In 2009 Monocle took notice of Reykjavik's growing businesses and optimistic entrepreneurs, a hopeful sign that the city, and Iceland in general, might be on the brink of overcoming their 2008 economic collapse.
The start-ups here are not deterred by conditions and take inspiration from successful forebears, such as CCP Games, [whose]...executive producer Nathan Richardsson notes, 'This wave of innovation happening in Iceland is a result of the dire consequences of 2008, which provides a useful constraint on developing ideas to find the simplest, best solution.'
In stark contrast to the frothy days of high finance, these bright young leaders have helped create an entrepreneurial culture where banker bragging rights have been traded for humble lunches and transparent business. The view...is one of optimism.
No small part of Reykjavik's burgeoning economy is due to tourism, an industry the country continues to push with all its might. The latest evidence is an interactive city map, soon to be expanded into an online shop and a mobile app. Designed by Borgarmynd, the map lets you zoom in and out of a cheerful illustration of Reykjavik's streets, with a special focus on restaurants, bars, shops and cultural sites. The business descriptions are pretty cute. According to the map, Faktory is where, "You fell in love 7 times a live concert, made 30 new friends, danced to a DJ set and crashed a private party. The suns up now. Just another night at the famous Faktory, the hottest partyplace (their spelling, not mine) in 101."
The map is still a bit beta, but for the most part it's pretty user-friendly and, I imagine, actually helpful if I were traveling to Reykjavik, which I really, really wish I was.
While the object fetishism of this era has somewhat eroded this statement's validity, I often find myself repeating the design-school mantra drummed into my head: "People don't want toasters. What they want is toast."
Howard J. Brown is the founder of dMass, a consultancy that focuses on "reduction through design" and integrating environmentalism with business. A guy like Brown understands the no-toaster concept well. In this video below, which is fascinating despite being rendered in primitive cartoon style, the same concept (though worded differently) is presented to a manufacturer of objects in an effort to place them on the right—and profitable—track for the future.
We're excited about our trip to Dublin this week for the 2012 Interaction Conference, produced by the good folks at IxDA. And of course, we're most excited about hosting the second installment of Coroflot Connects on Thursday night, a great evening of shmoozing, meeting/greeting, networking and connecting. Joining us at this year's event will be:
If you're in the market for a new job, check the links above. For those lucky enough to be there in Dublin, make sure to stop by, say hi, grab a drink and meet you new boss/employee.
If you're unable to join us in person look for updates and dispatches from the conference this week. Or take a look through some of the interviews we did with presenters from this year's conference:
Another aspect of Chinese manufacturing I've found difficult to reconcile is that they've made some seriously junky crap that I've purchased--and they also make the iPhone. The manufacturing quality and the fit & finish of that device is top-notch, and they are reportedly manufactured at breakneck speed in a facility with high quality control, much like a 21st-Century version of the Singer factory of the 19th and early 20th Century.
When the iMac first came out it was manufactured at an Apple-designed factory in California, but now nearly all of the company's production happens overseas. Why?
The answer is long, complicated, and eye-opening. In an exhaustively-researched feature in the New York Times entitled "How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work," reporters Chalres Duhigg and Keith Bradsher reveal some shocking capabilities of Chinese factories—in particular, the Foxconn City factory that's cranked out 200 million iPhones—that makes you understand why the U.S. and many other countries simply cannot compete. The quality control is in place, and the sheer manpower available, which can apparently be turned on and off like a tap, is unprecedented.
Design diversification: BMW DesignworksUSA, Porsche Design and Mercedes have all expanded their initially auto-based design talents into other sectors, and now Nissan is taking steps in this direction. The number two Japanese automaker has developed a self-healing material for their 370Z, Murano and X-Trail vehicles that they feel would lend itself well to a certain popular consumer product.
Nissan's Scratch Shield iPhone Case is made from a proprietary blend of ABS plastic and polyrotaxane paint that heals itself, depending on the severity of the scratch, in hours or days:
The Nissan Scratch Shield iPhone case has been designed using several automotive engineering innovations to deliver a more durable and long-lasting paint coat, and closely fitting, tight case. The case has three key benefits: the highly flexible and elastic properties of Scratch Shield paint technology allows fine scratches to quickly mend themselves*; its tactile gel-like rather than glossy surface is more scratch-resistant than conventional paint and provides a better grip; and the case itself is made of ABS plastic - a high grade substance widely used in the automotive industry which is more rigid and robust than other plastics. The outer 'paint' is made from polyrotaxane, which means that when damage occurs to the coating in the form of a fine scratch, the chemical structure is able to react to change back to its original shape and fill the gap - 'healing' the blemish.
