly, the company writes "Please everyone be sure to use the robot in a Friendly and Safe manner." But they've recorded this for the demo:

Thirdly, you'd think they'd want to work out the ingress and egress before releasing the demo vid:

The following feature is quite innovative: Since the mech suit doesn't have to obey the laws of biology, it can bend over backwards, then walk backwards on all fours just as easily as walking forwards on two.

There's no official word yet on release date or price.

Renault Brings Back the Canvas Roof

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In the mid-20th century, when American carmakers were churning out convertibles, European manufacturers had a thriftier solution: The roll-back canvas roof. It was a much more economical way to provide an open-air experience. The Citroen 2CV and the Renault 4 offered them.

Today Renault has revived the Renault 4 as an EV. And the Plein Sud ("Due South") version of the Renault 4 E-Tech, as it's called, has also brought back the canvas roof.

The Plein Sud canvas roof has been engineered to deliver the joy of open-air driving without compromising refinement or practicality. Operated via a one-touch button or voice control using Renault's Reno digital assistant, the roof opens smoothly to create a wide 80x92cm aperture, allowing both front and rear passengers to enjoy an open, panoramic view of the sky above.

The canvas roof, which gathers cleanly into three folds, can be opened in several intermediate positions to suit the occupants' mood. When closed, its multi-layer construction ensures excellent acoustic and sealing qualities with no trade-off in weight, while there is also minimal impact on headroom compared to the fixed-roof version.

We won't, of course, see this car on American roads; Renault pulled out of the U.S. market in 1987.

Core77 Weekly Roundup (5-11-26 to 5-15-26)

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Here's what we looked at this week:

Alessandro Stabile's beautiful Areo Chair for Kristalia: The Thonet No. 14 of our time?

David Chipperfield Design's plywood bathtub for Agape.

A clever add-on spout for camping vessels.

Luxury…towel rods. I mean, what better use for Murano glass.

Production minimalism: Vestre's June bench.

DEOS Architecture's chunky old-growth Oak seating.

ICP's climbing walls: Attractive, and designed to be easy to install.

Daniel Hubert's brilliant portable 3D-printed chess set for tradespeople.

Outside-the-box design: The Barbican's unusual bathroom sinks.

Japanese snack packaging goes black & white, due to Iran-war-related shortages. And a potato character is out of a job.

Luisa Ruge, the industrial designer pioneering Animal-Centered Design. Starting with a power button designed for dogs.

Invented for the cleanroom industry: Completely flush fasteners with a surprising mechanism.

Momentum Studio's low-waste 06 Sidetable.

A nifty folding travel lamp design from the 1950s.

A Folding Travel Lamp Design from the 1950s

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This wonderful, utilitarian design from the 1950s was made by a company called Blue Seal.

It's a handy portable lamp that can be used on a desk, or clamped to a surface. The reflector seals against the underside of the base, like a clamshell, protected the bulb within during transit.

It's made of aluminum, and this particular version has had its original finish stripped off.

This lamp was in the inventory of New-Zealand-based vintage goods reseller Kiosk (and has since been sold).

Momentum Studio's Low-Waste 06 Sidetable

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This 06 Sidetable is by German industrial design firm Momentum Studio.

To create it, minimal cuts were made in a 5mm aluminum sheet:

A major focus during the development was the efficient nesting of the laser-cut parts. We managed to use 96% of the raw material area for the final product, leaving only 4% off-cuts. This minimal-waste approach not only saves valuable resources but also allows us to offer a fair price while keeping the entire production strictly "Made in Germany".

We are absolutely in love with the bold, geometric silhouette this approach created.

The firm describes their overall approach:

The Pursuit of Form

Our work is a continuous approach toward the perfect form—a relentless process of refining lines and proportions until nothing remains to be added or taken away. Our goal is a level of precision that elevates an object into a collectible that carries its value and soul through time.

Integrity in Matter

We select materials for their permanence, not their convenience. We create objects that are designed to age with dignity and outlast generations.

