So from what I can tell this robot baby carriage promises to keep your baby happy and comfortable while you and your spouse are taking care of routine tasks around the home. From the BMGK Co Ltd website you’ll find it promises to:

• provide a comfortable chair from which your baby can watch you work

• provide an equally comfortable cradle when junior falls asleep
• act as a swing when baby wakes up. Oddly the swing isn’t in a pendulum motion but rather what they describe as a horizontal sliding motion. Weird
• provide a ‘maneuvering’ mode that as far as I can tell is very roomba-like and moves around the room without hitting furniture. Hopefully it knows what stairs are as well
• clean up easily, allow you to move it manually and hold a charge for over 3 days

I don’t know about this one. If anyone’s had an opportunity to try one out I’d love to know how it works. If it lives up to the promises then the $500.00 price tag may be a steal.

Found over at The Daily What

Cool Mom Picks recently posted about a creative furniture design shop called Dust Furniture that features really fun shelves and tables that would be perfect for children’s rooms. While I love many of the designs, in particular:

The Best Bookcase no.2
Sparkle Table

they remind me a little too much of a local Vancouver design shop that I posted about a while back called Straight Line Designs. I don’t know how old Dust is, but I’ve known about Straight Line Designs for many years, having toured their shop a few years back during the Eastside Culture Crawl.

Since Straight Line Design has a Flash site that doesn’t allow linking to product pages (seriously… wtf) you’ll have to go check them out yourself here.

I’ve been remiss in my posting… and will try to correct this. In the meantime, I’ll try to deliver a quick link fix below. Have a great weekend!

Straight Line Designs
I was lucky enough to stumble on these guys during Vancouver’s Culture Crawl a couple years ago. The designs are wonderful and would be loved by any kid lucky enough to have these pieces in his or her room. Some favourite examples include (man I hate flash sites without internal links):

Cabinets section > Boom
Cabinets section > Melting
Cabinets section > Tree Cabinet
Furniture section > Bad Table (kids would LOVE this!)
Furniture section > Burnt Leg Table
Projects > Pine Beetle Rocks

If you’re in Vancouver next November I recommend you try the Culture Crawl, and be certain to visit Straight Line Designs.

Joe Blow Glassworks
While on the subject of the Culture Crawl I have to mention Jeff Burnette’s Joe Blow Glassworks. While the prices may prove a bit high for you to let children play with these things, his Raygunz are a thing of beauty. I almost gave in when I stumbled across some of his pieces on a recent trip to Tofino.

Enjoy!

w00t! There’s an English version.

Ok, I definitely want some of these for gifts and for myself.

My French is bad, but these Livingstones look to me like the world’s coolest beanbag replacements. I’d buy about 20, various colours and sizes and spread them around the living room.

I can only imagine how much fun kids would have with these… one recommendation though, please be sure to reinforce that while throwing rocks at home might be OK, the outside world is a different story.

How much? Who knows.
Where can I get them? If someone could tell me it would be much appreciated!

I was walking around Yaletown (Vancouver) this weekend and ducked into a few shops containing toys and such along the way. As I’m not at all handy with tools I was in awe of some of the nicely designed toys, clothing and in particular furniture on display. Possibly more in awe of the outrageous price tags affixed to same.

My cousin caught me looking at some very simple, yet very nice looking rocking chairs, essentially what looked like single sheets of plywood folded into various curved shapes. The price tag? In excess of $2,000.

He looked at me, shook his head and informed me that he could make the same product for a tenth of the price. When I actually looked at the piece I found it easy to believe. The baby / children’s toy market must be a marketer’s dream. Cater to the well heeled parents, take a page out of Apple’s marketing playbook and if you’re lucky your simple design will soon line your pocket.

Update: Here’s an example of the chair I talked about… not exactly the same one, but very similar.

Another example? Just look at Uglydolls. I love the things, but come on, how difficult are they to design and produce?