*Scratch Shield can heal small scratches in as little as an hour, but more severe cases can take up to a week's time to heal.
If beta-testing of the currently-being-prototyped case works out well, Nissan expects to begin selling the product later this year.
This Alfred Dunhill leather case construction spot is one of the best "objects being made" videos I've seen recently, and I've sat through a lot. The recent rash of such videos makes it harder for good ones to rise to the top, as the videos take on a kind of sameness—shallow field of focus lovingly lingering on tools, poignant voiceover with a few piano chords in the background, off-center subject slowly coming into focus while staring earnestly into the camera—but this one gets right down to business and lets the work, and the sounds of work, do the talking:
Join the London design community for the second UK Designers Accord Town Hall in London on Thursday, January 19, hosted by Engage by Design and in partnership with the Design Council in London.
Systems innovation is driving the sustainability agenda; come and discuss how we can create social innovation that generates meaningful change.
Last week, an engineer mentioned his Harmony remote to me. He really loved it and was one of those passionate early adopters. I remembered that they had more humble beginnings, so I went back and did some quick research. Use this for a great case study of the power of design.
Harmony began as Easy Zapper in the Toronto suburb of Mississauga, Ontario around 2000-2001. In 2002, they were selling the remote pictured, the Harmony Easy Zapper, for $200. It featured all of the technical features that today's users rave about: activity-centered control, easy programming of the remote via a PC and constantly updated software. However, the one big thing it lacks is style: it looks like a Radio Shack bought electronic project box from the 1980s.
Someone else saw the same glaring problem: Logitech. Logitech bought the company in 2004 for the small sum of $29 million. According to their 2005 annual report, "The first Harmony remote to leverage Logitech's renowned design expertise, [the Harmony 880] features a large color screen and comfortable sculpted buttons." That focus on design is what has lead to the 2005 Logitech Harmony 880 pictured here. It retailed for $250.
Here's the kicker: In 2011, Harmony contributed $164 million in revenue and a profit of $57 million to Logitech's empire.
To those who are not familiar with the product, I have a later version, the 550, which retails for around $100. The quality design is evident just picking it up. It has a substantial weight, tight tolerances, no sharp flash around the plastic parts. Moreover, the higher quality (i.e. more expensive) manufacturing is clear: metallic painted plastic and soft-touch painted shell with an acrylic window separated by a line of vacuum-plated trim running through it. That's a lot of operations and assembly by the standards of a remote control that is normally squeezed out of an injection molding machine, stamped with a logo and screwed together over a PCB and some silicone buttons.
By now, you might've already looked over the five winning entries in the Fast Track to the Mobile App design competition, and seen the list of the 95 finalists who impressed judges with their combination of practical, creative and fun concepts. Over the next month, we'll follow the winners as they pair up with developers to turn those designs into workable apps.
Three winners (Black Belt, Bridge, and car pal+) will be paired with well-known Windows Phone developers or MVPs (Most Valuable Professional) who expressed an affinity to work on a specific winning app. Two of the winners (Social Mints and Rhythmatic) will be doing their own development. Winners and finalists will be connected to a Microsoft Mobile Phone Champ—Windows Phone mavens who are developers in the winners' regions with intimate knowledge of the ins-and-outs of app building, to help them along. Then, it's on to making a to-do list of necessary steps to ready their designs for launch in the Windows Phone Marketplace by February 15th. We want to encourage everyone who entered the contest to go through as much of the app development process as they can to bring their proposals to life. In this special series, we'll be exploring that process as the winners prepare their apps for entry into the Windows Phone Marketplace.
No one really seems to actually know what the vaguely named Motorola Solutions does, but Frank Lawlor is working to change that. As Global Brand Creative Director, Lawlor is taking Motorola Solutions from misunderstood anonymity to a company known for developing cutting-edge public safety and industrial communications... as well as bad-ass police cars.
Judging from Lawlor's case study, he had his work cut out for him when rebranding Motorola Solutions. The old identity was centered around cheesy, staged photographs that look culled from a stock images website, while the supporting graphics are more like sci-fi interpretations than reality.
