It's a shame Jonathan Ive doesn't grant more interviews, but it's easy to see why: There exists a YouTube clip of Ive being interviewed by a British tabloid-style TV show some years ago, and rather than being given an opportunity to engage in a potentially-edifying discussion about design, the cloddish host ambushes him with questions about a media-manufactured controversy over iPod battery issues. And in more recent years, sensationalit articles speculating on Ive's salary or discussing his choice of car have cropped up.
We here at Core77 don't care what kind of car Ive drives, how much money he makes or what his workout regimen is. We're not interested in Ive's celebrity. We'd be thrilled to see a Jonathan Ive interivew where he talks about aluminum or co-molding for 30 minutes. We're interested in his design talents and philosophies, his knowledge of materials, and what those things can inspire and impart to the upcoming generation of designers. So we were excited to see Shane Richmond, The Telegraph's Head of Technology, intercept Ive on the occasion of his being Knighted and interview him in an engaging discussion about design, released just this morning.
We think of Jonathan Ive as a successful designer because we have seen his successes, but it's not productive to merely drool over his on-the-market creations. To understand his design thinking and how those successes are achieved is much more edifying. It's fascinating, for instance, to think about how many iterations of the iDevices Ive and the design team slaved over that would never make the cut:
"For a large percentage of a program, it often is not clear whether we are actually going to be able to solve the problems. For a significant percentage of the time we don't know whether we are going to have to give up on an idea or not. And that's been the case whether it's the iPod, the iPhone or the iPad."
And there have been times when we've been working on a program and when we are at a very mature stage and we do have solutions and you have that sinking feeling because you're trying to articulate the values to yourself and to others just a little bit too loudly. And you have that sinking feeling that the fact that you are having to articulate the value and persuade other people is probably indicative of the fact that actually it's not good enough. On a number of occasions we've actually all been honest with ourselves and said 'you know, this isn't good enough, we need to stop'. And that's very difficult.
Those are the kinds of design lessons we'd like to read more about, and luckily, this morning we can. Check out the two-page interview here.
When the designers at RUX finished a recent wood-based project, their workshop was littered with leftover wood scraps and offcuts, everything from Maple to sun-bleached Ipe salvaged from the Coney Island boardwalk. Instead of tossing away the bits and pieces, they decided to make it a design challenge to come up with a product that not only made use of the leftover materials, but made it a central part of the final design. The result is the Stickbulb lamp, a skinny LED light housed inside the wooden scraps that can be painted and joined in a variety a ways.
The Bang series joins three sticks together with a steel 'knuckle' or joint - a fresh take on the tripod lamp. It comes in three sizes, Little Bang, Middle Bang and Big Bang. The Torch is a floor lamp made up of just one stick that juts through a weighted steel base so that it leans forward just slightly. My favorite is the Wall Torch, which can be positioned in two ways. You can take it out of its base (no, it's not hot) and face the stick against the wall to create a soft glow, or you can face the light out and raise the stick up to a 90-degree angle to make a reading light. The LED strips look great alone and in a group, housed in raw wood or painted.
In a reminder that not every Kickstarter project is a blowout, last week the Arqball Spin project we've been keeping tabs on squeaked over the finish line, barely reaching its $40,000 target with mere hours to spare.
While I dig the technology, plan on using it and will pay whatever the service ends up costing, I wasn't sure the Arqball guys would hit their target. The $60 buy-in seemed kind of steep for the small turntable you'd get in return, particularly when the web is awash in DIY motorized turntable tutorials.
For example, here's one from a guy who kind of looks and sounds like Casey Affleck. He whipped his up for $25 and apparently did it while drinking a Sierra Nevada:
While I'd like to use Arqball's technology, the reason I didn't pledge for one of their turntables is because the objects I need to create Spins of—vintage sewing machines—weigh in excess of 30 pounds, and the Arqball turntable's cut-off is five pounds. If you're an ID student wanting to Spin something as heavy as a car clay model, you're in the same boat. So for those needing to DIY a turntable that can spin heavier stuff, here's a guy who whipped one up for about $40 using a rotisserie motor, a lazy Susan and some woodworking skills:
Houghton Mifflin is seeking a Director, User Experience (UX), who will be responsible for ensuring all Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) learning products provide a best-in-class and age-appropriate user experience. HMH learning products include books (in print, audio, and electronic formats), interactive digital content, game-based learning, interactive whiteboard lessons, and videos.
Not that it wasn't relevant a month ago—after all, I happened upon the daring Danes during their pop-up studio during the Salone—but the guerrilla ethos of the DENNIS Design Center has taken on an ethical significance in light of the recent events surrounding designer Takeshi Miyakawa's (benign) intervention on the occasion of the ICFF in New York. (For my part, I plead guilty to a regrettable delay in saving the best for last: the mobile workshop was easily my top pick for Zona Tortona and certainly one of the best in show during the Salone this year.)
