Core77

This weekend saw the unveiling of the collaborative bicycle designs that are going head to head in the third edition of the Oregon Manifest, in which five teams in as many cities set out to create and craft the best urban utility bike. As of Monday morning, the public is invited to vote on their favorite one, which may well be produced by Fuji Bikes in the near future. We are pleased to present exclusive Q&As with each team so they have a chance to explain why their bicycle is the best before the voting period closes this Sunday, August 3.

Yesterday, we heard from NYC's Pensa × Horse Cycles. Here's the story behind Industry × Ti Cycles's "SOLID," representing Portland, Ore.

Did you and Ti Cycles know (or know of) each other before the collaboration? What was the matchmaking process like?

Garett Stenson: We knew of Ti Cycles' reputation, their 25 years of experience, and expertise in bike craftsmanship. They are experts in metal, most notably, pushing the boundaries of titanium. The matchmaking and selection process for us was about close collaboration—is our builder willing to change the game, redefine the category, and truly make things better?

By its nature, the design/fabrication relationship for this collaboration is far more intimate than your average designer's relationship with a contractor or manufacturer. To what degree did you educate each other on your respective areas of expertise?

To disrupt any category you need friction. Innovation hurts—tension is an important part of the process. We believe the best idea needs to be stress tested and the process, iterative. Bringing together Ti Cycles' craftsman mentality with INDUSTRY's modern and agile approach was the perfect marriage. We aligned on pushing the boundaries early on, yet respected each other's expertise. At the end of the day, it was about creating a meaningful (and winning) result—together.

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Tonight's Curiosity Club is "8 Days A Week" with the prolific Kate Binaman-Burt, illustrator, educator and all-round creative badass. As she puts it: Kate will involve colorful visuals, excitement about personal projects (both hers and others), her path from wanting to be a morning TV personality (watch out Kathie Lee) to teaching (it was an accident, I swear) to drawing every day (my hand is cramping as I type this). Also, she has a problem with slipping from third person to first person while writing (I am so sorry). Also, she usually gives away stuff at her talks (Will the TSA confiscate a t-shirt cannon? What if it shot confetti? Hmmm...how about hot dogs? I love hot dogs). Bring your own ketchup and mustard. I look forward to seeing you all.

Come by Hand-Eye Supply at 6pm PT, or tune in as we stream live.

About Kate Bingaman-Burt

Kate makes piles of work about the things that we BUY (and want) and the emotions attached to our STUFF. She also happily think and draw for good people and companies. She has been making work about consumption since 2002, teaching since 2004 and drawing until her hand cramps since 2006 (ouch).Along with being an educator and illustrator, she organize events, installations, workshops and she probably talks a bit too much.

Her first book, Obsessive Consumption: What Did You Buy Today? was published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2010. Since then, she has collaborated with them to produce two more titles about documentation and consumption in 2012 and 2014. Her design clients include Chipotle, Hallmark, IDEO, VH1, Girl Scouts of America, Madewell and the Gap as well as locally loved institutions like the Museum of Contemporary Craft, Reading Frenzy and Know Your City. She am also actively involved in the organization of Design Week Portland.

Kate is an Associate Professor of Graphic Design at Portland State University. In 2013, she was the recipient of the 2013 College of the Arts Kamelia Massih Outstanding Faculty Prize as well as a TEDXPortland Speaker. She is the faculty advisor for the PSU.GD student design group Friends of Graphic Design (FoGD) and the in-house student design studio A+D Projects. She also coordinates the weekly Show & Tell Lecture Series. For her, teaching and making go hand in hand. Without one, the other wouldn't exist.

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Interaction design has increasingly been supplementing (if not outright supplanting) industrial design when it comes to many of the products that we use on a daily basis, and technology continues to promise new ways to interact with objects, both within and without ubiquitous touchscreens. The Internet of Things may not yet be evenly distributed, but the Interaction category of the Core77 Design Awards continues to celebrate not only what's new and next but also the experiments and breakthroughs of the future made real.

Even so, the content itself is often familiar—if not outright commonplace—which only underscores how new modes of interactions have the potential to reinvent age-old experiences such as socializing, storytelling and wayfinding. Led by Jury Captain Aaron Siegel of Fabrica, the jury selected these projects and products—over a dozen in all—for top honors in the Interaction category of the 2014 Core77 Design Awards.

