A bag is definitely not just a bag when you’re commuting in all weather conditions, biking to work, carrying a lot of expensive gear and trying to look professional and stay organized all the while. These next-level backpacks, tote bags, duffels and briefcases are full of all kinds of cool features, like built-in solar chargers, bike safety lights, crash sensors, theft-proof locks, access from virtually any angle, extra durable materials and every manner of pocket, compartment and gear tie-down you can possibly imagine.

Aster: The World’s Safest Commute Backpack

Aiming to improve visibility, reduce accidents and save lives, the Aster commuter backpack features rear, front and profile lights as well as automatic brake lights and integrated turn signals. Not only will drivers in vehicles see you from all angles, you’re less likely to end up with a door in your face, too. The backpack includes a USB-rechargeable built-in battery that powers the lights for 10-15 hours of commute time. It ships with an app called Lumos Aster for additional functionality like low battery alerts and anti-theft protection features. A crash sensor inside the bag will alert your emergency contacts if something happens to you. Plus, it’s got a helmet holder, lock strap, whistle buckle, bottle pockets, shoe compartment and a rain cover. The bag opens completely so you can grab whatever you need without pulling everything else out.

SlingFin Honey Badger Backpack and Bicycle Pannier

Wear it as a backpack or a bicycle pannier. The SlingFin Honey Badger backpack is as tough as its name suggests with a semi-rigid external skeleton made of recyclable high density polyethylene that helps carry weight more comfortably than a fabric bag. The back and straps are made of padded mesh for airflow between the wearer and the pack, and the lid is magnetic. Throw an LED light or even your phone with the flashlight on inside, and it dramatically increases your visibility at night. It comes with a 25-liter dry bag that can be used to protect your belongings inside, or alone as an ultralight pack. The exterior is as customizable as you want it to be – you can draw right on it.

12L Cargo Motorcycle Tail Bag

If you get around on a motorcycle, you need tough waterproof gear that won’t bulk up your silhouette. The 12L Cargo Tail Bag by Shaun Lee is great for both everyday use and overnight trips, compressing down to a packable size that sits low on your seat.IT’s made of waxed canvas and metal attachment hardware with a waterproof zipper, hidden pockets and a removable cargo net for outerwear and water bottles. When it’s empty, it rolls down to a quarter of its size secured with clips. Attachment straps secure the bag to your bike without a specialized rack system.

The NOMATIC Travel Bag

Designed for a 3-7 day trip, the NOMATIC combines the best features from a backpack, duffel bag and luggage in the bid to be “the most functional travel bag ever.” It fits a whole lot more than you’d imagine, especially since it comes with a vacuum compression bag for your clothes. Other features include a laundry bag, shoe compartments, an RFID safe pocket, laptop and tablet slots, water bottle pocket, roller bag sleeve, TSA-approved lock, built-in cord management, a valuables pocket, notebook pocket, easy access pocket for boarding passes and other essentials, and more. It’s also water resistant, and meets carry-on size requirements.

The Everyday Backpack, Tote and Sling

The ‘Everyday’ set by Peak Design includes a backpack, tote bag and sling packed full of features that will please both professional photographers picky about their camera bags and everyday users. Available in 20L and 30L sizes, the backpack includes easy-access side zippers, a dedicated laptop sleeve, subdivided interior side pockets, outer side pockets, built-in expansion and lots of straps for bulky items like tripods. The tote has similar pockets and external carry abilities as well as dual side access and a flex-fold interior divider system. Need something even smaller? The Everyday Sling is super compact, but has many of the same features as the other two bags.

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Its In The Bag 13 Ultra Functional Backpacks Totes For Busy Urban Lifestyles

A lot of the most impressive space-saving ideas really only work for wealthier urbanite apartment owners who can simply hire a contractor to design a bunch of customized built-ins. The results – like beds that lower from the ceiling at the push of a button – are often undeniably cool and effective, but not exactly accessible to most of us. For the renter with an average income, tiny space hacks need to be cheaper and way more portable. Here are 15 ideas that are either commercially available for less than the price of your first-born child, or could serve as inspiration for something to build yourself.

Fold-Up Walk-In Wardrobe

How luxurious must it feel to have the kind of walk-in closet full of beautiful wooden built-in shelves and drawers, with space to organize all of your shoes, accessories and clothing? Hosun Ching applies this concept to a fold-out wardrobe with additional storage in the doors, transforming into a sort of portable walk-in. There are mirrors on both sides, too, so you can see your outfits from every angle.