Looks cool, but what does it actually do? Well, a lot more than your average exhibitor in Milan: the DENNIS Design Center is a "newly started platform for urban design studies," working "across disciplines [to introduce] new and diverse atmospheres into the streets of Milan, inspired by the local population and its surroundings."
During the project in Milan, DENNIS invites you to get refueled with cultural and social energy at the self-constructed gas station placed on the parking lot in front of Superstudio 13. The gas station provides refueling of inspiration, how design is generated, shaped and communicated.
While the Copenhagen-based crew readily cites graffiti as a source of inspiration, their ad-hoc furniture workshop—a creative outlet (a vehicle, perhaps) for art/design collective Bureau Detours—is rather less illicit... and far more functional to boot. (Indeed, the DENNIS Design Center had the blessing of the Temporary Museum for New Design and Danish Craft Council, among others; Takeshi's project, on the other hand, involved some internal electronics and a late-night installation—red flags for New York's finest.)
In other words, they hope to translate the same highly public aesthetic experience of graffiti into furniture.
Tracy Cordingley and Jamie Billing, product design professors at the UK's Nottingham Trent University, have launched a website that's something like Instructables for the recycling-minded. Called Co-oproduct.org, the site is a "web portal that shows you how to creatively ReUse your Household Packaging and Everyday Waste Materials to make new desirable objects."
The site is broken down into categories—Metal, Plastics, Glass, et cetera—though at press time, not every material had an attendant product you could make with it; presumably the community-minded site's offerings will grow over time as more people submit projects. But thus far there are tutorials such as how to make drinking glasses out of beer bottles, tables out of bicycle wheels, stool tops out of shredded paper and resin, and what looks to be about two dozen others. Below is a lamp made from plastic spoons.
The quality of photographs on the site is quite poor, another area they will need to address if they hope to draw mass attention. But the central idea of the website is sound and we hope it catches on.
A map of the global game guides who helped manage the Catalysts For Change game during its 48 hour run.
It seems like we're playing video games every day. Every morning and evening on the subway, I see people swiping their phones, whether they're slinging a red bird into a pile of green pigs, guessing a friend's drawing, or any number of fun, frivolous, addictive activities. That's a lot of time spent on games, and a lot of cognitive energy. What if all of that brain power could be put toward social issues, like finding a way out of poverty?
Catalysts for Change, a game initiative put out this past April by the Institute for the Future, is an attempt to do just that. It ran off their popular Foresight Engine, a game platform originally designed by Jane McGonigal to drive insights and innovation through an aggregate of hundreds of mini, 140-character forecasts structured in a fast-paced card game.
And with a broad global reach, they were able to bring in global game guides, i.e., regional game managers, who helped them reach 79 countries and 1,600 players speaking English, Spanish, French or Chinese. These game guides played a crucial role as cultural bridges to the broad audience far from Palo Alto. Most were found through IFTF's broad reach of contacts. In one instance, an aspiring game developer in Mexico City reached out via Twitter, as he saw an opportunity to refine his skills in a city with limited opportunities for learning about games.
I sat down with Tessa Finlev, the official gamemaster of Catalysts for Change. Their goal for the 48-hour burst was to answer a difficult question: how to find new paths out of poverty.
Core77: From the numbers, it sounds like the game went very well.
Tessa Finlev: I think it went really well. Catalysts for Change garnered over 18,000 cards in 48 hours—[double] the previous record for a Foresight Engine game (Magnetic South), in which just under 9,000 cards for a game played in Christchurch, New Zealand after their earthquake last year.
It's important to mention that while our reach was wide and very global, an online forum is, of course, limited to people who can access the Internet and are savvy enough to navigate the Foresight Engine platform—which is designed to be very lightweight and easy to jump right into, but still requires some experience using the web. Our next step is to find new ways to break down these barriers even further.
C77: What sorts of games and gamification models were implemented in building this site?
In order to gamify the Foresight Engine, we implement a basic scoring structure. When you sign up you get some points; when you play a new card, you get points; and as people build on your cards you get even more points. The focus is on building collaboration, so the majority of the points are gained when players begin to build on each others' cards.
Foresight Engine games also tend to go hand-in-hand with player awards, which are given to players for the most innovative ideas. Although the awards do not come with points, they reward the desire to be recognized in front of your community for being innovative and creative in your thinking. The awards are not built into the site itself, and require game guides to find the right players and ideas to receive these awards.
The process was particularly daunting for the Catalysts for Change game due to such a large amount of cards that were played in such a short period. Many of the global game guides suggested that we find a way to have the game automatically award players with basic algorithms. However, this becomes increasingly difficult since the themes of the awards change for every game. In the end, it might mean that next time we run a game with global game guides that we need to focus on adding in more training around the process of awarding players.