The new collection of videos and photographs supporting the rebranded identity works quite well. Lawlor describes the goal as developing a "design language that tells a powerful story of a company that has been 'helping people in the moments that matter' for over 80 years." The working man/woman is the centerpiece of the campaign, focusing on real situations, not sexy ones. Likewise, communications and radios are not terribly sexy technologies, so it makes sense to play them up as the backbones of public safety departments.
In just a few weeks, Ikea will enact a massive design change that will be largely invisible to consumers: They're ditching wooden shipping pallets in favor of cardboard ones. The furniture giant has designed a way to fold corrugated cardboard into a structure that is far thinner than a traditional wooden pallet, yet can still support the 1,650 pounds necessary to transport their goods. According to Bloomberg Businessweek,
One-third the height of wooden trays at 5 centimeters (2 inches) and 90 percent lighter at 2.5 kilos, they'll save thousands of truck trips and cut transport bills by 140 million euros ($193 million) a year at a cost of 90 million euros for paper purchases and new forklifts, Ikea says.
As Ikea uses some 10 million pallets a year, if the experiment is a success it's a good bet that other retail giants will take notice. But the thing that has analysts skeptical is that the pallets can only be used once. While they'll surely be recycled afterwards, perhaps on-site at each facility, this bucks the industry trend of "pooling," whereby used wooden pallets are collected by companies dedicated to the task who then redistribute them to other retailers, prolonging the pallets' lives. We're curious to see how the green balance shakes out on this one.
In July 2012 General Motors Advanced Studio will cut the ribbon on their new Shanghai design facility, which will be headed up by Wulin Gaowa (pictured above). Gaowa is GM's first female design studio chief, having been appointed Design Director of GM China Advanced Studio in September of this year.
A press release from this morning features a Q&A with Gaowa, who previously worked for the Mercedes-Benz Technology Center in Germany and Italdesign Giugiaro in Italy, on the new facility. Here's an excerpt on the "crewing up" process:
Q: How is it going with the hiring process? What kind of talents are you seeking to hire for the Advanced Design Studio?
A: We have found some qualified candidates here in China. We're looking for people that have a passion and superior talent in the area of car design, and are willing to challenge the status quo. Hiring locally is important for us as the designers' Chinese cultural background will help us better understand how to design mobile products that meet the needs of our customers in China. Overseas experience will be a plus and good support to achieve global standard.
I've been visiting design universities and colleges all over China and the U.S. since I arrived in September, looking for designers who will fit into our organization. I've been to Beijing, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Detroit and Los Angeles so far....
Luxo did well out of the licensing arrangement for the Anglepoise lamp, selling an estimated 25 million L-1s and branching out into the full-fledged lighting company they are today.
John and Simon Terry, the current generation of Terrys to run the company their great-grandfather founded, struggled up to the millennium, constrained by their Commonwealth-only licensing deal mentioned in Part 2. In 1975 Terry Lighting had been spun off as its own company separate from the Terrys' springs business. In the early 2000s, as sales sank to just 50,000 a year, the Terrys brought in industrial designer Kenneth Grange to revamp the Anglepoise line. Grange created the more modernized Type 3, seen below, which met with acclaim and sales success. The company is now called Anglepoise.
In 2004 a Giant Anglepoise, like the one seen up top, was produced as a one-off for the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre. Tim Burton then famously purchased a second one created for a charity auction. Following that, demands started coming in, and the Giant went into production.
Earlier this year Autodesk acquired Instructables, the go-to site for learning to make...well, anything. At Autodesk University 2011, we asked Instructables Founder (and 2011 Core77 Design Awards Jury Co-Captain) Eric Wilhelm what the acquisition means for the company, then chatted with Instructables Artist-in-Residence Oliver Kreitman to ask how the merger shakes out on a foot-soldier level. Wilhelm also explains the very good reason why certain products, like 123D Make and 123D Catch, are currently on different platforms. Check it out:
When we got to our "Have any advice for design students?" question, all of the creatives we interviewed at Autodesk University 2011 had great, and very distinct, answers. Saul Griffith discussed the importance of creating your own design tools. Daniel Simon talked about
altering your perspective of the environment around you. And here both Jeff McGrew and Jillian Northrup of Because We Can each give great suggestions on learning how You Can, too.
You've heard of Detroit's CCS, but you've probably never heard of Detroit's CCSS. Cass Community Social Services is a Detroit-based nonprofit that employs homeless people by having them transform discarded tires into mudmats.
