By Rain Noe - Mar 06 New

Counterfeit Sneakers are Now Manufactured So Well, Even Experts Can't Tell the Difference

Companies prone to piracy must invest heavily in R&D and materials science to stay ahead

With the woodchipper fired up, the men began tossing $1 million worth of brand-new sneakers into it. Nike, Adidas, Vans, Converse, it didn't matter what it said on the label; all 150,000 pairs were counterfeits,

By Rain Noe - Mar 06 New

Hell in a Handbasket: Using Superhydrophobic Paint to Create Splashback on Drunken Public Urinators

German city enacts what they call "peeback time"

Mornings in New York: The taste of hot coffee, the din of traffic, the aroma of fresh urine. If you have the bad luck to pass anywhere a drunken bar-goer might have the night before, as most of us do, chances are you'll pass some building nook with a suspicious

By Mason Currey - Mar 06 New

Tech Specs: Victoria Slaker, VP of Product Design at Ammunition

The San Francisco–based designer on having a very straightforward computer setup, being an impatient early adopter—and why she’s grown wary of the “super shiny rendering.”

By Rain Noe - Mar 06 New

Kairos: A Mechanical/Smartwatch Hybrid

The trick is to use a transparent OLED over the face

Billing their product as the "world's first and only mechanical smart watch hybrid," Kairos Watches has set the expectations bar high. Especially considering their watches haven't launched; they're taking pre-orders, but still working out the tech.

By Kat Bauman - Mar 05 New

Tech-tacular Forum Frenzy: Should Modeling Knowledge Be Deep Or Wide? 

As much fun as it is to fill a notebook with sketches of fast shoes and sexy cars, ID is definitely a digital field. As we trawled around the forums looking for interesting tech issues we noticed several queries about which programs beginning designers really ought to know.

By Rain Noe - Mar 05

Fiskars "Gears" Up to Launch PowerGear2 Line of Cutting Tools

Toothed gears in these hand tools let you generate three times the force

Last year I stood in a snow-dusted field in Finland, handling a variety of bladed tools. There at Fiskars' proving grounds, a bunch of us visitors took turns chopping, cutting and slicing wood with a series of ingeniously-designed gardening tools that surprised me in their ease-of-use.

By Jeri Dansky - Mar 05

11 Alarm Clocks for Starting the Day Right

Many people are happy to use their smartphones as their alarm clocks, but that won't work for everyone. Some users don't have smartphones—or are minimally tech-proficient and only know how to use them for limited purposes. Others choose to follow the advice of sleep researchers and feng shui consultants and keep all screens out of the bedroom. And others simply find a physical alarm clock easier to deal with when waking up than a smartphone.

By Mason Currey - Mar 05

Tech Specs: Abe Burmeister, Cofounder of Outlier

The Brooklyn-based designer and entrepreneur on the iPad Mini’s “transformational” form factor, his devotion to Wacom tablets and why he does most of his work from the couch.

By C77DA Program - Mar 05

Bringing Service Design to a Broader Audience 

The 2014 Core77 Design Awards Service Design Jury Captain shares his experiences from the awards program

Tennyson Pinheiro is a serial entrepreneur, designer, professor, startup founder and angel investor. You may be familiar with him as the founder and CEO of Livework in Brazil, the pioneering global Service Design agency, or as the creator of Eise - The School for Service Innovation. He has also written two books about design thinking; one, Design Thinking Brasil is a best seller in Brazil and the other, The Service Startup :: Design gets Lean, explores the intersection between...

By Rain Noe - Mar 04

Another Table Design Inspired by Natural Bodies of Water

What Greg Klassen did for rivers, Christopher Duffy does for oceans

Do you remember Greg Klassen's River Collection of tables? To refresh your memory, the Pacific-Northwest-based craftsman used two slabs with live edges to make one tabletop—but he flipped the live edges over to the inside. By precisely cutting a piece of glass to match the edges, the resultant table looks like a natural river: A paradoxically similar-but-totally-different table is London-based designer Christopher Duffy's Abyss Table.

By Kill Screen - Mar 04

Google's AI Has Conquered Tetris. Next Up? The World.

Let’s say you met a caveman and wanted to teach him Tetris. How would you go about it? You and the caveman would probably sit down on a couch one afternoon and, after a perfunctory description of the rules, just start playing.

By Rain Noe - Mar 04

Production Methods: How to Turn a Flat Metal Disc into a Bottle-Necked Scuba Tank

They call it "hot spinning"

Plastic bottles are made by blow-molding, a beautiful, elegant process that can create a full-bodied shape with a narrow little neck. But how the heck do they make scuba tanks, fire extinguishers and gas canisters, which have similarly narrow necks, but are of course made of non-blow-moldable metal?

By Rain Noe - Mar 04

Tools That Change the Way We Design & Build: Jory Brigham on the Festool Domino's In-Shop Impact

Furniture designer Jory Brigham tells us what six years with a Domino does for your work, and your workflow.

By Mason Currey - Mar 04

Tech Specs: Ladies & Gentlemen Studio

The Seattle-based designers Dylan Davis and Jean Lee on working from home, being “degenerate Luddites” and searching for the perfect small-business software.

By Sam Jacob - Mar 04

The Real Smart City

We are right to remain suspicious of techno-utopian urban fantasies—especially when they come to us through corporate interests.

The Smart City is a huge, vague and ubiquitous idea. The phrase—so insistent yet so slippery—suggests a way we can understand how cities work and how we might get them to work better.

