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Frank Gehry doesn't typically do one-off pieces but after much convincing, he agreed to design the visitors bench for the World Company building in Tokyo, Japan's largest fashion house with over 90 labels and 3000+ retail outlets. It was just installed a few weeks ago and we were able to sneak in for a closer look last night while they were hanging a banner in the front for design week.
>> View all Tokyo Design Festival posts here.
RCA Graduates Shay Alkalay & Yael Mer are quickly establishing themselves as two of the most interesting designer's in the contemporary furniture scene today. Exhibiting their latest projects at Design Tide Tokyo, the 'Pull Lamp' was literally given it's name when shot this video.
>> View all Tokyo Design Festival posts here.
Posted by: squee.gee | Comments (0)
SPR Pressurized Rover
Evan Twyford and Carl Conlee are two of three industrial designers working in NASA's Habitability Design Center (HDC), and in just over 2 years they have transitioned the department from one that dealt only with small isolated ergonomic projects to working on arguably the most exciting project at NASA today—a next generation pressurized lunar rover. Since working at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) they have had robots walk past their office door during meetings, experienced zero-gravity flight, had their bodies 3D scanned, and worked alongside some of the most talented engineers and scientists in the country. The thing is, NASA doesn't actually have an industrial design department. They don't even have a design department. Not technically, anyway.
Pictured left to right: Richard Szabo, Travis Baldwin, Carl Conlee and Evan Twyford
Meeting the team
"Things have changed so much since we started, people here don't really understand what Industrial Design is or how it fits into the bigger picture. But once they work with us and see the services we provide—visualizing information, realizing concepts—they see the value of what we do," explains Evan.
Both Carl and Evan graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design's Industrial Design program in 2005, and they both did internships at the HDC. Evan stayed on as the first industrial design hire, and Carl joined later. Travis Baldwin, 32, recently joined the team, moving from San Francisco where he worked for a number of companies like IBM, Frog Design, several start-ups, and ultimately running his own business. He graduated in Industrial Design from North Carolina State University in 1997 and actually attended space camp as a kid. The opportunity to work at NASA was a childhood dream come true—and he is still swimming in the euphoria. "For the first few months it was thrilling; people were talking about how it is on the moon, relaying stories of astronauts bouncing around in 1/6g—it felt like being at a space port 20 years in the future." The first six months were the toughest, he reports, since it's such a specific application of design: understanding the unique constraints of manned space flight and figuring out how to navigate the overwhelming protocol that comes with an institution the size of NASA.
Johnson Space Center
Johnson Space Center
The freeway commute from Houston, Texas to the Johnson Space Center is about 50 minutes, and it is easy to see the appeal of opting for a motorbike over carpooling. It's a Friday, and today's schedule is exciting for Carl and Evan, some custom-built seats they designed for the Rover project are finally arriving. Firstly though, Carl has to take a safety exam which he was routinely selected for by the computer (a byproduct of working at a government facility and a not-so-infrequent occurrence).
The daily challenge
Like most people who work at the Johnson Space Center, the HDC team is made up of contractors who work on site. In fact, the entire workforce at the JSC is comprised of 15,000 contractors (compared to roughly 3,000 civil servants), including 110 astronauts. Not only does this create a huge amount of bureaucracy, it means that job security is project-based. Those who have carved out a long-term career at NASA periodically change from one contract company to another, exchanging their requisite ID tags to follow choice projects. But from a day-to-day perspective, it feels likes one big community working for a common goal and organization.
Saturn V
Security at JSC is similar to what you might encounter as an alien at JFK airport's immigration. To the left of the entrance is a massive hanger housing the Saturn V. It is unbelievably huge in real life, but NASA will never build something of that scale again; the preference now is to build smaller modular units and not risk losing everything in one big ship. For some reason, I imagined NASA would have official transport like golf carts everywhere to maneuver between buildings, but it is really just a massive campus with huge car parks, and everyone uses their own vehicles to get around. I note some bikes parked outside as we enter Building 15, but that's gotta take real commitment in the summer months here.
Rendering of Small Pressurized Rover
Building 15: The Office
There is nothing glamorous about the design studio, located in a two-story industrial building that looks like it was built in the 50's and renovated in the 80's. The interior is defined by beige linoleum-lined corridors, evenly lit with fluorescent lights and decorated with photos from space, posters of projects and communal notice boards covered in memos and photocopies. The building's foyer is like a mini science museum with glass cabinets full of mechanical artifacts
—some cut to show cross sections and many of them actually used in space. There is an overwhelming sense of history and nostalgia here, with many areas dating back to the halcyon Apollo era. To this day, veteran engineers talk about how things were done during the Apollo missions, holding them up as benchmarks for today's efforts.
Got plans for Election Night? If you're in New York, celebrate the changing of the guard with a slumber party at Storefront for Art and Architecture. Booze, blogging, and breakfast the morning after. Plus, while you're there, you can check out the best entries in Storefront's contest to re-design the White House. B.Y.O. Sleeping bag.
Posted by: William Bostwick | Comments (0)A bite-sized list of what's happenin' now:
design taxi
ICSID Senator to give closing speech for Seoul's Design Olympiad
michael huebner's blog & column
Hoover's Moss Rock Festival combines art, architecture and environmentalism
businessweek
2008 Paris Motor Show Roundup
home rejuvenation
Home Rejuvenation's 10 Most Influential Design Bloggers 2008 (and we ain't on it!)
apple insider
Can the iPhone resuscitate interesting in reading the Classics?
concordia university
Rethink, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
the economist
Weapons design: Ray guns are real!
From the Coroflot portfolio of : Vanessa Su (Taipei, Taiwan)
Featured Project : Chair Chair Pad
Too clever... is there such a thing? After clicking below, one may think so.
Posted by: core jr | Comments (0)
ASUS and Intel are pissing off at least a few in-house designers by turning to the general public for design help. WePC.com is their new joint venture, a crowdsourcing effort that asks the average Joe to "join us in making the world's first community designed laptop."
ASUS and Intel have created WePC.com, a place where users like you come together to share ideas, images and inspiration about your ideal PC. But what if it's not just talk. Your designs, feature ideas and community feedback will be evaluated by ASUS and could influence the blueprint for an actual notebook PC built by ASUS with Intel inside.On WePC.com, the web's most creative minds are blogging about what innovations they'd like to see in a PC, chatting with you about your ideas and fueling the community brainstorming session. Join them in creating the perfect PC!
Check out the suggestion entries here.
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (1)
I.T. Managers are becoming the Hall Monitors of adult life. In a recent study by FaceTime Communications, 60% of I.T. Managers report that employees are using Facebook and other social-network sites at work, and this has now been linked to security incidents; "Information [can leak] out through those channels they can't monitor."
Among the most surprising finds in the report, according to [Frank Cabri, vice president of marketing and product management at FaceTime Communications], was that one third of the employees surveyed said they had the right to run these applications on their desktop, even if it was a violation of IT policy. "If applications are attractive and they allow the benefits for work or both, people are willing to go against corporate IT policy," he says...."I would never advise a company to give access to each and every [Facebook app] to its users," [Cabri] says. "First, determine which Internet apps users are deploying and how they are using them, he says.
"The key is putting controls in place," Cabri says. You could allow Facebook, for instance, but only with business applications within the group and block chats, he says. "And you should be measuring and reporting on what they are doing" with it, he says.
And there's more bad news for the social lives of office drones: A company called TextGuard "quietly released a beta version of its eponymous application, which offers a method of blocking and monitoring text messages on Windows Mobile and Blackberry telephones."
Now get back to work!
If flatscreens could have eating disorders, Samsung would be the guilty stage mom driving the complex. Their new OLED "Flapping Display," exhibited at Flat Panel Display International 2008, is an absurdly thin 0.05mm thick.
"It is technically possible to make the panel thinner," says a Samsung employee. We'd hate to be that guy's kid.
via tech on!
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)
Assistant Professor of Illustration - Graphic Design
Rhode Island School of Design
Providence, Rhode Island
The successful candidate must possess experience in both teaching and professional practice as an illustrator, with expertise in visual communication/illustration concepts, traditional and digital media, and the history of illustration and visual communication.
The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.
Posted by: core jr | Comments (0)
The candidates have until next Tuesday, but you? You have just nine hours left, to get your brilliant Voting Booth concept finished up and posted to our 1 Hour Design Challenge forum. The competition, with guest judges William Drenttel and Jessica Helfand (of Winterhouse, Design Observer and Polling Place Photo Project fame), closes tonight at 9pm sharp, Pacific Time, meaning those of you out east have all the way until midnight, and the rest of you have until...breakfast or happy hour or something.
Specifics are as per usual: spend no more than one hour (honor system) not including time spent thinking it up; submit your concept as an image to the 1HDC forum; use whatever digital or analog media you prefer; and completely blow our minds with inventiveness, clever commentary or sweet imagery. The clock is ticking, and design democracy hangs in the balance--we're counting on you.
>>See all entries, and submit your own here<<
Posted by: core jr | Comments (0)
Japan loves vending machines (jidoohanbaiki, I think). Food, books, clothes -- get it all by pushing a button. And remember this? They're so ubiquitous you can wear a vending machine suit and blend right in (kind of).
Taking this obsession to its illogical extreme, on November 18th, Uniqlo invades Times Square with an army of Human-Powered Vending Machines. Provocative commentary on the depersonalization of retail space design, or bizarro publicity stunt?
Posted by: William Bostwick | Comments (0)
Tokyo Designer's Week & Design Tide Tokyo (pictured above) kicked off today and Core will be on the ground over the next few days seeking out the freshest work and talent. Design Tide wins hand down for exhibition design, it's hard to tell from the photo but the stands divided by sheets of transparent fabric--a commercial cloth material used in water filters--are entirely suspended by balloons filled with helium. It looks awesome and yes the base is weighted to hold it in place. Click through for more pics.
>> View all Tokyo Design Festival posts here.
Posted by: squee.gee | Comments (0)A bite-sized list of what's happenin' now:
creative match
From the Post Office to Aston Martin: Britain's design genius celebrated in 2008 Prince Philip Designers Prize
clitheroe advertiser and times
Student's award-winning design enables disabled to ski
canberra times
ID student develops new rotational moulding process
marketwatch
Autodesk Inventor of the Month for October: ClearEdge Power
businessweek
Review of Robert Brunner-designed Dr. Dre headphones
the earth times
FACTON's Event for Manufacturing Professionals
pack expo
"The one show that can solve all of your packaging challenges": Chicago Pack Expo 2008
Umm, wow. Flickr user lunger girl reminds us why ApartmentTherapy would have sucked if it was launched in 1971, with her photo scans from the book set The Practical Encyclopedia of Good Decorating and Home Improvement. The page is a must-see, but do yourself a favor and don't eat beforehand.
Those of you who actually want to buy the book set can do so here.
via design public
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (2)A good bench is sturdy and heavy; it's also a pain-in-the-neck to move. But Dutch designer Rogier Martens has handily solved the problem:
via swiss miss
Maarten Baas' 'Clay Furniture - Stacking Chairs'
Is 'Good Design' an asphyxiating dogma?
Design is a peculiar activity: It's a creative process, but a process that subscribes to and reinforces certain restrictive attitudes. It can be rigid and self-policing, since a profession that earns its living by discerning what is good and bad must necessarily become judgmental. Ultimately this judgmental nature creates and enshrines certain points of view, which left unchallenged, become dogma. Today, one could argue that this dogma, generally predicated on longstanding ideas of 'rightness' and 'beauty' is choking the profession down, and worse yet, stifling its creativity as it faces some truly great problems—problems which if handled with new thinking and true creativity, will define the substance, practice and contribution of a generation of designers.
Pretty: Right priced beauty
But wait. Truth and beauty are good things, right? Not necessarily. Design's traditional preference on establishing 'order' has had the consequence of driving a collateral and unchecked pursuit of beauty. Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, of course, and as such is subject to the vagaries of cultural bias and popular opinion. By degrees this pursuit of beauty has gradually been replaced with the much more predictable and less admirable accomplishment of achieving 'pretty'. And while consumer culture, planned obsolesce and design culture in general have benefited soundly from the creation, production and documentation of pretty things—the pursuit of pretty hasn't pushed the discipline of design into the tighter, less comfortable and ultimately more rigorous inquiries that outside forces (sustainability for example) are aligning to demand of us.
How might product designers better position the discipline to take on the hairy problems of sustainability, economic uncertainty, global competition and the like? Well, one thing is for certain, simply co-opting present patterns of consumption into activities and services linked to conservation won't get us there. That path might work if the world population of 6.5 billion was to stay fixed, but with an additional 3 billion consumers arriving to the party by 2050 we'll need to find more expedient (read: more creative) solutions.
Tjep's 'XXL Chair' and Front Design's 'Sketch Furniture'
PrettyUGLY: The case for 'UGLY' thinking in popular design
Whether attributable to a crisis of faith or economic malaise, High Design's recent fascination with the aesthetics of the unorthodox has given rise to some of the freshest design proposals of recent memory. It's too early to tell whether these musings signal a genuine turning point in the evolution of design, but the newfound acceptance of UGLY as a legitimate voice in design sets the stage for some interesting possibilities at a time when the profession faces deep challenges.
Longtime anathema of design circles, I'd like to suggest that design capitalize on UGLY's present arrival on the scene to boldly re-imagine itself and its future. Appropriating UGLY affords a latitude that would serve to liberate design and design thinking, expediting the introduction of new voices and ideas that might stimulate and revitalize the practice of design. Embracing a word so readily identified with everything popular design claims to have been a reaction against seems a logical choice if we are to create a vision for the practice of design freed from the restrictions and prejudices of its past.
Posted by: core jr | Comments (15)
Desire: The Shape of Things to Come, by Gestalten Press is visually interesting on every page. The oddly framed and somewhat flat front cover's picture of simple wooden furniture and gaudy gold tableware is by no means representative of the elegant furniture designs contained within. The introduction by Andrej Kupetz sets the tone by explaining the context of 21st Century design as a natural successor to the functionalism of Louis Sullivan's edicts and the visual expression of the Memphis movement. I still find the description of eras from the last fifty years as "modern" and "postmodern" somewhat confusing, but since it has become common usage I understand the authors need to use the terms. More interestingly, however, the remainder of the book does provide some new and useful (though not likely to become common usage) categories for recent design movements.
After the introduction, the book is structured in four parts: The Modernists, The Inventors, The Taletellers, and The Entertainers. Each section has a short introduction detailing the movements and their major players. The layout includes a mix of full bleed photographs, silhouettes and nicely gridded pictures with descriptive text. For some work, short background essays on the designers accompanies the photos. A lot of the furniture included in Desire transcends the neat categorization that the author provides, but is equally effective at provoking the emotion to which the title aspires. Though much of the work profiled here is more exhibition piece than industrial production, any reader is likely to discover something to lust after. For me, it was Kjellgren and Kaminsky's "Pompous Fat Armchair" which looks like set design from the Matrix met an 80's couch and a folding umbrella in an S&M club. Since that may not quite be your thing (and both the designers and myself admit that it isn't normally ours either), I encourage readers to find their own wish list inside.
Posted by: Robert Blinn | Comments (1)
Director of Engineering
Radius Product Development
Clinton, Massachusetts
We are looking for an engineering leader with imagination, passion and the technical expertise to turn great ideas into compelling, successful products! This leadership position requires a strong ability to effectively collaborate across multidisciplinary teams on challenging programs, and ensure department performance and results.
The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.
Posted by: core jr | Comments (0)
You've got until 9pm Pacific Time tomorrow night to enter our latest 1 Hour Design Challenge: Voting Booth, so get those Prismacolors sharpened and put some politics to paper! Guest judges are William Drenttel and Jessica Helfand of Design Observer and founders of The Polling Place Photo Project now featured on the New York Times site.
>>See all entries, and submit your own here<<
All the details after the jump.
Posted by: core jr | Comments (0)
It ain't exactly dog hair, but retailer Muji has found a way to make shirts out of castoff material: Ochiwata, "short fibers that are removed during the weaving process. With an earthy feeling and simple design for multi layering, the shirts are more comfortable to wear and more eco-friendly."
Called Rescue Cotton Shirts, the new garments are currently for sale at a Muji near you. Which means if you live in Ohio, you're S.O.L. We'd hoped Muji would have an online store by now, but their U.S. website, which was only meant for publicity, still has pages saying "Under Construction" that are dated from 2007.
Weekly finds from the 3D world.
Alias Studio
Natural surfacing tutorial Part II, by Joshua Maruska
Prepping Alias files for Autodesk Showcase
Rhino
Using Rhino in fast P.O.P. design
Inventor
Rendering and documenting designs in Inventor Studio
New eLearning section on the Inventor Manufacturing Community Portal - 14 lessons already posted
SolidWorks
Tips for importing sketches
Why your mate gives you two different measurements
Pop!Tech, the Biggie to TED's Tupac, brings the year's most brilliant, engaging, and PowerPoint-savvy thinkers/doers to the East Coast every October. This year's standout was economic heavyweight Juan Enriquez.
His presentation (it's long, but worth it) used LOLdogz and econ graphs to show that yes, we are in fact screwed. Unless...
Watch to the end for his 10 Commandments to Save the Economy. For all you frustrated and freaked out tech designers out there, take heart! Making sure your internet startup gets off the ground is a cornerstone of the solution.
Posted by: William Bostwick | Comments (0)
Our DesignPhiladelphia 2008 gallery is now online with images covering a full week of events in the city of brotherly love. Highlights include Philly Heart Design local designer exhibition, A Clean Break: Pop-up Neighborhood, Make:Philly Art Cart Derby, and many lectures and exhibitions. Enjoy!
>> View Gallery
View all DesignPhiladelphia 2008 posts:
>> DesignPhiladelphia 2008: SOS Stool by Josh Owen
>> DesignPhiladelphia 2008: Matthias Pliessnig
>> DesignPhiladelphia 2008: The Hacktory
>> DesignPhiladelphia 2008: Two Days Left
>> DesignPhiladelphia 2008: A Clean Break
>> DesignPhiladelphia 2008: Student Work at 222 Gallery
Posted by: core jr | Comments (0)A bite-sized list of what's happenin' now:
thomasnet
Award-Winning Design for Counterbalanced Lift Truck
ten links
Autodesk Launches Free Formula Car Design Curriculum
marketwatch
Legal Ruling on Design Patents Favors Consumer Goods Companies
bangkok post
Thailand: Bathroom Design banks on innovative products
wales online
"Chairs that should make the world sit up and notice our design talent"
insurance news
Kansas State U. Exhibition of Architecture and Product Design Student Work
byu news net
Students trying to explain to your parents what ID is, e-mail them this link
TechShop, the membership-based machine shop for DIY gearheads, has been a favorite of us here at Core for a while, getting glowing mentions here and here. The biggest criticism we've always had of the place is that there's only one of them, and it's in Menlo Park, CA, which is great if you're a Silicon Valley tool nerd but annoying if you're a tool nerd anywhere else.
Thankfully, that's starting to change: after more than a year of anticipation, several of the planned expansion locations are starting to see some action, first at the Durham, NC Techshop, whose building was previewed in July, and just last week in Portland, OR, where Core contributer Molly Purnell hopped on a bus to the industrial section of nearby Beaverton to check out the new space, and talk to some other excited makers. Here's what she found:
On the bus I get to know Dave, a self-proclaimed inventor and maker who's excited about TechShop's CNC router. Dave builds Fretted Dulcimers which are apparently coming back into fashion in the Japanese hand-made instrument market, and he needs access to the shop in order to build prototypes.Dave seems to be the typical clientelle of TechShop; a maker with big dreams, little space, and no equipment. TechShop's goal is to remedy this situation for the 300 or so potential members that came to the opening event. TechShop plans to have milling machines, lathes, welders, a laser cutter, an electronics shop, blacksmithing tools, a finishing room, workstations, a 3D printer, and of course the coveted CNC router. Along with all of this equipment there will be a tool and materials shop, a small library and a communal kitchen.
The greatest benefit of Techshop will be the probable development of community. The owner of TechShop, Jim Newton and the Portland shop manager, Denney Cole, claim that the community is one of the greatest drawing powers for continued membership. Most builders know that another's experience and knowledge is the best tool available.
Posted by: core jr | Comments (1)Wednesday, October 29[Note - This edition of Daily Design Snacks was mistakenly left unpublished yesterday; today we will have double the Snacks.]
A bite-sized list of what's happenin' now:
time compression
Minima uses design to add value to science at Bio-Technica 2008marketwatch
Belkin Wins Three 2008 Japan Good Design Awardsmaranouchi house
Tokyo: "The Mother of Design" eventinternational herald tribune
Volkswagen passes Exxon as world's largest companyapple insider
Surprise: Apple's got more cash than Microsoftdesign taxi
Annoucing the winner of the IDSA Education Awardtaipei times
Taiwanese product design recognizedPosted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)
Wednesday, October 29
The elegant BEE (top photo) combines elements of biomimetics and aviation engineering, drawing inspiration from honeycombs and airplane wings to produce this beautiful bamboo fiber chaise longue.
