We’ve all had moments where we wished we could tune out a particular person or muffle loud music without losing the ability to hear a friend’s voice, but standard earplugs don’t exactly allow for a lot of fine-tuning. But with a new product called ‘Knops,’ you can literally turn the volume of the world up or down in an instant. Founded by musicians, the Dutch startup aims to help you hear what you want to hear and ignore what you don’t with the twist of a tiny knob.

Each pair of knots has four modes you can switch between: the first is clear sound, the second reduces ambient ‘city noise’ by 10 decibels, the third muffles live music by 20 decibels, and the fourth is ‘isolation,’ blocking out 30 decibels. You can easily switch between the four levels whenever you want, eliminating the need to constantly pull out and reinsert your earplugs.

Noting that most earbuds are “downright ugly as hell,” the designers gave Knops a minimalist look available in four different colors and trims. You might imagine that they’d be unnecessarily high-tech, turning a simple product like earplugs into an expensive, high-maintenance gadget that requires syncing to electronic devices or battery charging. Surprisingly, that’s not the case. The creators wanted control over external sounds without the distortion that can come with electronic solutions.

How does it work? According to the creators, “Knops uses no electronics, no apps and no batteries. Instead our earbuds are acoustically engineered. The real sound is filtered using gold old physics. With the help of computer simulations and real-world prototypes tested in acoustic labs, we tuned Knops. We spend a lot of time fine-tuning the sound, so we can provide the best quality sound at every volume level. Working with the natural response of the ear canal.”

You can pre-order a pair by backing the project on Kickstarter for 58 Euros (about $62 USD) or more.

3D printers are now making it possible to quickly and economically ‘print’ everything from haute couture to full-scale architecture, medical prostheses to cars. Now, the technology has advanced enough to blend two different materials in a single print to make them stronger and more functional. ‘Blossom,’ a project by designer Richard Clarkson, not only produced 3D-printed flowers made from two materials with properties ranging from flexible to rigid, he also made them inflatable.

Believed to be the world’s first inflatable 3D print, Blossom is a series of flexible artificial flowers that can be inflated with air so they ‘bloom’ like real flowers. Completed in 2013 but just now released to the public, the project incorporates a rubbery black material called Tango Black for the petals and a clear, solid substance called Fullcure 720 for the center and stem.

While this project may not be as immediately practical as many other 3D printing demonstrations, it gives us an intriguing look at what might be possible in the future, pushing past limitations that have held innovation back in this field.

“As in nature, materials can be distributed seamlessly within objects for structural and functional advantage,” says Clarkson. “The variation offers an opportunity to generate complex forms and dynamic structures that are impossible to make by any other means.”

Digital photography innovations have led to cameras that can capture images at the speed of light, see the world from the compound eye of an insect or describe scenes via speech for the visually impaired. Some of these strange and amazing digital cameras will even remember your preferred settings using iris recognition software, spit out descriptive text with the help of virtual workers around the world, or activate only at the touch of strangers.

Touchy Camera for Social Anxiety

The wearer of this odd-looking camera helmet is entirely in the dark – literally – until touched by another person. When continuous physical contact is maintained between the camera, ‘Touchy’, and an outside person, the eye-hole shutters are activated. This gives the wearer back his or her own vision, and captures images every ten seconds. The creators note that we’re all separated into social bubbles, avoiding connection with strangers. “However, technologies like internet social networking or the mobile phone loosens social boundaries, hence dehumanizing physical communication. to a certain extent, it generates social anxiety such as the one experienced in the ‘hikikomori’ and ‘otaku’ cultures in Japan. Touchy criticizes this phenomenon and suggests a solution by transforming the human being into a social device: a camera. the touchy project investigates how such a device improves social life, presupposing that a camera is a known tool for sharing memories, valuable moments, enjoyment, emotions, beauty and so forth’.

Iris Camera

Iris is an eye-tracking camera that you control by blinking and squinting. It uses biometric technology to recognize users’ faces through their unique iris signatures, automatically loading their preferred settings including aperture, ISO and screen display. Zoom in and out by widening your eyelids, and take a photo by holding your gaze before double-blinking.

Panoramic Camera Ball

This incredible throwable camera captures photos of scenes from thirty-six individual lenses to create a continuous spherical landscape. The modules are mounted in a 3D-printed enclosure resembling a soccer ball, which is padded with foam and contains an accelerometer that helps predict rise time to the highest point of a throw. At that point, the exposure is triggered. Once the ball is caught, pictures are downloaded automatically via USB and shown in a spherical panoramic viewer so you can explore the full representation of the scene.

Descriptive Camera

Imagine having an army of virtual slaves at your command who help you organize your photo collection by printing a description of what each picture contains. That’s essentially what the Descriptive Camera by Matt Richardson achieves, taking advantage of people who perform menial online tasks for a few pennies at a time via the Amazon Mechanical Turk API. You take a photo and a worker receives it instantly via IM, typing up a description that the camera will then print on a receipt. The whole process takes three to six minutes, and the quality of the description may vary. One example: “Looks like a cupboard which is ugly and old having name plates on it with a  sturdy lamp attached to it.”

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Photofuture 13 Innovative Intelligent Digital Cameras

(Check out our complete collection of Unusual, Creative and Transforming Furniture.)

[above: The Design Pod mobile office concept by Andrew Maynard]

What if you could simply reuse packaging as part of a product rather than sending away for disposal or recycling? Some industrial designers have taken up the challenge with varied results. Like creative flat-pack designs, the constraints of the projects become opportunities for self-expression and to (literally) think outside the box.

Tom Ballhatchet is a jack-of-all trades, working on inventions, interior designs and ecologically friendly products. His work is perhaps best understood through a single object that combines all of these interests: his television box that turns into a stand after a quick transformation following the unpacking of its contents.

Olivia Cheung is a conceptual artist and product designer who specializes in three dimensional design with an emphasis on popular culture. One of her projects involves light bulb packaging that also takes on the function of a lamp shade. In principle this is simple, in practice it combines entertainment, reuse and feasibility.

Knoend is a commercial company that has put into practice Cheung’s design concept, creating semi-transparent and still-elegant packaging that conveniently folds out into a surprisingly appealing minimalist light cover for the purchased fixture.

Zero Thick has another solution the the package-as-product problem. It perhaps isn’t as elegant, but it also doesn’t aim to be. In a very modernist way the packaging is expressive of its multiple purposes and shows both its final use (as a candle holder) and its prior purpose (as a candle package) quite clearly and creatively. For more compact furniture check out this collection of transformable and convertible urban furniture.