By Sam Dunne - Mar 03

Hackaball: A Toy for 21st Century Launched on Kickstarter

Creators Made by Many give us an insight on an epic 2-year design process

We've had an eye on the "Hackaball" project by London based agency Made by Many since we heard wind early last year. What started out as a brief for two talented incoming interns, slowly grew legs and spiraled into a learning project that saw the studio stepping back from the

By Core Jr - Mar 03

Core77 Techtacular Forum Frenzy: Automation Arguments

The State of Automated Design Is...Still Pending?

A controversial tech topic showed back up in the forums over the last year: the onward march of automating design. With the steady progress towards smarter programs and ever greater computing power, some designers look forward to more automation and some remain skeptical.

By Rain Noe - Mar 03

How Ikea is Managing Their Natural Wood Push

That is an awful lot of pine!

Core77 talks to IKEA about the NORNÄS range, their new natural pine line of furniture.

By Rain Noe - Mar 03

Tools That Change the Way We Design & Build: The Festool Domino

For the Core77 Tech-tacular, a look at a game-changing power tool of such unique utility and intelligent design that the capabilities of the tool itself actually change the way we are able to design and build.

By Mason Currey - Mar 03

Tech Specs: Paul Hoppe, Art Director at Local Projects

The NYC–based art director on prototyping through code, building interactive installations—and being careful not to let new technology get in the way of the story.

By Core Jr - Mar 03

Design for All Life

Is it time to re-examine human-centered design?

With the Biomimicry Center opening today at Arizona State University, the Co-Director argues for a new locus for design—moving beyond anthropocentrism and towards biocentrism.

By Rain Noe - Mar 03

Jenny Nordberg's Five-Minute Furniture

Is it good? No, but that's not the point

A recent furniture project exhibited at the Stockholm Furniture Fair challenges conventional wisdom for the sake of exploration.

By Rain Noe - Mar 02

The Sweater Stone, Patagonia, Product Longevity, and How to Keep Customers for Life

Pumice stones and sewing machines can make all the difference

"Sustainability" is a popular buzzword, but I think we should also consider "longevity." When a company has sustainable practices but you must re-buy their products every few years, it seems obvious that we should be leaning more towards longevity. This is Patagonia's Men's Better Sweater Hoody, which I purchased three

By Carla Diana - Mar 02

Embracing the Wild World of Wearables

A look at what's ahead for design when the worlds of technology, fashion and wellness collide.

There’s something about the current design buzzword, “wearables,” that is spectacularly mesmerizing. As a tech nerd, I’ve seen it coming for some time, and have been intrigued to see its recent explosion in new product launches and popular media coverage. When the UP band from Jawbone emerged on the market

By Mason Currey - Mar 02

Introducing 'Tech Specs,' Our Interview Series on Designers' Digital Tools

Starting today, as part of our 2015 Tech-tacular, we’ll be publishing Q&As with ten designers about their computer setups, most-used software, favorite apps and biggest tech gripes.

By Mason Currey - Mar 02

Tech Specs: Thomas Murray, Senior Industrial Designer at Bresslergroup

In the first of our ten tech-centric Q&As, Murray talks about the industry-wide transition from analog to digital sketching—and his personal aversion to cordless mice.

By Core Jr - Mar 02

Welcome to the Core77 Tech-tacular!

Exploring the myriad ways that new technologies are shaping the future of design.

Over the next few weeks we explore the myriad ways that new technologies are shaping the future of design.

By Carly Ayres - Mar 02

Making It Count

Tangram's Smart Rope displays workout data in midair, thanks to LEDs embedded in the rope itself.

Startup culture may be good for innovation, but it’s often bad for the body—a plight that the folks at Tangram know all too well. “Running a busy startup means our schedules are less than predictable, and we’re always crunched for time,” says Joen Choe, the president of Tangram America. To try to squeeze in some cardio during their long workdays, Choe and his colleagues got in the habit of taking breaks on the office patio to jump rope.

By Rain Noe - Mar 02

The World's Most Beautiful Staircase is in Portugal

An engineer showing up designers…again

Inside what may be the prettiest bookstore in the world… …is what has got to be one of the world's most beautiful staircases.

By Rain Noe - Feb 27

Hell in a Handbasket: The Real Problem with the "White or Blue?" Dress

Idiocy is in the eye of the beholder

Yesterday's viral internet event quickly went from neat to depressing. For those who stayed away from a computer yesterday, this Tumblr photo of a dress went viral as people began to realize: Some of us see the dress as white with gold stripes. But others see the dress as dark

By Rain Noe - Feb 27

The "Shotgun Balloon Drop:" Thrill Seeker Hoisted 8,000 Feet High, Blasts His Balloons Out With a Shotgun

It's not exactly the sequel to "Up"

By Rain Noe - Feb 27

Tom Sachs' Updated "Love Letter to Plywood"

It was two years ago that we first showed you Tom Sachs' "Love Letter to Plywood" video, and we didn't realize he'd since updated it. The video is part of his "Energies & Skills" series on studio practices, which are "required viewing for Tom Sachs' studio:" They comprise guides to

By Rain Noe - Feb 27

Hi-Tech Headlights and Taillights

Coming in function, going in style

File this first one under wildly impractical but mind-blowingly cool. Audi's "OLED Swarm" concept wraps a super-thin layer of OLEDs—we're talking sub-millimeter—across a curved glass surface, essentially turning the back of the car into a curved flatscreen: Sure I'd swerve off the road watching this from behind, and have an