Here’s the thing about living in a city. You’re always caught between two opposing needs. You want to tune out the world on your commute, but also crave those spontaneous outdoor moments with friends. You need to look professional on video calls, but sometimes you just want to capture a memory for yourself. Your laptop runs hot, and honestly, so do you after a long day. It’s exhausting, this constant push and pull.
Designer Junwoo Lim has been paying attention to these contradictions. His “Our Seoul” project isn’t about creating more gadgets we don’t need. It’s about recognizing that our daily desires are complicated, and maybe our objects should be too. The series includes three products, each designed around a specific urban tension: Our Picnic, Our Flash, and Our Chilling. Together, they explore how reality and personal longing can coexist in the same space, the same device, the same moment.
Designer: Junwoo Lim
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Let’s start with Our Picnic, because it perfectly captures something we all experience. Most mornings, you’re plugging in earbuds to create a bubble of privacy during your commute, shutting out surrounding sounds to protect your sanity. But then the weekend arrives, and suddenly you want the opposite. You want to be outside, sharing music, letting sound fill the space around you. Picnic bridges these two modes by transforming from earbuds into a speaker. Rotate the inner body 180 degrees, and what was personal becomes communal. When you’re outdoors, you can even rotate the back section 45 degrees to prop the device on the ground. The main body holds a 600 mAh battery while each earbud contains about 50 mAh, giving you flexibility for both modes. It’s a simple mechanical solution to an emotional need.
Our Flash tackles a different kind of duality, one that’s become painfully familiar in our video call era. Cameras are constant observers now. We exist within someone’s field of vision during meetings, always aware of being watched. But we’re also the ones doing the watching and recording, capturing moments we want to preserve and control. Flash merges these experiences into a hybrid camera unit that functions as both webcam and selfie camera, positioned somewhere between “the me that is seen” and “the me I want to show.” As a desk webcam, it handles your professional presence. But lift the head section, and the internal selfie camera detaches, ready for personal documentation. The clever part? That perforated central section that normally serves as a vent becomes a 360-degree rotating desk lamp when the internal light activates. It’s surveillance and self-expression and ambient lighting, all depending on what you need in that moment.
Then there’s Our Chilling, which might be the most relatable concept of all. We spend our lives surrounded by devices that need cooling. Laptops, desktops, gaming rigs. We’re constantly monitoring temperatures, adjusting fan speeds, making sure our machines don’t overheat. But who’s taking care of us? Chilling functions primarily as a laptop cooler with Bluetooth connectivity, letting you monitor CPU and GPU temperatures in real time and adjust cooling intensity through your laptop’s software. The bottom stand even adjusts the tilt angle for ergonomic positioning. But here’s the twist: flip it over, and those tower fan blades inside suddenly serve a different purpose. It becomes a desktop fan, one that can monitor room temperature just like it monitors your laptop’s heat. The same stand that adjusts your laptop angle now controls the fan’s direction. It’s a reminder that in a life where work and rest blur together, maybe we deserve the same attention we give our machines.
What makes this project compelling isn’t the technical specs or the minimalist aesthetic, though both are thoughtfully executed. It’s the underlying philosophy. Lim isn’t trying to simplify urban life or pretend we can eliminate its contradictions. Instead, he’s designing objects that acknowledge the messiness, the constant switching between modes, the way we’re always negotiating between competing needs. The “Our Seoul” series suggests that good design doesn’t resolve tension. It accommodates it.
These are concepts rather than products you can order today, but that’s exactly what makes them valuable. They capture something true about how we’re living right now, in cities that demand constant adaptation, surrounded by technology that often feels like it’s designed for a simpler, more consistent version of ourselves. We’re not that simple. Maybe our objects shouldn’t be either.
The post 3 Seoul Gadget Concepts That Transform When You Need Them Most first appeared on Yanko Design.