Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Bringing high tech to your living room and kitchen worktop - the Pixel Couch and the ZUSE toaster

Style is so often in the eye of the beholder.

And so it is with pixelated soft furnishings like the Pixel Couch. Designed by Cristian Zuzunaga who spent time in the Royal College of Art - and graduated too - and now being manufactured by Kvadrat (a Danish firm). But keep your Post-It pad in your hand in case you lose it when you set it down! Moroso will be selling them.

The Pixel Couch

Reminds me a bit of the Post-It wall art that a guy did over the weekend in his office ... so popular that it’s now become a permanent, approved feature. And then there was the write on, peel away Post-It wallpaper from last March.

Toaster stamps have been around for a while, to put quick Happy Birthday messages or Hearts on your childrens’ (or older loved ones’) breakfast.

The ZUSE compact, 12x12 dot-matrix toaster

But the ZUSE compact toaster aims to take that one stage further, mimicking a rather crude dot matrix printer, burning 12 x 12 images onto the bread as it passes through.

Still in the concept stage, it’s just about one step up from the dot matrix printers that squirt the red best before dates onto eggs as they fly past on conveyor belts on their way into egg cartons.

The designers have a high-concept way of expressing their creation:

“With its candid intention of providing happiness to its owner ZUSE can randomly draw from its repertoire of images encoded in its memory chip. ZUSE custom-toasts for a fresh start of the day.”

(As usual, via Shiny Shiny.)

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