We last wrote about inventor extraordinaire Matthias Wandel back in May, when his homemade rolling table saw stand caught our eye; Wandel has since updated his website with a list of all of the "insane contraptions" he's built over the years, and even better, has committed to posting weekly updates of new inventions.
To refresh your memory, Wandel's a guy who buys machinery and shop tools at flea markets and tag sales, and later converts them into practical, sometimes incredibly specific purposes; some of his devices are sure to drop the jaw of many a woodworker. If you like woodshop stuff click here to check out his joinery jigs, but be warned that you may get sucked in for the next hour.
Speaking of getting sucked in, for the layperson or non-shop-geek, one of his easier-to-understand contraptions is his simple Wasp-Sucking Machine. After finding a wasp's nest on his property, Wandel converted a blower he picked up a a surplus store into a pest-capturing device:
The box has a glass lid so you can see the status of the catch, and only bug screen for a 'filter' so there isn't much to resist the flow of air. A piece of metal or cardboard can be slid in a gap where the hose connects to seal off the box, and the box just sits on top of the intake spout for the blower, so it can easily be removed from the machine for purposes of showing off one's catch.
The catch above is from leaving the machine running for 9 hours straight while I went to work. The machine doesn't suck the wasps out of the nest, it just catches most of the wasps that come back from the field. Coming out of the nest, most of them are smart enough to crawl away from the suction before getting airborne, but coming back, they get sucked in on the landing approach.
Nelly Ben Hayoun, creator of the theatrical Soyuz Chair, brings us another hybrid between design, performance, science and amateurism, the Super K Sonic Booooum. The show, taking place at Shunt in London, is described as "a fantastic voyage on a dingy that floats on 50000 tons of extremely pure water where neutrinos interact with electrons in a massive Sonic Boom." In other words, a simulated tour of the Super K Neutrino Observatory in Japan.
Visitors, who will don wellies and white suits, will board a small dinghy with scientists from the real Super K, who will give a short lecture on particle physics as the boat makes its way through the installation by means of pullies. Throughout the tour, the space will periodically resonate with a "Sonic Boom," a powerful sound and light show by Hayoun and sound artist Tim Olden.
Sounds pretty spectacular, and if you're in London, you still have two more days to catch it. More info here.
Material Short Stories is a new project from Core contributor Aart Van Bezooyen (author of the Material Stories Newsletter ) and designer Tim Oelker. Manufacturers, design agencies or individual designers can subscribe to this service in order "to advance their product with innovative materials."
This consultancy takes the form of a publication, offered at a fixed subscription fee. Instead of receiving a magazine, however, each client receives a pamphlet produced especially in response to a submitted concept.
After receiving a concept from a client by email, Bezooyen and Oelker will select five innovative materials, sketch out how they might be applied, and send back a booklet of material information, sketches and specs, complete with USB card for digital materials.
Once upon a time telephones were split into two pieces, one for the ear, one for the mouth. I talk, I listen.
It's a sign of the times that Fujitsu's new F-04B cell phone splits into two pieces, one for the fingers and one for the eyes. I type, I watch.
The detachable screen communicates with the keyboard via Bluetooth, and the keyboard side has both a QWERTY and a number pad. Oh yeah, and they threw in a pico projector, too:
First thing I thought when I saw this was, if I had one, I'd surely lose one half and not the other. Luckily the engineers thought of this too: Press a button on one, and the missing unit flashes a light and beeps from its location under the couch cushions or in your kleptomaniac friend's pockets.
We are looking for a furniture designer to join our growing bespoke furniture design studio. We predominantly work with interior designers and architects to work up, detail, design and furnish their schemes. There is a strong collaborative element to our work. We also work with private clients. We work on prestigious projects predominantly in London but also overseas (at present we have projects in 7 other countries).
A very cool material is Hylite, which is comprised of sheets of aluminum bonded to a polypropylene core. Why bond metal to plastic? Because once you mill off a thin strip of aluminum from either side, boom, you've got a metal sheet with a living hinge.
Hylite is being used to excellent effect by California-based computer accessories maker AviiQ, whose folding Portable Laptop Stand has been named a CES Innovations 2010 Design and Engineering Award honoree. Check out how it works, simple and sweet:
I used to have a car that spent a fair amount of time in the shop. During servicing I'd routinely ignore the NO CUSTOMERS BEYOND THIS POINT sign and walk into the garage to talk to the mechanic. Not because I cared about the car--I just liked looking at the garage's tool carts, which seemed to hold and organize an insane amount of tools and attachments.