“The depth of a standard wardrobe is 60cm,” says Ching. “That is simply not practical, because it means that you literally lose sight of your clothing; and what you don’t see, you don’t wear. The Walk-In Closet is a small storage unit designed to solve this problem. The focus is on organization and visibility. There are drawers for accessories and the reduced depth does away with those ‘hidden’ stacks.”

DIY Breakfast Nook with a View

Turn any available window in your space into a cafe table with a view simply by adding a shelf and a chair or a couple bar stools. It takes up practically zero space, installs in mere minutes and makes a big impact.

The Hobby Box Craft Cabinet

Got a lot of crafting materials or art supplies? The HobbyBox by The Original Scrapbox Company has space for everything, keeping papers neatly organized, protected and individually visible. In addition to a whole lot of internal shelving, this craft cabinet features a small wall of magnetic storage and some hooks for hanging certain items. It also comes with a fold-down work table, a daylight LED light, 22 clear acrylic totes and 7 clear zipper pouches. The company has other versions of this cabinet that are customized for other activities, like sewing, as well as narrow storage towers and storage desks with clear tops so you can see all your supplies from above. Being able to closet it all up when you’re done eliminates a whole lot of visual clutter in a small space.

Space-Saving Living Cubes

Few things make more of an impact in a small space than the ‘all-in-one living cube,’ a freestanding piece of mega-furniture that typically incorporates a bed, storage and perhaps a desk or couch into the same unit. This one, the Kammerspiel by Nils Holger Moormann, is designed to stand in the center of a studio apartment, dividing up the space and offering just about everything you need. It even has a mini kitchen and a walk-in wardrobe.

“At a time when affordable living space is becoming scarce and the grand opera is not always possible, a Kammerspiel – or intimate theater – can be a fitting alternative,” says Moormann of his creation. “It’s a room within a room, condensing enough features and space to take the airiness of the rest of the apartment into consideration.”

Endlessly Customizable Peg Board Walls

Spotted here at a compact Budapest AirBnB designed by local firm Position Collective, pegboard walls prove they don’t have to be relegated to dirty garages to be handy. This one is made of a smoother-grained plywood, with pegs supporting custom shelves. You could mount these to the wall and have an endlessly customizable shelving arrangement without drilling a bunch of holes in your rental.

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Portable Walk In Closets 14 Other Ways To Make A Studio Feel Like A Mansion

One person’s ego-centric vision of how cities should adapt to their own particular individual needs encroaches upon the dreams of another, as revealed by MVRDV’s Tetris-like open-walled ‘(W)Ego House.’ The design is part art installation, part futuristic vision, part warning against architecture that’s one-size-fits-all. Originally created in 2015 and displayed at Dutch Design Week 2017, it’s now reassembled for UABB, the seventh Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture in Shenzhen.

MVRDV worked with The Why Factory, a think tank and research institute associated with the Delft University of Technology, to create the installation, which “represents a window into the future of adaptable housing to the user’s needs. The vision allows the coexistence of multiple lifestyles in an optimized dense reality.”

Dwelling on the concept of coexistence, the architects posit that we all have to learn to negotiate with each other to optimize use of limited urban space. The layout of (W)ego is meant to be adaptable and reconfigurable, though the installation displays it as stacked static rooms.

As far as the architects are concerned, this process of negotiation is a good thing, and W(Ego City) displays a novel way in which various kinds of housing can be Tetrised into a single building taking up a relatively small footprint in a city where undeveloped land is hard to come by. They argue that every dwelling could be unique, each one ergonomic and tailor-made to particular spatial needs. Some people might need an accessible space all on one level toward the bottom floor, others may prefer a more unusual space that requires active climbing, others are happy to pay less for a smaller and simpler unit.

That may be true, but is the firm accidentally making a statement on the impact of class, and how the dreams of the rich impede upon the everyday comfort and survival of those with fewer resources at their disposal? While some might look at (W)Ego City and see a playground where they can choose the customized residence of their heart’s desire, others see a maze of ridiculous spaces that aren’t just unavailable to them, but produce irregular, impractical, virtually unusable ‘leftover’ spaces that would likely rent for lower prices.

MVRDV co-founder Winy Maas says “Through gaming and other tools, (W)ego explores participatory design processes to model the competing desires and egos of each resident in the fairest possible way.”

But when multiple people are ‘negotiating’ with each other to build their own spaces however they want within a limited envelope, and not everyone has the same financial resources, physical strength, entitlement and pushy personalities, who wins?

It’s not just you – that bench in your city is designed to be uncomfortable on purpose. Armed with a loose definition of what it means to ‘loiter,’ intentionally hostile and sometimes downright sadistic urban design prioritizes separating ‘undesirables’ from city residents deemed more deserving. But these designs aren’t just inhumane – they have a negative practical and psychological effect on virtually everyone who spends time in public spaces. Can you imagine how different our cities could feel if they welcomed us, made us comfortable, asked us to stay a while and treated us like we actually live here?