The table will ship flatpacked, and they estimate they'll be in production in two months' time.

Completely Flush Fasteners with a Surprising Mechanism

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Jeff and Brandon Serle are engineers from the cleanroom industry. Cleanrooms are used for the manufacture of pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, medical devices and aerospace parts, where the environment needs to be pristine. Even the slotted heads in fasteners must be fastidiously cleaned, lest they capture any dust.

The Serle brothers thus invented Flush Fasteners. Here's what the heads look like:

So where does the driver go? You're not gonna believe this:

Yep, they've engineered the fasteners with a spring-loaded plug that seals the cavity shut. When you need to drive it, you just stick the bit in and it yields.

The Serles' invention went viral in 2022, and today Flush Fasteners have also seen uptake by hospitals, the marine industry (salt water corrosion can start in exposed fastener heads) and even industrial designers who can't bear the thought of exposed fastener grooves.

Luisa Ruge, Industrial Designer Pioneering Animal-Centered Design

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Industrial designer Luisa Ruge has worked for Steelcase and Whirlpool, but ultimately gravitated towards her true passion: Animal-centered design. "My journey into animal-centered design began not with theory, but with lived experience at Bergin College of Canine Studies," she writes. "I chose to start with service dogs because of the deep, interdependent bond they share with their human partners—trusting your life to an "animal" is one of the most profound relationships we can witness.

"I wanted to understand how animals perceive, learn, and respond. What I discovered was transformative: everything we feel travels down the leash. Dogs don't respond to what we say, but to what we embody—our tension, presence, and intention. This work taught me to observe without judgment, to become more consistent, and to take full responsibility for the signals I give off. It was the beginning of designing beyond language."

Though she already had two degrees in ID, as well as a Masters in Canine Science from Bergin, Ruge pursued a fourth: A PhD in Animal-Computer Interaction at the UK's Open University. "With new awareness from the training world, I wanted to take things further—beyond practice, into systems. I began asking: What if animals were not just users, but participants in design?

"There, I developed a button interface for service dogs to request human help—bringing together technology, empathy, and behavioral science. That work laid the foundation for animal-centered design as a methodology: one that challenges human dominance in design and opens space for true interspecies collaboration."

Ruge's design, developed under professor Clara Mancini, has evolved into the Dogosophy Button. Manufactured by Ravencourt, a UK-based company that creates daily living aids for those with disabilities, it's commercially available in the UK. It allows dogs to turn things on and off, which is handy for those with mobility issues.

So what goes into the design of a button for dogs? More than you'd think. Ravencourt explains:

"Its blue push-pad is highly visible for dogs and the contrasting white casing allows it to stand out against any background. Its lightly textured surface provides a comfortable grip, whilst making it easy to keep the pad clean. Its convex profile makes it possible to approach and press it comfortably from different angles.

"The button responds to gentle nudges, for dogs who prefer to use their nose, and withstands energetic pushes, for dogs who prefer to use their paws.

"A soft light inside the button's chamber flashes the moment the control is activated, showing that the interaction has been successful without dazzling dogs' eyes.

"Since it is wireless, the button can be placed or fixed where it is most accessible for the dogs who need to use it, regardless of where the appliance is located, within its 40 metres range."

What the training sessions look like:

And a successfully trained dog using the button:

Unfortunately for us Yanks, the Dogosophy Button is UK-only for now.

Ruge is now the Chief Design Officer for Barknito, a tech startup that gamifies dog training through a mobile app.

ICP's Climbing Walls: Attractive, and Designed to be Easy to Install

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Even climbing walls can be made beautiful, as demonstrated by climbing wall architecture, design and engineering company ICP. The Australian firm's "volumes," which are distributed globally, are designed to be easy for general contractors to install, while being easy on the eyes.

"Climbing walls are more than just functional, they're a canvas for creativity," the company writes.

