This isn't the first time we've talked about Corque on Core77, and since the Portugese design brand keeps coming up with one good idea after another, it won't be the last either. Corque was born in 2009 after its founding partners finished a three-year research and development program that explored the sustainability of using cork as a material for more than just wine bottles. What they learned in a nutshell? Cork is a renewable resource; It grows on trees, or rather, it is trees. But because it regrows only every nine years, harvesting it is a delicate process, one that requires highly skilled workers. [Ed Note: For more on cork harvesting and manufacturing, check out Daniel Michalik's series on the material!] Most of the world's cork comes from Portugal, 52.5%, to be exact, making it an ideal material for a Portugese design team like Corque to utilize. And it doesn't hurt that it makes for furniture so beautiful furniture it crosses the line between art and object.
Seeing as he cut his teeth with the likes of Max Lamb, Studio Gilthero, Martino Gamper and Julia Lohmann, it comes as no surprise that designer Phil Cuttance is well-versed in materials and processes. "FACETURE" is a series of household objects that take a vaguely crystalline appearance based on a unique fabrication process. Each vase, lamp and side table looks is made by casting a water-based resin in a handmade mold:
First the mould of the object is hand-made by scoring and cutting a sheet of 0.5mm plastic sheet. This sheet is then folded, cut and taped into the overall shape of the product that is to be cast. The mould's final shape, and strength, is dictated by which triangular facets I pop in and out. I do this each time I ready the mould for the next object, meaning that no two castings are the same. I then mix a water-based casting resin that is cast in the mould where it sets solid.
The resin is poured into the hollow mould and rolled around to coat and encase the sides, controlled by me on the casting jig on the machine. The material soon sets creating a hollow solid object. Then another, different coloured measure of resin is poured into the same mould, and swirled around inside, over the first. When it has set, the mould is removed to reveal the solid set cast piece.
The results look something like stalagmites from a virtual cave, though Cuttance notes that their origin is neither geological nor digital: "The casting appears with sharp accurate lines and a digital quality to its aesthetic, a visual 'surprise' considering the 'lo-fi,' hand-made process from which it came."
But the real gem is the bespoke machine with which Cuttance creates "FACETURE":
If I could convince you of one thing, it would be this: Crowdfunding is not Nyan Cat. Nyan Cat will be the answer to a Trivial Pursuit question in 10 years or so. If it's lucky. Crowdfunding is radically changing the way things are made.
That's why it bugs me when I see the inevitable Internet eye-rolling starting to take place. "Oh great, another Kickstarter project." Look past the avalanche of Apple related accessories. Lower your designer snark rays for just a moment. Just because something is trending on the Twitter, doesn't make it bad.
Crowdfunding is the most important thing to happen to industrial designers and people who are interested in making things since, oh I dunno, CAD? Outsourcing? 3D printing? User-centered research? I know that's pretty big talk for something that's only been in the design community consciousness for a year or two, but think what crowdfunding means for a solitary designer or a small team of people who have a *really great* idea and the know-how to get it made, but no money.
Think of all of the times you have been in meetings with people who make decisions that designers are generally not allowed to make. Think of bringing your hacked up prototype to a bank and explaining to the loan officer that "Yes, even though this is made out of blue foam, the actual thing will be made from molded plastic." Think of building up enough courage to go it alone, and then staring at the ceiling at night worrying if you are committing your family to eating ramen for the next couple of years while you chase your crazy dream. Think of having investors tell you they love everything about your idea, except 80% of it. And the color.
Now think of side-stepping all of that. You refine your idea on your own. You talk to manufacturers and see what it would take to get it made. You work out the budget. You shoot a video marketing the idea and explaining what you need to get it done.
You launch it.
Maybe it doesn't get funded. But at least then you can say that you tried and failed on your own terms, without going tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt. At the very least, you have an interesting portfolio piece to talk about and maybe if you're feeling frisky, you refine it further and try launching it again.
But what if it does work? You get funding. You get confirmation that your idea is good and should exist. Holy crap.