The beautiful and bone-like Free Jump clip stirrups & riding boots (bottom photo) combine high-tensile steel with a plastic shell, and the whole thing disassembles cleanly for recycling.
Both of these eye-poppers were designed by Fritsch & Associates, a design firm outside of Paris. F&A will be presenting these and other projects this November at the International Biennale of Design in Saint-Etienne, where Core77's own Allan Chochinov will be lecturing.
The rest of us at Core will just say behind, which I guess is no big deal...I mean France, big whoop...the food is just so-so, and I guess their designers are okay. And anyways, New York is really...pleasant in November.
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)
Wednesday, October 29
You're probably wondering what the heck those photos are. That, friends, is the Hobart I-Cool seat, perhaps the most radical-looking in a long line of devices designed to make you lose weight while doing nothing.
Designed by Tel-Aviv-based Padwa Design, the I-Cool is
...the first ever Exercise-Free, Calorie Burning seat designed to deliver significantly increased sedentary calorie burn rates.This proprietary system, which induces accelerated calorie outtake via temperature regulation, creates a revolutionary personalized micro-environment, by allowing individual users to set their preferred temperature within the comfort of their own personal space, regardless of the climate around them.
We're not clear on exactly how it works, but apparently you sit in it and sweat. No clue as to how effective it is, but at any rate, it looks a damn sight better than these did:
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)
Wednesday, October 29
Social networks are providing tremendous opportunities for people to collaborate. But until now, thinking has focused only on how organisations can respond to and capitalise on networks. This report by the UK think tank Demos argues that we have to look equally at how networks use organisations for their own ends. That is where the new contours of inequality and power lie that will shape the network world. We have to face networks' dark side, as well as their very real potential.
Bringing together in-depth case studies of six organisations, Network Citizens maps the key fault-lines that people and organisations will have to address in the future world of work. Not doing so puts at risk the very qualities we had invested in them: openness, innovation, collaboration and meritocracy. Since networks can act for good or ill, incubating the talents and ideas of the many, or promoting the interests of the few, the need for a new set of responsibilities is growing. If we are network members, we must be network citizens, too.
Posted by: Mark Vanderbeeken | Comments (0)Wednesday, October 29
New Media Creative Director
Arcad
Auckland, New ZealandThe ideal candidate will have a strong conceptual vision and the ability to inspire and communicate that vision to the creative team as well as to clients. You must have a passion for design, a thorough grasp of online technologies and programming - along with the ability to balance cutting edge technologies with the realities of execution. You must be a natural problem solver with strong project management skills and also be comfortable working in a fast paced environment. You must be able to work well with multiple disciplines (3D, Programming, Media, TV) and support common goals.
The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.
Posted by: core jr | Comments (1)Tuesday, October 28Behind the scenes tour of of an award-winning creative farm, juicing process and distribution in South West England.
There is also a high res version
Posted by: Mark Vanderbeeken | Comments (0)Tuesday, October 28via kottke
Posted by: core jr | Comments (0)Tuesday, October 28
From the Coroflot portfolio of : Sherwood Forlee (New York, NY)
Featured Projects :
>> Anti-Theft Lunch Bag
>> Sleep Safe Tape
>> Easy JarYou may have seen Sherwood's Anti Theft Lunch Bag floating around the blogosphere, but have you seen his Sleep Safe Tape?
If you're interested in a kitchen trick click below for another tactic by Floree.
Posted by: core jr | Comments (3)Tuesday, October 28
Most visitors to Japan during the rainy season have noticed the variety of umbrella-drying devices placed at department store entrances; the most common is the one that slides a sort of plastic condom onto your umbrella in one swipe, and you may have seen seen a larger hairdryer-style contraption.
But the hairdryer one needs to be plugged in, and the condom-style umbrella wrapper will generate thousands of plastic bags that go into the trash. Annon's cool umbrella-drying device, on the other hand, requires no electricity and generates no waste; the film coating on the pie-slice-shaped sponges just squeegees the water off of your umbrella, draining it into a pan below.
Of course if you really wanted to be green, you would drink the water that accumulates in the pan, so it wouldn't go to waste either. But I guess that's kinda gross.
via dig info tv
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (1)Tuesday, October 28
I remember buying jeans on a trip to Beijing in '01 and thinking: As a child of the '70s and '80s, I never thought I'd be trying on blue jeans in a store in Communist China.
Nor did I ever expect Chinese design to compete on the world stage, and while their cars still have a ways to go, they've arrived in terms of appliances. Haier's double-drawer 'fridge-freezer is bumping into LG territory, and if I saw the photo cold, I wouldn't doubt you if you told me it was designed in Italy.
The center-mounted LED features a neat, high-tech update to leaving notes on the 'fridge: a video camera that lets you record messages. You can record abusive messages to yourself regarding self-control--"Sure you wanna finish that, fatso?"--or nag your roommates not to touch your potato salad.
via appliancist
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)Tuesday, October 28
Rob Tannen and his team at the Bressler Group, where he is Director of Research, have been working on the FieldCREW User Research Concept Platform, photo above. In Tannen's own words, "It's a concept design for a data gathering system for user researchers who...spend so much time gathering information to design high-tech products, but have very limited tools themselves. It also brings together some interesting 'near-future' technologies, like subvocalization to silently take notes while conducting field observations."
The nifty for-designers, by-designers tablet features
...several wireless data gathering components, including:- Wireless, remotely controlled tracking video cameras for audio and video recording
- Handheld wireless taggers that allow each observer to tag key events of their choosing for later review - tagging is synched to a common timeline on the tablet
- Subvocalization sensor allows the researcher to silently dictate notes that are automatically transcribed to text and stored on the tabletThe tablet manages and receives data from these wireless components and provides features including:
- Video notation (i.e. telestrator) for annotation of events as they happen
- Speech-to-text translation of recorded audio (and subvocalizations)
- Access to stored and online project and research reference materials
- Built-in storage and recharging for wireless components
- Synchronization of all input sources (video, tagging, notes) for streamlined analysis
Check out the full slideshow and description here.
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (3)
Tuesday, October 28
Core's favorite local designshop, KIOSK, is hosting an opening tomorrow night, Wednesday, to launch their latest exhibition: Matt McGregor-Mento, Black Cross "Flying Machines". 6-9 with beer, cider and cheese. 95 Spring Street on the 2nd floor. Here's more:
What is it about things made with our own hand that makes them more fun to use? Why is a rough handmade aesthetic so appealing right now? How can making an object intentionally less "functional" bring us closer to the pure experience of using that object? And ultimately, what is the human fascination with speed--and why is our exhilaration heightened when coupled with the sense of unpredictable disaster?BlackCross "Flying Machines" is a re-inventing of three common recreational objects. Built crudely of wood, the plywood bellyboard (or paipo), the shipping palette sled, and the simple lumber skateboard all feel like Middle School shop-class inventions.
Posted by: core jr | Comments (1)Tuesday, October 28
From the "You've gotta be kidding me department" come two lamps from Franco Zavarise and Ingo Maurer sure to piss off New Yorkers: The Ociu and the Seven Rats Table Lamp, respectively.
The former is a 72-inch pendant lamp, which I agree is beautiful, but makes me bitter because no one I know could fit this darn thing in their apartment. Plus, how much juice does this thing suck up? And is it just me, or does it look like the kind of thing where you pull a lever and this falls onto James Bond, trapping him underneath it?
The latter is a table lamp (admittedly from '07, missed it the first time around) comprised of seven rats trapped in cages. This is every New Yorker's dream. Another thing we need is a silverware set that uses cockroach shells for the bowl of a spoon and their grotesque little legs for the fork tines.
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (1)Tuesday, October 28
Senior Web Designer
frog design
Stuttgart, GermanyQualified candidates will share our belief that design is as much about behavior and emotion as it is about utility and ease of use. Senior interface designers provide leadership in concept development, creation of original art and wire-frame interaction model, project design/development, and QA. They are responsible for the development of innovative navigation systems, interface designs, typography, and screen or page layouts for software, application, web sites, and other interactive media. They will push the state-of-the-art with every creation and thrive in our fast-paced studio.
The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.
Posted by: core jr | Comments (0)Tuesday, October 28
Cannondale is hoping their Bad Boy will be a good incentive for design; they're giving a BB to the winner of their "Commuter Bike for the Masses" design competition.
Do you have an idea for a bicycle that might persuade the average person, with no prior interest in cycling, to park the car and pedal to work? That is the main idea behind this competition. The scope is up to you--choose to come up with a whole new form factor for a pedal powered machine, or focus on specific details that you consider key to accomplishing the goal of getting the average non-cyclist to consider riding a bike for transportation.Don't be constrained by products that are currently on the market, but do make sure that your concepts are based in reality (don't break the laws of physics, etc) and that they are manufacturable using existing technology. All concepts submitted will be considered, so be creative and have fun.
A jury of 6 industrial designers and 1 journalist will review and discuss the submissions to choose a winner. The jury will be looking for creative and sound concepts that are clearly defined, original, and innovative. Presentation counts too, so do your best to sell us on your concept.
Deadline's December 5th, so get those pedals churnin'.
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)
Monday, October 27Posted by: Jeannie Choe | Comments (0)
An existence as "makers of stuff" has long been accepted but, more recently, it's been thrown out many a proverbial window by designers worldwide. To set things on track to where they always should have been, Emily Pilloton founded Project H, a non-profit organization that puts design to work for humanity, habitats, health, and happiness. Its latest project is Design for Education, an initiative to design tools to improve teaching and learning in both the US and developing markets.
Learn extensively about what Project H is up to now and Pilloton's P.O.V. on the future of design over at Ecolect LimeLight.
I'd love for communities, both in the US and in India, Africa, Asia, and beyond, to begin to view design as something we rely on to solve our problems- one of the first lines of defense in ameliorating social ills. Design can be a form of capital, a form of public health, and a vehicle for social and political progress. I hope that Project H becomes proof of that.Monday, October 27
Good entries keep rolling in for this months 1 Hour Design Challenge - Design Democracy edition - and you all seem to be having a lot of fun with it. Recently we've gotten several proposals that take the concept of the voting booth to some ridiculous, commentary-laden extremes, like this one from jknodell, that puts voters through a hudraulic-enabled carnival ride showing the potential consequences of their vote before letting them stagger dizzily to the adjacent voting booth:
Then we've got Brett_nyc's keen observation about the similarity between the decision Morpheus poses to Neo, and the one we're all facing on Nov. 4:
Vinishree turns the booth into a sculpture, depicting a barren tree that bursts into life as votes are added to it:
But the most fun so far is probably this gem from TheMunesterOfPortSalut. Not much to look at:
but read the description:
...November 4th, all channels broadcast recordings of debate/discussion during voting hours.-Cameras behind the screen identify the viewer's retina and track eye motion.
-A monkey with a tamborine is superimposed between the candidates.
-The candidate who gets the most attention gets the viewers passive vote.
-Attendance at a polling place replaces the passive vote with an active vote.
-If the monkey wins, congress must entertain a motion that the US recognize the next American Idol as Supreme Dictator of the Known Universe...
You've still got three more days to submit your democracy-saving design, and remember, every entry gets personally reviewed by no less than William Drenttel and Jessica Helfand, who constitute two-thirds of Design Observer's editorial staff, and founded The Polling Place Photo Project now featured on the New York Times. So you know you'll be getting some good feedback.
>>See all entries, and submit your own here<<
Posted by: core jr | Comments (1)Monday, October 27
Is Prototyping finally entering the pop-cultural lexicon?
Where it was once an opaque techno-fabulous term used by Q in James Bond flicks, or forming the dubious core of a Star Trek episode, we've now got a word that actually has meaning for the average TV viewer. "Prototyping" arouses interest and fascination, but lately it's also started feeling accessible, like a sexier version of building a birdhouse in the garage with your dad.
Case in point: in addition to reality TV phenomena like Project Runway, Mythbusters and Junkyard Wars, all of which feature on-the-fly construction as part of the drama, we can now count Discovery Channel's Prototype This, which not only uses the term in its name, but invites viewers to submit ideas of their own. This is a marked break from the established depictions of hi-tech: people pay attention when Apple rolls out a new product, but Steve Jobs never asks viewers to suggest what they ought to be working on next.
Now it looks like Prototyping may have its greatest advocate yet, in the form of recent Carnegie Mellon grad Johnny Chung Lee, whose YouTube video explaining how to hack a Wiimote into a VR display has earned him a TED talk, a pile of job offers, and over six million views. If you haven't seen it yet, you pretty much have to stop whatever you're doing and watch it right now:
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0)Monday, October 27
[image credit: Curventa Bloodhound SSC]
We're conflicted about putting these images up because yes, we're supposed to be designing green vehicles to save the planet, not land-rockets that go over 1,000 miles per hour; but darn if this thing doesn't look cool.
You read that right: Curventa's Bloodhound SSC is a car (well, a land-based vehicle, anyway) designed to hit 1,050 m.p.h., which would make it faster than a bullet fired from a .357 Magnum. The three-year mission is still in progress, and if an actual production model ever sees the light of day, we can tell you they needn't include a seatbelt and airbag; slam into anything at those speeds and you will probably disintegrate entirely.
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)
Monday, October 27
The saying goes "Those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones," but there's no corollary for those who live in glass temples. Then again the monks at Thailand's Wat Pa Maha Chedi Kaew temple should be able to throw stones; they've earned their fair share of good karma by recycling over 1.5 million glass bottles, incorporating them into the premises as walls, railings, columns, and they've even used the bottle caps to make mosaics.
As you'd expect from monks, the construction wasn't exactly a rush job-- these patient gents have been at it since 1984, and counting. More incoming bottle donations means they can build more structures.
via inhabitat
thanks mike!
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)Monday, October 27A bite-sized list of what's happenin' now:
ny post
Manhattan's hottest architects (and their proteges)industrial it
Nothing lost in translation with accurate digital prototypingwired
Nottingham applying to be World Design Capitalsun star
Pinoy designers to help RP break into new marketsthe star
Quick interview with Rolf Benz head of designvfx world
Cintiq Digital Pen Fosters Product Design at Oakleydexigner
European Design Since 1985: Shaping the New CenturyPosted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)
Monday, October 27
Roman letters are low-res.
What we mean by that is you can get away with fewer "dots" in an LED display to spell them out than you can with, say, Chinese; the latter's more sophisticated characters make reading them difficult without high-resolution.
Jiangmen Seekway Technology Ltd. makes a pretty cool 3D LED display that can render Chinese characters with clarity, not to mention spin them around in animations we'll one day have to learn to ignore when walking through Times Square, just as we learned to ignore blinking neon.
Ironically, the company has chosen to display their high-quality LED display in a crappy, lo-res YouTube video:
And just for kicks, below is what is reportedly the most complicated Chinese character (for a type of noodle):
Whatever store sells these noodles and uses an LED display saying so, is going to have a higher electricity bill!
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (1)Monday, October 27Came across this one in a "Modern Morals" column:
Q: I have been working in industrial design for almost 20 years. Recently a friend told me about a design idea he had proposed for his daughter, who is just starting out in her design career.The idea, which is linked to the 2010 World Cup, would make her lots of money if she were to follow through with it. Since being given this idea two months ago it seems that she has still done nothing about it. For my part, I have thought about little else and really think that with some improvements it could really be a money spinner. I want to put in a proposal, but feel I am stealing their idea. Should I just be ruthless and go ahead with it?
So--what would you do? And we wanna hear what you'd do before you read Mr. Morality's answer, here.
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (12)Monday, October 27
Communication Design Professor
Fashion Institute of Technology
New York, New YorkExpertise required in areas such as web design, interface design, motion graphics, and other associated disciplines. Candidates must demonstrate expertise in screen-based typography and design principles as well as in two or more of the following areas: XHTML/CSS, JavaScript, digital video editing, digital audio editing, motion graphics, or 3D modeling and animation. Experience teaching courses such as Web Design, and Motion Graphics, as well as Graphic Design is required.
The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.
Posted by: core jr | Comments (0)Monday, October 27
During a recent speech Professor Yrjo Sotamaa, former Rector of the University of Art and Design Helsinki (TaiK), described Finland's educational strategy to remain at the forefront of innovation:
The new strategy aims at strengthening the core competencies of Finland through a radical university reform. And it is turning innovation thinking 180 degrees around to human-centric thinking. It does not lessen the importance of technology and business know-how, but in the future the innovation drivers are stronger tied to the needs of users and the opportunities on the market. The shift to user-driven innovation highlights the importance of design. Design has a huge and very new potential for innovation."Posted by: Mark Vanderbeeken | Comments (2)Aalto University, scheduled to officially open its doors in Autumn 2009, is a new university being created through a merge between the Helsinki School of Economics, the University or Art and Design Helsinki and the Helsinki University of Technology. The merge between the three universities will create a new science and art community from the three universities of technology, business studies and art and design and provide possibilities for multidisciplinary and strong education and research.
Sunday, October 26
Brilliantly simple. From the portfolio of Ignacio Pilotto, an Argentinian designer.
Posted by: StuCon | Comments (2)Saturday, October 25
The inside cover of Daniel Eatock's monograph Imprint is covered with a rather exhaustive list of tasks that could be construed as either design projects or performance art pieces depending upon one's point of view. While certain items like "I have spent twenty-four hours in a pitch-black room, lying on a mattress with ear plugs in my ears, without eating or visiting the toilet," suggest David Blaine's feats of endurance, others stray from conceptual art into true iterative design. While his project to draw ten thousand circles by hand before selecting the best one sounds like an introductory sketching exercise (and the final circle is indeed nearly Zen in its perfection), the ream of A3 paper consisting of the other 9,999 imperfect circles stands as the real piece of art.
In the accompanying text Eatock admits that he's not an intuitive sketcher, instead describing the ideas behind his work as the true art. Instead I would posit that his process stands as his most substantial artistic achievement. Sometimes, the idea and the output fuse perfectly, like arranging an entire set of Letraset Pantone Markers according to the color spectrum and leaving them open to bleed into 500 sheets of paper. The resulting set of prints was both aesthetically pleasing and, I assume, easily numbered. Inviting participants to help to manufacture "the world's largest signed and numbered artwork" by signing and numbering labels themselves, however, is more intellectually than aesthetically interesting. Eatock works and has trained as a graphic artist, so his output isn't industrial design by any stretch of the imagination, but the process is the same. In effect, Eatock has made the process of the art into the art, and the results are both inspirational and humbling. I once heard that looking at a Picasso makes one want to paint, but looking at Rembrandt makes one want to quit. Miraculously, reviewing Eatock's prolific output manifests both urges at the same time. For any designer struggling to find a place to start, reading Imprint should be ample proof that almost any starting point will look brilliant in retrospect, provided that enough work, practice and repetition went into the final product.
Posted by: Robert Blinn | Comments (1)Saturday, October 25
Last week marked the end of DesignPhiladelphia, but Gallery 222 is keeping Product 01 and Build 02, two exhibitions of work from two of Philadelphia's premiere design education courses, running through November 1st.
Checkout some of the highlights after the jump.
Posted by: Bryce | Comments (0)Saturday, October 25
After Shock is the world's first massively collaborative disaster simulation, about a major earthquake affecting much of Southern California.
Starting Nov. 13 2008, you'll experience the earthquake as if it's really occurring, and what happens next--How do we survive? Can our region recover and rebuild?--will be up to you.
And if you don't live in Southern California, you can still participate.
Created by Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA and the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, CA.
Posted by: Mark Vanderbeeken | Comments (0)Saturday, October 25
Day 2 at Poptech rang in with bright sunshine and thoughts of digital freedom as old fave Chris Anderson took the stage with Clay Shirky and Matt Mason. Anderson emphasized the need for non-monentary transactions in today's society, while Shirky contemplated the role of generosity in organization. The piracy expert, Matt Mason, filled out the morning session by presenting piracy as a new form of capitalism, marketing and business tool.
We're seeing a lot of design for social innovation projects this here year, and mid-morning kicked off one of the more powerful -- the announcement of Project M, a mobile HIV prevention program, which brought the speakers to tears and audience members to their feet. Additional inspiration came from Heather Fleming of Catapult Design, an initiative of Engineers Without Borders, as she described their work in developing countries. Fleming, one of the Poptech Fellows, emphasized the need to act: "You have to be the change you want to see in the world."
Posted by: elle* | Comments (0)Saturday, October 25
The MIT Mobile Experience Lab, within the Design Laboratory, signed a 3 years strategic alliance with the Fondazione Bruno Kessler, a local research institute, to advance research in sustainable connected homes, including subtopics of renewable energy systems, sustainable architecture, social sustainability, and connected information systems to optimize home behavior and people's lives.
The project, which is promoted by the Autonomous Province of Trento, Italy, will conclude with building a full-scale prototype of a sustainable home with new technologies, materials, and applications.
(Also here several former Ivreans are involved including Dave Chiu, Hector Ouilhet and Silvia Gabrielli).