The company isn't shy about sharing behind-the-scenes shots, showing you the parts of a climbing wall you never see:

"Our system significantly diminishes the necessity for specialized climbing wall installers, allowing any building professional to install with ease. Engineered to perfection and rigorously safety tested, our wall system is a solid solution. Being a fully modular system, our walls are adaptable to your evolving needs; it's easily disassembled and relocated, providing the ultimate future-proof solution."

ICP's walls can be found across America, Australia, Canada and Europe, and the company is now making a push into Africa.

Outside-the-Box Design: The Barbican's Unusual Bathroom Sinks

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The design of the Barbican Estates, London's residential Brutalist masterpiece, was finalized in 1959. Many of the apartments had bathrooms where the toilet was in its own little room, separated from the sink and bathtub. (This is an arrangement you often see in Japan.)

But in the 1960s, as construction began, the housing codes changed. Any room that contained a toilet now had to have its own sink. As-designed, there was simply no room to add a conventional sink to the separate toilet rooms. It fell to German architect Michael Hohmann to solve the problem.

Hohmann collaborated with Twyfords, a British sink manufacturer, and their in-house designer Munroe Blair on a radical design that would fit within the space. Because of the sink's unusual shape, it reportedly took six months for the firm to perfect the unusual mold and firing conditions required to create the porcelain sink within the tight tolerances.

Today the Barbican basin, as it's known, has become something of an icon, and an example of outside-of-the-box design thinking. It was also long-lived; it remained in production for over 50 years.

Brilliant Portable 3D-Printed Chess Set for Tradespeople

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Daniel Hubert, a 3D designer who posts his .stl files on Printables, may be a genius. At a hardware store, he encountered sets of security bits (for driving tamper-proof fasteners) in both black and silver.

Where we see specialty bits, Hubert saw chess pieces:

He then 3D printed this:

The files for his Screwdriver Bits Chess are here.

Japanese Snack Packaging Goes Black & White, Due to Iran War

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Butterfly effect: Among the things that currently aren't getting shipped through the Strait of Hormuz is naphtha, a crude oil derivative that's used in colored inks. As a result Calbee, the Frito-Lay of Japan, has announced they're switching their chip packaging to black and white.

"This measure is intended to help maintain a stable supply of products," the company writes, noting that the color change "will not affect product quality." (Which means, I guess, that they don't actually use the colored ink in the chips themselves.)

Tragically, the change also means that their potato pitchman must be removed from the graphic; apparently he doesn't translate well to black and white. It also appears he was responsible for 5g of the overall package weight.

DEOS Architecture's Chunky Old-Growth Oak Seating

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There's something really charming about these chunky, sort of art-totem Miorita furniture pieces.

It's also shocking that they're made out of gigantic pieces of old-growth Oak, which are scarce in America; but DEOS Architecture, the firm that created the pieces, is based in Moldova. Romania still has large tracts of old-growth forest, with some stands reportedly being 300-400 years old. So these pieces appeal to me partially for the primitive, designer-as-child form, and primarily out of raw material envy.

DEOS is producing them in a limited run only, for €1,000 ($1,180) a pop.

Their making-of vid:

Making the Invisible Visible

Amish Patel

For the last thirty years, venture capital has largely been shaped by a software worldview. The model was simple enough: write a check, help a company scale fast, chase the hockey stick, and win through speed. That framework made sense in a world where software was supposed to eat everything.

But that is not the world we are entering now.

What's emerging instead is a much more complex and consequential arena: the infusion of intelligence into the physical world. Manufacturing. Healthcare. Energy. Robotics. Supply chains. Industrial systems. Real infrastructure. This is where some of the biggest opportunities now sit. And this is also where the traditional venture model starts to show its limits.

Physical innovation does not move at software speed. It takes longer. It costs more. It requires coordination across far more variables. You are not just moving ones and zeros around. You are working through factories, deployment, regulation, hardware constraints, research institutions, supply chains, and real-world adoption. That journey is harder, lonelier, and far less forgiving than the old venture playbook ever accounted for.

