Industrial Facility. Their products are understated and refined, belying the uncompromising approach they take to reinventing accepted standards in the things we use in our daily lives. Clearly not afraid of anything, they’ve designed all sorts of things, including projectors, knife sharpeners and a camera that has no viewfinder. Instead they’ve used a mirror system. They to tend focus on what the product needs to do in it’s simplest form and then turn the design on it’s head, often producing a very measured but also radically different solution. So, the projector looks like it might be at home next to any modern lamp or table, and you might mistake the for an exquisite futuristic briefcase.

Their most recent project, The Little Disk Program, a collection of portable hard disks for LaCie fuses a lot of technology into a 1.8″ space with a simple stripped down elegance and looks more like a Zippo lighter than a data storage device. Really pleasing and tactile you want to hold it, not something you’d normally do with a hard disk, you can also imagine it disappearing into the background on its own when not needed. It certainly beats the collection of hard drives we’ve got lying around the office.

What if your phone had everything you need and nothing it didn’t? Without doubt my favourite is the Second Telephone, a project for Muji which takes the home phone a removes all non essential items. Designed for one thing only – basic communication – the Second Telephone perfectly reflects this. There are no flashing lights, menu buttons or screens. It doesn’t require a base station or even need electricity. By having the receiver button built into the phone all you have to do is pick it up, off any surface, and it answers. Genius really.

Designed to blend into your surroundings with its extreme simplicity it’s no surprise that the designers consider ‘landscape’ a key starting place in their projects. They say their “work is shaped by the questions we ask.” And I can’t but wonder what those questions are. Is there a simple answer? Seems a good place to start.