The newest video from Polish knifemaker Trollskyy couldn't have come at a better time, considering Earth Day has barely passed us by. "I love to make something out of nothing," he mentions on his YouTube page—well said considering his designs feature abandoned metal scraps. Trollskyy's most recent YouTube upload follows the process of a knife he made from the leaf spring off of an old Jeep. The end result is a dangerous-looking blade that bears no resemblance to its past life. Take a look:
The Lord of the Rings-esque music just adds to the oh-so-epic transformation (Let your nerd flag fly high and feel free to imagine Trollsky standing at the edge of Mordor, knife in hand—I did.) From railroad spike to old bearings, Trollskyy spotlights rejected metal in a whole new functional way. Check out more of his video documentations:
I'm definitely among those who have been waiting for Minority Report-like gesturing to become a reality. While light beams on desks and walls seems close, it's not our hands manipulating objects in thin air. But now researchers at the University of Bristol have developed the starting point, called MisTable. And they're doing it with mist.
Words will only fail to properly describe the look of this thing, but a tabletop computer system projects images onto a thick blanket of fog. They appear as ghostly apparitions, much like R2D2's projected Princess Leia.
We can interact with the 3D images by sticking our hands into the 'objects' and moving them—maybe to the person sitting next to us. At this time it's simple stuff, but still it means moving something as if it were actually something tangible. Check out the video:
Lately, I've felt that most products, from cars to headphones, have employed the marketing tactic of releasing limited or special editions. The crazy fact of the matter is that people buy it because they like knowing they are part of a small circle who are privileged enough to own it. I am no stranger to the envy of walking into class with my new shoes, only to have my victory walk ruined my seeing someone else with the same pair. Exclusivity is a powerful tool to sell a pair of Air Yeezy 2's or evoke the urge to wait in line at your favorite meatpacking district club in the hopes of "getting on the list."
What I'm preaching is for a product that speaks to greater lengths of who you are, your favorite color, even the way you tie your shoe. The people at Hickies, who brought out the Jeff Spicoli in all of us by developing a new lacing system that turned any shoe into a slip on, have released their new Kickstarter project.
It was just a few years ago that Lytro released their Light Field Camera, meant to usher in an era of "computational photography." Users capture the ambient light field rather than a bunch of static pixels, and this radical technological approach allows one to re-focus shots after the fact.
But the LFC never really took off, whether because of its alien, boxy form factor or the educational hurdle the company faces in explaining this new generation of product. So now Lytro is releasing a new model, the Illum, featuring both improved internals and an entirely new form factor. What most caught our eye is that it echoes an SLR in shape, but is clearly an entirely new class of object—not an easy design line to tread.
The Roomba has made all of our lives easier from cleaning up after us to serving up some much-needed laughs moonlighting as "DJ Roomba." Someday soon you may be seeing a similar looking robot make an appearance in the world of architecture. Designer Han Seok Nam is looking to cut down on labor costs and up efficiency with his design, Archibot. The mobile printer works with in-room sensors to print uploaded CAD files that signify different construction points and plans right onto the floor of a work area.
The recently patented Archibot has been designed to recognize where building elements such as doors and walls need to be built. The printed plans can be compared to larger print-outs, making them easy to interpret and cross-check for both architects and contractors. Check out the video to see how it all comes together:
Granite Gear is an outdoor gear company started by outdooring obsessives back in 1986. Like many successful names in the outdoor game, their focus has been balanced between innovation and pragmatism. As co-founder Dan Cruikshank puts it, "If someone else is already doing a great job with a certain product, we say good for them, but if we can take it to the next level and improve, we will." As a result, Granite Gear is well known for making sturdy and attractive ultralight packs, (and plenty of other accessories) with a sharp focus on adaptability for personalized fit. I spoke with Michael Meyer, Granite Gear's Director of Design and Development, to dig into how they make their ultralight gear work right.
Core77: Tell me about your design background.
Michael Meyer: My first real job was designing backpacks and luggage for High Sierra, where I worked for four and a half years and learned a lot about backpacks and luggage. From there I went on to Under Armour where I was the senior product designer for bags—duffel bags, sport bags. They were bringing it in-house after have been licensing it, so we built the program from the ground up and lead it into what it is today. I was there a hair over three years. From there, I came to Granite Gear, where I have been as the director of design and development the last year. Granite Gear has always been a tried-and-true hardcore outdoor company, and we're looking to grow and move into new product categories. We're already deep into the outdoor hiking and climbing packs, and the company wanted to get more into the day-to-day backpack, campus bag, the back-to-school market, as well as adventure travel gear, which is essentially luggage.
What's your outdooring background like?
The outdoor industry is a great fit for me. I always loved to spend as much time as possible outdoors. I got into cross country running, I'd do day hikes and trips, kinda weekend warrior hiking trips. And did cross country all the way through highschool and college, so I'd spent a lot of time outdoors, which is what sparked me to start designing gear for the outdoors. It's what pushed me into my first real job at High Sierra.
Describe the Granite Gear design team.
A couple new faces and a couple of old faces: Dan is one of the founders of the company—which is 28 years old now—and he's not a classically trained designer; he's experience-based, and self-taught. Dan is involved in the design process as much as possible, as well as skilled design engineers Scott Anderson and Wade Niemi. The three of them have been the leads on the ultralight side of pack design for the last eight years. Our current design team consists of myself, Dan, Scott, Wade, Associate Product Designer Ben Landry, and a design intern, David. That's us in a nutshell right now. In the near future we're hoping to hire our intern as an associate product designer, and hire another senior level graphic designer, and we're always going to do the intern program every summer.