Herein lies the revolutionary aspect of crowdfunding: Product designers can finally tap into the Internet money pipe. For years we have had to sit on the sidelines while nascent web companies attract investors or bootstrap it themselves. It's not because we're lazier than Mark Zuckerberg. It's because the cost of entry into shipping atoms is dramatically higher (both in time and money, but especially money) than it is to ship electrons.
To start Facebook you need the skills, a laptop, a server, and a few months of late nights. (This is a dramatic oversimplification. Sorry Zuck and every software/internet developer ever.) To start a company that gets something manufactured, you need all of that plus a ton of cash. Prototyping, tooling and fulfillment are tremendously resource intensive. Have you ever wondered why VCs tend to back web startups, but for the most part leave hardware startups alone? Money. Crowdfunding lowers the money barrier.
Ok great, so some dude can get the money he needs to make an iPhone case that mounts to his forehead. Hey, what did I tell you about the snark rays? Let's think bigger picture here. What are the long-term implications of designers having a lower barrier for funding their pet projects?
"The best interaction design doesn't just make things easier to use, it opens up new spaces for play and collaboration to enhance our relationship with the world and each other," explained jurist Robert Fabricant, VP of Creative at frog. Kicking off the announcements for this year's inaugural IxDA Interaction Awards, San Francisco-based agency Stimulant won Best in Show AND the Best in Category, Expressing for Loop Loop, an innovative music sequencer app that encourages kids and adults to create improvised musical compositions using their Sifteo cubes to stitch and layer a set of samples and beats.
The People's Choice Award went to Interaction Cubes by the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation/Museum of Life. The project is an interactive module created for the exhibit "Elementar: a química que faz o mundo" (Elementary: the chemistry that makes up our world) for the Museum of Life in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
From a pool of over 300 entries representing 33 countries, 26 projects were awarded honors in the categories of Best in Show, Best Concept, Best Student, People's Choice, and Best in Category for Optimizing, Connecting, Disrupting, Expressing, Engaging and Empowering.
Best Concept went to Out of the Box by London-based Vitamins, and the award for Best Student was given to Ishac Bertran from Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design for his project Pas-à-Pas.
It's no secret that we're fans of London's Black+Blum: year in, year out, the design duo always seems to have something new up their collective sleeve. The recent NYIGF was no exception, as it was occasion for the official unveiling of three new designs.
First up, the "Eau Good" water bottle is a clever take on a water bottle with a natural filter.
The bottle uses a filter system with binchotan active charcoal, which has been used in Japan as a water purifier since the 17th century. It reduces chlorine, balances the pH and adds minerals to the water. Most importantly, it makes tap water taste clean and delicious.
The design of the eau good combines the vintage feel of the cork stopper with the unique clear, blow-molded bottle and the utilitarian aspect of the centuries-old filtering system.
The filter takes roughly 6–8 hours to work its magic and after its six-month lifetime, the charcoal can be used as an odor absorber for refrigerators.
The "Lunch Pot" (center) is a new offering in their line of tupperware containers: a pair of pots that neatly snap together, a handy solution for those of us who often bring multi-part meals for lunch. The watertight, BPA-free, microwave- and dishwasher-safe pots also feature an unique threadless enclosure for added convenience. Meanwhile, the strap remains secure even when the "Lunch Pot" is inverted or otherwise subject to the abuse of transit.
That there is the perfect object. It's completely functional, it's the latest evolution from a history of progressively better objects that have been around since man's earliest days, and it's freaking beautiful. It's the two-pound Velvicut Premium Hudson Bay Axe, and it's made using that perfect blend of high-tech machines and an experienced craftsman's handwork.
While I'm suspicious of outdoor tools that are pretty--when you're working outdoors, hardcore functionality is everything and aesthetics don't mean a damn thing--this one is made by Council Tool, lending it some instant cred. The North-Carolina-based manufacturer has been producing quality tools since 1886, and I dig that the company president who narrates the making-of video has the same name as the company.
In the vid you see a 90-year-old eye-punching machine, the brutal, no-margin-for-error drop forging process in action, and you learn something cool about Council's ideology: They retain and retrain. Even as they upgraded their tooling, they kept the guys who used to do the rough grinding by hand and trained them to program the machine that took the task over, rather than letting the machine replace them altogether. "There's no substitute for experience here," says Council.
