Core77

Photos by Tom Oxley Photography

Duffy London is really good at giving everyday furniture essentials fun, design-savvy flair. Most recently, we saw their swinging table at this year's London Design Festival. The brand's versatility fits any home—if you're looking for a contemporary simple statement piece, you're covered. Bend a few joints, twist a few knobs or fold over a table leaf and you've got a totally different (and more complex) piece of furniture.

Believe it or not, this is the same table.

This is the case with their new series of folding tables. What may come off as an angular space-saving coffee table is actually also an expansive dining room table. In two simple movements, the hidden legs and leaves that make up the coffee table pull out to become a 4.5' x 2.5' dining area. The MK1 Mini Transforming Table may come in at a steep price (about $1,080), but really it's like buying two tables in one, so you can't feel that guilty about it. For small spaces, this may be the table we've all been wishing for.

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Dear Designers, Craftspeople, Curious/ Creative Types of Portland, Ore.,
The Portland bureau of Core77 & Hand-Eye Supply invite you to the design event of the season: HOLIDAY SHINDIG at the Museum Of Contemporary Craft on Friday, December 13, 2013 -- 6:00pm till 9:00pm
- Complimentary Social Lubrication: * Dj Music * Cocktails *
- Peruse the Bridge City Tool Works exhibit for free!
- Win up to $500 in Hand-Eye Supply gift certificates!
- Mingle with & be dazzled by the illustrious, brilliant Curiosity Club speaker-alumni, incld. but not limited to:
--- Type-Casters, CC Stern Type Foundry
--- Camera Fabricator, Kurt Mottweiller
--- Guitar Maker, Matthew Reineck
--- Laser Mapper,Tarika Hanawalt
- All in attendance are eligible to vote for the Curiosity Club Speaker of the Year Prize.
Hope to see you there! - Core77 & Hand-Eye Supply
RSVP now...

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Todd McLellan meets Ferris Bueller's friend Cameron? For his contribution to the "exploded object" genre of photography, Fabian Oefner ratchets up the intensity by seemingly having taken a ratchet to exotic cars, disassembling them piece by piece.

The Swiss artist's Disintegrating series features some of the most beloved classic car models--a Ferrari 250 GTO, a Gullwing Benz, a Jag E-type--and shows you what they're made of, deconstructing those beautiful forms to float the mechanicals out into space.

It's digitally manipulated, sure, but each piece is the result of a real photograph. How does he do it? Well, guess:

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'Tis the season to do all kind of holiday things. Amongst the multitudes of baked cookies and gift wrap, some of you may make it a tradition to make your own gingerbread houses—sometimes half-heartedly and half-eaten, depending on your tastes. No matter the level of strategy and effort you put into your sugary construction, I'm willing to bet that none of your attempts will ever turn out as appetizing and lifelike as the buildings food stylist Caitlin Levin and photographer Henry Hargreaves have put together.

With world-famous silhouettes to guide them, they've created a set of candy architecture that we'd all think twice about eating. The buildings are so lifelike that I had to keep reminding myself that every surface on all of the houses is edible. The series features several well-known art museums: Guggenheim, Louvre and the Tate Modern, to name a few. The duo wanted to show candy in a more serious light, one that isn't focused on the vivid colors and sweetness we're so used to associating with sugary treats.

Click the jump for more photos of the sugary architecture.

London's Tate Modern

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There's a lot of hope for displays made from organic light-emitting diodes, a.k.a. OLEDs. They provide better color, higher contrast and are more energy-efficient than the LCDs that currently provide displays for pretty much every television and computer. Many think OLED displays could supplant LCDs within the next five years. But there's a problem: OLEDs are challenging to make, so mass production has been a distant dream.

...until now. The engineers at the equipment company Kateeva have recently launched with what they think is the solution to significantly push OLEDs ahead. And they are doing it with an old technology: ink-jet printers.

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So you've designed your product, run simulations on the model, figured out the PLM and rendered countless iterations. Now it's time to actually machine the thing. Autodesk is now addressing this final step, taking advantage of Autodesk University's packed attendance (10,000-plus people this year!) to announce their new CAM 360 software, which they're billing as the world's first cloud-based CAM solution.

CAM 360 is seen as the final puzzle piece in their cloud-based digital manufacturing software suite, following on the heels of PLM 360 (product lifecycle management), Sim 360 (analysis) and Fusion 360 (design). By finally integrating the thing that actually generates the toolpaths for CNC, the company reckons manufacturers will enjoy a huge time savings. And the cloud-based approach confers three distinct benefits: 1) Customers no longer need worry which version of the software they and their collaborators are on; 2) Files can be accessed anywhere, anytime; and 3) they've got virtually limitless cloud-based computing power available to quickly crunch those monster files.