For the second part of the Student Design Challenge hosted at WantedDesign, students representing three American and three French schools were divided by the judges into small teams based on their individual presentations. With access to acrylic, a laser-cutter and 3M-donated architectural films, the students began meshing their ideas together with their teammates. Challenge judges including Core77 Editor in Chief Allan Chochinov, Parsons Product Design Director Rama Chorpash and New Zealand-based designer David Trubridge worked with students while François Brument helped guide the process. With less than 48 hours until their final presentations, the students had a long road ahead of them.
A great example of these collaborations came from an American student who created a radial lamp for his personal presentation. He was partnered with a French student who had created a series of V-shaped acrylic pieces that can be notched together. Together, their pendant light became a sculptural object.
I especially liked the way that this team explored the materiality of the 3M architectural films. Their light was powered by batteries hidden in the fold of this soft-bodied light. The shape undulates into a rolling S-shaped donut.
One of the few projects that successfully explored both materials—laser-cut acrylic and 3M film—this team applied the reflective films to a modular acrylic base to build out mirrored, sculptural table lamp.
I prefer Doypacks to bottles, but during my gig as a structural package designer, the corporate marketing higher-ups were adamant that the American public would never accept them. So we churned out bottle after bottle after bottle.
It's heartening to see China, with all of their one-billion-plus consumers, readily willing to put the the Doypack into common consumer use. A Chinese company called Huishan Dairy has begun using Swedish company Ecolean's Air Aseptic containers for their 240mL milk containers. ("Aseptic," in the beverage packaging world, just means "sterile.")
The Air Aseptic has two innovations, one ergonomic, the other a materials innovation. First off, pouring liquid from a Doypack is never easy as there's no good place to grab; Ecolean solves this by blowing an air-filled fin into the side of the packaging, providing a convenient handle. Secondly, in search of an alternative to plastic, Ecolean discovered they could use a minimum of polyethylene and fill out the bulk of the packaging with calcium carbonate--a/k/a chalk. Turns out the stuff is good for more than putting schoolkids to sleep; Ecolean has figured out how to extrude and layer the stuff into an efficient, not to mention bright white, Doypack.
Here Pat Reynolds, Vice President and Editor of Packaging World, gives us the rundown on the package and how the materials are put together:
The trick to standing out amongst the 35 designers crowded into the Designboom mart at ICFF is not to overwhelm your tiny display space with everything you've ever made. Canadian designer Miss Sinclaire set up shop with just one product, her tiffin lunch kit, and its clean lines and thoughtful design elements easily caught my eye. As anyone who regularly eats their weekly midday meal from plastic togo boxes and ziploc containers knows, it feels really nice to eat off an actual plate with real utensils.
Sinclaire's design gracefully solves one of those problems. The tiffin lunch kit is made up of two stacking bowls and a cork lid that locks the set together under an elastic strap and a metal handle. The bowls, which Sinclaire casts herself in "durable, thin-walled ceramic," are beautifully made. They can be used to separate food like curries and rice or soup and bread, and the cork lid can double as a trivet or even a plate. Pack it up for a picnic or for an office lunch you don't chuck in the bin when you're finished. You can pick one up at Sinclaire's online shop for $65.
NY DESIGN WEEK GUIDE
CORE77 OPEN EXHIBITION
Architectural Digest Home Design Show 2012
International Home + Housewares Show 2012
New York CityVision Competition
Snarkitecture - Funiture 
Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving, by Jon Kolko
Where They Create, by Paul Barbera and Alexandra Onderwater
The Key to Sustainable Product Creation: Engineering + Design
One Chair a Week 
IKEA Takes on Consumer Electronics
New Philips LED Light Bulb
Core77 Design Awards 
SHIFTBoston 2012 Glow Competition 
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
A map of the global game guides who helped manage the Catalysts For Change game during its 48 hour run.
FRIEZE ART FAIR NEW YORK 2012
MILAN 2012: SALONE INTERNAZIONALE DEL MOBILE
MILAN 2012: SATELLITE EXHIBITIONS
MILAN 2012: BRERA DESIGN DISTRICT
Book Review - Introducing: Visual Identities for Small Businesses
Wallpaper's City Guide: What's Hip in Tel Aviv
Paper View: Sight Unseen's Printed Edition
Book Review - Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving, by Jon Kolko
4
Looking Back at 20 Years of Kikkerland with Jan van der Lande
Imperialist Tendencies: The Real Design Imperialism
New Amsterdam Bicycle Show Recap
Case Study: Icebreaker Merino - Reinventing Wool as a Performance Fiber
Logic over Lust: Remembering Butzi Porsche
