A good industrial designer will take note of forthcoming, non-design-related trends and figure out a design angle for it. A good case in point is American designer Andrew Thomson: "In a year," he notes, "our nation will be covered with political signs again." Those signs will be made out of the corrugated plastic, or Coroplast, we've been writing so much about, and Thomson knows that recycleable or no, most of the stuff will end up in the trash.

Starting with the 2010 primaries, Thomson began harvesting the signs and applying some good ol' Bucky Fuller to 'em, developing geodesic campaign pendant lamps. "The process is very simple," he writes. "Just cut out a whole lot of triangles and hot glue them together with small plastic hinges."

Check out more of Thomson's stuff here.