Posted by: Mark Vanderbeeken | Comments (0)Saturday, October 25
CScout reports on how tactile surfaces are making technology and information much more accessible to people with visual handicaps, and features the Touch Sight Camera, the ReEnvision debit card reader, the Sentio watch (pictured), and the Saifu tablet PC.
"As a range of new interfaces and surfaces for digital devices are developed, it is becoming easier for visually impaired people to use devices sighted people take for granted. Tactile displays enable digital data to be felt rather than seen, making it easier for blind and partially sighted people to access the Internet, keep their credit card details secure, and take and archive pictures.">> Read article
Posted by: Mark Vanderbeeken | Comments (0)Saturday, October 25
Antenna Design is transforming nuts, bolts and circuit boards into brand experiences, making "interface" and "automation" a lot less scary for marketers outside the tech world.
"Since New York-based Antenna Design launched in 1997, its work has meandered in and out of the public and commercial realms, overlapped with experiment and art, and blurred the distinctions between product, interface and environment. Its output includes New York City subway cars and ticket vending machines, JetBlue's electronic check-in kiosks, Microsoft VoIP telephone systems and flexible display monitors for Bloomberg. Not to mention art installations in Bloomingdale's storefront windows, interactive exhibits for public arts foundation Creative Time and, recently, a conceptual installation in Turin, Italy involving re-contextualized sand bags.So, with such a wide range of work, what exactly is it that binds the firm's design practice?
According to founders Masamichi Udagawa and Sigi Moeslinger, it's people. Udagawa and Moeslinger say they can navigate diverse projects because they all begin and end with the user."
>> Read all (Creativity online)
via Dexigner
Posted by: Mark Vanderbeeken | Comments (0)Friday, October 24
It's a bit broad and uneven, but the Volvo- and Vice-sponsored Creative30 competition/website offers some great creative eye-candy, in the form of 3-minute videos of some of the most phenomenally talented young designers and artists the UK currently has to offer. As the name implies, thirty subjects have been selected to showcase and talk about their work, which ranges from sculpture and visual arts to music, fashion and furniture design. Visitors to the site are invited to cast a vote for their favorite, and the winner drives off in a Volvo (runner up has to settle for £10,000 in cash "to help launch their career").
As a bunch of product designers, we're drawn immediately toward Julian Mayor's structurally complex one-off furniture pieces:
but we have to admit to falling hard for Glaswegian Katie Paterson's beautifully nerdy conceptual art, which includes records made of ice that play back the sounds of glaciers moving:
Voting runs until November 16; vote as many times as you like, but only once per person per day.
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0)Friday, October 24
One of the more exciting announcements at this year's PopTech conference goes by the tongue-twisting name of Project Masiluleke. Project M, as it's been abbreviated for those of us not fluent in Zulu, is an enormous and ambitious attempt to leverage the high degree of cellular phone penetration in South Africa to fight HIV and tuberculosis, which plague that country with some of the highest infection rates on earth.
Pooling the expertise and donations of Nokia Siemens, frogDesign, National Geographic, a host of South African tech firms and health NGOs, and the nation's second largest telco company, the project aims to send approximately one million free text messages a day in its first year, urging mobile phone users across the country to call into existing HIV and TB call centers. Beta testing has seen a tripling of call volume to the National AIDS Helpline in Johannesburg after just three weeks; hundreds of thousands of HIV positive South Africans are expected to be connected with accurate health information and referrals because of the project, which will also include ARV therapy support, at-home HIV testing, and virtual support networks for HIV patients as it ramps up.
The potential for cellular technology to address health and economic problems in previously neglected markets has been gaining some traction lately--this NY Times Magazine profile of Jan Chipchase's research for Nokia is a good place to start--so it's nice to see some big players jumping in with both feet. Here's hoping it's just the first of many such initiatives.
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0)Friday, October 24
The people have spoken, and last night the People's Design Award was awarded to Stuart Karten Design's Zon Hear Aid. You can learn more about the device (and read comments) at the Cooper-Hewiit site, or just mosey on over to SKD and check the work out there. Congrats SKD and Starkey Laboratories!
Posted by: core jr | Comments (0)Friday, October 24
Designers have been inspired by other designers since, well, as long as we can remember; but it's especially cool when the inspiration travels across product lines, making a jump into an entirely different category. Fast Company has a killer analysis of how the designers of Burton's latest snowboard bindings were inspired by, of all things, Herman Miller's Aeron chair. What the Aeron does for your ass, Burton's CO2 bindings will do for your feet, ankles and calves. Click here for the design feature play-by-play.
[photos above are courtesy of Herman Miller and Burton Snowboards, respectively; the matching color dots were overlaid by the eagle-eyes over at Fast Company.]
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)Friday, October 24
An electric version of the Mini Cooper will soon be available 'Stateside for test drives, at least for New Yorkers, Jerseyites and Californians. The spritely zero-emissions car will go from 0-60 in eight and a half seconds, and will probably not take much longer to run out of slots; they're only granting 500 test spins. Sign up here.
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)Friday, October 24
Designer Tokujin Yoshioka (he of the crystal chair) is curating an exhibit of his own work and the work of eight international creatives. Second Nature is currently running at Tokyo's 21_21 Design Sight, and features works by:
Noriko Ambe, artist
Makoto Azuma, flower artist
Campana Brothers, designers
Asuka Katagiri, photographer
Ross Lovegrove, designer
Kaiji Moriyama, dancer/choreographer
Takeshi Kushida, film director
Yukio Nakagawa, ikebana artist
Tokujin Yoshioka, designerAnd as for the unusual exhibition title, here's the explanation:
This exhibition offers an opportunity to once again ponder the future of design as well as the mysterious powers of nature which transcend the limits of human imagination. Tokujin Yoshioka, the director of the exhibition, has attempted to incorporate in his own design work the many laws that exist in nature, while at the same time exploring the possibilities of technology. His works do not merely remind people of the natural world on a visual level or imitate the more apparent manifestations of the laws of nature. Rather, by using technology as well as his own ideas as a kind of sustenance, he creates new forms of nature, in a process that results in what might best be described as a "second nature." Rooted in this mindset, this exhibition presents the experimental works of eight groups of creators, including Tokujin Yoshioka himself. The exhibition also presents a cloud-like installation that envelop the exhibit space.Runs through January of '09.
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)
Friday, October 24A bite-sized list of what's happenin' now:
design taxi
Zon Hearing Aid wins Cooper-Hewitt Museum's 2008 People's Design Awardthe daily yomiuri
A better life through Good Designeuractiv
EU announces next eco-design product prioritiestg daily
Dell shifts design from U.S. to China and strikes goldearth times
'TruWood' by Novem Could Make Imitation Wood an Endangered Speciesprocess & control today
FLIR Systems win awards for thermal imaging camerasmontreal gazette
Architects invited to compete on planetarium projectPosted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)
Friday, October 24
PopTech 2008 kicked off yesterday in Camden, Maine to an enthusiastic and boisterous crowd. Addressing this year's topic of "Scarcity and Abundance," presentations ranged from energy awareness to cello lessons (!). WattzOn's Saul Griffith opened the session with an overview of his energy consumption monitoring platform. In its alpha phase, WattzOn allows users to visualize and understand their personal energy footprint. Highlights from the morning included Malcolm Gladwell's discussion of cultural "capitalising" (an analysis of processes that affect success and failure in society) and Paul Polak's call to arms for low-cost, sustainable design solutions in developing countries. The afternoon was ripe with expression as Marian Bantjes' (pictured above) spoke of her transition from traditional graphic design to "meaningful" design. "I started creating work that was meaningful to me..." she said, "and discovered it was meaningful to other people as well...I made a decision to stop working for money. And start working for love."Chandler Burr, the New York Times perfume critic, led the room through an exploration of scent and its relationship to history, culture and emotion (who knew patchouli smelled that way because it includes rotten LEAVES in its process?!). Ripe with anecdotes and hilarity, he cited the reason for differentiation between male and female perfumes as nothing more than "offering hetero-sexual men the freedom to wear scent in society."
Benjamin Zander, conductor of the Boston Philharmonic, ended the evening in great spirits with a presentation on the Art of Possibility. Conducting renditions of "Happy Birthday," he emphasized the need to "get up and conduct" in life, as well as the joy of making mistakes and embracing the present. His energy and optimism rang true with the entire crowd as he careened around the Opera House floor, using a young cellist's rendition of a Bach to offer insights on how to weave emotion and nuance not only into a musical piece, but everyday life. "I have a bigger dream," he closed the night with, "that you will live the rest of your life in possibility. That is my dream."
Check out more coverage on the PopTech blog.
Posted by: elle* | Comments (0)Friday, October 24
Is it possible to design a chair that will fit everyone, whether short, tall, fat, skinny? Maybe or maybe not, but if any company can pull it off, it's Herman Miller.
Given this seemingly impossible task, HM's engineers came back with the Embody chair:
The Embody's colorful fabric seat hides a system of 94 plastic coils. Each compresses independently, allowing pointy bones or bulky wallets to sink in without causing nearby areas to sag. The designers also tuned the springiness of each coil based on its location. The coils under your thighs and the soft backs of your knees give easily so they don't chafe; those under the bones in your rear, which bear most of your weight, are the stiffest. Plastic caps on top of the coils tilt in any direction to hug instead of poke your curves.via popular science
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)
Friday, October 24
This isn't strictly design-related, but will surely be of interest to those of you who like entering those theory-heavy design competitions:
...a new study by researchers [tested] to see if there was any connection between physical and emotional heat.To their surprise, they found that people who held a cup of hot coffee for 10 to 25 seconds warmed to a perfect stranger. Holding a cup of iced coffee had the opposite effect.
Might this explain why people seem friendlier in Hawaii than in Helsinki? And what implications could this have for product design--business-card-warmer-upper carrying cases, anyone?
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (6)Friday, October 24
A few days ago we wrote about how people tend to anthropomorphize objects--seeing faces in cars, for instance. And we've all seen objects based on animal shapes, like this dog bowl. But if designer Shao Yung Yeh is right, future products will be inspired by insects:
"They are light-weight, agile, versatile, efficient and ecological beings," he said. "Compare that to mammals, a common inspiration of modern car design. Insects are more suitable for cars of the future generation."Hence his Insecta concept car, inspired by a grasshopper. "The legs are connected to a central chassis as a thorax, while the canopy can be read as an insect's head," Shao explains. "The battery pack at the back symbolizes abdomen." And interestingly enough, it's the second thing we've seen inspired by a grasshopper in as many days.
via wired
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)Friday, October 24
Senior Product Designer
Samsung Design Europe
London, United KingdomPerformance Standards: Deliver the project on time and budget. Ensure the results satisfy the given briefs in aspects of form, aesthetics, physical and psychological interfaces between users and products, and system compatibility where required. Determine appropriate materials, mechanism, construction, colour, surface finishes, manufacturing process and package in cooperation with related business functions involved in the projects. Create the documentation necessary to convey the design solutions through renderings, models, mechanical drawings.
The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.
Posted by: core jr | Comments (0)Thursday, October 23A bite-sized list of what's happenin' now:
boston dot com
Boston Design Center sees uptick in '70s design trendscanberra times
Economic muscle car designsart daily
Exhibition Examining Innovation in European Designpc world
The Case for an Apple "Netbook"nbc 25
Eliminating waste by designdexigner
Deconstructing Product Design bookscoop
Award winning designs expand bioplastic potentialPosted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)
Thursday, October 23
Apart from surgery, this is probably as close as we can get design to the eye. After five years of development, one of the boldest ideas in jewellery design is now undergoing tests and certification - a contact lens that becomes jewellery!
"Eye Jewellery is a concept by Dutch designer Eric Klarenbeek, who explores the potential of jewellery as an integral part of the human body. a combination of a pair of contact lenses and a string of tiny crystals makes a jewel that joins the movements of the eye and eyelid."
If laboratory tests are successful, we might already see Eye Jewellery in the shops within a few months. Whether this piece of jewellery would look good on you? Just watch the Eye Jewellery video here.
via domus
Posted by: Aart van Bezooyen | Comments (6)Thursday, October 23
Emergency Response Studio, by Paul Villinski, is a solar-powered, mobile artist's studio, re-purposed from a salvaged FEMA-style trailer. This sustainably re-built, off-the-grid living and work space is designed to enable artists to "embed" in post-disaster settings, and respond and contribute creatively. Villinski conceived the project in response to the devastation of post-Katrina New Orleans as "a symbol of transformation and possibility for the communities of the Gulf Coast."
Minimizing the structure's carbon footprint and enhancing quality of life for its inhabitants, ERS has been reconstructed with sustainable, green materials like recycled denim insulation, zero-VOC paints, bamboo cabinetry, compact fluorescent lighting, reclaimed wood and floor tiles made from linseed oil. Though designed as an artist's studio, the Emergency Response Studio also serves as a prototype for self-sufficient, solar-powered mobile housing, and explores the application of sustainable materials in the construction of trailers and other forms of temporary housing.
more after the jump.
Posted by: toolgirl | Comments (1)Thursday, October 23
Most robots have wheels, some have tracks, and this creepy dog one has legs; but Lausanne's Laboratory of Intelligent Systems' robots have, well, little twiggy things.
The Swiss robotics lab looked to nature to design their search-and-rescue 'bot, which can easily traverse rocky and difficult terrain due to its grasshopper- and locust-inspired jumping legs. The two-inch robots can jump eight feet into the air, even while loaded up with miniature sensors and cameras meant to relay your rescue-needing-ass' location back to the S&R guys.
Me, I'd still prefer a Saint Bernard with a little barrel of brandy around his neck, but I'm just old-fashioned like that.
via pop sci
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)
Thursday, October 23Weekly finds from the 3D world.
Inventor
Associative surfaces video tutorialAliasStudio
Interview with Troy Sumitomo of Five Axis, on CAD in concept car developmentSolidWorks
Tutorial: modeling a cheese grater in sheet metal
Is history-based modeling a flawed idea?
COSMOSWorks is now SimulationXpress, and offering free online trainingPro/Engineer
Using the AutoRound featureRhino
Brazil release 2.0 for Rhino Beta 21 now availableBunkspeed
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (1)
Hypershot video tutorials, all in one placeWednesday, October 22
One of the last things you'd expect to find on a large vacant lot in downtown Philadelphia might be an exhibition full of progressive thinking on sustainable design. But from now until October 30th, A Clean Break will be putting a previously empty space to good use by showcasing low waste innovations for the urban environment.
A Clean Break exhibit brings together the work of architects, furniture designers, product designers, artists, landscape designers, forward thinkers, and everyday design-minded activists to present a collection of work addressing the how of sustainability.Details at A Clean Break
Posted by: Bryce | Comments (2)
more images after the jump.Wednesday, October 22A bite-sized list of what's happenin' now:
design spotter
Final call for entries for Designspotter Exhibition @ 2009 International Furniture Fair, Colognetech on!
Sanyo Discusses Product Design Innovationpr log
HK design scholar honoured with ISDA Education Awardvirtualization
Altair Adds Industrial Design Software solidThinking to HyperWorksidsa sf
The Bay Area's Best Industrial Design eventcollegiate times
Move over, Prius: Avion pushes 110 mpggraphic repro
EskoArtwork's innovative designs at Luxe PackPosted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)
Wednesday, October 22
When reading Wired's article about Massimo Banzi and his Arduino team - see this earlier post - Experientia's Jan-Christoph Zoels and I thought it might be good to provide readers with some further insight on the offspring of the acclaimed but defunct Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (archival site).
A quick survey with former "Ivreans" revealed the extent to which this Italian graduate school, which was directed by Gillian Crampton Smith, produced a huge amount of entrepreneurial activity, with former staff and graduates now working throughout the design spectrum.
Here are - in alphabetical order - the 26 companies founded by former Ivreans:
- Applied Fiction, Bangalore, India (Aparna Rao)
- Arduino, Milan, Italy (Massimo Banzi, David Curatielles, Tom Igoe, Gianluca Martino, David Mellis)
- Barragan Studio, Bogota, Colombia (Hernando Barragan)
- BOX, India (Rajesh Dahija)
- Codesign, New Delhi, India (Rajesh Dahiya)
- Cute Circuit, London, UK (Francesca Rosella and Ryan Genz)
- Experientia, Turin, Italy (Mark Vanderbeeken and Jan-Christoph Zoels, Yaniv Steiner)
- Experiential Design Lab, Delhi, India (Giovanni Cannata and Anurag Sehgal)
- Fluidtime, Vienna, Austria (Michael Kieslinger)
- Frank First, New York, USA (Kim Mingo)
- Harald Unnarsson Industrial / Interaction Design, Dalian, China (Harald Már Unnarsson)
- Interaction Design Lab, Milan, Italy (Walter Aprile, Ailadi Cortelletti, Line Ulrika Christiansen, Barbara Ghella, Franz Goria, Giovanni Innella, Giannino Malossi, Gianluca Martino, Stefano Mirti, Simone Muscolino)
- Interaction Design Studios, Berlin, Germany (Reto Wettach)
- Ithaka Design, San Sebastian, Spain (Garikoitz Iruretagoien)
- Keep Company, Los Angeles, CA (Margot Jacobs)
- Kinfo.com, San Francisco, USA (Matty Sallin)
- Live|Work, London, UK (Chris Downs, Lavrans Løvlie, Ben Reason)
- Openwork, New York, USA (Hernando Barragan)
- Project Bureau, London, UK (David Slocombe)
- Tinker.it, Milan, Italy (Massimo Banzi and Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino)
- Truth Dare Double Dare, Hamburg, Germany (Jeremy Abbett and Franziska Hbler)
- TODO, Turin, Italy (Giorgio Olivero)
- UNPACKED Office of Architecture, Rome, Italy (Daniele Mancini)
- Unsworn Industries, Malmö, Sweden (Magnus Torstensson)
- Urban Seeder, Tel Aviv, Israel (Maya Lotan)
- Urbanspoon, Seattle, USA (Ethan Lowry)
- Wiring (Hernando Barragan)
- zero-th association, Pula, Croatia (Karmen Franinovic)
- ZORA Identity & Interaction Design, Düsseldorf, Germany (Britta Boland)In addition, former Ivreans have also founded new schools and study programs (Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, Interaction Design Programme at IUAV University of Venice, and BA/MA program "Interface Design" at University of Applied Sciences at Potsdam), work for famous design consultancies and with the design and innovation departments of major multinational companies (Accenture, Arena Solutions, Canon, Cooper, eBay, Fjord, France Telecom, Frog Design, Google, Hitachi, HUGE, IDEO, lastminute.com, Microsoft, Nokia, Orange, Panasonic, Pega Design, Philips Design, Reed Business, RED Associates, Rockwell Group, Samsung, Seren Partners, Skype, Sony Ericsson, Tiny Pictures, Vodafone, and Whirlpool), and are involved in teaching and research (Alghero - University of Sassari, Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, California College of the Arts, Delft University, Domus Academy, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Hamburg University of Applied Science, Highwater Research, Holon Institute of Technology, Institute for the Future, Istituto Superiore Mario Boella, ITP, IUAV University of Venice, K3 School of Arts of Communication at Malmö University, Munich University of Applied Sciences, National Institute of Design, NTNU, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti-Milano (NABA), Princeton University, Shenkar Academy of Design and Engineering, Stevens Institute of Technology, SVA, Umea University in Sweden, University of California at Los Angeles, University of Washington in Seattle, and Zurich University of the Arts).
Posted by: Mark Vanderbeeken | Comments (4)Wednesday, October 22
Package designers looking for an excuse to go to Monaco, here's your excuse, if you've got the scratch: Luxe Pack Monaco will run from October 28th thru 31st. Packaging tech and samples for Cosmetics, Perfumes, Wines & Spirits, Fine Foods, Jewelry, and others will be on display.
If you're like me and can't afford to go, satisfy yourself by taking a gander at the Luxe Pack Monaco picture gallery, here.
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)
Wednesday, October 22
From the Coroflot portfolio of : Roberto Vackflores (Santiago, Chile)
Featured Project : LIFT Concept
Public and personal transportation combined. Say goodbye to parking lots, and hello to hang outs.
Posted by: core jr | Comments (2)Wednesday, October 22
There are at least two things you need to be Dutch product designer Patrick Schuur: Patience, and a lot of cassette tapes. Schuur's office divider/closet is made out of 918 of them. Hit the jump for more photos.
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)Wednesday, October 22
Industrial Designer
Giant Bicycle, Inc.
Newbury Park, CaliforniaAs an Industrial Designer for Giant's Global Group you will be responsible for the design and development of Giant's most dynamic innovations, developing creative concepts from sketches to finished designs. You must have exceptional attention to detail and possess a strong understanding of the mechanical requirements needed to bring product to life.
The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.
Posted by: core jr | Comments (0)Tuesday, October 21
The 1HDC Voting Booth Challenge is in full swing, and is already turning out to have a little different flavor than past incarnations. Maybe it's the fact that designers, too, have voting on the brain lately, or the strong feelings that get ramped up as an election approaches, but some of the early entries have more commentary in them than we're used to seeing--and that's a good thing.