I finally found the site of the company that makes those things: Montezuma Manufacturing. They make portable toolboxes, rolling cabinets and the chests that go on top, in both steel and aluminum. Their capacity and price--the large black cabinet pictured above rings in at $2,300, which is worth more than my car was--put these out of reach of the casual DIY-er, but it's interesting to see how the pros store their stuff.
In association with Judd Foundation, design gallery Sebastian + Barquet is presenting Donald Judd: Furniture, an exhibition of Donald Judd's resolved furniture designs. Shown alongside Judd's original drawings, this exhibition will include important early examples of his furniture in a variety of woods, colored-plywood, enameled aluminum and copper.
Donald Judd: Furniture Sebastian and Barquet, New York City
November 12-December 25th, 2009
Opening: Thursday, November 12th. 6-9 pm
I've got an 8-foot ladder in the photography studio I operate, and while the thing is indispensable for the grip & lighting guys, it's a pain in the neck to store. Not to mention for shoots where the crew needs to shoot against multiple walls, the hard-to-miss ladder always seems to be in the way. Sure it folds flat, but it's still 8 feet long, and I'm getting sick of finding creative ways to hide it.
The Xtend & Climb ladder seems to be a neat alternative, as it stretches from 2 1/2 feet in storage to 12 1/2 feet in height.
It's made from aircraft aluminum with steel connectors and it needn't be unfurled all the way to be used; just "pop" up as many steps as you need into their locking positions. I'm thinking about picking one up, and if I do, an in-depth review will follow.
Israeli designer Alex Padwa has his students at Shenkar's College of Engineering and Design not only sketch, but learn to juggle--literally, with three balls--in "freeing the mind" exercises prior to beginning design projects. Padwa's class' latest was to design a tea kettle that breaks away from the conventions. Hit the jump to see some of our faves, large.
The Architecture for Humanity Chicago is in the process of transitioning to a new role as a government-funded national chapter. As part of stepping up to this new challenge, the AFH-Chicago is seeking a new logo, and has posed the following competition to designers everywhere:
Brief: The redesign of the AFH Chicago Logo is a competition for 'branding' the Chicago Chapter with a new logo that will be used on all items issued by AFH Chicago. This is an open call for a logo that will represent the broader Architecture for Humanity Organization but a logo that also represents that this is a local chapter that is recognizable as a distinct chapter focused on local issues as well as the larger goals of the national organization.
Logo Competition Submission Requirements + Timeline
I. The entry should be submitted in e-mail format as a high resolution PDF file, JPG or TIF, not to exceed 8.5x11, no later than Monday, November 16th by 5:00 p.m. to logocomp [at] afh-chicago [dot] org.
II. The entries can be hand sketches, line drawings; full color imagery...anything that gets the idea across the design does not have to be the finish product as long as the idea for the logo is conveyed.
III. All entries received will be voted on at the November AFH Chicago monthly meeting and the top five (5) vote receiving logos will be forwarded to the national chapter with the winning design selected by the staff at the national headquarters.
IV. The author(s) of the winning design will be asked to work with the 'board' to apply the logo to the website, stationary, business cards, etc.
V. With your e-mail please state the name(s) of all entrants, your contact information and the best means and time to be contacted.
Email logocomp [at] afh-chicago [dot] org for more information.
We're excited to announce the brand new, just-launched web magazine Sight Unseen, which "takes readers inside the worlds of design, art, fashion, food, photography and other creative disciplines." Compiled by editors Monica Khemsurov and Jill Singer, the interviews, studio visits, book excerpts, factory tours, sketchbook highlights, and design flashbacks reveal all the thinking, hard work and discoveries behind a vibrant, pluralistic and international creative scene.
For example, Khemsurov's piece "Sissel Tolaas, Scent Expert," visits Tolaas in her Berlin studio, where she develops complex scents for museums, big brands, and her own artwork. An excerpt:
Though on any given day she might be busy developing an ambient odor for a Margiela exhibition or identifying a prototypical Swedish smell for Ikea, the larger aim of her career, she says, is remediating "the lack of understanding smell has in our society." The first step is getting people to pay attention, even if it means using unseemly tactics like mixing up a kind of "filth soup" cologne and wearing it to a film festival, or simulating the body odors extracted from men having panic attacks and exhibiting them on scratch-and-sniff walls at MIT. "I have what scientists don't have--the guts to go out there and try my ideas out in reality," the 49-year-old says.