The CAM 360 release date is pegged for next year.

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When it comes down to it, good design is often more a matter of execution as opposed to the idea itself: Speculate as we might, a product must actually be in production in order for the world to appreciate its merits. And while few among us have the luxury of not having to compromise (Apple, for one, if Leander Kahney's biography of Jony Ive is any indication), these are precisely the instances in which the vision must remain coherent if the concept is to be realized in full.

Count Moroso among the vanguard of design-led brands. The Udine-based furniture company celebrated its 60th Anniversary last year, but as Creative Director Patrizia Moroso notes, they took the opportunity not to look back but to look forward. She personally toured their factories, "looking for the prototypes an the pieces that never went into production," for an exhibition in Milan last year. "All the things that go before the 'birth' [of a project]"—samples, prototypes, early experiments (some of which were aborted)—"it was very emotional, because I remember when the designer came and changed this detail, maybe he [or she] changed a lot..."

But she doesn't dwell on that which could have been: When we caught up with her at Moroso's New York showroom in October, Patrizia was in a buoyant mood (thanks, perhaps, to a few espressos following a flight from Italy), as was Marc Thorpe, whose recent collection for the brand is currently on view at the space at 146 Greene St. Indeed, she was in town on the occasion of the opening of "Blurred Limits," featuring the young New York-based designer's "Blur" collection, along with the one-off "Ratio" table and a first look at "Morning Glory," which will officially debut at the Salone in 2014. We had the chance to speak to the two of them about their ongoing collaboration, which dates back to the "Mark" table from 2010.

"I actually met Patrizia and in Italy in 2009, in the Fiera, but it was very brief," relates Marc, when asked about how they first met. "And then a year or so later, we were here [in New York] at an event, so I asked very humbly if I could show some of my work to her, and she said, 'Oh yeah, come have lunch...'" He recalls showing her a handful of renderings and prototypes, but one piece stood out: "That was the 'Mark' table, which was produced for a bar/lounge called the Mark." ("Easy to remember," Moroso notes.) "So she took everything to Italy and that's where it sort of began.

"A year or two later, we had the first conversations about the 'Blur' collection."

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The legendary Boston Whaler brand began in 1958 when founder, Richard Fisher, crafted the first unsinkable 13 foot Whaler and they've been manufacturing quality unsinkable boats from 11 to 37 feet ever since. They'd like you to join the team and build upon existing Brunswick Boat Group products as well as innovative new offerings.

As part of the design team you will have the opportunity to generate and develop concepts and designs for Brunswick Boat Group products and maintain a wide range of responsibilities. If you are currently pursuing your degree or are within a semester of receiving your degree, Apply Now.

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Spanish artist/designer Javier Lloret has created what is possibly the nerdiest (and coolest, in our books) interactive façade ever. Puzzle Façade, a 3D-printed interface cube that's connected to a digital wall by Bluetooth, lets passersby try their hand at solving a larger-than-life Rubik's Cube.

The tools and pieces behind the interface cube

The handheld cube is made up of 3D-printed exterior pieces (the twistable cubes we've all grown to love and hate) and a digital core that connected wirelessly to a laptop that controls the projection on the façade. As the challenger twists and turns the physical cube, the LED lights transform accordingly. The actual cube is a pristine white, making it harder for those who have memorized their puzzle-breaking pattern. Check out the video to see it in action:

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Update: Commenter Max Shelley has not only dug up the original video but juxtaposed them, YouTube Doubler-style, in an absolutely uncanny comparison video, embedded below, and it's holy-crap-I-sh*t-you-not dead on. Good work, Max!

Seeing as toilet humor never gets old, we were very interested to stumble upon a company called Remade Co., which gives a veritable swirlie to a certain New York City-based design company. We've seen similar variations on the theme of painting a handle before, but Remade is a parody par excellence: The website is dead ringer (or should we say plunger) of its target, and the product lineup is at once entirely on-brand and completely off-the-mark.

In the profile video (below), which I assume is a shot-for-shot remake (get it?) of an original that I was unable to dig up as of press time, an unidentified jester goes by a hyphenated surname that is the inversion of that of his mark. Reader Max Shelley has put them side-by-side, revealing a profound attention to detail on the part of Mr. Smith-Buchanan—the, um, original Remade vid is here—and frankly it's hard not to be impressed by the whole thing.

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