Ah, the humble pencil. After ages of bestowing upon us the gift of saving, sharing, and showing information, it remains the same wooden shell that cradles a stick of lead. Recent Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication grad Yuta Watanabe took it upon himself to enhance this utensil in a dozen ways, from sheathing it in a different familiar object to attaching other tools that speed and strengthen the process of sharpening. In creating A Dozen Pencils, Yuta “wanted to make something that people could intuitively understand. Because of the pencils’ use and function the end result is interactive design. [He] made them from different points of view, including memory, behavior, humour and ‘product language’.”