Starting at the top: Yo's thumbprint-reading, vote-from-anywhere web-based system; jknodell's converted shipping container voting station (complete with staff uniforms); and personpeoples4444's booth with an integrated mirror, designed to encourage self-examination while completing your ballot.
Then something a little more aggressive: sdcrosla suggests dunking both candidates in water-filled boxes and supplying them with oxygen at the rate of one bubble per vote.
At the bottom is a detail from TheMunesterOfPortSalut's vision of voting station as ice cream truck, or maybe carnival: Mr. Democracy rolls into town blasting classic Schoolhouse Rock songs about civic duty, and is staffed by helpful volunteers in Uncle Sam costumes who feed you patriotic ice cream bars when you're done.
Think you can do better? The competition's open until 9pm on October 30th, and winning entries will be selected by Jessica Helfand and William Drenttel of Winterhouse, creators of the Polling Place Project.
>>See all entries, and upload your own.<<
If you still need inspiration, we've included a couple more designerly responses to the current campaign after the jump.
Posted by: core jr | Comments (0)Tuesday, October 21
Arduino was the self-proclaimed 11th Century King of Italy. Arduino was also the name of a bar where students and staff of the now defunct Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (archival site) gathered on Friday nights.
It finally became the name that my former Ivrea colleague Massimo Banzi (in the center above) chose for the Italian firm that makes a highly acclaimed open-source electronics prototyping platform.
Bruce Sterling invited him earlier this year for a presentation at Torino's Share Festival, as an example of how the digital is integrated into the real.
Now Arduino is featured in Wired Magazine.
Congratulations Massimo!
Posted by: Mark Vanderbeeken | Comments (0)Tuesday, October 21
A tale of product success: Jeremy Huber found current methods of affixing iPod Nanos to the body--armbands, cases and the like--unsuitable for his weightlifting routine. He and wife Alissa devised the iStik, a snap-on plastic case containing four magnets, which corresponds with a thin plastic sheet also holding four magnets. The rest is simple: put the sheet inside your clothing and the case outside the clothing, and the magnets do the rest. You can now store your Nano on any part of your body covered by clothing.
(If magnets don't sound like such a hot idea, remember that this is for the Nano, so there's no hard drive to accidentally erase.)
While the object itself is neat, what we found more interesting was the success the Hubers found in a market glutted with corporations all trying to design a hit iPod accessory. The Hubers started by renting a booth at the L.A. marathon, where the hordes of runners saw the wisdom of the gizmo and quickly bought up all 400 of them. This led to an appearance on CNBC's The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch, and the publicity boosted sales--with no dedicated retail space, just a website, the Hubers have racked up $50,000 in sales in just six months! No ID background, and not too shabby.
via invention and technology news
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)
Tuesday, October 21
Lots of interesting content in the November issue of Fast Company magazine.
Can design save the world? Hilary Cottam thinks so.
Alice Rawsthorn, design critic of the International Herald Tribune, profiles Hilary Cottam, founding director of the social enterprise Participle, on her use of design to try to change the world for the better.
[If you want to know more about Hilary, read the lengthy interview I did with her last year for Torino World Design Capital.]Three more who design for society
Meet three visionaries who solve social problems with design thinking: Ezio Manzini (Politecnico di Milano), Marcia Lausen (Design for Democracy) and George Kembel (Stanford D.school).Building a sustainable design community
Anya Kamenetz reports on the highly laudable Designers Accord: "Valerie Casey is rallying the creative community to her version of a Kyoto treaty for designers -- and her peers are signing on in droves. Now comes the hard part."Green guru gone wrong: William McDonough
Posted by: Mark Vanderbeeken | Comments (0)
This long feature story is probably a bomb. McDonough, the architect who developed the "cradle-to-cradle" concept, is widely revered as an environmental guru. The article describes McDonough as a great promoter with good intentions, who creates projects with often very mixed or even failed results.Tuesday, October 21
Are you attending the same lecture over and over again? That's not change; that's more of the same.
Tonight, Valerie Casey presents Creating the Conditions for Change:
Integrating the principles of sustainability into design practice and production.Valerie Casey of IDEO and founder of The Designers Accord provides practical advice on integrating the principles of sustainability into design practice and production. Ms. Casey will present the progress of the Designers Accord movement and discuss how participating design firms, educational institutions, and corporations throughout the world are making change. The lecture is hosted by Philadelphia product design firm, Bresslergroup and IDSA Philly. SRS Energy's new solar roofing system will also be showcased.Tonight at Bresslergroup
The Marketplace Design Center
2400 Market St, Suite 1-2 (Lower Level)
6:00pm cocktail reception / studio tour
7:00pm lecture
Admission: Free
For More Information: Contact Desiree Ruiz at druiz@bresslergroup.comThis is just one of over 15 events happening between today and tomorrow throughout Philadelphia.
Posted by: Bryce | Comments (0)
Check the full schedule for more.Tuesday, October 21A bite-sized list of what's happenin' now:
creativity online
Antenna Design profile: interface, automation, and industrial designinfotech
Dell racks up 48 design awardsfast company
Three visionaries who solve social problems with design thinkingcanadian architect
An Ambitious Vancouver Design Firm Has Gone Global With An Inventive Approach To Lighting And Productssun times
Black industrial designer's work will be honored at Smithsonianwhat they think
Heidelberg Wins Three Good Design Awardsmanufacturing & business technology
Smart product design: It's getting easier to be greenPosted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)
Tuesday, October 21
Having dropped a couple hunnert on an iPhone, I seek the 1980s U.S. Army ethos for it: I want it to be all that it can be. It's currently a remote control for my computer, a phone, a PDA, an iPod, etc. which means less stuff for me to carry/own.
I've been in the market for a nifty desk clock, so was glad to come across this, one of the neater iPhone apps: Flip Clock. Sure, setting it to the optional non-sleep mode will burn the battery quicker, but presumably I'll only be using that setting when it's on my desk, i.e. plugged in, anyway.
Best of all it only runs $0.99, which is undoubtedly less than what I'd have dropped at CB2 or Bed Bath & Beyond. One less object I need to buy, less clutter, cheap price. Victory!
via bauldoff
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (1)Tuesday, October 21
Beginning October 27th and running 'til December 20th, an ambitious new pop-up will take residence in NYC. Living the Italian Soho House will contain over 150 Lombardy-designed furniture and home accessories, film screenings, and panel discussions. Produced by Promos, a specialized division of the Milan Chamber of Commerce, the initiative aims to shine a light on Italian design. Here's more:
The idea behind Living the Italian Soho House is to recreate five spaces found in Italian houses by using elements and products from 35 of the most innovative design companies in Italy. The space at 172 Mercer will include a kitchen and dining room, living room with garden, office and entertainment room, bathroom/spa, and bedroom. There will also be a welcome room, which will host seminars, events, and presentations over Living’s eight-week residency.The items on display in the house were selected by interior designers and include over 150 products from companies including Paola C, Bizzari, Bodema, Luceplan, Progetti, and more. Among the items will be seating, bathroom and kitchen furnishings, lighting, windows, flooring, tables, and more. All products on display will be available for purchase.
And we're confident they'll take American dollars.
All info at the site: www.livinglombardy.it.
Posted by: core jr | Comments (0)
Tuesday, October 21
The awesome painting/illustration/rendering duo of Kenn Brown and Chris Wren, who together make up Mondolithic Studios, have an upcoming exhibit in Guadalajara at the Kappeh Galeria Cafe. Mecanicos Fantasia opens October 25th, and the work brings to mind some of the wilder Queen album covers of yore.
Even if you're unfamiliar with them, the Mondolithic Studios name probably rings a bell; these are the guys who illustrated, for Alan Weisman's The World Without Us, a timeline of what would happen to NYC if humans just disappeared. Unsurprisingly, things go to hell pretty quickly. Hit the jump to check it out.
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)
Tuesday, October 21
Assistant Professor, Interdisciplinary Design
(Visual Communication and Product Design)
NSCAD University
Halifax, Nova ScotiaQualified candidates must have a terminal degree (MDes, MFA, or Ph D); current or recent university-level teaching experience, and/or professional design experience. Design thinking is considered to be of paramount importance, thus applicants must be well-versed in design theories, history, and criticism
The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.
Posted by: core jr | Comments (0)Tuesday, October 21
Not to be outdone by other retailers simply putting together pop-up stores to showcase their wares, Chanel is pushing their brand with a full-size travelling pop-up museum, designed by Zaha Hadid no less. The edifice, officially known as the Chanel Mobile Art Pavilion, opened this morning on Central Park's Rumsey Playfield, marking the start of the New York leg of the Pavilion's five city tour, and also the first time one of Hadid's super-swoopy designs has actually been constructed in the Big Apple.
Reviews of the pavilion and show within are equally impressed and amused, and we have to admit, even if you build a huge ridiculous egg-like thing and populate it exclusively with art based on an expensive handbag, it still makes for some great photos. Local shopping blog Racked has an impressive photo gallery with reluctantly positive commentary; see it here. And if you're in New York and want to take a look in person, get in line: the only remaining tickets to be had are handed out in small batches at 8am each morning.
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (1)
Monday, October 20
It's kinda like midterms--only for you, not the students, and with much better refreshments. The School of Visual Arts MFA in Design Criticism is holding an Open House this weekend! Here's the pitch:
D-CRIT is up and running with 15 stellar students, an all-star faculty, and a feature article on the program coming out in the next issue of Surface magazine. Find out what the fuss is about first hand at our Open House taking place on Saturday, October 25. Students will be there to talk about their experiences so far, such as what it's like to produce a podcast for Kurt Andersen and the "Studio 360" team or why architecture critic Karrie Jacobs has them reading John Ruskin in preparation for a visit to Times Square. D-CRIT Chair Alice Twemlow will give an overview of the program, its goals, structure and its philosophy. Faculty members Russell Flinchum, Steven Heller, Karrie Jacobs and Leital Molad will talk about what students can expect from their classes. This is your chance to meet and mingle over drinks and snacks and find out more about D-CRIT. We look forward to showing you around!Register online or contact the department for more details at dcrit@sva.edu or 212.592.2228. Hit the site at http://dcrit.sva.edu.
Posted by: core jr | Comments (0)
Monday, October 20
Now that everyone from GOOD to Target to Banksy is doing a pop-up store, we can start getting a little more discerning about which ones are worth visiting, and which are just basking in the light of a clever new marketing trend.
Toronto furniture purveyor Ministry of the Interior is making its own stab at the pop-up store starting tomorrow, and this one looks to fit neatly in the former category. Running from Tuesday to Saturday only, it features the work of Swedish designer Jens Fager, notable lately for his "Raw" Collection of rough-hewn, painted furniture, unveiled earlier this year at Milan.
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (1)
Monday, October 20
A woman in a white dress methodically uncaps two dozen felt-tipped markers, and inserts them into her dress, allowing them to bleed into the fabric.
Why? She's demonstrating Lisbon designer Fernando Brizio's renewable dress from the "Flexibility: Design in a Fast-Changing Society" exhibit, which closed last week. Check out the video below, and fast-forward to 0:27 to see the good stuff.
via the moment
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (1)
Monday, October 20
While we fully endorse all modes of charitable giving we do favor those that are innovative and, being a design site, a little fashionable. So naturally we are fans of Mustaches vs. Cancer ; a fund-raiser in which mustachioed competitors grow whiskers and gather donations for the pediatric department of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer center in NYC. The 'thon runs till November 29 and the race is still wide-open: if you have Teen-Wolf facial hair abilities you could easily turn the field on its head!
Find a 'stache to sponsor here - Join yourself here
Sponsor these posterboys! (from top-left, row by row):
Posted by: core jr | Comments (3)
growch, Harry Lipmann, Stachequatch, MexiStache, Mikey Mustache, SlowStache
Monday, October 20
When it comes to automobiles, GM used to stand for General Motors; but soon the acronym may be better known for geometric morphometrics, a system of study recently used to measure pareidolia.
What the heck is pareidolia, you ask? Hope you're sitting down:
...we have [a propensity] to actually see faces or human characteristics in everything from cars to clouds, a phenomenon called pareidolia. But now researchers hope to better understand what goes on in the brain when people see faces in objects versus humans faces, as well as help automakers design more appealing cars....Study participants assessed cars based on a system known as geometric morphometrics (GM), which allowed the men and women to rate certain traits on a sliding scale (such as "infancy" to "adulthood"). The traits represented maturity, sex, attitudes, emotions, and personality — all things that people infer from human faces at a single glance.
After rating car traits, participants then answered the question of whether they saw a human face, animal face or no face at all on the cars. They drew facial features such as eyes, nose and mouth on the car images whenever they did see faces.
Lastly, the study participants answered whether they liked a car or not... People overwhelmingly preferred cars that rated highest on "power" traits." High "power" cars like the BMW 5 Series tended to be lower or wider, and have slit-like or angled headlights with a wider air intake.
The participants also largely agreed on which cars had which traits, such as arrogant, afraid and agreeable. A few traits such as disgusted, extroverted and sad caused more disagreement.
Looks like Pixar was onto something.
via live science
thanks alice!
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (1)Monday, October 20
Have you ever wanted to learn how to control Ardunio, weave conductive thread, create a GPS tagging device, or print on Fab@Home? If the answer is yes, then you might be interested in The Hacktory.
Tucked away on a side street just north of Philadelphia's city hall, The Hacktory is a non-profit community work space with a group of hackers, tweekers, and geekers on a mission to spread the use of technology in art. They offer a variety of courses, shared equipment, material exchanges, and events that make it easy for anyone to start tinkering.
See images from this weekend's most popular course, How to Create Interactive Installations with Micro-controllers, after the jump.
Posted by: Bryce | Comments (0)Monday, October 20
With the next presidential election looming in sight, we've seen a ton of political-design coming out of the States this year, but this pumpkin-propaganda totally takes the cake. (Can you imagine the trick-or-treating conversations this is gonna spark?!) Check out the Better Home and Gardens site (seriously!) and download a pumpkin stencil. There's no better way to support your candidate and keep the holiday spirit alive.
Make sure to check out the entire celebrity pumpkin gallery -- everyone from Joe Biden to Michael Phelps is there in carved vegetal glory!Thanks Beefy!
Posted by: elle* | Comments (0)
Monday, October 20The UK think tank Demos has launched a new report, Video Republic, exploring the contours of a new public space enabled by cheap digital technology and broadband access.
You can download the Video Republic report for free here.
Posted by: Mark Vanderbeeken | Comments (0)Monday, October 20
To be honest, I feel that the latest furniture-that-folds-into-a-box, Ariel Jacubovich's 'Pocket Library', looks kind of crappy when unfurled; but it does raise an interesting point. Most of us keep our books in open bookshelves with each and every book visible 100% of the time, but we only actually peruse the titles for a few brief seconds while looking for reading material. The rest of the time the books are exposed for no reason and gathering tons of dust.
So while I'm not crazy about the final execution--the straps and whatnot--I think Jacubovich's idea that books can be stored in a box that opens up to display the spines (rather than just tossing the books into a regular box that you'd have to dig through) is good, sound thinking. And I like the fact that the box could be used as a coffee table or footstool for that 99% of the time. Ariel, if you're reading this, please keep developing this design! If you hit that next level, I'll be the first in line to buy one.
via treehugger
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)
Monday, October 20
You've seen plenty of pictures from us of those swanky, design-y First Class airplane seats, so here's a switch: Japan Airlines has just won their fourth Good Design Award for the seats used by us bums in Economy.
The JAL Sky Shell Seat was designed with a "sliding shell" feature so that when 12-B reclines his seat, the seatbase scooches forward rather than the seatback tipping back and invading 13-B's space. Each seat also has La-Z-Boy-like leg support, its own power outlet, a 9" LCD, and offers 20% more legroom than previous models.
We look forward to seeing the new seat in person, but we're still holding out for our dream design feature in an airplane seat: some kind of magic tray table that can actually be left unfolded during take-off and landing. The flight attendants act like everyone will die if you don't put that thing up.
via finchannel
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)Monday, October 20
Okay, I know we promised we wouldn't mention the new MacBook again but since Jonathan Ive was so adamant about the Unibody housing being more beautiful internally, we had to share some pics from the crew over at ifixit who've documented dismantling the entire unit on their site.
Posted by: squee.gee | Comments (1)Monday, October 20
A bite-sized list of what's happenin' now:metro
Cardiff Design Festival Showcasenational post
40 under 40: Fresh ideas from young Canadian designersmcad cafe
iCHECK For Autodesk Inventor Identifies Design Problemsdesignophy
"Managing Design for Innovation" lecture at Turkey's METUtimes online
The UK's Concept Group International: a flexible workforce combined with the latest design technologyfinancial times
Belgium's new generation of designers showcased at Interieur 08it web
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)
ASUS PDA, PC win G-Mark 2008 design awardsMonday, October 20
Built in 1980 in Warren, Michigan, the General Motors wind tunnel is one of the biggest in the industry. Constructed from 20,000 cubic yards of reinforced concrete, a 43-foot fan in the center of the tunnel can generate wind speeds of up to 138 mph. which is powered by a 4,500-horsepower, variable-speed, DC electric motor. Engineers not only study airflow to minimize drag, 40 percent of their work is focused on reducing the sound of wind noise in the car's interior.
View the complete gallery at wired.com
Posted by: squee.gee | Comments (1)Monday, October 20
Eco clothing company Nau reopen their doors for business tomorrow, the Fall '08 collection will be available online and in selected stores as of November. Continuing with their distinct blend of style and performance clothing with a focus on sustainability, the new range includes a variety of products from cashmere-angorra dresses to highly technical ski jackets and pants.
Santa Barbara-based clothing company Horny Toad purchased Nau after they announced they we're unable to secure further financing five months ago. The rebirth has required scaling down operations with the team downsized from 60 to 12 staff and their Partners for Change Program which originally donated 5% of every sale to organizations working for positive change will now be 2%. According to Nau, this is still twice the most generous established benchmark and 28 times the national average for corporate philanthropy. The number of partner organizations has been reduced from thirty three to six, five of which have already been nominated: va.org, Mercy Corps, Ashoka, Breakthrough Institute, and Ecotrust.
As one of the few companies in the fashion industry genuinely committed to finding a balance between being successful at business and minimizing their environmental impact, we wish them well. If you can't wait till tomorrow to see the new range, catch a sneak peak here.
Posted by: squee.gee | Comments (2)Monday, October 20
The Icograda Multiverso workshop and conference that took place in Turin, Italy this weekend, was a surprising and stimulating treat full of uncommon approaches to the field of design.
Cristina Chiappini and Silvia Sfligiotti, who selected the speakers, clearly had some fun making those unconventional choices, and so did we as the audience.
A speaker that stood out for me was graphic designer, typographer and design educator Saki Mafundikwa from Harare, Zimbabwe.
Posted by: Mark Vanderbeeken | Comments (1)Monday, October 20
CNET News has published a small photo gallery of new user interfaces developed by Microsoft Research. The integration of physics engines looks quite promising.
Posted by: Mark Vanderbeeken | Comments (0)Monday, October 20
Automotive Interior & Exterior Designers
Honda R&D Americas, Inc.
Torrance, CaliforniaInterior Designer responsibilities include:
Focusing on the inside of the vehicle, the design of the human space including basic vehicle dimensions, ergonomics, functionality/features, seating, electronics, and color/materials. Combining interiors in a thoughtful, organized, and mass-producible way while still evoking a positive emotional response with the customer. Proposing this space using a variety of 2D and 3D methods including sketches, section models, clay models, CAD data models and fully functional actual mock-ups...Exterior Designer responsibilities include:
Focusing on the total image of the vehicle. Seeking out a three dimensional expression of the customer's needs. Sculpting the vehicle and integrating styling with functionality. Creating very rough 2D sketches and 3D form studies progressing to more defined renderings and drawings. Generating a series of 3D models with a team of modelers to create CAD surface data for use by the factory...The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.
Posted by: core jr | Comments (0)Monday, October 20
Bruce Sterling was one of the keynote speakers at Multiverso, the Icograda Design Week conference that took place in Turin, Italy, during the last few days (see also this Core77 post).
But Bruce wasn't there.
Instead he sent his Italian twin brother Bruno Argento, interpreted by David Orban, who gave his entire speech in Italian to a flabbergasted but amused audience.
Posted by: Mark Vanderbeeken | Comments (0)Monday, October 20
In the world of reused object design, Tiffany Threadgould is a breath of fresh air. Her current lineup of DIY recycling kits are poised perfectly for the upcoming holiday season, and if you can get past the paradox of buying something more in the service of recycling something already in existence, well, then ReMake its kits are for you. We smile at the Wine Cork Trivet, but swoon for the Magazine Stationery.
