While the UK's Pylon Design Competition considered the standard wire-supporting towers dotting the landscape to be eyesores, Californian Daniel Ballou has found their clear utility pleasant enough for a smaller-scale task: Desktop cable management.

"There are hundreds of miles of power lines strung across the California desert landscape," he observes. "A miniaturized version in bent, chromed wire works well for the desk."

Pylons aren't the only thing in Ballou's SoCal environment to provide a source of inspiration.

Living and working in Long Beach means watching 80,066,130 tons of cargo come in and out of the city every year. The ubiquitous metal storage container is everywhere. Everyone in the industrialized world knows the iconic container, and many see them on a daily basis.

Here, you have a ceramic version scaled to become a useful storage container for the home. It's likely that whatever is stored inside, has seen the inside of a cargo container before. A reminder of what goes around the world and makes the world go round for the last 50 years.We've written Ballou up before. Anyone who designs metal coins to use as their personal business card is aces in our book.

The prolific Ballou is also the founder of Dashdot, the Long-Beach-based ID consultancy behind simplehuman's Sensor Cans.

You can check out more of his work in two places: Client projects are on Dashdot's site, and personally-undertaken design explorations--like the pylons and the Cargo Containers, the latter of which are now produced by Areaware--at Ballou Projects.