The idea
What if a clock didn't just show you the time — but made you think to read it? Albert Clock replaces digits with a live math equation. Every glance becomes a small mental exercise. The harder the difficulty, the more complex the calculation. It trains your brain without you noticing.
Featured at MoMA New York and the Museum of the Future in Dubai. Electronics by Semaforge, housing manufactured by Zimmermann Uhrengehäuse GmbH, Bad Dürrheim. Available in Original and Mini.
Materials & process
Technology
The idea
Undine integrates two audio transducers into the fabric of a chair, creating a stereo or binaural sound environment. Rather than filling a room, the sound is delivered directly to the body — high and mid frequencies experienced close to the skin, low frequencies felt as physical resonance. For everyone else in the space, it is almost inaudible — near-zero sound bleeding into the room.
No headphones. No earbuds. No isolation from the world.
Named after the water nymph who gains a soul only through human contact — the object is incomplete without a person present. Developed for private spaces, executive offices, and cultural institutions.
"Another way to meditate." — Eija Ahvo, singer and actress, Helsinki
Materials & process
Technology
The idea
After a trip to Oaxaca, the discovery was made back in Marseille that agave americana — the same plant family used to make mezcal — grows invasively along the Frioul islands and the Côte Bleue, where it was being torn out as an ecological threat. The idea: harvest it, distill it, make Europe's first agave spirit.
Josiane was born — named after a tag on a rock at Plage du Prophète. Co-created with Justine Batteux and master distiller Martial Berthaud (Atelier du Bouilleur) under the non-profit lab REVEEAL. A second spirit, Viviane, followed.
Process
The idea
A commission in two parts for the Conservatoire Botanique National Alpin in Gap, France — one of Europe's most significant alpine botanical gardens.
The Sky Table is an orientation table whose mirror surface reflects the sky above — giving the visitor the perceptual illusion of looking upward while gazing down.
The Jardinalp Pavillon is the accompanying structure: a shade pavilion and exhibition space where the alpine landscape itself becomes the exhibition content.
Materials & process
The idea
Sunglasses that adapt to light conditions by twisting the frame — a simple mechanical gesture that rotates the ND filter lenses, adjusting shade intensity on demand. No electronics, no battery: pure optical engineering embedded in the hinge. The frame is fully 3D printed.
Technology
The idea
Most laptops manage heat by moving air — fans, vents, noise. Silencio takes the opposite position: what if the housing itself were the cooling system? The entire enclosure is designed as a fully integrated heat sink, drawing heat away from the processor passively through the material and geometry of the body itself. No fans. No vents. No noise.
The result is a machine that runs in complete silence — not because the sound has been suppressed, but because there is nothing left to make it.
Technology
The idea
headbones starts from the biology of hearing — bone conduction — and asks what a product looks like when it's built around the physics rather than convention. A personal audio object that sits outside the ear entirely, transmitting sound through the skull.
Technology
The idea
The Pradeau Chair removes everything a chair doesn't need. What remains is the load path — the structural logic of sitting, expressed directly in form and material. Built entirely by hand in the studio.
Materials & process
The idea
Lela is a prototype for an automated ice-cream sprinkle distribution machine — three flavors, precisely dispensed, in a mechanical aesthetic that owes more to a 19th-century laboratory than a food service counter.
Materials & process
The idea
Instant Landscape takes SRTM satellite terrain data and makes it physically touchable. A pneumatic sculpture that inflates and deflates to match the topography of a real landscape, letting visually impaired persons experience geography through their hands.
Technology
The idea
The wooden sled is one of the oldest human-powered vehicles still in daily use. Hot Sled redesigns it from first principles — what does a sled actually need to do, and what does that demand from its form, material, and construction? Winner of the Design for Europe Award at Interieur Kortrijk 2006.
Materials & process
The idea
The diploma project was a constraint turned into a method: design one product per day, every day, for 50 days. No carry-over, no revision — each day a complete idea, resolved as far as it could go in 24 hours. One of those 50 ideas became the Albert Clock.
Materials & process
The idea
Designed for the palliative care unit of the Diaconesses Croix-Saint-Simon hospital in Paris. A honeycomb LED wall structure pulls live weather data from the internet and renders it as an atmospheric image of the following day's sky. Each patient selects their own region.
Commissioned via the Fondation de France, supported by Maison Hermès. Inaugurated December 2012.
Technology
The idea
Winner of the Mairie de Paris smart urban furniture competition. A connected public shelter on the Rond Point des Champs-Élysées — bringing free high-speed WiFi up from the city's underground fibre-optic network, like Wallace fountains once brought free drinking water to the surface.
Technology
The idea
Le Laboratoire was David Edwards' experimental art and science space in Paris — where designers, artists, and scientists worked in open collision from 2007 to 2015. It has since relocated to Cambridge, Boston.
Lab Gate is the entry portal developed for the Paris space: the threshold object that marked the transition from street to laboratory.
Materials & process
The idea
The food and beverage space at the heart of Le Laboratoire Cambridge — David Edwards' art and science innovation hub in Boston's Kendall Square. The café functions as both a fine dining restaurant and a sensory experiment.
Materials & process
Full press kit available on request
Axel Schindlbeck is a Helsinki based designer and entrepreneur working at the encounter of technology, culture and design. Trained at Kunstakademie Stuttgart and mentored in New York and Paris, he co-founded MNTNT in 2014 with software engineer Frédéric Mauclere. Every object is conceived, prototyped, and built from the ground up — from first sketch to finished product, together with a long-term team of engineers.
Schindlbeck is interested less in aesthetic appeal and more in objects that forge a genuine connection between people and technology. The work spans product design, public commissions, wearables, robotics, and sculpture.
Open to commissions and partnerships.