These kits and more at her site: www.replayground.com
Posted by: Allan Chochinov | Comments (0)Sunday, October 19
Matthias Pliessnig's bent wood furniture has been seen here before, but last night he introduced some stunning new pieces during his Debut Solo Exhibit at the Wexler gallery. The centerpiece of the exhibit is a large steam bent oak seating sculpture titled Providence. It's the result of over 5 weeks of careful planning, prototyping, bending, and forming. Also included in the gallery is a collection of mixed media sculptural studies that Matthias creates along with his furniture.
Hopefully we will see more bent goodness from Matthias now that his new studio in Philadelphia is up and running.
More event images after the jump
Posted by: Bryce | Comments (1)
Saturday, October 18
This month's 1 Hour Design Challenge is timelier than timely, focusing on the theme of voting booths. Everyone is welcome to take part, so fire up those pencils, markers and tablets and get in the game! Cause hey, participation is a central component of this one.
THEME:
Voting BoothDOORS OPEN:
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
9 PM PST (4AM GMT)DOORS CLOSE:
Thursday, October 30, 2008
9 PM PST (4 AM GMT)BRIEF:
As we approach the upcoming November election, the role of design and experience will once again take center stage. The ballot design fiasco of the 2000 election taught us that the ramifications of design decisions can be profound, so for this Core77 1 Hour Design Challenge, we invite designers to submit design solutions for the "voting booth." Designs submitted can include both voting machines and environments, but we are looking for strong concepts that explore the way we vote, where we vote.HOW TO ENTER:
Participants must execute their design in only 1 hour, based on an honor system. Upload images and a brief text description of your design to the designated discussion forum.Jury:
Winners will be selected by Jessica Helfand and William Drenttel of Winterhouse, creators of The Polling Place Photo Project (now a New York Times project) and founding editors of Design Observer. Community discussion is encouraged to help ensure that the best designs win.CRITERIA:
Judging will be based on quality of presentation, strength of concept, and ambition of idea.PRIZE:
1st prize will receive a gift basket from Winterhouse, including maple syrup, t-shirt, a copy of Design For Democracy, boxes of Obama O's and Cap'N McCain's cereal, and other special surprises. 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners will be featured in the Core77 November Newsletter and on the Core77 Blog.>>Enter your submission here<<
Posted by: core jr | Comments (0)
Saturday, October 18
Men's Vogue magazine has commissioned Michael Bierut to design a "politically neutral" USA pin "in an attempt to end the flag-pin controversy." Comments Bierut, "I tried to defamiliarize a very familiar configuration of letters. A flag is a corporate logo. A monogram is much more private." 5000 of the pins are for sale with the proceeds benefiting a great nonprofit, Puppies Behind Bars.
Here's more on the organization:
The New York-based charity, which has been training prison inmates to raise service dogs since 1997, has recently turned its attention to veterans, with a new initiative called Dog Tags. The program provides dogs for soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan who are physically injured or suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. The dogs, Labradors and golden retrievers, are trained to do everything from reminding their companions to take their medication to allaying combat-induced fears that make everyday life back home impossible.Support the cause here.
More story here.(Photo: Richard Pierce)
Posted by: core jr | Comments (1)Friday, October 17
Scruffy canvas bags with recycle symbols on the side not really your style? Lightweight tent manufacturer NEMO has a snappy alternative for the rip-stop loving gear geek in all of us: shopping bags made from factory second tents. Pick one up here, and while you're at it check out some of their other green-leaning innovations, like tents made with bamboo poles and 90% recycled fabric.
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0)Friday, October 17
Given our current 1 Hour Design Challenge: Voting Booth, we are particularly keen on the Design-for-All voting booth, which just won the States Design Competition and will be developed for a pilot study for next year's elections in Norway.
Designed as a collaboration between KADABRA Product Design, Innovativoli Industrial Design, and Blueroom Graphic Design (all of whom share a studio in Oslo), the project is the centerpiece of a comprehensive set of voting materials comprised of a ballot box, graphic profile, signage and ballot. Here's a bit more from the team:
A voting system is not truly democratic until everyone who has the right to vote can do so without encountering physical or mental barriers. As the initiator of this project, the Norwegian state wished to focus on inclusiveness--a good voting experience for everyone regardless of physical or mental impairments. By including "elite users" in the creative process, all the elements of the voting experience are designed to be just as available to the visually impaired, wheel chair users, or illiterates, as they are to an "ordinary" user. The proposed project lifts the elections to a higher functional level, and injects a feeling of solemnity and pride both for the voters and the volunteers. Posted by: Allan Chochinov | Comments (0)Friday, October 17B3ta draws the parallel to a razor ad, but we didn't want to hold this until Fathers Day. Enjoy it right now.
Posted by: Allan Chochinov | Comments (0)Friday, October 17
You're not going to qualify for the Idiotarod with Korean designer Jaebeom Jeong's Cartrider but it would definitely make for an interesting ride in the next Zoobomb meet.
via designboom
Posted by: squee.gee | Comments (1)Friday, October 17
Last Monday, the winners of the 2008 Design Management Europe Award (DME) were announced at a gala ceremony at the Wales Millennium Centre. The event formed a major part of the Cardiff Design Festival.
The DME Award is a business award which recognises the critical role of management in the successful implementation of design and innovation. This year, registrations were received from over 22 countries. A jury of international business experts selected winners in seven categories. You can see all winners and honourable mentions here (click the red icons to see full poster presentations).
For more design management reading, make sure you don't miss out on the DME database which features various case studies of European good practises, articles on design management topics and video footage from DME events.
Posted by: Aart van Bezooyen | Comments (0)Friday, October 17A bite-sized list of what's happenin' now:
international business times
DesignConcept solution lets manufacturers estimate production costs as early as the design phaseforbes
Save the planet and get rich: Six-Figure Green Jobscanada
Vancouver Home and Interior Design Showfibre 2 fashion
Symbiosis Institute of Design to host "Timeless De-tour"informationsdienst wissenschaft
Beauty Matters! Usability and Aesthetics - International Information Design Symposium in Stuttgartmass high tech
Factor the full customer experience in designhk design centre
Workshop on Designing the Service ExperiencePosted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)
Friday, October 17
French company CANAL+ and Yves Behar/fuseproject are launching Le Cube, a television receiver with a satellite decoder, ethernet connection and built in gyroscopic sensor that automatically rotates the display allowing the box to be used in both a horizontal and vertical position.
The unit is intended to look minimal from a few feet away and reveal it's high detail up close, the remote control features a sculpted soft back surface which creates the illusion of floating when placed on a table.
Posted by: squee.gee | Comments (0)
Friday, October 17
Last night, Philadelphia based designer Josh Owen introduced his SOS Stool for Casamania to the US market with a fantastic presentation that detailed every sketch, prototype, and manufacturing process required to make this object a reality.
The hooks on the top create so many holding, hanging, and seating possibilities that this might be the most amazing stool EVAA! The Pompidou Center for Contemporary Art in Paris seems to think so, as they have already added it to their permanent collection.
The SOS Stool is now for sale in the US through Unica Home.
Josh will continue to make an impact at DesignPhiladelphia with two more events scheduled this week:
Tonight: PRODUCT DESIGN: Surpriseutility
Tomorrow: BUILD 02: Exploring Materiality with WilsonartSee the Full Event Schedule for all the details
Posted by: Bryce | Comments (0)Friday, October 17
Put some industrial back in your design with the new container color systems posters from Antrepo.
Posted by: squee.gee | Comments (0)Friday, October 17
Let me ask you something: How long do you keep your eyes closed in the shower?
[Design consultancy Continuum] tested shower heads for Moen Inc. and found something strange. When asked how much users keep their eyes closed while showering, respondents estimated as low as 10 percent. Continuum built a "test shower" and observed that figure to be as high as 80 percent. The users were truthful, but didn't know themselves.This is the latest bit of industrial designer's "cocktail party chatter," as I like to call it; we've all got those anecdotes particular to ID'ers that cause your graphic designer friends' eyes to glaze over while the product people lean closer to hear. It's from an Inside Product Design & Development article called "Collaborative product design meets customer demands," which lists opinions and findings by several design consultancies and covers things like "non-conscious behaviors," "feature creep" and "the danger of internal design groups."
It also attributes the famous "A camel is a horse designed by committee" quote. Before we spill it, anyone know who came up with this gem? Bueller, anyone?
The answer is Sir Alec Issigonis, designer of the original Mini, and one of the few ID'ers to actually gain Knighthood because his product kicked so much ass.
Hit the link below to check out the rest of the article.
via mass high tech
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)
Friday, October 17
Design Director: One Star
Converse
New York City, New YorkCommunicates design concepts to various internal and external audiences. Presents ideas and direction to executive level management. Provides appropriate business, design, consumer, and cultural story-telling within the context and parameters necessary. Leads the development of appropriate sell-in tools to effectively communicate concepts and strategies.
The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.
Posted by: core jr | Comments (0)Friday, October 17
Dutch Design Week starts tomorrow! 1500 designers from around the world will display their work at various locations in Eindhoven, and the whole shebang kicks off with a lecture by some guy named, oh, Alberto Alessi. The rest of the week will be filled with lectures, workshops, shows, seminars and exhibition. Click here for details.
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)Thursday, October 16
The two-day Business Innovation Factory "conversation" has officially come to a close, the second day another impressive lineup of storytellers and mavericks. Saul Kaplan opened this morning, citing the ongoing theme of "doing, translating ideas into action." And while each of the presenters was a case-in-point for walking-the-walk over talking-the-talk, it's hard not to wonder whether the hundreds of attendees would be inspired to do the same (the "curse of the conference" persists-- where talking abounds, despite goals of changing the world). That being said, today's stories were rooted in inspiration, and one can only hope that the conversation translates into not just action but impact. Read on for a few of today's best moments and musings. And be sure to check out all the additional information, articles, and resources on the BIF-4 website.
Posted by: Emily Pilloton | Comments (1)Thursday, October 16A bite-sized list of what's happenin' now:
yes weekly
The lasting influence of the Eameses, 50 years ontaiwan news
Taiwan's product designs make impact at Paris showwales online
Young Welsh graduates' innovative designs exposed in showcasecity paper
Redesigning Philly's newspaper boxesart cal
On display: Greta Magnusson Grossman's recently discovered industrial design drawings from 1948-1959marketwatch
Vacu Vin Wins European Design Management Prizethe economic times
Business sustainability through Product Lifecycle Management softwarePosted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)
Thursday, October 16
From the Coroflot portfolio of : Zinc Chan (London, United Kingdom)
Featured Project : icono
"I have based my design on the iconic hand gesture people use to represent the telephone. The handset is divided into two parts, earphone and microphone. This invites the user to use the iconic gesture when using the phone. When the user dials the numbers, an animated path is shown on the touch screen. Therefore, people start to remember the person by their unique pattern rather than the numbers. This, together with the two-piece handset creates a more emotional interaction between the phone and the user."HANG LOOSE! More pictures after the jump.
Posted by: core jr | Comments (5)
Thursday, October 16
Peugeot has chosen the winner for their design competition. Top prize went to Colombia's Carlos Arturo Torres Tovar for his folding RD concept, video below.
His 3-wheeled design is called the RD and like most of the other entries, it is small and made for driving on narrow roads. During periods of heavy traffic or when space is limited, it can fold upward and shorten the overall length by a substantial amount.The talented Tovar beat out some stiff competition; you can follow this link to see other entries.
via inventor spot
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (1)
Thursday, October 16
This comes to you from the Must Be Nice... department: Some rich dude is paying Ross Lovegrove to design him a bed. And not just any bed, a "capsule bed" that will sit atop a private mountain in the Italian Alps.
The capsule bed will be mirrored on the outside but transparent on the inside to take advantage of a 360 degree view of the breathtaking landscape.Lovegrove describes the capsule bed as an "incredible ethereal space. You lie on this irregular shaped bed, maybe you can play classical music or something that is going to stimulate your senses and then you are going to marvel at this 360 degree view around you, I couldn't think of a better way to wake up in the morning," he tells CNN.
Placing a seemingly incongruous space-age pod on a mountain top in the middle of the Alps is something Lovegrove has no qualms about doing. He said: "In areas like this where they predominantly build from wood and you see the very old buildings, they are very beautiful, they work in total harmony with their environment and I'm not looking to interfere with that at all. It's worse for me to design a hybrid type of structure that is trying to tastefully fit in."
via cnn
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (1)Thursday, October 16
Today's the day that Liquavista (a spin-off of Philips Research Labs) launches ColorBright, a new type of display platform they're hoping will shake up products like watches and cell phones.
Its unique combination of outstanding brightness in natural light and vivid color range offers new legibility and design freedom to creators of design-led electronic products.Says Mark Gostick, Liquavista CEO, "No other display technology can create such a wow impact with color, contrast and innovative reflector design--it simply transforms a product."
A video explaining the display and the tech can be seen here.
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)
Thursday, October 16
Okay, we promise this is the last you'll hear of it; but for Apple to post a video featuring two of their industrial designers showing factory footage of different production methods is just too industry-specific for us not to post about. Extrusions, milling, laser-machining, all for that little laptop. Heck, we get more pleasure from watching the thing being built than we do from laying our eyeballs on the finished product.
Click here for the vid.
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (1)Thursday, October 16Weekly finds from the 3D world.
SolidWorks
Exhaustive tutorial on optimizing the SW 2009 interface.
The secret usefulness of the new "Unload Hidden Components" command.
PhotoView 360 vs PhotoWorks: the final reckoning.Inventor
Modeling thin features in the Plastic Features Technology Preview.Pro/Engineer and CoCreate
PTC talks up the joys of explicit modeling. (login required)Rhino
T-Splines 2.0 is now available.
New build of Rhino available for Mac OS X.
The Lexus CS 2054 from Minority Report - modeled in Rhino.
Rhino-NC 3D CAM plug-in allows graphical control of CNC machining and toolpath simulation inside Rhino.AliasStudio
Surface exploration tutorial.Multiple Packages
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (1)
Print3D plug-in allows real-time quoting for rapid prototypes, and one-click ordering. Compatible with SW, Rhino, Inventor, AutoCAD, more to come.Thursday, October 16
Design Center Manager
Herman Miller
Chicago , IllinoisThis person will oversee installations, customer experience, events, and day-to-day operations of the design center... Maintain current product knowledge on all product lines and understand current work place issues for impromptu presentations to customers, dealers, A&D, students and walk-ins.
The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.
Posted by: core jr | Comments (0)Wednesday, October 15
Tomorrow marks the beginning of the fourth annual city wide design extravaganza known as DesignPhiladelphia. This year's event list is stacked with top notch lectures, contests, open studios, and, of course, parties. We will be there all week covering the action.
Posted by: Bryce | Comments (1)Wednesday, October 15
The first of two days at the Business Innovation Factory 4 has come to a close, and the conversation was nothing short of a whirlwind of inspiring provocations. From Saul Kaplan's energizing welcome to Jacqueline Novogratz' social entrepreneurship stories from the field, the common theme seemed to be coming together to enable change and make life better through business and design. Here are a few key sound bytes from throughout the day, followed by some other glad-I-didn't-miss-them highlights. And stay tuned for the Day 2 recap tomorrow!
"There's nothing more important than being a catalyst." -- Saul Kaplan
"It's not what you make, it's how you make people feel." -- Marc Ecko
"Our charity is the most flexible capital we have to leverage more capital and create change." -- Jacqueline Novogratz
"Am I elderly?!" -- Richard Saul Wurman, 73, in response to Bruce Nussbaum slyly referring to him as an "old fart."
"I want to leave a beautiful, safe, sustainable world to my children." --Lewis Gordon Pugh
Posted by: Emily Pilloton | Comments (0)
Wednesday, October 15
Tomorrow night the IIDA NY is hosting the First Annual Sustainable Quilt Auction and a preview of sustainable materials presented by Material ConneXion. Quilts were hand crafted by members of the New York A & D community to benefit Furnish-a-Future. Furnish A Future is a program provided by the Partnership for the Homeless which provides free furniture to formerly homeless families.
LOCATION: Scandinavia House, Volvo Hall, 58 Park Avenue, NYC
DATE: Thursday, October 16, 2008
TIME: Cocktails and Hors D'Oeuvres 6:00-9:00pm
Silent Auction 6:30-8:30pmCOST: $15 Members, $25 Non-Members, $10 Students and Educators
Register Online here
Posted by: toolgirl | Comments (1)Wednesday, October 15A bite-sized list of what's happenin' now:
industry week
Designing the Next Materials Revolutionag ip news
BYU Wins Second Straight Top Industrial Design Student Awardpr log
MOTOR EXPO 2008: Thai Youths to Create Designs under Concept "Vehicles to Stop Global Warming"marketwatch
Teague Appoints New Creative Director for Aviationcnet
CNET review: The uniquely designed Motorola Krave ZN4design taxi
Young Blood: Designers Marketbusiness wire
New 'Engineering Textiles' BookPosted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)
Wednesday, October 15
It's not that we dislike having smaller, sleeker objects, but with Apple's announcement yesterday of new laptops, we couldn't help but notice how small the visual difference is between this generation and the last. Why? Because as objects get "tighter," well, there's simply less to design. Everything goes into the details; broad design strokes seem to fade in importance.
To see what we mean, hit the jump and take a look at these older Apple products, manufactured during a time when there was still enough meat on the product to hang some design onto, so to speak.
Vintage Apple photos by Flickr user The Nixer.
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (4)
Wednesday, October 15Tonight's the debut of the Discovery Channel's Prototype This!, "a new TV show centered around conceiving of, designing, and testing prototypes of robots, gadgets, machines, and other things." Here's a YouTube teaser of the team in action:
Our previous write-up of the show is here; on the "Submit Your Ideas" section on their own website, the team is taking suggestions for "cool builds."
Airs tonight at 10pm, meaning you should be able to grab the torrent by about 11:20 or so.
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (1)
Wednesday, October 15
I think if I slowed down I could score better than 6.51, and I swear I hit the center of the circle dead-on (accurate to 0.0 units!) but forgot to get a screenshot. All this to say that you should take a few minutes off right now and try The Eyeballing Game, spotted on Toolmonger this morning. Great fun for designers and visual folks of all stripes.
(Leave your score in the comments!)
Posted by: Allan Chochinov | Comments (11)Wednesday, October 15
Recognizing that the so-called "blind man's dimple" on the '5' keypad of most cellular phones is actually of little use to the blind, designer Takumi Yoshida came up with the SENS concept.
To improve interaction between the user and the phone, SENS combines touch sensors and regular mechanical keys to provide real-time audio feedback. When the user touches a key, the phone tells them what key has been touched without actually registering it as an input. The user may hover across the keys to gain feedback on which key they are touching. Once the user is sure their finger is on the correct key, they can then press it just like on any other standard handset; a click sound is then fed back to confirm the input. In order to eliminate the need for other people in public to also hear the audio feedback from the phone, SENS has an integrated Blutooth headset which ensures it can't get misplaced.The concept was developed in conjunction with students from the UK's Royal National Institute of Blind People. Click here for more info.
via gizmag
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)
Wednesday, October 15
Tomorrow night in New York, Staple Design + Gran Turismo will present Downshift Session 2008: A Celebration of Automotive Design, Music, Art & Gaming. As JeffStaple writes:
After my visit to the Polyphony offices in Tokyo, I was so incredibly inspired by them and their game, Gran Turismo, I felt like we could do something together. It occurred to me that in my immediate world, especially Downtown NYC, automotive design was almost nonexistent. Gaming design was a close second. And of course, we are always highly exposed to fashion design, street art and music. I thought; what would happen if we did an event that merged all of these together? If we organized one night where automotive design, game design, street culture, music and art all come together? To be honest, I'm not sure! But I do know that something positive will surely come out of it.And with that, I formed the Downshift Session. I hope this becomes an annual event as I think all these cultures have something to contribute to one another.
For more information, click here.
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)Wednesday, October 15
We've just arrived at the Trinity Rep Theatre in Providence for the Business Innovation Factory 4, a 2-day "conversation, not conference" and collaborative innovation summit. Over the next two days, storytellers (not speakers) will share their tales that exemplify and demonstrate social engagement and deep business value. The lineup is a veritable who's who of movers and shakers in the business of innovation and social entrepreneurship (doing good while makin' bank). This morning's highlights include a welcome from Saul Kaplan, and presentations by Marc Ecko of Marc Ecko Enterprises and Sweat Equity Enterprises, and Acumen Fund founder Jacqueline Novogratz. This afternoon: Richard Saul Wurman and more.
We'll give you our full wrap-up at the end of the day, but in the meantime, follow the BIF-4 action on Twitter!
Posted by: Emily Pilloton | Comments (0)Wednesday, October 15
While English Prince Edward was abdicating his crown for the love of American divorcee, Wallis Simpson, a Swedish prince by the name of Sigvard Bernadotte gave up his title for another love: Design.
Er, well not really, that's the fairy tale version of it. The second son of King Gustav VI Adolf of Sweden and Princess Margareta also lost his title when he married a non-noble woman whom he met while working as a stage designer in Berlin. But while Bernadotte may not have left this world as a prince, he is often referred to as the "Design Prince of Sweden" and he is one of the few royals to have a direct effect of the daily lives of his people because his designs found their way to almost every home in Sweden.
