Why absurd? Well, there is something particularly vulnerable about a piece of military hardware that can be rendered inactive by a group of boy scouts laying an iron bar sufficient to derail it. At the same time, the ordinary look of many steam trains seemed more robust than some of these tin can efforts. I chose this list because they are a design backwater with unusual looking phenotypes.

Pleasure piers are a unique and interesting piece of architecture in that they are both whimsical and sinister. Inhabited bridges that lead nowhere and aren't meant for ships to dock, they are often abandoned, creepy and decrepit, yet covered in brightly colored gadgets built for amusement. These piers are giant technological follies.One of the few remaining giant Victorian English pleasure piers burned down today. In fact a large proportion of them burned to the ground, which you might think is ironic, since they are surrounded by water. The sea breeze which was the reason they were built in the first place, as health promenades, is what makes them a fire hazard as winds fan the flames of timber buildings.

With the notable exception of Apple, America has largely ceased to be a design culture, yet from Art Deco to Mid-Century modern, the US once ruled the world. There is no better example of a quintessentially American product designer than Raymond Loewy, who combined the exuberance of consumer culture with the asceticism of modernism and applied this to elements from pencil sharpeners to locomotives.Like Apples lead designer, Loewy was not from America. He was born in France and travelled to New York after WWI, wearing only his officers uniform and carrying $40. Here are a dozen of our favorite examples of Loewy designs.

This is a video roundup of currently available or prototyped 3D printers, a gadget which has been sitting on the sidelines for a while, but hasn't become mainstream yet. 3D printing machines are fairly simple in their operation, building any 3D shape, no matter how complex, as a series of contour slices which are hardened as a printer head slides back and forth across. But the results look like magic, real objects, in color, with moving parts, direct from a CAD model. The main reason that 3D printers, still remain a professional niche product, used by design firms rather than end consumers, is that their output is small and slow. In addition, more people know how to create text files for 2D printers than a CAD design, and this is unlikely to change in the near future. As a result of this small market, some of the marketing videos of 3D printers shown here look distinctly old fashioned for such a futuristic product. We long for the day when we will be able to print a full sized chair in ten minutes.

Billions of dollars are spent on car design and manufacture, and yet few vehicles match the beauty of some of those built for land speed record attempts, sometimes by a handful of people in a garage.Here are our picks purely based on looks rather than actual speed. Seeing them on one page is extremely satisfying.

The original yellow submarine may have been aqualung inventor Jacques Cousteaus. Since The Beatles song, all manner of weird and wonderful, quixotic submarines have to be bright yellow, from home made subs, floating human powered septic tanks and deep sea exploration vehicles. Vote for your faves.