Popsticks rolls chopsticks into your pocket — as inflatable pool-toy utensils

Productober is an Instagram-based creative challenge that invites designers to respond to prompts. De la Bedoyere — who about ten years ago made the 'Emergency Moustache' — took the 'Inflatable' theme as a chance to prepare for another unnecessary emergency: finding yourself without chopsticks.

Chopsticks with no hinges or joints: roll them flat into a pocket spiral, then inflate them into full-length utensils when dinner calls.

Each translucent blue stick rolls into a compact spiral when deflated and inflates into an elongated utensil, its look borrowed from the inflatable furniture of the designer's 1990s childhood. He stepped outside his usual CAD-and-KeyShot workflow and used Vizcom to capture that translucent, nostalgic appearance.

A concept, not a product: designboom published it as a playful challenge to what ordinary objects must be, extending the designer's running line of 'unnecessary emergency products'.

Some ideas begin with a serious problem; Popsticks begins with the possibility of finding yourself without chopsticks, which designer Liam de la Bedoyere judged sufficient grounds for a design intervention. His answer for October's Productober challenge, themed 'Inflatable', skips the usual hinges and folding joints: the chopsticks take shape with air.

Each stick rolls into a compact spiral when deflated and slips into a pocket, then inflates into an elongated utensil ready for an unlikely chopstick emergency. The translucent blue forms deliberately resemble miniature pool inflatables, pulling the visual language of 1990s inflatable furniture — which the designer remembers from childhood — into an object that is usually rigid and conventional.

To get that nostalgic translucency, de la Bedoyere turned to Vizcom instead of his usual CAD-and-KeyShot workflow. Popsticks stays a concept rather than a product, and the designer is candid about the lineage: 'This isn't my first emergency product idea. About ten years ago, I created the Emergency Moustache, so I'm always thinking about the next unnecessary emergency to prepare for.'

The transformation is genuinely novel: air instead of hinges or detachable parts, so the utensil's storage state and use state share one continuous form.

It is a complete concept, not a sketch — prompt, process, material language and a self-aware place in the designer's 'unnecessary emergency products' series.

The 1990s inflatable aesthetic makes a strange object instantly familiar, which is exactly what lets the joke land.

Treating a fake problem with real process is a design genre of its own: commit to the bit — materials, rendering, back story — and the joke becomes a portfolio-grade concept.

Popsticks remains a concept rather than a commercially available product, leaving questions of materials, rigidity and everyday usability unanswered. Its appeal, as designboom puts it, lies less in solving a pressing culinary problem than in challenging the expectations attached to ordinary objects.