here & now

Instead of bemoaning the disappearance of things once loved and treasured – your cassette mix tapes, your old BMX bicycle, etc – Leipzig-based design collective diefabrik have come up with the idea of ‘upcycling’, meaning to update out-of-use items to function in our modern and digital world. Such as, for instance, their beautiful tomboxes: formerly produced as loudspeakers for your portable record player, diefabrik manually install small amplifiers into the speakers so you can hook them up to your MP3 player of choice and listen to your music outdoors in style. Not cheap, but all the more desirable. Unfortunately, since they are one-offs only, they tend to be sold out rather fast, so keep checking back to their site frequently.