Benches That Prevent Laying Down

The Camden Bench hates you. Seriously. It isn’t just a vaguely Brutalist block of concrete with a surface faceted for the sake of aesthetics. It’s the public furniture equivalent of a finger wagging in your face. Commissioned by the Camden London Borough Council and installed in 2012, it boasts of its ability to deter a grand total of 22 behaviors, including sleeping, skateboarding, canoodling, drug dealing (what?), littering, graffiti and theft. Its solidity makes it too heavy to move, its angles make it uncomfortable, it has no crevices and it’s coated in a waterproof anti-paint coating.

In a masterful stroke of smirking condescension, its manufacturer, UK-based Factory Furniture, calls it “a more inclusive place to sit,” noting that its indentations are at different heights. Sure. But where there’s a will, there’s a way, and skateboarders have already proven the marketing materials wrong, as seen in a video at The Guardian.

But other bench designs simply insert armrests and other objects, ostensibly to ‘separate the seats.’ We all know what they’re really for – preventing anyone from laying down. Cities criminalize homelessness and ghettoize low-income residents in an attempt to conceal poverty under the guise of making public areas cleaner and safer while the machinery that creates these social and economic conditions in the first place churns away. Furthermore, these designs don’t distinguish between houseless people and other city residents who might be ill, disabled, pregnant, elderly or just tired after a long bike ride. So who are they for?

The Archisuit by artist Sarah Ross is one example of ways in which city residents fight back against these measures. “Archisuit consists of an edition of four leisure jogging suits made for specific architectural structures in Los Angeles. The suits include the negative space of the structures and allow a wearer to fit into, or onto, structures designed to deny them.”

(images via Wikimedia Commons, Factory Furniture, Flickr Creative Commons, Sarah Ross)

Public Seating ‘Alternatives’

If you’re a small person, you might be able to rest a single butt cheek on the wooden oval stools at Montreal’s Laurier Station. If you’re not, the most these ‘seats’ can offer you is a momentary place to sort of awkwardly lean against the wall. In Tokyo, a tubular stainless steel bench that gets dangerously hot in summer and freezing in the winter certainly won’t let you settle in for long. Some parks have installed giant boulders in place of benches – good luck taking a nap on one of those.

A book called Unpleasant Design by Selena Savic and Gordan Savicic chronicles all of these awkward seats and other ways in which public spaces are made intentionally uncomfortable, modified to deter certain activities or otherwise created to manipulate us. Examples they’ve gathered include decorative ‘picket fences’ around public landscaping that are really spikes, boulders placed beneath highway overpasses, trash cans with tiny openings and even benches with studs built right into the seat that only retract for a short period if you insert some coins into a slot. The latter started as a satirical joke by sculptor Fabian Brunsing, but Chinese officials didn’t see the humor, copying the design in Shandong’s Yantai Park.

(images via Wikimedia Commons, MTL Blog, Yumiko Hayakawa, Unpleasant Design)

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Hostile Urbanism 22 Intentionally Inhospitable Examples Of Defensive Design

Proponents of our supposed driverless car-sharing future say the system could lead to a dramatic drop in the number of vehicles in our cities, so does that mean we’ll be able to fill our sudden abundance of parking spaces with micro houses like this one? The Tikku by Marco Casagrande is a three-story structure with a footprint that fits perfectly within a single parking spot and can be erected overnight. Wherever a car can go, “the Tikku can grow,” says the architect.

“Tikku is a safe-house for neo-archaic biourbanism, a contemporary cave for a modern urban nomad,” Casagrande explains of his creation, which was installed outside of Atheneum in the heart of Helsinki for the city’s Design Week 2017. “It will offer privacy, safety and comfort. All the rest of the functions can be found in the surrounding city. Tikku is a needle of urban acupuncture, concquering the no-man’s land from the cars and tuning the city towards the organic. Many Tikkus can grow side-by-side like mushrooms and they can fuse into larger organisms.”

The self-sufficient house produces its own energy with solar panels and has dry toilets, but you’ll have to tote in your own water; the architect emphasizes that there’s no need for many amenities like showers, saunas, laundry machines or complex kitchens because such things exist all around you in the city.

The Tikku is made of CLT (cross-laminated timber), an engineered wood material that’s five times lighter than reinforced concrete, and it doesn’t require a foundation; a sand box in the bottom gives it balance on slightly uneven urban surfaces. It’s simple but cute, with interiors that might offer just enough space for a single minimalist occupant who’s dedicated to integrating into the fabric of the city. Would you live there?