In the 1930s his redesign of Georg Jensen's silver collection (the original contract between them has never been annulled) met with considerable success, but it was a trip to New York in 1937 and a series of studio visits with American industrial designers like Raymond Lowey, Henry Dreyfuss and Walter Dorwin Teague, that prompted him to re-direct his theatre and cinema career into design.
More after the jump.
Posted by: toolgirl | Comments (6)
Wednesday, October 15
Blog Action Day 2008 Poverty from Blog Action Day on Vimeo.Today is Blog Action Day 2008 where the conversation online will be about poverty. To mark this day at Core77, here is a selection of posts from our blogs and article archives that look at the issues from design's point of view.
Articles
May 2008: Project H Design (Anti)Manifesto: A Call To Action For Humanitarian (Product) Design, By Emily Pilloton
April 2008: Design for the Next Billion Customers, by Niti Bhan and Dave Tait
February 2008: Good For Nothing? Why Nonprofits, Designers, and Techies Can't Talk to Each Other By Ayça Akin
May 2007: Design for the other 90%: A review of the Cooper-Hewitt exhibition by Natalia Allen
July 2006: Corporate Social Responsiblity: You must remember this. By Steven MacGregor
January 2006: 16 Manufacturers, 175 Products, 7 Weeks: Reflections on a mission to Manila By William Gordon
February 2004: Institute without Boundaries: Massive Change
January 2003: Doors of Perception. Flow by Human Beans
Selected Blog posts
Sustainable innovations at the bottom of the pyramid conference in Helsinki
Posted by: Niti Bhan | Comments (2)
Design for social impact Workshop by Continuum
Mobiles and the urban poor
Sustainable Brands 08 - Out of PovertyWednesday, October 15
Industrial Designer : Intel Mobile Group
Intel
Beaverton, OregonThe work is based around mobile platforms, specifically notebooks, and involves working closely with ODMs, engineers, and managing external design companies. Part of the role will involve exploring new concepts and user experiences based on Intel technology roadmaps. Previous experience designing notebooks would be very useful.
The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.
Posted by: core jr | Comments (0)Tuesday, October 14
Clean, crisp, sweet instructions for building a 4' x 8' whiteboard from scratch for under $50. Kicker studios puts together a tidy downloadable PDF, outlining their solution for low-cost fabrication of a small business essential, spawned from the needs of their own studio. If nine people crowding around a sheet of letter size paper isn't cutting for you anymore, give it a look.
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (1)Tuesday, October 14
Apple's latest Big Announcement Day was today, and those of you hoping for some new, revolutionary laptop might be disappointed; the new MacBooks and Macbook Pros don't look that different from their predecessors.
There are differences, of course, but they're of the type to perhaps excite us ID'ers more than the average Joe. The new "unibody" design is described thusly:
[The unibody design] creates its own set of challenges. When you have multiple parts that are fastened together, tolerances don't need to be perfect. You have wiggle room, both literally and figuratively. But when one part is responsible for many functions, it's critical to manufacture that part with absolute precision, down to the micron... There was only one way to achieve this level of precision: mill the unibody from a solid block of aluminum using computer numerical control, or CNC, machines....
Other than that we've got LED screens that burn less juice, separated keys that you'll either love or hate, a black bezel under the glass screen, and a new big-ass glass trackpad (with no button, as it's tap-able) that understands Multitouch gestures.
One piece of very good news is that access to the hard drive has been redesigned; there's now an access door that just pops off. I replaced the hard drive on my current-gen MacBook Pro, and the instructions for how to do that looked like the instructions for how to build a missile. I mean MacGyver would have had trouble doing it. At least, MacGruber would have.
More details here.
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (1)Tuesday, October 14
We are proud to launch this month's 1 Hour Design Challenge tonight, focusing on the theme of voting booths. Everyone is welcome to take part, so fire up those pencils, markers and tablets and get in the game! Cause hey, participation is a central component of this one.
THEME:
Voting BoothDOORS OPEN:
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
9 PM PST (4AM GMT)DOORS CLOSE:
Thursday, October 30, 2008
9 PM PST (4 AM GMT)BRIEF:
As we approach the upcoming November election, the role of design and experience will once again take center stage. The ballot design fiasco of the 2000 election taught us that the ramifications of design decisions can be profound, so for this Core77 1 Hour Design Challenge, we invite designers to submit design solutions for the "voting booth." Designs submitted can include both voting machines and environments, but we are looking for strong concepts that explore the way we vote, where we vote.HOW TO ENTER:
Participants must execute their design in only 1 hour, based on an honor system. Upload images and a brief text description of your design to the designated discussion forum.Jury:
Winners will be selected by Jessica Helfand and William Drenttel of Winterhouse, creators of The Polling Place Photo Project (now a New York Times project) and founding editors of Design Observer. Community discussion is encouraged to help ensure that the best designs win.CRITERIA:
Judging will be based on quality of presentation, strength of concept, and ambition of idea.PRIZE:
1st prize will receive a gift basket from Winterhouse, including maple syrup, t-shirt, a copy of Design For Democracy, boxes of Obama O's and Cap'N McCain's cereal, and other special surprises. 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners will be featured in the Core77 November Newsletter and on the Core77 Blog.>>Enter your submission here<<
Posted by: core jr | Comments (1)
Tuesday, October 14
From the Coroflot portfolio of : Miles Russell (Philadelphia, PA)
Featured Project : Squeeze N Spread
"Research and development led to the creation of "Squeeze 'N' Spread." The package relieves the mess and hassle of using a tub and knife to spread cream cheese while producing significantly less plastic waste." Good idea Miles!
Posted by: core jr | Comments (2)Tuesday, October 14
Kansas-based artist Kris Kuksi created this Church Tank image last year, but somehow he has not yet been struck by lightning.
This image and others go on display at Kuksi's show this November, over at NYC's Joshua Liner Gallery. If it's raining that day, do yourself a favor and don't stand next to the guy.
via book of joe
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)
Tuesday, October 14
Industrial designer David Chavez picked up a Spark Award for his movable Braille timepiece Haptica which displays a real-time readout in Braille using a military time format. He shares the Award with some industry-heavyweights including Fuseproject, Smart Design, Essential Design, James Dyson, One and Co, Pentagram and IDEO.
84 designs won bronze, silver, gold or the ultimate Spark! Award. The winning entries are on display until January 2009 at the Autodesk Gallery, One Market, San Francisco.
View Winners
Posted by: squee.gee | Comments (0)Tuesday, October 14
They told us that expensive CFL bulbs would last for years longer than the cheap incandescent kind, and they lied! I've got some CFL's that already burnt out and they're only three years old. So much for my amortized cost savings.
If this has happened to you, don't chuck 'em in the garbage--there's Mercury in those bad boys. Bring your dead CFL's to Home Depot for proper (free) recycling. Just because the manufacturer is screwing us doesn't mean we have to screw the environment.
via curbly
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)
Tuesday, October 14
A low-cost disposable strip of plastic that can record a soldiers exposure to explosions for up to seven days is hoped to help doctors learn more about brain injuries. Soldiers are increasingly injured by experiencing multiple shock waves from powerful explosives, not necessarily from being hit directly.
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) signed a $5 million contract with Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) to develop the strip of tape which will contain printed electronics, analog memory, and sensors.
The information collected will be added to a soldiers medical records making it easy to track their blast history. 25 prototypes to test components are scheduled for Spring next year and 1,000 units for field testing are planned for 2010.
via dvice.com
Posted by: squee.gee | Comments (0)Tuesday, October 14Need to build Optimus Prime, but you're all out of Energon Cubes? French/Swiss artist Guillaume Reymon found himself in that predicament--we've all been there at some point, haven't we?--and came up with a workaround:
I'm having trouble deciding if this one is cool or lame, but experience has shown that the Comments section of this entry oughta straighten that out right quick.
via makezine
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (4)
Tuesday, October 14
I can't fathom why anyone would want to drink a cocktail filled with ice shaped like AK-47 bullets, or why someone would go to the trouble of making an ice tray shaped like an AK-47 magazine.
I was going to write some silly pun about drinking "shooters," but the more I think about someone being excited to buy this, the more depressed I get; I think I need a drink. And I'm going to fill it with regular ice cubes that don't mimic the shape of something meant to kill people.
via uber review
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (5)Tuesday, October 14A bite-sized list of what's happenin' now:
art daily
Aleksandr Rodchenko: Soviet Constructivist industrial designmarketwatch
Architectural Record and BusinessWeek Honor 'Good Design Is Good Business' Award Winnersbmw group
BMW Group DesignworksUSA turn to yacht designsydney morning herald
Australia's Home Beautiful Product of the Year Awardswhat they think
Mitsubishi Wins Japan's "Good Design Gold Award"pc world
U.S.: Free Nationwide Wi-Fi?marketwatch 2
Globally Recognized Interior Architect and Designer Launches Houston-Based FirmPosted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)
Tuesday, October 14
Giraffe obsessed Colleen Venable has taken the conventional tattoo to another level, you know she'll be a great hit at kids parties.
Posted by: squee.gee | Comments (8)Tuesday, October 14
The latest work from Helsinki-based designer Lincoln Kayiwa is a flower vase called EEMILIO which will be available in black or white porcelain and glass. Calling it a vase seems to be an afterthought as the piece is clearly intended to hold it's own without flowers. Click through for more pics the reverse version BETTY.
Posted by: squee.gee | Comments (0)Tuesday, October 14
That there is the Sentori 58R, a 58-foot flybridge motor yacht designed by Christian Gumpold and Christopher Gloning for their postgrad industrial design diploma thesis at the University of Applied Science in Graz, Austria.
"The target is serial production," says Gumpold, explaining that an actual prototype will be ready by February of 2009. He and Gloning are in the process of founding a design studio specializing in naval architecture.
"The exterior design of the yacht is strongly inspired by automotive design and communicates a simple, clear linework, with the emphasis on a coupe-like appearance," Gumpold explains. "The interior design has the language of modern interior architecture and contemporary living, together with a number of highly innovative detail solutions never seen on a yacht of this size."
We'll post a link as to what those detail solutions are as soon as they become public.
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)
Tuesday, October 14
These days Toyota is the world's #1 (or #2, depending on the week) auto manufacturer in the world, so it's interesting to see a time when they didn't quite have it together.
Above is their RV-2 prototype from 1972, a year when a pointy station wagon (that's "estate car" for you Brits) that opened up into a tent probably seemed nifty. Or just weird.
Either way the vehicle had one thing in common with Joe Pesci in Goodfellas: Neither of them got made.
via retro thing and modern mechanix
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (4)
Tuesday, October 14Victor Lombardi has written 8 short bulletpoints addressed to designers keen on becoming more strategic in their work. Here's a snippet,
Designers often ask this question. Sometimes I think the question arises from a genuine desire to be doing something else which is more strategic in nature, and sometimes I think what is being asked is, how can I convince or influence others to do things my way?The answer might be the same or it might not. I've started to keep track of the answers I hear to shed some light here.
1. Change your title, brand identity, clothing, etc. in order to change perceptions of what you offer.
2. Charge more money so that only the people who have real strategic influence can afford you.
3. Bootstrap your way into different work.
4. Be strategic. In Porter's definition, strategic is long-term planning. Avail yourself of strategic tools both simple (e.g. roadmaps) and complex (futures analysis and design).Have something to add? Go read the rest and comment here.
Posted by: Niti Bhan | Comments (0)Monday, October 13
Straddling the line between design and sculpture in what ArtForm critic Jenifer Borum calls "a stubborn hybridity," Forrest Myer's array of wire and metal seats and surfaces (we dare not call them chairs and tables) are currently being exhibited at San Francisco's Hedge Gallery. The pieces by the forties-born California native range from meticulous yet seemingly spontaneous wire "wads" to Zaha-esque swooping ribbons of anodized colored metals ("250 mph," above). On view at Hedge until November 8th.
Posted by: Emily Pilloton | Comments (0)Monday, October 13
Next week in Ljubljana, Slovenia, the Month of Design Conference tackles the issues of design and experience at three levels: Designing bodies (How are objects created through design?); Designing space (How do real and virtual spaces intertwine); and Designing mind (How do images enter our minds and become needs?) Here's a bit more:
The Design Conference 2008 will feature a pool of design professionals, managers and internationally renowned lecturers, who will discuss the ways of maneuvering through the world of experience shocks. Ljubljana looks forward to hosting designers, fashion editors, theorists of desire, agents of consumerism, creators of web platforms, web designers, architects, interior designers, marketing gurus and consumer rights activists.We're especially anxious to sit between the "marketing gurus" and the "consumer rights activists"!
Click to see the full lineup of speakers.
Posted by: core jr | Comments (0)
Monday, October 13
So sure, you love the Annual Design Review issue right? And those consumable 40s issues are pretty informative too. But I.D's New + Notable issue (due on newsstands at the end of the month) is the one that gets your covetous heart racing, and now you can "enter and win" one of the sweet featured designs.
Starting today, visitors to I.D. Magazine's website can enter for the chance to win one of 19 choice designs featured in the 2008 New + Notable issue. From a weekend for two at one of Mexico's famed Habita hotels to a Lladró vase worth more than $1,000, the weekly prize will change every Monday, culminating in a grand prize giveaway on February 23 of a $2,000 gift certificate to DWR: Tools for Living!Lladró, baby!
(Above: Week 17's WirePod power strip by Joris Laarman for Artecnica)
Posted by: core jr | Comments (0)
Monday, October 13
For those of you who (understandably) like your google searches design-biased, you might already be using Find: Design. But now you can get the filter built right into your browser with this plugin. Happy surfing!
Posted by: core jr | Comments (0)Monday, October 13Animation created for the 60th Anniversary of the Declaration
Posted by: Niti Bhan | Comments (0)Monday, October 13
Apparently it's Design Fair season on the Pacific Rim. While Core is keeping an eye on the Seoul Design Olympiad in Korea, Frog's Design Mind blog just wrapped up a visit to the Shenzhen Original Design Fair a few thousand miles south of there, with some interesting observations.
The author, Tim Leberecht, reports a consensus among local and visiting designers that "China's main challenge on its path from a manufacturing economy to an information economy to a creative economy is not the lack of talent (which is abundant), but rather to unlock, reward, and translate this talent into tangible outcomes," an assessment we've heard in some for several years now. As creative professionals wait on pins and needles for China's prodigious educational and manufacturing capacity to start manifesting designers who can innovate rings around us, Leberecht casts the obstacle primarily as one of branding:
China has passed Germany to stand fifth in international new patent rankings. In absolute numbers, it spends more on R&D than Japan (in fact, only the U.S. spends more). But it lags behind in break-through innovations, and it can't count a whopping 30% of its workforce as members of the "creative class" as the US can. China has a branding challenge. It wants to move from "Made in China" to "Created in China." The reason is pragmatic: With the development of the market and changing demands for products, the seller's market has become a buyer's market and competition in the manufacturing industry has become fierce. In a TV-interview with a nationwide business channel I was asked for my recommendations to THE most pressing question that is beleaguering Chinese companies and economists these days: How can OEMs and ODMs become OBMs and create sustained brand loyalty based on differentiation and excellence and not just volatile competitive advantages derived from low-cost manufacturing efficiencies?>>Read the answer (and the rest of post) here.
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0)Monday, October 13
Director of Industrial Design
Innovative Design Engineering Animation
San Francisco, CaliforniaA minimum of 10 years of experience in industrial design, consulting and implementation with leadership experience guiding team members through the design implementation process all the way to manufacturing is preferred.
The Design Director's role is to drive the process, execution and development of the tools, guidelines and standards for the successful implementation of design applications. As Design Director your passion must lie not only in design but in leading IDEA to be become one of the top Product Development companies in the world.
The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.
Posted by: core jr | Comments (0)Sunday, October 12
Most event organizers would be content with producing a three-day conference featuring 20 speakers from around the world, including Ross Lovegrove, Daniel Libeskind, Yves Behar, Kim Young-Se among others. But the Seoul Design Olympiad has greater ambitions. The conference, which concluded on Sunday, was just one element in a month-long celebration intended to promote design and the design industry to the public in leading up to 2010, the year Seoul will be officially designated as the World Design Capital.
Other elements in the program include a design business exhibit, a young designers market with more than 50 participants, a design competition exhibit housed in three tents showcasing more than 100 entries, a car design exhibit, a street furniture exhibit (designed by citizens!), fashion and lifestyle exhibits, a custom art installation that literally wraps the entire Olympic Stadium, installations from more than 20 schools and continuing presentations from speakers world wide.
The best part is that the entire event is free of charge and open to the public. So the consumers of all this future-looking knowledge, for the most part, were not a select group of industry insiders, who already know and believe in the power of design. Instead it was a mainstream audience, young and old, including families with children, something you don't usually see at a design festival. The city of Seoul has done a great job in promoting ideas and visions usually confined to the halls of art and design schools to the mass market, and should serve as a model for how other municipalities world wide can help educate people about the power of design in ways that easily relate to their daily lives.
Lots of pics after the jump!
Posted by: StuCon | Comments (0)Sunday, October 12For your Sunday reading pleasure, Adam Levy's recent article on Design Observer profiles Jack A. Weil, inventor of the snap-buttoned cowboy shirt, Bolo tie, and well, a way of life. Here's the sweet spot:
Back in the 1940s, Jack A had realized that the cowboy shirt could be something more than a simple product. The idea behind the cowboy shirt, he said, was to reflect the flamboyance of the rodeo riders, their reckless bravado. His job was to translate those qualities into the language of pattern and cut: shaped cuffs, bold yokes, tapered waists, and vibrant colors. "In those days, when cowboys rode into town they wore simple chamois shirts and denim Levis. They had two or three months pay in their pocket to raise hell with and get drunk and I got the idea that they'd buy a few fancy shirts while they were at it." His innovation, in other words, was to sell back to the cowboy the very idea of what their life was all about.And a bit more:
Manufacturing those early bolos was a craft-intensive undertaking. Special pliers, used by telephone linemen, were used to bend the silver tips around the lariat. It took training and persistence. As a result, for many years Rockmount produced only two types of bolo ties. ("Bolo" is actually a misnomer. Jack A wanted to call it the "bola" but he didn't write the "a" clearly enough on the manufacturing order one day. Remarkably, when westerners pronounce "bolo" it comes out sounding like "bola.") When Jack B assumed some of the design responsibilities from his father in the mid 1970s, he felt it was crucial to expand their output. "I've styled the bolo line for over twenty five years," Jack B boasted to me as he tucked into his meat, "and now we have over 300 styles. You know those bolos with dried scorpions on them? Those are mine, along with all the ones with buffalo nickels and cowboy boots, pigs asses and Stetson hats. Oh yeah, its been a lot of fun."Continue reading here.
Posted by: core jr | Comments (0)Saturday, October 11
At the Paris Motor Show last week, the Italian car manufacturer Fiat unveiled eco:Drive, an innovative, easy-to-use social software application that helps drivers improve how efficiently they drive. It analyses their driving style and helps them to use less fuel by reducing their CO2 emissions and to save money.
(and make sure to choose the correct language - choices are English, French, Italian and ...International English)
Posted by: Mark Vanderbeeken | Comments (0)Saturday, October 11
The Norwegian Nobel committee announced yesterday that Finland's ex-president Martti Ahtisaari has won the Nobel peace prize.
Martti Ahtisaari is the father of Marko Ahtisaari, the former director of design strategy at Nokia and now director of brand and design at the advertising-supported phone company Blyk.
He was awarded the prize for his important efforts, on several continents and over more than three decades, to resolve international conflicts.
Congratulations to the Ahtisaari family.
The photo, which comes from The Guardian website, shows Martti Ahtisaari with his wife, Eeva, his father, Oiva, and his son, Marko, in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on August 2 1973. Ahtisaari was then the Finnish ambassador in Tanzania.
Posted by: Mark Vanderbeeken | Comments (0)Saturday, October 11
CNN, in collaboration with Ericsson, looks at the future in 2020.
In addition to feature articles focused on people such as Ross Lovegrove and Rem Koolhaas, the site contains entire sections on the future of nature, cities, space, living spaces, community, health, transport, and education.
The same site also features an article on interior design of the future, with a extensive photo gallery.