Professional Winner: Sadly By Your Side, by Angelo Semeraro and Davide Cairo

Turn your iPhone into a visual and musical remixing tool with Angelo Semeraro and Davide Cairo's Sadly By Your Side. Bring each song in the 8-track album to life by using the app in conjunction with the imagery in the accompanying booklet, or by 'scanning' the real world. By deeply integrating disparate media—an album, book and iOS app—the project easily stood out to the jury: "Sadly by Your Side captivated us visually and emotionally. It explored an interaction paradigm that was new to most people, and it bridged a number of disciplines and mediums while also rethinking how we experience music, causing the user to become a part of the composition process."

» Learn more about Sadly By Your Side

Student Winner: inFORM: A Dynamic Shape Display, by Tangible Media Group

MIT Media Lab's Tangible Media Group turned heads with their Dynamic Shape Display, and for good reason. The device turns digital data into virtual objects that can be manipulated in real life, allowing users to play with things that aren't actually there. "The integration of telepresent characteristics helps bridge the virtual divide with the additional fidelity of experience through haptic feedback," says the jury. "While we would love to see this scaled, we thought that even this prototype demonstration was extremely compelling and the fact that it got us talking for a lengthy amount of time about its different applications in the world very much pointed to its worthiness."

» Learn more about inFORM: A Dynamic Shape Display

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You might exchange ideas, motivations and inspiration within your own circles on a regular basis, but how often do you get to do it with people from all across the globe? Your chance to do just that at 2014 IDSA International Conference is almost gone. Late registration for this annual IDSA event ends this Sunday, August 3, but you can also register on-site from August 3rd to August 16th.

Not only is there an impressive line up of speakers and events to attend, the local arts and culture of Austin, TX should keep you busy and perfectly entertained when you're not at the conference center. And don't forget about the Core77 Party on Friday, August 15, at the historic Scoot Inn, kicking off at 9pm. Get your tickets today before it's too late and we'll see you there!

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Images via Robbie Khan / PetaPixel

While I'd previously caught wind of LG's new 34" monitor, the company's hero shots showed little more than a rectangle covered in Photoshopped fake screens and devoid of local scale. But I just came across photographer Robbie Khan's write-up on his, and seeing it with actual work on it drives home how gi-normous this thing is.

Like many of us creatives Khan spends long stretches in front of a monitor, and the 34UM95's 21:9 aspect ration and 3440x1440 resolution would go to good use in his work editing panoramic photos.

LG's product copy points out that they've included a "Screen Splitter" feature (both Windows and Mac compatible) that automatically tiles out four screens with a single click...

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If you appreciate organized and efficient living spaces, and would like to create tomorrow's home storage and organization products, Lynk would like to hear from you. Lynk is a leader in the home storage and organization market and they are looking for two industrial design interns or part-time designers who have strong creative problem solving skills and desires to bring valuable new product ideas to life.

As part of the Lynk design team, you will have direct involvement in all areas of design from concept to market. This means you'll need knowledge and understanding of industrial design processes, strong ideation and visualization skills and proficiency using Photoshop, Illustrator and SolidWorks. If you want to create new products that improve people's lives and build up your resume at a company with 35 years of market leadership, Apply Now.

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Although the perennial buzz around 3D printing has yet to materialize into a proper industrial revolution, the increasingly powerful technology has gained some traction in the medical world, where customizability and on-site availability trump the constraints of cost and scale. It may come as no surprise, then, that one of the 2014 Core77 Design Awards honorees that caught our eye was developed by a previous winner, whose work we'd covered as far back as 2010, before the the inaugural awards program.

This time around, Scott Summit took Professional Runner Up in the Social Impact category with the EKSO personal exoskeleton, a mecha-like medical device at the intersection of robotics, rehabilitation and digital fabrication. As a replacement for a wheelchair, the device has the potential to revolutionize mobility for paraplegic individuals.

Summit shares credit with Gustavo Fricke, 3D Systems and Ekso Bionics, all of whom worked together to print parts that connect a person to their robot as naturally and respectively as possible. "This is an unusual design effort on every front," designer Scott Summit says. "We had challenges with the technical details, since these are massive files, and almost entirely organic, but very precise. It's also very tricky to scan a paralyzed person, and expect the data to be exactly as desired. We found that even the slightest detail could lead to dangerous bruising." All of that considered, the prototypes have been met with a great response. The test pilot loves it so much, she wants to use it all of the time. But like many of these things go, the team has to wait until the design is FDA certified to be worn daily.

