It’s hard to imagine greeting Monday with enthusiasm. It signals the end of the weekend and, usually, a return to work. New York design firm IDEO has added some joy to Mondays with a trio of products that are guaranteed to make you smile on that most dreaded of days.

Created for Studio 360’s Redesigns series, the products are referred to collectively as Monyay! Lolzzz, the alarm clock above, starts out your Monday with a hearty laugh. The cute, minimalist timepiece features a curved back and a “bellybutton” on the front.

It wakes you with the sounds of children laughing as it tips back and rolls with laughter, a sound that has been proven to improve the mood. Every Monday brings a new recording of laughter so it’s like a little gift to yourself each week. To increase the volume of the laughter, you tickle the clock’s little bellybutton. To snooze, just set it up on its end.

Getting back into a schedule after a carefree weekend is such a drag. Looking at all of those little boxes with the week’s appointments in them can be daunting, and there’s nothing fun about the standard calendar. PopUp is a colorful calendar app that uses bright, animated polka dots to display your appointments. The app gives you sweet little reminders of how to find joy no matter what you’re doing. You might be having lunch with a new acquaintance (a great chance to make a new friend) or let you know about a lovely piece of public art near your next meeting.

PopUp is accompanied by a whimsical desk accessory that replaces annoying reminder beeps with bubbles. When an appointment is coming up, PopUp blows and releases a bubble. Instead of irritating you with a grating sound, it delights you with a silly, fun visual reminder.

Sincerely is a practice in gratitude that reminds you of everything you’re thankful for. It evokes two sweetly innocent images: the wagging tail of a happy dog and the can-and-string telephones of childhood. The app reminds you to cap off every Sunday evening by recording a message of gratitude to someone you care about. You use the corded can to record a message and the recipient is notified when their can begins wagging its little tail. They can then hold the receiver up to an ear to listen to your words.

Regularly expressing gratitude can actually improve your health and help you live longer, so making a habit of thanking the important people in your life is good for more than strengthening relationships. This tactile method of sending and receiving messages is so much more personal than getting a text or an email. And by ending your Sunday on a note of thanks, you can wake up on Monday morning feeling warm and fuzzy.

The post Impossible Dream: Making Mondays Bearable (and Fun) first appeared on Gajitz.

How do you measure the passing of days, weeks and years? Do you cross the little squares off on a wall calendar? Maybe tear off one more sheet of your daily calendar every evening before bed? Believe it or not, the mess of measuring tapes above represent a thoroughly novel way to measure the passage of time.

Hiroyuki Miyake’s Measure Calendar is a clever play on both traditional calendars and classic tape measures. The tape coiled inside the plastic housing is pulled out day by day, revealing more and more of the markings that represent passing days.

One side of the tape represents January to June while the other side has markings for the dates from July to December. Smaller numbers tell you how many days remain until the end of the year.

If you like, you can compare the revealed markings to physical objects. How much longer is your little black book than those two weeks you spent mourning after a break-up? Measuring the inches rather than the days until a vacation might just help to make the wait seem less traumatic.

The post Stretching Out the Days: Unique Tape Measure Calendar first appeared on Gajitz.

It has been said that the days of the single-purpose gadget are over. If an electronic item doesn’t do at least two or three things, we aren’t interested. And why not? Smaller components are being engineered all the time, so it makes sense to save space by cramming lots of different gizmos together into one.

The Sundial Wall Clock concept features a revolutionary space-saving design that combines a clock with all sorts of other organizational and social applications and a slick touch screen…and lasers.

The clock itself blends analog and digital display methods, using lasers to point to the traditional clock-face positions of the numbers and projecting the numbers themselves onto the wall’s surface.

But the Sundial can do much more than tell the time: it keeps track of handy facts like currency exchange rates and weather conditions. It even appears to be able to play music and display the name of the artist and track on the wall.

Maybe handiest of all, the device can keep track of your schedule and display a timeline for you so that you know exactly what your entire day looks like before it even starts. The designers, Yonggu Do, Dohyung Kim and Sewon Oh, say that the Sundial would easily sync with your home computer so all of your schedule info would be wirelessly beamed over to the awesome wall adornment.

The post Wonder Wall: Laser-Shooting Clock Keeps Life Organized first appeared on Gajitz.

It seems like most of us are short on time these days, despite having a house full of gadgets to take care of many of our everyday tasks. That smart phone might help you keep track of appointments at first, but it can only do so much to actually make your life easier. This conceptual product is described as a “life support” device, meant to take care of remembering all of those little things you might otherwise space off and forget.

The Mercator is part personal data assistant, part health monitor, part GPS, part shopping assistant, and all must-have cutting-edge technology. New nanotechnology and a tiny AMD processor chip make this functional but stylish piece come together in a way that makes us want one right now.

Far from being just a wrist-mounted PDA, the Mercator – designed by Chinese UI designer Kingyo – actually uses holographic imaging to display the information you need to keep your life in order. Appointment details, information about your current vital signs, and even your grocery shopping list pop right up in front of you to keep you on track no matter where you are.

The device can tell what type of store you’re shopping in (presumably with some related piece of infrastructure that’s present in the store) and presents you with recommendations and reminders based on your buying patterns and preferences.

Of course, the conceptual device includes rechargeable batteries so that you can simply charge it at night along with your other daily-use electronics. The device, which will no doubt become a permanent part of the owner’s daily accessories, can be customized appearance-wise to suit the wearer’s style. While the Mercator might be a few years from realization, the technology used in the concept’s rendering seems almost close enough to touch.

The post Tie One On: High-Tech Bracelet is a Personal Life Manager first appeared on Gajitz.

What can really be said about calendars? They keep us on track, they help us remember appointments, and they usually come with pictures of kittens or Dr. Who opposite the date-tracking bit. But once in a while, a designer comes up with a totally new way to represent our lives day by day and month by month.

The Gregor Calendar is a design by Patrick Frey, which is being produced in a 2011 edition by Details Products + Ideas. The idea is elegantly simple: the calendar starts off as a knitted scarf-type piece of material, and as the days go by you simply unwind more and more yarn. When the yarn is all gone, crafty types could even re-use it to make another (different, of course) scarf.

The Ink Calendar is a brilliant design from Spanish designer Oscar Diaz. It makes use of the capillary action of ink spreading across paper to show the date. At the beginning of the month, a single small slip of paper is inserted into the ink. It slowly spreads across the connected numbers, giving a tangible feeling of the passage of time, much more like a clock than a calendar.

This partial-year calendar is more of a marketing ploy than anything else, but the mechanism is so interesting that it might just find a market in full-year calendars. Designed for leaf blower manufacturer STIHL, the calendar counts off the days in Autumn, and at the end of each day a “leaf” falls off of the calendar on its own. The device is supposed to simulate leaves piling up in the fall; just imagine how much fun you could have blowing those pieces of paper away with a leaf blower!

The post Days of Our Lives: 3 Cool and Unique Calendar Concepts first appeared on Gajitz.