Posted by: Mark Vanderbeeken | Comments (0)
Friday, October 10
45 Limited-Edition Confederate Fighter motorcycles are available from the 2009 Neiman Marcus Christmas book.
Like the Wraith, the Confederate Fighter uses a girder-style front suspension made up of titanium, aluminum and carbon fiber bits and a 120ci 45-degree air-cooled V-Twin. From there, things diverge rather rapidly, with the Wraith's carbon fiber monocoque chassis being replaced with a backbone unit made from titanium connected to front and rear bulkheads cut from solid chunks of billet aluminum.Here's a breakdown of what you'll get if you fork over the $110,000.
via autoblog
Posted by: squee.gee | Comments (2)Friday, October 10
A bite-sized list of what's happenin' now:interfax china
Reviews of the latest touch screen mobile phone user interface designs by Apple, Google and Nokiabusinessweek
Sleek, But Don't Touch: Samsung's Glydemexperts
"My Private Robot": Not your average trade show boothautoblog
Lamborghini reveals Estoque interior for first timeinternational herald tribune
Morandini's art: Playful, geometric designpace
I/O remotes receive Good Design Awarddesign taxi
Tyler Vreeling turns trash to treasure at Fat Crow DesignPosted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)
Friday, October 10
Indeed it is that time of year again, and in honor of Halloween, Core77's taking part in Instructable's DIY Halloween Contest. Here's the (brief) design brief:
We want to see what delightfully frightful items you've made and we have dozens of awesome prizes to give away! You can enter an Instructable, photos, or video, just make it amazing and it will be eligible to win in one of our six categories: Hack-o-Lantern, Costume, Gadgets and Gizmos, Decorations, Food, and Green, or our Photo and Video categories!Core77 Editors' Choice Prize
Posted by: core jr | Comments (0)
Core77 will select one entry for its Editors' Choice. The prize is a custom Core77 Dremel kit worth $85! There are also tie-ins with Ponoko and a pile of interesting prizes up for grabs, so fire up those glue guns and get in the game!Friday, October 10
From the Coroflot portfolio of : Thomas O'Connor (Detroit, MI)
Featured Project : USB Floppy Drive
Bringing the 80's back for a reason is Coroflot member Thomas O'Connor: "The design is simple. My intention was to recycle/reuse old, outdated and obsolete 1.44mb floppy discs and reuse the housings to create modern, USB hard drives."
Posted by: core jr | Comments (1)Friday, October 10
NYC-area Bustin Boards was kind enough to send us one of their "Complex" boards for a little feet-on-the-street testing. We took it for a spin around lower Manhattan and although the steepest inclines we encountered were curb cutouts we did get a taste of its abilities - it reminded us of a highly-engineered version of our old Freeride Bowlrider - a small nose, big kicktail and upturned sides that made getting up over the edge real easy. Our young foot model in the pic above thought the Bustin would be great for going fast and straight - probably true as well - we're looking forward to a trip to Central Park's North side to find out. Check out their website; they have a cool ordering system where you can spec custom colors and designs.
On a related note, if you are in NYC tomorrow and feelin' a little Charles Bronson-ish, aka DEATHWISH-ISH, find a board and join Bustin at the "Broadway Bomb 2008" - an 8 mile race down Broadway's relentless gauntlet of taxis, jay-walking tourists and careening delivery trucks. If you don't have street experience stick to the sidelines - Better a fan than under a van. 116th @ Riverside Park - 11:30am Saturday, October 11th
Posted by: shaggy | Comments (0)Friday, October 10
Scheduled to ship in late 2009, the Terrafugia Transition is one step closer to realizing the flying car. The Transition is being designed to be a factory certified Light Sport Aircraft (LSA) that just happens to be street legal.
To qualify as "light sport," the Transition will have to weigh around 1,300 pounds. That's 500 pounds less than a Smart car, but the Transition will be as long as a Suburban and, in places, just as tall.The first flight test of a fully functional proof-of-concept vehicle is scheduled for next month, over 40 customers have already put down a deposit with the anticipated purchase price of $194,000. Popsci caught up with Terrafugia co-founder Carl Dietrich, 31 to get the story on the roll out.
Posted by: squee.gee | Comments (3)
Friday, October 10
Tired of those sleepless nights disrupted by constant offers for cheap viagra, stock tips, instant diplomas and the lonely girl who writes "i have not boyfriend...I very want to meet real men...which will know woman's need...like in a cinema...", than get yourself a Dream Captcha.
via boing boing
Posted by: squee.gee | Comments (2)Friday, October 10
"How much service can you put in a burger?" - "What will be the future of banking?" - "How do airlines create customer loyalty?"
The 5th Design Management Forum will focus on service design and takes place at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal in Cologne on November 7-8, 2008.
This year's Creating Experience is all about successful business through consistent service design management and offers a stage to business experts who have taken a new and pioneering approach to developing and designing experience worlds and services.
Visitors will enjoy two days with lectures and interactive workshops by recognized speakers such as Katrin Flöther (Germanwings), Brian Gillespie (Molecular), David Griffiths (Aliagroup), Stefan Moritz (Isobar), Ira Holl (Q110 Deutsche Bank) and Udo Klinkhammer (McDonald''s Germany).
For more information and registrations visit www.design-management-forum.org
You can see more pictures from last year's event here.
Posted by: Aart van Bezooyen | Comments (0)Friday, October 10The problem with having an approachable face and earbud headphones is that people will come up and talk to you, encouraged by the former and oblivious to the nearly-invisible latter. Your moment of musical bliss is interrupted by someone mouthing Which way is Houston Street?
But wear a pair of these, and there's no mistaking that you're not to be interrupted. Nikon's "can-style" Media Port UP headset plays music and offers wi-fi internet browsing throught the flippable eyepiece, not to mention two hours of video viewing. And if someone steps to you, for maximum rudeness you can flip the eyepiece into place while your exposed eye glazes over.
via dvice
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)
Friday, October 10
Yesterday, Markus and Daniel Freitag, or the Freitag Bros., inspired young design students at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (HAW Hamburg).
Their lecture kicks off with this Still Truckin' video of their 15 year anniversary party, which shows that it's been a while that the brothers started as students themselves.
A one-hour stream of photos, videos and sweet music guides us through the early days from when they were washing truck planes in their bathtub as students, to today's factory in Zurich selling some 200,000 products yearly.
Continued after the jump.
Posted by: Aart van Bezooyen | Comments (0)Friday, October 10
The Legomaniacs at this week's BrickCon in Seattle numbered roughly 3,200; from millions of Lego blocks were wrought Battlestar Galactica sets, Art Nouveau movie theaters, military parades, cities under attack by zombies, Spider-Man re-enactments, you name it. It's Friday, so you can burn at least half the day browsing the roughly 5,200 images in the ever-growing BrickCon Flickr pool.
via makezine
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)
Friday, October 10
Creative Directer / Traffic Coordinator / Graphic Designer
Kiehl's Since 1851
New York, New YorkManage and lead the copy and artwork routing and approval process for all Packaging, windows, collateral, stores design, Public Relations and all creative materials for Kiehl's. Act as liaison between all internal departments including Marketing, Copywriting, Creative, PR as well as Affiliates and other external departments. Expedite the process when necessary to ensure that projects are completed on time and communicate to all any problems or issues which could jeopardize the project.
The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.
Posted by: core jr | Comments (0)Thursday, October 09
Those recently painted, floor-to-ceiling rat billboards plastered all over NYC by Banksy were just the beginning. Now having already garnered plenty of buzz for the artist, Banksy-lovers can experience the main course at The Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill, a bizarre pop-up shop featuring a fish bowl inhabited by fish sticks, McNuggets, various animatronics, and other curiosities, edibles, and unexpecteds in terrariums.
"New Yorkers don't care about art, they care about pets. So I'm exhibiting them instead. I wanted to make art that questioned our relationship with animals and the ethics and sustainability of factory farming, but it ended up as chicken nuggets singing. I took all the money I made exploiting an animal in my last show and used it to fund a new show about the exploitation of animals. If its art and you can see it from the street, I guess it could still be considered street art."Prep yourself before you visit for real by watching the creepy videos.
The shop will be open daily from 10 a.m. to midnight until October 31st at 89 7th Ave. South.
More coverage over at Wooster Collective, naturally.
via gothamist
Posted by: Jeannie Choe | Comments (1)Thursday, October 09
No, it's not scheduled to happen yet, or anywhere near it, but we're heartened by this discussion on Afrigadget and Ned forums about the possibility of holding a Maker Faire in Africa next year. The amount of clever, locally appropriate innovation that gets profiled on blogs like Afrigadget leave us continually impressed, and also frustrated that more attention isn't paid, or more capital and distribution channels made available.
The domestic Maker Faires that have been going on in the US for the past few years have featured a combination of whimsy, hi-tech, development, and hobbyist work. An African Maker Faire though, according to the post, would focus on fabrication, asking, "What happens when you put the drivers of ingenious concepts from Mali with those from Ghana and Kenya, and add resources to the mix?"
Although specifics are lacking, interest appears high, and an organizing team for the effort will be meeting next summer at Nkrumah University in Ghana as part of the International Development Design Summit. Best of luck, guys -- we're fascinated.
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (1)Thursday, October 09
ILoveSketch from Seok-Hyung Bae on Vimeo.We gave ILoveSketch a brief mention in yesterday's 3D CAD News post, but this one's great enough to deserve some extra love. Click the above video, and watch probably the smoothest, best-realized attempt at a 3D sketch-driven interface currently out there.
Most of the video is filmed in real time, so the speed with which the demonstrator is able to navigate, sketch and modify is extra impressive. Curve editing has received some special attention too: trimming, deleting and tweaking curves are all gesture-driven, and some nice touches like auto-merging of tangent sketch lines make it obvious the developers at University of Toronto understand the sketch process at least as well as they understand interface design.
So, how long til we get to try it out?
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (4)Thursday, October 09
Here are some neato body kits for Smart Cars!
...Unfortunately, they're all fake.
Oh Photoshop trickster, you have ruined my day with false hopes and empty promises. A curse on you.
via geekologie
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (2)
Thursday, October 09A bite-sized list of what's happenin' now:
ag ip news
Canada: Amended Industrial Design Regulations Come Into Forceopen pr
DMY Berlin promotes design in Asian tour3 news
New Zealand's innovative ideas go on display at National Design Awardsthe age
"Architect of far-out industrial design" tackles problems in outer spacethe engineer
The business of judging Fiat's design competitionthe independent
Teaching creativity to the next generation of entrepreneursdesign week uk
Universities offering commercial 'in-house' design services: confict of interest?Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)
Thursday, October 09
Ah, the elusive wristwatch phone. Many have tried, but all have failed to go mass-market. And by "failing to go mass-market" I mean no one I know has one.
The latest talk-into-your-wrist endeavor comes from Chinavision, and they've solved the problem of the requisite tiny-footprint-equals-tiny-screen-and-keypad; they've effectively doubled the interactive surface area by making it a clamshell wristwatch phone. Of course that raises another problem, which is that now you're wearing something so thick and clunky that after a month of hailing cabs, one of your biceps will be bigger than the other.
Our suggestion: Get one for each wrist, be super-connected, and have huge, symmetrical biceps.
via geek alerts
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (1)
Thursday, October 09
MÖLOTOV by Marjolijn Stappers is one of the nearly hundred e-mail entries to the Hacking IKEA contest... and probably one of the reasons why IKEA didn't sponsor this event ;)
The Platform 21 organization recently invited creative minds to change traditional IKEA products in their (very) own way. We spotted the exhibition during FreeDesigndom. You can see more hackers at their website.
Posted by: Aart van Bezooyen | Comments (0)Thursday, October 09
This is the Mrs. Hudson, an oddly-named toilet seemingly ripped from the Joker's bathroom. Designed by Ukrainian architectural firm 2-B-2 Architecture, this pipe-like take on the can placed in a bathroom design contest sponsored by bathroom manufacturer Roca.
The Mrs. Hudson is definitely different than the current crop of Toto-inspired toilets, but I'm not sure I like that crevice; eventually it will get gross and require cleaning, which might be harder once I succumb to the temptation to stuff magazines back there.via dvice
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (1)Thursday, October 09
We always thought fire extinguishers were an ugly, easily-discernible red cylinder for a reason, but Japan's Miyata Industries seems to disagree. Their Kitchen Eye line of firefighting cylinders come in champagne gold, platinum silver, aqua blue, and a red as deep as the Hinomaru's. Some people say to fight fire with fire; the Kitchen eye says to fight fire with style.
via c scout japan
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)Thursday, October 09On the Counternotions blog, the author - known only as Kontra - writes at length about the concept of releasing concept products that many companies such as Microsoft, Nokia and various automobile manufacturers indulge in. He points out that Apple doesn't 'do' concepts and hasn't released one to the public since the eighties then tells us that 'real artists ship'. His post expounds at length on Steve Jobs' approach to visionary product design and Apple's strategy of releasing real products not just concepts. Here's a snippet,
Pretenders don't quite understand that design is born of constraints. Real-life constraints, be they tangible or cognitive: Battery-life impacts every other aspect of the iPhone design - hardware and software alike. Screen resolution affects font, icon and UI design. The thickness of a fingertip limits direct, gestural manipulation of on-screen objects. Lack of a physical keyboard and WIMP controls create an unfamiliar mental map of the device. The iPhone design is a bet that solutions to constraints like these can be seamlessly molded into a unified product that will sell. Not a concept. Not a vision. A product that sells.It turns out that when capable designers are given real constraints for real products they can end up creating great results. In Apple's case, groundbreaking products like the iMac, the iPod and the iPhone. Constraints have a wonderful way of focusing the mind on the fundamentals, whereas concept products can often have the opposite affect.
Concept products are like essays, musings in 3D. They are incomplete promises. Shipping products, by contrast, are brutally honest deliveries. You get what's delivered. They live and die by their own design constraints. To the extent they are successful, they do advance the art and science of design and manufacturing by exposing the balance between fantasy and capability.
So, what do you think? Should companies release concept designs or simply wait to launch the products?
Posted by: Niti Bhan | Comments (9)
Thursday, October 09Weekly finds from the 3D world.
Solid Edge
Synchronous Technology, Part 2Multiple Programs
Sketching-based interface for 3D CAD input
Using lightweight 3D formats for conducting digital prototyping (login required)SolidWorks
Not so impressed with the 2D emulator
Photoview 360 vs Photoworks: comparing materials handlingRhino
Sophie3D lets you render Rhino models to Flash for web publishing
MecSoft releases RhinoCAM 2.0
Luxology announces Rhino file translator for modoMaya
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0)
Maya turns 10 - A chat with veteran user Kevin TureskiThursday, October 09
Industrial Design Intern
Bose
Framingham, MassachusettsWe are looking for a highly motivated Industrial Design student to intern in our Advanced Development Industrial Design (ADID) group for six months' time beginning in February of 2009 at our Framingham R&D Center, about 20 minutes from Boston. The Advanced Development Group's mission is to push the envelope, explore new ideas, technologies and trends; and articulate them into tangible product opportunities for future products or business ventures.
The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.
Posted by: core jr | Comments (0)Wednesday, October 08
Peer-to-peer travel site AirBed & Breakfast wants you to start each day of your "better than a cheap hotel" stay with a bowl of left or right. Between those hopeful Obama O's and maverick-y Cap'n McCain's, you'll be fed a nutritious breakfast, not a bunch of lies...maybe.
AB&B is promoting some serious voting by helping campaign volunteers spread the word in cities across the nation. You can practice your for-real vote right now by choosing your top cereal pick on the site. You can even purchase your very own limited edition box for $39. Five percent of each sale will go to respective campaigns.
P.S. Don't forget to have a listen to the jingles--yes, each cereal has its very own jingle with words and camp and everything.
Posted by: Jeannie Choe | Comments (0)Wednesday, October 08
One of the more unexpected charms of driving through the Spanish countryside is the proliferation of windmills, especially in the windier, higher plateau areas in the north of the country. We're not talking about charming medieval ones that Quixote took for giants either -- Spain is rapidly becoming one of Europe's leaders in green energy, and broad acceptance of wind power is a big part of it.
As if an annual 30% growth rate in wind energy weren't enough, the Spanish are also going after the sustainable living thing in a more immersive way, with plans released recently for a completely carbon-neutral city on a pair of hills in the storied Rioja wine-producing region. Consisting of 3,000 homes, the Logrono Montecorvo Eco City will include wind turbines and photovoltaic cells to supply all of its own energy needs, and just received approval from the local government.
Renderings of the project, developed jointly by architecture firms from Spain and the Netherlands, are inspiring in that way renderings have -- they're also the latest entry in a growing parade of eco-city concepts that are turning up in countries all over the world:
Posted by: Carl Alviani | Comments (0)Wednesday, October 08There are two kinds of artless segues: the one a bad conversationalist makes, and this one.
via kevin kelly
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)Wednesday, October 08
Here's an idea: Let's take some vehicles intended to safely transport children to places of learning, and race them around a track!
This schoolbus race in Marne, Michigan ends predictably, and by that we mean it ends with bent metal. We must warn you that neither the race nor the crashes are spectacular--for that, you'd need to see a showdown between these three:
race via toolmonger
bus mod photo credits: skoolie, uncle joe and jay leno's garage
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)
Wednesday, October 08A bite-sized list of what's happenin' now:
businesswire
Logitech Wins Four Good Design Awardsdexigner
David Chavez's Braille Watch Design Receives Spark Design Award7th space
Cooper-Hewitt to Present "Fashioning Felt"international business times
RP: Altium's Innovation Station Videos Demonstrate New Approach to Electronics Designfast company
A Designer's Inspiration Listmarketwatch
Using design to save 11 million gallons of water, one flush at a timemarketwatch 2
Whipsaw Featured in Fast Company Masters of Design IssuePosted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)
Wednesday, October 08
We've all heard that storage is one of the fastest growing product categories, and a look inside people's houses provides unsurprising evidence of this. We've all got a lot of stuff.
Artist Paho Mann has been photographing people's junk drawers and medicine cabinet innards since 2000; you can check out his work here. Mann would probably say the same thing about storage furniture that surgeons would tell you about human bodies--no matter how nice they look on the outside, the inside always seems to be a bloody mess.
via kottke
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)Wednesday, October 08
It is a treat to see some of our friends in the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards Peoples Choice Awards. People here in the office are rooting for the incomparable Design Observer (currently the leader! Go!), but core-faves Inhabitat, Project H, and GreenCell are also getting the nod. We gotta give props to Brian Collins' logo for the "We" campaign, but perhaps just being nominated for this thing is honor enough? (There are 77 lame hints in there; maybe next year?)
Vote here until October 21st!
Posted by: core jr | Comments (1)Wednesday, October 08
Departing a dinner party hosted in a no-shoe, Asian household is always an awkward affair; the host and guest say their goodbyes at the door, then share 20 seconds of weird silence while the guest laces their shoes back on.
Taking shoes on an off can be easier with the Yankz Sure Lace System, a set of elastic laces that you retrofit to your existing kicks. Unlike Speed Laces, they don't require their own eyelet hardware; you lace 'em up normally the first time, and thereafter you tighten and release them by means of the integrated locking mechanism. Check out the Cool Tools review, and see how you can have "hiking boots that go on and off almost as easily as bedroom slippers."
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)
Wednesday, October 08
From the Coroflot portfolio of : Ben Landau (Melbourne, Australia)
Featured Project : bald bowls
Now serving: Brain Food! More after the jump.
Posted by: core jr | Comments (1)Wednesday, October 08As anyone with grandparents of advanced age can attest, manual tasks that we young'uns don't think twice about can be difficult for the elderly to accomplish.
When the President of Tokyo's Sasaki Co. visited a nursing facility, he discovered many patients had difficulty operating standard toilet dispensers. The result: Sasaki now produces the Korobe-kun, a toilet paper dispenser designed for the elderly and handicapped. Video is from the Autumn 2008 Tokyo International Gift Show.
via dig info
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)Wednesday, October 08
The UNESCO Creativity Workshop is an innovative design workshop taking place this year in Turin, Italy from 15 to 28 October.
For two weeks, 20 participants will live and work together in close contact with children with special needs to develop new toys that encourage play and also fulfill therapeutic goals.
Posted by: Mark Vanderbeeken | Comments (2)
The most interesting toy prototypes will be exhibited and refined for an easy and affordable "do-it-yourself" manual to be used by parents and care providers.
Wednesday, October 08
Industrial Designer
The Coleman Company
Wichita, KansasAid in the aesthetic development of new products and responsibility of brand identity relating to product aesthetics. Participate in new product development by contributing to the overall balance of color, branding, graphic design and application to the product. Coordinate with other resources to accomplish project goals.
The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.
Posted by: core jr | Comments (0)Tuesday, October 07
Pure Austrian Design (PAD) have posted a few highlights from this year's Vienna Deign Week which will continue through till Sunday. Taking place in their home city, PAD's contribution was a huge bubble showcasing Austrian furniture in the main courtyard of the MuseumsQuartier. Given the wet weather, the installation was possibly the best solution for an outdoor exhibit.
Pictured above, the exterior of the Liechtenstein Palace where the opening party took place, PAD's oversize bubble at the MQ, Marie Rahm & Monica Singer from Polka, Czech designer Maxim Velčovský (Qubus design) and new wine glasses from Polka produced by LOBMEYR Vienna.
Posted by: squee.gee | Comments (0)Tuesday, October 07
Well, come on, you can't blame the guy for trying.
via fail blog
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)
Tuesday, October 07
It's good to see people messing with the browser as the internet grows up and get's all shiny, if you're like me and miss the global 'play' link at the top, you'll get something that looks like Jack Bauer is about to appear at any moment.