That is why what Eclipse is doing deserves attention. The headline is easy to misunderstand. Another billion dollars raised for physical AI is interesting, but that is not the real signal. The real signal is that a massive chunk of that capital is being allocated not just to investing, but to building. It suggests that even major institutions now recognize that writing checks is not enough. If you want to transform the physical world, you need a model that is more operational, more collaborative, and more deeply involved in execution.

Eclipse is not alone in making this bet. SOSV, through its HAX program, has built one of the most active hardware-focused investment operations in the world, running founders through a hands-on development process inside a fully equipped facility with machine tools, engineering labs, and on-staff technical experts. Monozukuri Ventures, whose name draws from the Japanese concept of "the art of making things," pairs early investment with prototyping know-how and manufacturing expertise rather than treating those as the founder's problem to solve alone. These are not incubators in the traditional sense. They are something closer to operating partners with capital attached.

The category is still being named. Venture. Studio. Incubator. Accelerator. Fund. Holding company. Operator network. None of those labels fully captures what is emerging. The point is not the label. The point is the mechanism.

The mechanism reflects a simple reality: physical innovation requires a different kind of institutional support than software ever did. In software, a small team can sometimes brute-force its way from idea to product. In physical tech, that is much harder. The path demands what might be called a fellowship model: the right operators, the right institutions, the right supply-chain experience, the right technical and commercial guidance, brought together at the right time. It takes collaboration, not just capital.

That first stretch, between a validated idea and a product actually deployed in the world, is where most of the real work happens. Everyone loves the breakthrough moment. The actual journey from "I have a vision" to "this is running in the real world and changing an industry" is rarely a solo act, and it is almost never funded well by a check and a board seat.

This is beginning to reshape how the investment landscape is organized. At the top, you have mega-institutional ambitions, the JP Morgan and Bezos-scale bets on reindustrialization and physical infrastructure. Then you have firms like Eclipse, moving beyond traditional venture toward a more operator-infused model aimed at large industrial problems. There are earlier-stage players as well, working from the ground up: more 0-to-1 in orientation, more translational, more directly focused on helping researchers and founders navigate that brutal first stretch. At Conduit, that is where we have focused our work.

The thesis across all of these efforts is not that founders need less ambition. They need more. They need the willingness to pursue big, important, disruptive problems. But that ambition must be paired with operational discipline and a support structure that understands what physical-world execution actually demands.

The people building at the intersection of machine intelligence and physical reality need more than encouragement and a term sheet. They need access to operators who have done it before, to factories and labs and institutional relationships, to manufacturing insight and strategic guidance that make hard things possible. There are now firms organized specifically to provide that, catering to specific verticals: robotics, energy, defense, medtech, industrial automation. The model is maturing.

The old venture model was built for software. The next innovation stack will be built for the physical world. And not by capital alone.

About the Author: Amish Patel leads Conduit Venture Labs, a venture studio dedicated to building and backing companies that merge software intelligence with the physical world. By leveraging expertise in operational execution, product design, and venture capital, the studio transforms innovative technologies into impactful products and businesses. Amish's background includes leadership roles in product and design within consumer and medical technology, with a passion for blending design, behavior science, and engineering to build trusted, widely adopted solutions.

Production Minimalism: Vestre's June Bench

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This June bench, by street furniture brand Vestre, takes minimalist production seriously. It consists of just two steel end pieces that define the overall form, while pre-cut lumber does most of the heavy lifting.

There's also an armrest version, where the steel endpieces become significantly more complicated.

Designed by the trio Espen Voll, Tore Borgersen and Michael Olofsson, JUNE was developed to meet the need for a seating solution in more classic or transitional settings – especially in projects where a modernist look may be seen as too bold or out of place. The goal was to create a quiet, inclusive design that would feel at home in European cities, American parks and heritage contexts, while staying true to Vestre's design DNA.

The form balances softness and structure; oval tubes meet round legs to create a gentle, elegant silhouette. High-back and low-back options allow for flexibility and comfort, while easy to assemble modular connections enable endless layout options and quicker installation times.

Vestre offers the benches in over 200 different powder-coated colors.