It's like Arne Jacobsen collaborating with McGruff the Crime Dog: The Stop Thief Chair, designed by the UK's Design Against Crime, is like Jacobsen's iconic Series 7 chair but with two slots to accommodate purse straps, hanging it in a difficult-to-snatch location.
The concept has been around for a while but the chairs, which are stackable and come in 12 colors, have just gone into actual production by Danish furniture company Dan-Form.
Nice: Shanghai-based designer Zhili Liu's lighting series was inspired by gatherings of birds, which becomes obvious when you see them. Up above are models entitled Sparrow, Nightingale and Dove, respectively. (We especially like the "bird in a cage" design of the Nightingale.) The designer came up with the concept circa 2006 and is now getting into the prototyping.
Cheap bakelite bulb sockets have been widely used in China, from workshops to living rooms for over 4 decades without any change. With a bulb and some wire, it makes a practical and reliable pendant lamp for less than 10 RMB (about 75 pence).
The bird lamps were designed to inherit the simplicity of the bakelite sockets but at the same time offer the user some more room for imagination - only by adding a little angle.
The sockets [are] made of bone china, which is translucent, heat proof and electrically safe. [It will] work with incandescent, CFLs or LED bulbs with a standard E-27 base.
Incase is a lifestyle brand on a global basis and the leader in carrying solutions and innovations. We are currently looking for a 3D Modeler/Engineer to work in our design & development studio in the heart of downtown San Francisco. You will be under the direction of the creative silo of the hard-goods/innovation team, closely working with Industrial Designers to generate 3D databases and concept prototypes.
There's a little building around the corner from me with this sign posted on it--a rendering of its supposed future. It's been there for years, and it's pretty obvious that it's at best a hypothetical future, and arguably a fictitious one. The actual building remains vacant, and in fact is for sale. Any development that may take place some day depends on someone buying it, and what they might want to do. Till then, it's just another empty building.
We often see new pieces of furniture photographed "hero shot" style, with just one or two of them amidst an apartment-like catalogue background; so it's cool to see Austrian designer Thomas Feichtner's new stool design in all its mass production glory.
Called the Linz Hocker and made from recycled thermoplastic polymer by Vitra, the stool's "product launch" is actually an art installation:
The fundamental idea behind the installation, which consists of more than one thousand stools, is not to perform in a museum gallery but to launch signals from the [Landesgalerie] gallery. The temporary installation will not be preserved as a self-contained work but will be taken to pieces - the individual stools. Every visitor may remove a stool, starting the dismantling of the installation already from the opening of the exhibition "The Case Forum Design ". What will be left is: a piece of contemporary design in a number of Linz households.
The focus is not on giving something away but on the idea of artificial and sustainable democratization of design, projected onto a city like Linz. It is an attempt to use the visitor as distributor, supported by the suspension of all the market mechanisms to which any product is normally subjected.
One aspect of the concept is that over the years this product may become a unique Linz specimen: Stools will appear again and again in apartments, shops or studios. Some will change hands at the Linz flea markets after some years. In the course of time the Linz Hocker may begin to circulate in the City.
Designer Marcus Sandeman's Product Tank Toaster prototype started out as a design spoof, but beyond the shop-geeky central trick--the heating elements close in on the bread like a vise, accommodating different thicknesses--one extremely useful feature we dig is the crumb tray base, which can be easily separated from the rest of the toaster and tossed in the sink or dishwasher. Observe:
We also like that there are no dedicated slot widths, so you can throw in two regular-sized slices or a long piece of peasant bread and the like.
It's hard to say no to free raw materials. As a design student, you are perhaps even more inclined than regular students to pick up streetside milk crates, old refrigerators and the like and haul them back to your dorm to repurpose into a usable piece of furniture. When Miri Breskin, Adi Shpigel and Keren Tomer were ID students at Israel's Shenkar College of Engineering and Design, they took that a step further:
...they began keeping tabs on apartments that were being renovated, so that they could use the construction waste in their class assignments. What bothered them most of all was the question of where all the white plastic jalousie blinds - trisim - one of the most notorious components of apartment balconies in Greater Tel Aviv, disappeared to.
"We started tracing the path of discarded construction material," relates Tomer. "We discovered that the renovators weren't willing to give us the shutters and would only sell them to us, because they sell the aluminum frames. From the renovators we moved on to scrap metal shops, where we saw how they mishandled the poor plastic shutters, kicked them and broke them. We asked one of the scrap-shop owners for the shutters and because he had to pay for waste removal, he agreed to let us take as much as we wanted. We came, loaded up, and that's how we found new raw material to work with."
