Unless you've been on a desert isle for nearly four decades, innovative designs from industry icon Hartmut Esslinger and his team at Sunnyvale, Calif.-based frog design have likely caught your eye.

Jan Chipchase spent a decade circling the globe as a trendspotting anthropologist for Nokia . His beat-up MacBook, its cover crisscrossed with strips of black electrical tape, stores the thousands of ...