In a creative partnership with Toyota, launched during the London Design Festival earlier this year, Royal College of Art students have been tasked to help promote innovative design for urban living, using Toyota’s new premium city car as a template for excellence.

Living in a busy, crowded and noisy city environment presents many challenges. Taking inspiration from the revolutionary new iQ, the students were asked to think about those challenges and create an item to reflect the concept of 'intelligent urban living' within four categories; living room, kitchen, bedroom, garage. The shortlisted ideas offer an array of ideas, all focusing on an aspect of urban life.

Kristina Hofman’s Hide and Seek Curtain allows urban dwellers to either hide things from view or emphasise what they want to see.

DaeKyung Ahn, Gianpaolo Fusari and Nicholas Reddall offer a new take on a kitchen staple: Twist + Cap -  a lemon squeezer that prevents waste.

David Weatherhead’s Cold Block is an alternative design solution that allows the user to keep food in cold storage without using electricity.

Pack Lamp is an environmentally friendly lighting concept that aims to cut down on unnecessary packaging material, by Jonas Trampedach and Romain Jeantet.

Dominic Hargreaves had three bikes stolen in quick succession – resulting in Out of reach out of harm, a design solution for preventing bicycle theft.

Augustin Barbot’s My iQ Cinema offers a home entertainment system with a difference - utilising the user’s own garage.

iQ Luggage Furniture, designed by Filip Krnja, aims to make storage a little easier, by making travel containers part of the furniture.

Receipts tend to be small and easily misplaced. To overcome this,  Kyu-Seon Lee has designed Bookkeeping Cushion, a filing system inside a scatter cushion.

YuType, a computer peripheral that allows two fingered typists to increase their speed and accuracy, is designed by Yusuf Muhammad.

Simple but oh so effective: Quicksnap, by Graeme Davies, is a quick-release ice cube tray that prevents cubes from jumping out when the tray is twisted.

Designer Elizabeth Beaumont has created Bloom, a set of interactive wall tiles that move independently from each other and change from 2D into to 3D structures.

ThermoCon by Yuko Kanemura, is a thermally efficient textile that uses recycled materials to reduce heating costs, increase space and minimise environmental impact.

The ambition is to inspire new thinking and achievement across a wide spectrum of disciplines to produce ideas and concepts that respond to the many and varied issues associated with modern urban living.The winning designs will be displayed in a special exhibition at the Royal College of Art in early 2009, and then toured around the UK.