The trio has since opened up their own ID studio, Kulla Design, and have used trisim to create their own furniture line consisting of a chair, stool, CD rack, and room divider, seen above.
So. Is there anything useful that you see people throwing away en masse?
I'm a huge fan of Rob Giampietro, having discovered him first through his piece entitled "On Memphis, Pattern, and MacPaint." Completely convinced that Memphis is coming back, I, of course, loved this.
Now, I want to point you to a new piece by Giampietro, entitled "Public Notice," which explores the unadorned informational poster, its contemporary expressions and the "issues that arise from working with language as a medium in art and design."
Here's an excerpt:
In her seminal 1970 essay on posters, Susan Sontag begins by making a distinction between the poster and the public notice. "Posters are simply not public notices," she writes. "Both posters and public notices address the person not as an individual, but as an unidentified member of the body politic. But the poster, as distinct from the public notice, presupposes the modern concept of the public--in which the members of a society are defined primarily as spectators or consumers. A public notice aims to inform or command. A poster aims to seduce, to exhort, to sell, to educate, to convince, to appeal." There are many tools in the poster designer's arsenal to create the appeal Sontag describes, and the very rise of the poster as a form is tied to the rise of a technology needed to produce this appeal: color lithography. Implicit in Sontag's argument, though, is a claim about the form of information itself. The information the public notice offers arrives pure, unvarnished, unadorned. The information the poster offers is designed, decorated, expressed. One's form is neutral and the other's is inflected. But is information ever formless? Can it ever be delivered without some influence from its carrier?
The public notice as an object presents us with a challenge: Where does seeing stop and reading start? Where does information end and design begin? As we witness the rise of a sober new Helvetica age, the public notice's flat language and style shows up more and more in contemporary design. Here's a look at some of that work, some earlier artistic predecessors, and some of the issues that arise from working with language as a medium in art and design.
Read the rest here, or just check out Giampietro's generally awesome and informative site.
Finally, I couldn't help but point to my own favorite public-notice-like thing, the bizarre rest stop polling systems seen all over New Mexico:
So has anyone started to use google wave? We all know what it's like to try and sort through those long email chains between 5 different people, trying to read highlighted messages to questions and then trying to forward and reply all, and cc. new people...I think the key is everyone has to be on board with google wave for it to work well.
Created by Anca Trandafirescu, with the assistance of Le Nguyen, Hot Air is an inflatable, inhabitable monument commemorating the 20th anniversary of the fall of communism in Romania. The monument takes the shape of the fallen head of a giant statue, lit from within. We've seen a few iterations of this floating around the internet before, but we're happy to announce the inflatable has reached its intended site of Timisoara, Romania. Upon return, it will be shown again at the University of Michigan, where Trandafirescu teaches.
HOT AIR is envisioned as a celebration - a making of an object/space (and series of events) - inspired by the improbable and infectious spirit of the 1989 uprising that changed the course of history. The lasting legacy, and therefore the object of the memorialization here, is the possibility that lies in collective action and the less-than-perfect results. The contradictions of optimism AND instability inherent in Romania's political change are reflected in the mass, material, and construction of a symbolic image filled with HOT AIR.
We love the unexpected life of this monument as it reacts and adjusts to its environment. Here it is waking up in Eastern Europe and "snoring."
Finally, for anyone interested in making inflatables, we suggest you browse the archives of the Hot Air Blog, where the process from conception to implementation has been meticulously documented. Especially interesting is the creation of the inflatable pattern from a latex mold.
The Senior level Footwear Design position will be responsible for meeting seasonal design objectives within the parameters of the PUMA International timeline. The candidate will design footwear by combining influences of sport, fashion and lifestyle to bring unique products to market. Duties include designing seasonal fashion/performance driven footwear and address fast paced design requests for footwear design detailing: color and material selection, presentation preparation, market research, and logistical support. Categories include: Running, Training, Golf and special footwear initiatives.
We all know you can't get something for nothing; but apparently you can get nothing for something. The Times' "Internet" column has an article up describing how
Silicon Valley may have discovered the perfect business: charging real money for products that do not exist. These so-called virtual goods, like a $1 illustration of a Champagne bottle on Facebook or the $2.50 Halloween costume in the online game Sorority Life, are no more than a collection of pixels on a Web page. But it is quickly becoming commonplace for people to spend a few dollars on them to get ahead in an online game or to give a friend a gift on a social network.