Walk me through your design process.
We've been very fortunate to work with a number of athletes who we sponsor. A key guy is Justin Lichter, whose trail name is Trauma. He's authored a number of books on it, the latest is the The Ultralight Survival Kit. He's a younger guy and he's worked with us from soup to nuts, with what to do to make things lighter.
As with all our gear, they're very, very, very function driven, even more so with ultralight packs. These guys will go out on day hikes, week hikes, sometimes even longer, and they really like to tailor their packs to do what they need them to do. So we wouldn't design a pack and say "Trauma, here's our ultralight pack and it has a maple core frame sheet"—we do have a pack with an actual maple-ply frame sheet, which is super innovative. It's lightweight but it's not ultralight. These guys are going out there with effectively no frame, or very little stability in their back. If something's going to be ultralight, we'll use the lightest fabrics, whether it be silicone, nylon, or cuben fiber. Cuben fiber is non-woven dyneema that's layered into what could be called a textile. It's super light and strong.
We always use the smallest possible width of webbing, the actual difference in the webbing doesn't make much difference in weight savings between 5mm and 10mm, but what it does do is when you use 5mm webbing you can use 5mm hardware. All the buckles or ladder locks—that's where the weight begins to accumulate. If you can use 5mm hardware instead of 10, you're going to save an ounce across the bag since you'll have six buckles and eight ladderlocks. Every little area helps to add up to the whole project.
Misfit Wearables is looking for a designer to help define the future of Misfit software to join their team in Burlingame, California. Misfit develops the most elegant activity trackers in world and provides a unique mix of hardware and software that motivates and inspires people to be more active and live a healthier life. As a user experience designer, you would be applying Misfit design principles to a variety of user interfaces and websites, designing for a variety of formats (wearables, phones, tablets and the web), wireframing and presenting solutions to a wide variety of design problems, creating pixel-perfect mockups and generating production-ready assets for use by engineering.
If you're a Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign master; love a good crit; have no problem being a self-starter; love and understand global trends, tech and fashion; and have great interpersonal skills, then this might be the job for you—Apply Now!
Fire and heavy electronic beats may not be the first things you'd associate with a children's classroom lesson. The team at science/tech blog Veritasium met with a group of "physics and chemistry demonstrators" that combined all three in an audio visualizer they tour around to help demonstrate the shape and intensity of various sound waves. Turns out it's just as cool for adults as it is for the kiddos.
By creating a pyro board of Ruben's Tubes—essentially rows of Bunsen burners (see above)—that moonlights as a sound board, it's easy to see the flames jump as the different soundwaves pass over it.
In Veritasium's video, the first half address how the entire thing works and the second half consists of music and lots of fire (if you're just in it for the flames, make sure to stick around past the first half). Check it out:
You don't think of big-name designers doing furniture for schools, but Danish furniture brand Hay scored Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec to do their line for the University of Copenhagen. The resultant Copenhague line is a handsome blend of wooden desks, tables, chairs, and stools, some stackable. And in a nod to modern needs, the tables and desks featuring bent plywood provide a slot where the dual surfaces meet, intended for power cables to be routed through.
Editor: After going Hollywood in Part 5, here in Part 6 Accidental Designer finds a casual suggestion from his wife is about to change their lives. As one door closes, another door (this one on a shipping container) opens....
I was down in my basement workshop, failing.
I had been trying to produce a lightweight and affordable bamboo folding chair for Hollywood sets. After hundreds of hours and countless prototypes, this problem just had me beat—and I knew it. I mopped my brow and called up the stairs to ask my wife if we had any sandwiches left.
My wife is a mean cook and she goes through cutting boards like nobody's business. It doesn't matter what they're made of, she just plain wears them out. "I need a new cutting board, this one's through," she called down the stairs. "Can you scrape up some of that bamboo and make me one?"
I looked around at all of the bamboo scrap I had and thought, well, here's a problem I can solve. I glued up a bunch of scrap pieces, more than I needed just for the sake of doing something, and by the next day I'd made her a cutting board and a few back-ups.
Following that, to clean up my shop area, use up a bunch of scrap and exercise my brain, I threw myself into gluing up cut-offs and began experimenting with different styles of cutting boards. After failing with chair prototype after prototype, it felt good to successfully make something—anything.
I had consistently-shaped scraps in several different sizes, and so I designed the cutting boards around the shape of the scraps. By the end of my clean-up project I had several dozen good-looking cutting boards. I felt like my table saw and router respected me again.
I didn't think much of this until a few weeks later, when I was loading up my truck to hit a craft show in Arizona. I was bringing the $2,000 bamboo chair even though I knew it wouldn't sell, and also bringing some consumer-grade chairs I knew I could sell, just because I needed the cash. The extra bamboo cutting boards I'd made were sitting in the corner. I figured they'd be Christmas presents for relatives, which would save my wife and I some cash since we were getting close to broke.
Still, I grabbed a bunch of the cutting boards and threw them in the truck. I didn't think I'd sell any, but figured I'd use them to gauge interest.
ZAI SKI FACTORY TOUR
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