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Today saw the unveiling of the collaborative bicycle designs that are going head to head in the third edition of the Oregon Manifest, in which five teams in as many cities set out to create and craft the best urban utility bike. As of this morning's launch, the public is invited to vote on their favorite one, which may well be produced by Fuji Bikes in the near future. We are pleased to present exclusive Q&As with each team so they have a chance to explain why their bicycle is the best before the voting period closes this Sunday, August 3.

First up, Brooklyn's own Pensa × Horse Cycles, representing New York City.

Core77: Did you and Thomas know (or know of) each other before the collaboration? What was the matchmaking process like?

Mark Prommel (Pensa): We had seen Horse Cycles on various design and local maker blogs, and were already really into his work. When we were invited to participate as the NYC representative for The Bike Design Project, Thomas Callahan was definitely at the top of the list of bike craftsmen we were interested in talking to. After meeting a few builders, the choice was easy.

By its very nature, the design-fabrication relationship for this collaboration is far more intimate than your average designer's relationship with a contractor or manufacturer. To what degree did you educate each other on your respective areas of expertise? Has the collaboration yielded broader lessons?

One of the things that really made this relationship work well was the fact that Thomas is an established designer in his own right, and we at Pensa are also accomplished makers and fabricators. So it wasn't just a "we design it / you build it" relationship—it was a fully collaborative from the first day. All of our concepts were born out of our first few weeks of open collaboration workshops. Thomas was very open to our approach of establishing the big picture story of the bike first, ensuring it was unique, compelling, and based on real insight about the New York City urban rider. We had to make sure that we were looking at the full range of possibilities for the bike and that the foundation of our concept would have enough layers to make the end result truly special. In developing our early concepts together, Thomas lent a wealth of experience and expertise that prevented us from going down paths that would have been wrought with insurmountable challenges.

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Vacheron Constantin timepieces have been worn by the likes of Harry Truman, the Duke of Windsor and even Napoleon Bonaparte. So when the luxury watch manufacturer needed a special case built to house a one-of-a-kind watch (a "tourbillon minute repeater," buyer unknown), they couldn't exactly buy off-the-rack. Instead they turned to UK-based Method Studio, a highly specialized manufacturer of one-off furniture and cases, to create something truly unique.

Method Studio, which is comprised of the husband-and-wife, cabinetmaker-and-architect team of Callum Robinson and Marisa Giannasi, along with the input of Callum's master-cabinetmaker/woodcarver/designer/builder father David Robinson, is located on the east coast of Scotland. But they were able to source some "rare old-growth brown oak" from a woodlands in Northampton as their starting point.

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Perennially the most popular—and competitive—category of the Core77 Design Awards, Consumer Products encompasses everything from health and wellness to comfort and convenience. If you didn't catch the announcement of the Consumer Products winners back in June (live from our first annual Core77 Conference, no less), here's a closer look at the honorees, along with comments from the jury team led by Johan Liden.

As always, this year's honorees represent a full range of forward-thinking and noteworthy products released in 2013, for which mass market appeal is as much a criteria as the incremental innovations behind these objects. In fact, each of these products represents an upgrade from the average, unremarkable things that you might use everyday to the rarefied canon of products that you actually enjoy using.

Professional Winner: SOMA Water Filter and Carafe, by Moreless & Radius Product Development

It's a simple yet powerful premise: That a humble water carafe might serve as a centerpiece for a kitchen or dining room. Moreless and Radius Product Development rose to the challenge and developed the SOMA Water Filter and Carafe for that very purpose. Here's what the jury had to say: "SOMA is just as much about presentation as it is about purification. While other filtration pitchers may be intended to live on the dinner table, SOMA is the first one that belongs there... When you see it you ask yourself 'Why hasn't anyone done this before?', which we felt is at the heart of great design."

» Learn more about the SOMA Water Filter and Carafe

Student Winner: Stack, by Mugi Yamamoto

It's easy to see why Mugi Yamamoto's compact inkjet printer earned the praise of designers, including the jury team. Stack sits atop a column of paper and works its way down. The jury appreciated the transparency behind the work: "We loved the deconstruction and reductive thinking of an otherwise clunky, dated device and it's ability to solve for some real world pain points—imagine always knowing if the printer has paper in it!"

» Learn more about Stack

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