Which raises an interesting point--if someone buys me a gift (let's say, a crudite platter shaped like a pirate ship) that I never use, or if they get me a virtual bottle of booze on Facebook, isn't that basically the same thing, minus the manufacturing and shipping costs? "It's the thought that counts" and all that? And taken to the (admittedly unlikely) extreme, the rise of virtual gifting would mean fewer product design jobs to go around, and future Gift Fair tradeshows moved from the Javits Center to MySpace.
In any case, lest you think this is some blip in the economy, the Times article points out that virtual gifting is big business indeed, for the companies selling the goods: We're talking five billion dollars a year. Read about it here.
Michael Hopkins of th MIT Sloan Management Review in the OppGreen room
A great way to bum people out is to show them a bunch of pictures of dead animals. Bonus bummer points if you show those pictures to a room full of 500 environmentalists.
“What we need to do as Americans is grieve. Grieve what is being lost before our eyes everyday,” said photographer Chris Jordan, whose striking images of albatross killed after ingesting plastic waste from a floating gyre of garbage in the middle of the Pacific ocean. Maybe not the ideal early morning visual, but this presentation set the stage for the green business conference Opportunity Green, held November 7-8 at UCLA. Throughout the two-day event, the mood of presenters and attendees swung back and forth from doomsday depression to utopianistic confidence.
To gauge the situation, a number of presenters asked attendees for a show of hands at various times throughout the conference. How many green business owners are in the crowd? How many of you use Twitter? Do you know what the great Pacific garbage patch is?
The Business Response
Michael Hopkins, editor-in-chief of the MIT Sloan Management Review, asked the room whether they thought businesses had or had not cut down expenditures of sustainability measure due to the economic recession. The audience was just about evenly divided into three groups: those who predicted less spending, those who predicted more, and those who saw no change at all. But when Hopkins asked the same question to companies in a previous survey, fewer than 25% said that they made any reduction in their sustainability measures.
Len Sauers, vice president for global sustainability at Proctor and Gamble, shows a graph of his company’s energy footprint, articulating which products take the most energy to produce, distribute and use.
It seems counterintuitive, but now is the time that people are trying even harder to get the message out—whether it’s a new product, a green message, or even just a simple idea. A panel on using social media like Twitter and Facebook had a captivated audience, seeking ideas on how to use Twitter to build their audience and promote their brands.
Kibardin Design's suh-weet Deep Forest chair is the opposite of all of the "holey" chairs we've been seeing lately; it's made from 374 dowels, joined and shaped into a comfortable seating surface. As you might guess, this amount of craftsmanship doesn't come cheap--the chair goes for 4,399 Euros.
Here's a cute little video from Maya Research that illustrates the hugeness of our digital future: trillions of networked computers representing all scales of information and objects will make up the edgeless ecology of information that we'll be floating in. This is but a small preview of a larger project, so be sure to stay tuned.
DUTCH DESIGN WEEK 2009
PRAGUE DESIGN DAYS 2009
LONDON DESIGN FESTIVAL 2009
GIZMODO GALLERY 2009
EUROBIKE 2009
MAKER FAIRE AFRICA
NEW YORK INTERNATIONAL GIFT FAIR
ISTANBUL DESIGN WEEKEND 2009
BAUHAUS SUMMER SCHOOL 2009
We Were Factory Workers: 11 Young Designers Reflect on their Experience in Guyana
Social Software: The Other 'Design for Social Impact' 
Design Revolution: An Interview with Emily Pilloton 
Sketching in Hardware is Changing Your Life 
Design Club: Why young American designers are ganging up 
Case Study: Freescale Netbook Design at SCAD 
Tools of Engagement: The New Practice of User-Centered Design 
The End of Driving 
The Context of 'Low Product': How designers can help articulate a new social language 
Core77 Case Study: Modo's IV Pole for Cardinal Health 
Spend It Wisely: A Market Research Primer for Designers 
Design Salary Survey Results
Deconstructing Product Design, by William Lidwell and Gerry Manacsa
Baked-In, by A. Bogusky & J. Winsor
Change by Design, by Tim Brown
Classic Cars: 100 Years of Automotive Ads, by Jim Heimann and Phil Patton
A Fine Line, by Hartmut Esslinger
Less and More: The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams
Sketchbook, by Timothy O'Donnell
I Miss My Pencil, by Martin Bone and Kara Johnson
Rethinking Sitting, by Peter Opsvik
Essential Tips for the Design Professional
Check out 77 Great Design Gifts, all under $77!
Greener Gadgets Design Competition
The Best of Core77: Our Favorites from 2008!
Read our back-to-school guide for design students. A must!
Dutch Design Week
Prague Design Days
1 Hour Design Challenge Winners!
Coroflot Salary Survey Results