An Integrated Product Design class at the University of Michigan—a class that combines design, engineering, and business—has turned their attention towards CCSS's project and is attempting to take the business further, by using their rubber cast-offs to make sandals, with straps made from seatbelts harvested from junkyards (see also: E13's repurposed airbag). To that end, they've formed Treads Motor City Sandals to pursue the idea in earnest.
"For a lot of these students, this is the first time they've ever made anything physical and real," [said professor Bill Lovejoy]. "They have these grandiose plans in the brainstorming phase but after the first week in the shop they realize they need to scale back significantly. They develop a respect for craft and the people that actually make things."
Despite some setbacks, the students are making progress, as you can read about in the full story on Spero News. The basic idea is encapsulated in the brief video below, which was designed by the class as a commercial:
In Part 2, Because We Can founders Jeff McGrew and Jillian Northrup told us about projects past and present. Here in Part 3 they tell us about an ongoing project and tease a related item they're thinking about pursuing in the future: Open-source Because We Can desk and table designs! (I'm loving love the brilliant cable-management solution seen in the photos above; it appears to be a snap-shut binder.) Have a listen:
Here in Part 2 of our Because We Can interview, founders Jeff McGrew and Jillian Northrup explain how their RP habit organically went from being an interesting hobby to a full-time business. They also discuss the cool swiveling desk we posted on earlier this year and tell us about some of their projects both past and current:
From residences to offices to furniture to Burning Man art projects, Oakland-based design-build firm Because We Can is capable of designing and making a lot of crazy stuff. "CNC machines don't care how complex things are," founder Jeff McGrew pointed out during his Autodesk University 2011 Mainstage event.
By now you've probably read our transcript of that talk, and now we're ready to post our video chat with both McGrew and co-founder Jillian Northrup, whom we caught up with in the AU 2011 Creative Studio. Here in Part 1, the duo tell us about their fortuitous discovery of ShopBot and how digital fabrication helped launch their firm.
You love to sketch. Pen on paper, stylus on tablet, it doesn't matter. But what does matter, is that Scott Wilson understands that insatiable need to draw. Scott Wilson, the man behind the wildly successful Kickstarter campaign for the TikTok/LunaTik watchband for the iPod nano, just launched a great followup to the TikTok: a dual function rollerball pen and digital stylus aptly named the LunaTik Touch Pen. With a click of a button, you can toggle between paper and tablet with a single pen.
The Lunatik Alloy Touch Pen is manufactured from premium materials and features an aircraft grade aluminum barrel, a die cast clip that is hard coated with PVD plating, high grade silicone rubber grip as well as our patent-pending dual mode tip that allows you to seamlessly use the LunaTik Pen with any touch screen. Our custom engineered materials are designed to meet our demanding specifications for touch screen responsiveness and flow. And on paper, the Touch Pen uses precision Japanese rollerball components for a fluid inking experience.
This is a great solution for the way we work today and Wilson hopes that the LunaTik Touch Pen will be an integrated tool to move us into a more seamlessly workflow. This week marks the one-year anniversary of Wilson's impressive funding run for the TikTok! We learn from Scott's project video that the MINIMAL team will be launching a series of products over the next year...we'll be on the lookout for new ideas under the LunaTik brand. Watch the project video after the jump:
This Friday Apple opens its new retail space in New York City's Grand Central Terminal and it is huge. This morning Core77 got a sneak peek of the place, and while we initially thought it would only occupy the area above the stairs on the East Balcony, we were wrong. The 23,000-square-foot space wraps around the north end of the Main Concourse, going all the way to the escalators for those of you familiar with the terminal, and extends into rooms on the south end.
I'd wondered how Apple was going to deal with the lighting issues in the cavern-like Main Concourse, where the terminal's lighting is many stories above the floor; what they've done is outfit the tables with slender LED bars which, whether by design or coincidence, resemble smaller versions of the overhead lighting.
Since the store is located within a bustling train station, it will open at 7am for the convenience of commuters; other train-station-specific touches feature an Express Shopping counter facing the store's entrance, so harried train-takers who don't need to browse can quickly grab exactly what they came for, and special 15-minute Express Classes in using Apple gear are being scheduled around rush hour times.
Then there's Apple's recent push to create an experience where you needn't interact with a store employee if you don't want to, or are simply in a rush. An army of clerks were on hand to give EasyPay demos; I went to video one but it was literally over before I got the camera set up. You pick up an item, scan it with your iPhone/iPod Touch, punch in your iTunes password, then walk out with the thing. That's it. I asked the clerk how they'd prevent theft, and he said someone would check a receipt (presumably a digital one on your device) as you left the store.