Like Carousel USA, Turntable Works is another California-based manufacturer of large-scale turntables. But the latter firm has got a product I could not have envisioned: A portable, folding motorized turntable called the Pack-Man, which comes in diameters ranging from eight to fourteen feet.
Here's a sign you've seen too many building projects go wrong: At the six-second mark of the demo video, when the whole mechanism starts to tilt, I instinctively jerked my hands out towards the screen as if I could help the guy by grabbing it. But apparently it's designed or allowed, however inelegantly, to do that.
Didn't think it would fit a full-size car, did you? I like how they jump-cut the footage during loading, as I'm sure there was some finagling required to avoid driving off of the platform. But in any case the Pack-Man is an impressive feat of design and engineering, allowing one person to set the thing up in just five minutes.
Cleveland suffers from what I'm calling Detroit Syndrome. The population of the onetime million-resident city has shrunk to just 396,000 as manufacturing jobs have disappeared, meaning it's filled with dilapidated and abandoned buildings.
Those buildings—whether houses, churches, or retail spaces—are constructed out of wood, which means tearing them down can provide a veritable forest's worth of raw material. That's where an organization called Reclaimed Cleveland comes in. As they explain,
Most of the homes slated for demolition in Cleveland are nearly 100 years old (some even older) and were built with old growth lumber that is dense and beautiful. Reclaimed Cleveland is leading an effort to salvage lumber from local structures and give it a new life as well designed home furnishings and accessories. We are also working with a local non-profit, Towards Employment, to train ex-offenders in home salvage and give them skills and a new start in the construction trades.
The idea behind a Zen garden is that combing all of that sand into intricate patterns improves the practitioner's concentration. It's not easy to do—and that's the point. So Simon Hallam's Zen Table contraptions on Kickstarter, which automatically draw pre-programmed patterns via what appears to be a magnetic ball and some type of CNC mechanism, would probably be considered an abomination in the Zen Buddhism world.
Yet I have to concede that the machines, which come in both small and large sizes, are cool as heck:
Lisbon-based studio Cabracega recently collaborated with designer André Gonçalves on USMA, "a clock without a visual interface," which is intended to "bring the countryside into the city."
In Portugal, the urban population keeps growing year after year, in accordance to the world tendency for desertification of the rural space. In the urban space, the pace is increasingly fast because time is money and every second counts.
USMA is a clock without a visual interface, resorting only to sound to mark the passage of time. The sound of the church bell is the clock hand, which intends to bring home the rural experience with the definite goal of giving a new rhythm to city life.
That's right, the clock has no display: instead, it simply indicates the time by chiming the number on the hour—as well as a single chime every half hour—in the manner of a traditional clocktower.
The Future of Integrated Health Care
Google Maps: Designing the Modern Atlas
Design Miami 2011
Tokyo Design Week 2011
Born Digital: Exploring Digital Culture & Interactivity 
SHIFTBoston 2012 GLOW Competition 
Book Review: Where They Create, by Paul Barbera and Alexandra Onderwater
Book Review: Design by Nature, by Maggie Macnab
Teach Less, Integrate More 
Public Service Announcement 
Lego...for Girls?
Your First Car?
Core77 Design Awards 
SHIFTBoston 2012 Glow Competition 
All photos by Petr Krejci
Google Maps: Designing the Modern Atlas
The Messy Art of Saving the World
Big Idea, Little Printer
The Landscape of User Experience Design in Asia
DESIGN MIAMI 2011
TOKYO DESIGN WEEK 2011
DUTCH DESIGN WEEK 2011
VIENNA DESIGN WEEK 2011
Where They Create, by Paul Barbera and Alexandra Onderwater
Design by Nature, by Maggie Macnab
The Portfolio Handbook, by the Class of 2012, Industrial Design, DAAP, University of Cincinnati
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Making Promises at the End of Time
Space Migration and Designing Our Future Habitat
The Landscape of User Experience in Asia
The Path Less Followed (or, Why I Didn't Work at Circuit City)
Masters of the Cutaway
