We have an example of good designer-brand cohesion in the DP 01 telephone, designed for Punkt by Jasper Morrison. The former strives to produce consumer products that use technology to simplify life; the latter, for his part, says "I thought about the old telephone, lying face down on its cradle, and asked myself if it wouldn't be better the other way round, so you could see the screen and dial the number without picking it up."

The simple Muji-meets-Olivetti aesthetic of the phone belies an innovative technical capability: If you have more than one of these, you can "slave" up to seven of them together to scatter them about your house, while only one needs to be plugged into an actual phone line. And the form is designed so that it can be either placed on a horizontal surface or wall-mounted.