Posted by: squee.gee | Comments (1)Tuesday, October 07
Tokujin Yoshioka's chair made from growing natural crystals will headline the exhibition Second Nature opening on the 17th in Tokyo this month. The Venus chair builds on his earlier work such as Honey-pop (2001) which used a honeycombed paper structure to obtain it's strength and the Pane chair (2006) made of a translucent spongy material called polyester elastomer. The Venus chair is grown in a tank, the production process half controlled by Yoshioka and half left up to nature.
The Second Nature exhibition will feature work from Noriko Ambe, Makoto Azuma, Campana Brothers, Asuka Katagiri, Ross Lovegrove, Kaiji Moriyama & Takeshi Kushid, Yukio Nakagawa ikebana and Tokujin Yoshioka.
Second Nature
Posted by: squee.gee | Comments (3)
Oct. 17, 2008 - Jan 10, 2009
21_21 DESIGN SIGHT
9-7-6 Akasaka, Minato-ku, Tokyo
11:00-20:00
Tuesday, October 07A bite-sized list of what's happenin' now:
dexigner
Premio Lissone Design 2008: International Design Competitionapple insider
iPhone 3G now the second best-selling US mobile handsetstar tech central
Improving CAD with synchronous techhardware zone
MSI Accepts "2008 Top 20 Taiwan Global Brands" Awardall things digital
What would Apple be like without Steve Jobs?lawn & landscape
Award-winning Hitachi Power Tool industrial design team's latest: the Inspire blowerfibre 2 fashion
Australia's RMIT arts showcase puts budding talent in spotlightPosted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)
Tuesday, October 07
Re-frame your view with Nick Ross's Viewfindr. Would be nice in different aspect ratios for budding directors.
Posted by: squee.gee | Comments (2)Tuesday, October 07
Back in the good ol' days, lasers were used for wholesome purposes like shooting Stormtroopers and blasting Cylons. Now it seems every tool manufacturer around is slapping weak red beams onto everything from scissors to pool cues to, for chrissakes, toilets.
ToolCrib brings you the damage with their (unfortunately) hysterical "The Laser Guided Hand Saw (and 6 Other Stupid Laser Tools)." Han Solo would be ashamed to touch any of these.
Han Solo: Real man. Real laser.
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (1)Tuesday, October 07
If you're traveling through JFK (and have some cash to burn) you'll soon be able to pack a little lighter; Muji To Go is opening an outpost at the New York airport in two weeks, as they did in Hong Kong's airport earlier this year. With nearly 400 items focused on "travel and mobile," the 596-square-foot store expects to see high traffic. If it takes off, no pun intended, you can expect to see more Muji To Go at an airport near you.
Click here to download the Muji To Go catalog.
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)
Tuesday, October 07
This is Kit, my one-year-old Shiba Inu.
Why am I showing you my dog? To tell you that this little 25-pound hellion sheds enough fur in a week to clog up a HEPA filter. He generates such an astonishing amount of fur, I can't help but wish it was a resource and that I could do something with it.
Well, apparently I can! If I'm willing, that is, to wear a sweater made out of my own dog's fur.
Here's a link to stories of people who specialize at turning your dog into a sweater generator. Well, not really--the process is super-labor-intensive, so it's not like Fido's gonna be cranking out sweaters like a Gap factory. But it is possible to turn that fur into something useful over time. Says dog-sweater-wearer Betsy Willis:
We found out from the breeders we got the pups from that it was possible to use their coat for clothes. It is the most amazing stuff. It's like mohair but more lightweight and more soft, and the more you wash it, the more soft and fluffy it gets....People are surprised when they find out we're wearing dog wool clothes. Some think it's disgusting and ask how we can do it, but it seems very normal to us.
There's also a book out called Knitting With Dog Hair, with the amusing subtitle "Better A Sweater From A Dog You Know and Love Than From A Sheep You'll Never Meet."
If a sweater's too much for you, a company called Pet Yarn Chic will spin your pet's fur into yarn that you can use to make smaller things, like hats, scarves, or if you're really creepy, a little sweater for your own dog. Which would be kind of gross, like a cow wearing a leather jacket, or you and I wearing, well, never mind.
Anyways if you see me wearing a Kit-colored sweater in six months' time, you'll know what happened.
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (4)
Tuesday, October 07
Designer (Ascentials)
The North Face
San Leandro, CaliforniaExperience in flat sketching expertise and hands-on experience with CAD software are required. Working knowledge of: formulating color palettes, apparel construction, product cycles. Experience in creation of design packages and execution of product designs, designing successful products, researching and analysis and design cycles are needed.
The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.
Posted by: core jr | Comments (0)Monday, October 06
Celebrating Lego's 50th anniversary, the world record for the tallest tower made of Lego bricks was broken (by 7 inches) in Vienna. Designed to represent a Viking longboat mast, the tower stands 96.7ft tall and took almost 500,000 bricks to construct.
via dvice
Posted by: squee.gee | Comments (1)Monday, October 06This sounds kinda awesome:
Lextant's Lauren Serota and Dan Rockwell have recently launched a weekly series of forty minute design-related conference calls. This week's topic is Design Hacks.
Hacks are all the rage lately. You can never have or know about too many good hacks, we got DIY hacks, programming hacks, weight loss hacks, what are some design hacks?In this call we'll talk and share our own design hacks, tips, shortcuts and workarounds to attain great design. These could be new and unique methods, such as the use of online tools, and or new techniques with participatory design, ethnography, contextual inquiry, data analysis and more.Core friend Steve Portigal is the guest for this week's call, Wednesday at 12 EST. To participate, you've gotta pre-register here.
Posted by: Allan Chochinov | Comments (0)Monday, October 06
By now most of you have seen the Flatshare Fridge designed by Stefan Buchberger, but have a look at the other winners of the 2008 Electrolux Design Lab. From a basket-style washing machine to a toaster that burns the day's weather forecast into the bread, the entries are far-reaching, varied in concept, and presented with a pretty high degree of polish.
via appliancist
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (5)
Monday, October 06
FreeDesigndom 2008 is the first edition of a new annual design and fashion event in the Netherlands, with four-week program of festivals, exhibitions and symposiums including Experimenta Design, Hacking IKEA, Sustainable Design Collective and Red Light Fashion in the heart of Amsterdam.
>> view gallery
Posted by: core jr | Comments (0)Monday, October 06John Chris Jones, Welsh designer and author of the book, Design Methods, wrote these 2200 words in 1981. Timeless advice, they are still worth a read over 17 years later. Here is his introduction and the questions he covers, go read the rest,
The real difficulty in design is the designer!(I remember Charles Eames saying that in a lecture.)
[...]
What follows may seem elementary. It is - but it is more difficult than it looks. To carry it out requires some modesty and a willingness to learn, to change, and to share your thinking with others. Though the text is addressed to an individual most of the methods are intended for collaboration.1. designing your design process
2. what to do first?
3. what if I can't think of a solution?
4. what if I have too many ideas?
5. what if my ideas seem good but do not fit 'the problem'?
6. what if my perception of the problem changes?
7. what if I get into a muddle?
8. how can a first attempt be improved?
link thanks to Victor Lombardi
Posted by: Niti Bhan | Comments (0)Monday, October 06
A bite-sized list of what's happenin' now:sun 2 surf
Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport to "be recreated as a contemporary icon with an awe-inspiring design"realwire
Samsung Tops Table of 22,000 Products for Best Designbym product and industry news
Seatec 2009 to host fifteenth Targa Rodolfo Bonetto boat design awardsmarketwatch
Aqualux Drains Wasted Time out of Shower Design with SolidWorksgreen building
Today is World Day of Architecturepr canada
Canadian Design-Build Award of Excellenceindustry week
Taking a Quality Lifecycle Approach to Avoid Product PainsPosted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)
Monday, October 06
Now in its sixth year, The London Design Festival offers a great array of creative events, attracting everyone from consumers and professionals to students and all those with a keen interest in design. Check out the diverse range of talents, from established innovators to rising stars.
>> view gallery
>> view all London Design Festival 2008 posts in one place
Posted by: core jr | Comments (0)Monday, October 06
Seth Weintraub sheds some light on rumors of "The Brick," a code-name for a secret product to be released on Oct. 14th. Apparently it may not be the name of a product at all, but rather, the production method they use to produce the new MacBooks:
The company has spent the last few years building an entirely new manufacturing process that uses lasers and jets of water to carve the MacBooks out of a brick of aluminum....What advantages are there to manufacturing with 3D laser and water jet cutting?
- Carving out of aluminum eliminates the need to bend the metal and create weak spots or microfolds and rifts.
- There are no seams in the final product, so it is smooth.
- Screws aren't needed to tie the products together.
- The shell is one piece of metal so it is super light, super strong and super cheap.
- You can be a whole lot more creative with the design if you don't have to machine it.
As Peter Oppenheimer said at the recent earnings call, this innovation is something "Apple's competitors won't be able to match" for some time to come. We expect the process to drive down the prices of MacBooks over the next few years and at the same time allow Apple to continue to lead in the innovation department. Design changes should come much more rapidly with rapid prototyping.
via 9to5 mac
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (5)Monday, October 06
It's a beautiful thing when good design is the byproduct of finely-done mechanical engineering. If all engineers had an eye for aesthetics, yes, we ID'ers would be obsolete; but we could live with that if the world was filled with objects such as this.
The Curta Mechanical Calculator had 605 parts and required no electricity; it operated by means of a handcrank at the top, earning it the nickname of The Pepper Grinder Calculator, and made a pleasing mechanical purr as the parts moved.
It was designed by Curt Herzstark while he was a prisoner in a concentration camp; read the fascinating story here.
via drb
Posted by: hipstomp | Comments (0)Monday, October 06
PingMag caught up with Keiichi Matsuo of Hakusan Porcelain, an eighth generation ceramic company in Nagasaki, Japan. His father introduced a design-based approach to traditional crafts in the 1950's employing designer Masahiro Mori.
As the story goes, the famous industrialist Konosuke Matsushita was disembarking from an airplane after a trip around the world when he said "This is the beginning of the Design Era." My father heard that and thought, "Oh, so that's what era it is. But, what is design? If Konosuke Matsushita says it's the Design Era, then it must be so. OK then, let's hire a designer. I wonder where we find one of those?"Peaking in 1980, a slow decline set in as sales began to drop off year after year, the economy burst and by 1998 Matsuo thought he was going under. Things changed for the better when he sidestepped his distributors and began exhibiting at Tableware trade shows. The collection was met with a positive reaction and the company discovered a new audience for their contemporary minimal range.
Read the full interview here.
Posted by: squee.gee | Comments (0)Monday, October 06
A gathering of graphic design professionals committed to serving the social good, this year's Designism, Version 3.0, had the misfortune of being scheduled opposite Thursday's Biden-Palin debate. Given that the venue was the ADC Theater in New York, that the constituency was designers and artists, and the topic was social activism, the crowd seemed to have a predictably blue hue. In this case, then, political activism and social activism intersected, and to promote attendance, we were promised from the beginning that the succession of speakers would conclude in time for the nine o' clock debate.
Core77s own Allan Chochinov kicked off the event, presenting a manifesto of design imperatives for ethical design, using examples of modern design, conceptual art and even photography from his travels to get his message across. While the European advertisement he showed using images of polar bears to convey the message "get there before it's too late" proved too awkward a combination of hypocrisy and pathos (since airlines are a major contributor to carbon footprint) to make a cogent point, other images like cell phone graveyards amply demonstrated that even a seemingly trivial field like design had serious repercussions. The subsequent speakers underscored the point with real-world projects and successes that could make any graphic designer feel like they should be doing more.
Posted by: Robert Blinn | Comments (0)Monday, October 06
Senior Footwear Designer: Women's Lifestyle
Columbia Sportswear
Portland, OregonFor the Women's Lifestyle footwear products you will conceptualize and perform a wide variety of product design tasks in the development of new footwear products including the selection of components, materials, and colors. Conduct research for worldwide trends in the design of new products. You will also act as liaison for the Product Development Department throughout the manufacturing process.
The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.
Posted by: core jr | Comments (0)Sunday, October 05In Design Is More Than Packaging, the New York Times introduces "design thinking," citing Jump's work for Saturn, as well as Stanford's d.school, and Half Moon Bay's C2 Group.
The article takes a stab at actually explaining just what the heck people mean by that term....
They are proponents of "design thinking," which focuses on people's actual needs rather than trying to persuade them to buy into what businesses are selling. It revolves around field research followed by freewheeling idea generation that often leads to unexpected results.Properly used, design thinking can weave together elements of demographics, research, environmental factors, psychology, anthropology and sociology to generate novel solutions to some of the most puzzling problems in business.
...while offering a gently sober reality check for the bandwagoneers who might be reading.
Posted by: Steve Portigal | Comments (3)
"It would be overreaching to say that design thinking solves everything. That's putting it too high on a pedestal," Mr. Kembel says. "Business thinking plus design thinking ends up being far more powerful."Saturday, October 04
Crisis in the Credit System is a four-part drama dealing with the credit crisis, scripted and directed by artist Melanie Gilligan. A major investment bank runs a brainstorming and role-playing session for its employees, asking them to come up with strategies for coping with today's dangerous financial climate. Role-playing their way into increasingly bizarre scenarios, they find themselves drawing disturbing conclusions about the deeper significance of the crisis and its effects beyond the world of finance.
Using fiction to communicate what is left out of documentary accounts of the crisis, the short, TV-style episodes reflect the strangeness of life today in which the financial abstractions that govern our lives appear to be collapsing.
Crisis in the Credit System, commissioned and produced by Artangel Interaction, is the result of extensive research and conversation with major hedge fund managers, key financial journalists, economists, bankers and debt activists.
via Eyebeam reBlog
Posted by: Mark Vanderbeeken | Comments (0)Saturday, October 04Style maven Alice Rawsthorne asks in the New York Times style magazine whether design is still a boy's club and do women face the challenge of prejudice and misperception in the field? Personal experience seems to belie the contention, but that might just be me. What do you all think? Here are some snippets to get you thinking...
Richard Grefe, the association's executive director, says he believes women prefer to work with hand-picked teams in smaller studios for carefully chosen clients. Jongerius's experience of teaching in her native Netherlands supports this."To make it to the top, you need to be outspoken, self-confident and entrepreneurial, apart from having design talent," she says. "I have taught many talented young women and tried like hell to push them, but most were too shy, emotional, cautious and lacked self-confidence and ambition."In other words, women are bedeviled by the same entitlement issues in design as in other professions and, it seems, by similar misperceptions. "When I work with manufacturers and issues arise around construction or mechanical systems, the questioning faces often turn to my male partners," says the furniture designer Rosanne Somerson. "They suggest that I could answer better - I have terrific colleagues - but even then, there are times when my answers are ignored and the question is reiterated to them."
It isn't just men who are guilty of this. "If a prospective client calls Pentagram and doesn't ask for a partner by name, I see them thinking, Why did I get the woman? when I walk in," Scher says. "Even the women do it."
via RISD blog
Posted by: Niti Bhan | Comments (6)Friday, October 03
"Peace" by Daniel Chang, Graphic Design, a final poster from a transdisciplinary studio, instructors Martha Rich and Esther Watson, IllustrationSocial impact projects that come into the classroom and burst out into the field are thrilling. The rush of creativity and the synergy of many minds working together can result in purposeful design projects to great effect: generating tangible solutions that make a lasting difference in people's lives.
Historically, designers have always strived to create positive social change, and many celebrated efforts--think back to the Bauhaus--started in schools. Both of those things remain true today. In fact, design education has a larger role than ever to play in challenging the status quo around the wicked problems of a crowded planet. Despite, and perhaps because of, the world being in such turmoil, this is a very exciting time for design and designers. I firmly believe that with an expanded tool kit, designers can be instrumental contributors to a conversation about the future that it is getting increasingly layered and multidisciplinary. If we are ever to reduce or curtail dire societal ills and achieve sustainable development--by definition, prosperity that is globally shared and environmentally sustainable--responsible design needs to be front and center as part of the equation. (For an engrossing state of the world report, see Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet, by the economist Jeffrey Sachs.)
When it comes to social-impact messaging, the key advice is don't be drab; make it intriguing and make it look as fabulous as the new beer commercial. Generate mileage by utilizing the same attention-grabbing strategies you would for a consumer-based product.Educational institutions are vital labs for creative inquiry, entrepreneurial force and experimentation. As such, they can act as a powerful nexus for projects about critical issues that engage students in meaningful work. I have a front row seat in this dynamic field as the lead of the college-wide program Designmatters at Art Center College of Design. At the college through Designmatters, we constantly challenge ourselves to instill in our projects an empathetic approach, and to deliver "real-world" outcomes that have a killer aesthetic. At the root of the process, I am guided by a frontier-like impetus to create unusual alliances that cut across traditional boundaries between development and non-profit agencies, government and business sectors.
Camel Convoys in Kenya and testing of camel saddle and solar panel system for Mpala Community Trust with Bronx Zoo personnelWhat does it look like? What does it all mean? The projects below are a few salient exemplars--the voices of some of the individuals who make them happen offer a good starting point to draw an action list from.
Posted by: core jr | Comments (2)Friday, October 03
In a perfect world, we wouldn't need to sell what we design--people would just know. When Industrial Designers imagine utopia, it's not only full of beautiful, functional products, it's also full of consumers who recognize them instantly and without prodding. Persuasion, in the form of logos, ad campaigns, and the ever-broadening array of activities known as branding, has attained the status of Necessary Evil to many of us. Designers--as we repeatedly tell each other in school, in the studio, and at conferences--are all about function, emotion and progress; persuasion is for shills.
Branding agencies are just as good candidates for performing product design explorations as design firms at this point, and there's probably enough work for both of them.If we're honest about it though, we'd have to admit that branding and ID have been intimately related for a long time. Moreover, a lot of product designers have made their careers by getting in on the branding game in the past couple of decades. It shouldn't come as any surprise to hear that the same thing is starting to happen in reverse--branding agencies are doing product, and they're doing it fairly well.
Should product designers feel threatened? Depends on who you ask.
When Your Accountant Offers to Fix Your Car
Twist had a problem. By all appearances, the young Colorado-based company had everything going for them. Their line of environmentally sensitive sponges and cleaning rags had touched a chord with consumers, and was selling well at high-end grocery and housewares stores. They were getting attention from all the right magazines and blogs. But in order to expand, they needed a bigger brand with more product offerings; major retailers like Target said so, even as they expressed interest in carrying their line.Like a lot of companies in this situation do, Twist decided to look for help. After a few months searching, they settled on Crispin, Porter + Bogusky, an award-winning agency that happened to have an office in Twist's home town of Boulder. Crispin, however (or CP+B, as it's sometimes abbreviated), is not a product design consultancy, it's an advertising agency, and has been since its founding in 1965. The proposal that got them Twist's account included a range of brand-building services, among them the design of new additions to their product line. And it's not the first time they've done this for a client.
Posted by: core jr | Comments (6)Friday, October 03
Ok, we're over the crystal-bling craze, but crystal-bling-steampunk?! Yep. Hold onto your blowtorches n' chisels, design fans, the new Harman Kardon GLA-55 speakers are exactly that. Kurt Solland, the VP of ID at Harman and Core 77's very own 1HDC judge, gave us the low-down:"The idea was to meld high-tech with craftsman styling and pushing 'Steam Punk' in an elegant way. For the technology side, there are integrated digital amplifiers with special drivers and a proprietary port to allow this to be your complete sound system. All you have to do is plug it in, throw away your old 'boxy' speakers and enjoy. For the design side, I balanced the outside, inside and refractive aesthetic. The outside surfaces had to work harmoniously with the inside surfaces which both had to combine with the refractive nature of the facets…whew! It a way it was kind of like painting with light by utilizing each individual interior as an art installation, it certainly was a very delicate 'chord' to balance just right."
And when you consider these are stuffed choc-full of treats like a 100-watt bi-amplified digital amplifier coupled with DSP equalization, Atlas AL drivers and woofers, PLUS a CMMD tweeter as well as optimisation for digital sound -- oof! -- these beauties won't stay quiet for long. To top it off, the faceted cut-glass enclosures house touch-sensitive volume controls. Yowzas.
Check out more pix after the jump...
Posted by: elle* | Comments (6)Friday, October 03
Gary Hustwit's research for his upcoming film Objectified has uncovered an obscure record from the mid 90's that samples Braun products. Aided by the internet, he not only managed to get hold of the album from a Braun fanatic, he was able to track down the anonymous artist as well.
Braunmusic was actually an art project released in 1996 by Köln-based painter/sculptor Johannes Wohnseifer and a group of musician friends going by the name Diverse.You can listen to a sample track here.
Posted by: squee.gee | Comments (0)Friday, October 03
The Art of Innovation, a report by NESTA, the UK innovation endowment, explores how fine arts graduates contribute to innovation in the creative industries and beyond, and what policy makers can do to support their contribution.
Posted by: Mark Vanderbeeken | Comments (0)