With 750,000 people traipsing through Grand Central daily, the Apple Store is expected to draw huge revenue and boost traffic through surrounding businesses. It opens this Friday at (an uncharacteristically late) 10am.
At Autodesk University 2011, we asked Saul Griffith about his educational background and got a presumably truncated answer—the guy seems to have more degrees than a protractor—and queried him on Theory vs. Making Stuff in education. Following that, he allowed us to cajole him into giving some advice for the current generation of design students. The forward-thinking Griffith then raised an excellent point about the tools designers use, how to produce things that are truly unique, and why now is a great time to be making stuff. Have a listen:
Engineer/entrepreneur Saul Griffith never seems to lack for both ideas and, more importantly, the means to execute them. With Otherlab, he and co-founder Jonathan Bachrach have put together an impressive team ranging from comic book artists to toy designers to applied mathematicians, and that's just one of seven companies he's founded or co-founded.
In this Part 2 of our interview with Griffith, shot at Autodesk University 2011, we focus on the business behind invention and ask him about two inventor tropes: The one who quickly moves from invention to invention, and the one who sticks around to turn that invention into a business. His answer will be of interest to anyone who creates something and wants to see it go out into the world.
BestVendor, a website that helps people find appropriate work apps based on recommendations from their peers, just released their newest findings. After surveying 180 designers and creative professionals, they compiled their findings in this easy to read graphic. If we took a guess based on our own Core77 habits, it came as no surprise that Google Docs, Drop Box and Adobe Photoshop come in at the top of the list. We like their "Hidden Gems" section that reveals some emerging applications like GimmeBar (grab and store media in a single place to sync to Dropbox), WhatTheFont (for font-spotting) and LookWork (an RSS for visuals).
What tools aid you in a productive workday and why? Leave a comment.
A year ago Nathan Bestwick was an industrial design student at the UK's Sheffield Hallam University. Now, after receiving guidance and support from UK-based business incubator Incub, the recent ID grad is preparing to launch his own company and self-designed product, the MillMii.
The MillMii is a manual pepper grinder embracing the principles of universal design. For those with arthritis, the difficulty of working a manual pepper grinder means they're relegated to using battery-operated ones, which of course leave behind a larger carbon footprint. Bestwick's innovation was to design a manual grinder that can be operated without the user needing to form a grip: They hold the device between two palms and perform a hand-rubbing motion to create the action.
Bestwick will be launching his kitchenwares company, Yormii, in February of 2012 with plans to produce more items already in the works. And in an era when designing a new product for mass production means you'll shortly be getting on a plane to China, Bestwick is keeping things local, relying instead on a Sheffield-based manufacturing facility called The Hog Works.
"It's generally understood that in order to manufacture products you have to source them from the Far East to be able to compete on price," Bestwick told Housewares Live. "I put this myth to the test and have found that Yormii is able to match Far Eastern production prices, whilst having the added benefits of greater control over the manufacturing process, the quality of the products we produce, and vastly lower shipping costs with a smaller carbon footprint."
Here's a news clip of Bestwick from earlier this year (sharing airtime with local artisan and jewelry designer Jessica Flinn) describing his plans:
Here's a rather thorny issue taking place at the intersections of recycling, materials technology, business, and human behavior that we just read about in Packaging Digest.
Recycling would work well—if everyone did it. Since not everyone does, a governing body called the Plastics Environmental Council wants to standardize additive ingredients going into plastic bottles, with the idea being that these additives would help the bottles break down as they sit in piles of landfill.
The problem: Those in the business of recycling have invested millions of dollars setting up machines that turn post-consumer waste back into raw materials. And it turns out those very additives that help untended bottles break down in landfill tend to gum up the works in a recycling facility.
According to one PET recycler, Ed Byrne, CEO of Peninsula Packaging, who was quoted in the San Jose Mercury News: "Even in small percentages, like one-tenth of one percent, these are just catastrophic for us. They melt at different temperatures. They ruin our product."
So while the PEC backs the additives, NAPCOR (The National Association of PET Container Resources) is against them. Once again our society has proven to be so complicated that you've got two groups who essentially want the same thing--no wasted plastic—and yet they're at odds.
DESIGN MIAMI 2011
TOKYO DESIGN WEEK 2011
DUTCH DESIGN WEEK 2011
VIENNA DESIGN WEEK 2011
Reporting by Yin Ho
