Move over, Rain Tail—there's a new ultraminimal rear fender in town. The Plume is a recoiling mudguard that is deployed by unrolling the coiled strip of stainless steel and 'retracted' with a simple flick. The hardware slides neatly onto a bicycle seatpost and it looks something like a sideways cupholder when not in use, functioning something like a reverse slap-bracelet.
Note: Animated GIF for purposes of illustration only
Founders Dan McMahon and Patrick Laing met three years ago in London and have been developing the Plume for about as long. Now that they've filed a patent on the recoiling design, they're pleased to present their creation to the public via Kickstarter.
It's certainly a clever solution to a common problem, and the Kickstarter page duly features a couple examples of what Sparse deemed to be "bike hacks," i.e. variations on DIY mudguards. The main advantage of these ad hoc fabrications is that they're inherently disposable; the tradeoff is that they're ugly as sin.
Longtime Core77 readers know I've been a fan of Art Lebedev Studio for ages. Recently I got a kick out of their Attraktsionus ferris wheel/ski lift combination, their Stubus tree ring watch where cracks in the heartwood and exterior rings serves as the hands, and their older Skrepkus paper clip.
You couldn't make it up: a Portland, Oregon-based design duo just launched a crowdfunding campaign to launch a mason jar-based product, designed expressly to brew one of the two beverages that the City of Roses is famous for.
Besides its rugged good looks, it so happens that the mason jar is more durable than the traditional carafe; bedecked in a wool sleeve for insulation and topped off with a maple lid (with a press), the Portland Press is a crafty take on the iconic coffee brewing apparatus (footnote: the origin of the French press is unclear, but the modern version was patented in Italy in 1929; today, it's typically associated with Bodum of Denmark).
The acronym "P.O.S." always struck me as somewhat ironic: most folks who have worked in retail know that it's short for Point Of Sale, but it also has a pejorative meaning in common parlance. When it launched in 2010, Square's register app marked a digital solution to the former—precisely because extant payment gateways so often might be characterized as the latter.
Today, they announced a major upgrade from the now-iconic card reader.
Square, the company making commerce easy for everyone, today announced Square Stand, beautiful new hardware for brick and mortar businesses that turns an iPad into a complete point of sale. With local businesses increasingly tearing out their old point of sale systems to run Square Register, Square Stand gives merchants a remarkable new way to manage and grow their business, all for the price of a cash register.
"Local business owners take as a given that they need an ugly, slow, expensive, and complicated point of sale system cluttering their counter," said Jack Dorsey, co-founder and CEO of Square. "Square Stand is elegant, fast, affordable, and easy to use. Whether you're selling cupcakes, cardigans, or cappuccinos, running your business with Square has never been easier."
Designed by Ammunition Group in collaboration with Square, the simple swiveling stand is designed as an all-in-one system. The card reader is discreetly integrated into the base, providing a larger and more stable slot for swiping.
They've also managed to cast a young Julianne Moore in the role of a lifetime:
Like my train pass wallet, these objects fall into the category of things I touch and use every day. Carabiners are intended for mountain climbing, but their simple design and great utility make them super-useful to city dwellers like me, who only climb subway steps. I use them in the photo studio, during event coverage, and for my dogs, and I now wonder how I ever got by without them.
Leash Splitter
These were initially pet-driven purchases. I own two dogs and was looking for a way to hold both of their leashes in one hand without them becoming entwined. First I bought this thing, which is called a rotor swivel:
I spotted it at a mountain climbing equipment store across the street from Core77 HQ. It's just two aluminum loops attached by an enclosed bearing that allows them to rotate independently, and it set me back forty bucks. Being designed for climbing, I figured it's got to be watertight, which I'd need to weather thunderstorms (I'm out with the dogs for up to two hours a day, rain or shine).
Next I sewed a length of webbing through it to serve as a handle. (If any of you are interested in working with canvas webbing but don't know how to sew, please pipe up in the comments and I'll prepare a basic tutorial. With a simple trick, someone with no skill can use even a junky sewing machine to sew canvas webbing.)
Then I needed a carabiner to attach the two leashes to the rotor. Mistakenly thinking beefier would be better, I initially bought this Omega Pacific locking carabiner at the same equipment store for ten bucks.
However, I found this carabiner too bulky, and together with the rotor it added too much weight to the leashes for my taste. But at the hardware store I spotted these cheapie "key holder" carabiners for just a few bucks.
They appear to be made from aluminum and one can be used to handily attach the rotor to the two leash handles.
Whether you watch Mad Men or not, you understand that the advertising industry reflects the times we live in, addressing our distorted self-images with occasionally ruthless trenchancy. Thus Ogilvy Paris has commissioned the Slender Vender, an ultraslim vending machine for client Diet Coke.
It's more of a stunt than the real deal; while the machines were actually created and scattered about Paris, they dispensed free product. And though advertising blogs are heaping praise on the things--Adland TV writes "The idea is quite nice, turn the vending machine into a slender pole, reminding people that Diet Coke is the skinny choice" while Adverblog posits "Diet Coke is the responsible choice when it comes to calories, so why not let the vending machine show how slender it can be. Nice campaign to make the point of sale an experience," it doesn't take a major cynic to see these machines probably wouldn't fly in the 'States. Walk around your average U.S. shopping mall and see if the folks drinking Diet-anything are any skinnier than the folks drinking the regular variants.
"The first time somebody acknowledged your skill," writes craftsperson Jeff Baenen, "and asked you to personally make them something (and they would pay you!)... was a moment I will always remember." Years ago the Illinois-based Baenen, a mechanical designer by training, was having drinks with a co-worker who asked if Jeff could build him a special box: One that would hold his wife's family Bible.
A box to hold a book, sounds simple, no? But religious tomes that double as family heirlooms require a certain amount of reverence, and there was also a nuts-and-bolts design problem to solve:
The size of the family bible had a huge impact on how the box would be designed. I think it was somewhere around 14”×10”×4”. Being of such a large size I didn't want to have a person reach into the box to pull out the bible (it was pretty heavy). Nor did I want them picking the box up and dumping the bible out.
Baenen's solution was to design and build an interior mechanism that would enable the user to raise the book up out of the box, like something from an Indiana Jones movie. "I designed a lifting mechanism that would allow the bible to 'rise' out of the box by rotating two cam arms," Baenen explains. "In the down state the mechanism is only .75” thick. When actuated it will raise the bible 3.5” out of the box... easy to just grab with your hands."
Semi-obscure pop culture reference: surely some of you "Futurama" fans remember Professor Farnsworth's fanciful Fing-Longer, which is essentially a prosthetic extension of one's index finger. At the end of the episode, we learn that the plot is itself a recursive loop of hypothetical situations, in which the professor was merely speculating as to what would have happened if he invented the Fing-Longer.
I'm sure that everyone can understand the appeal of having longer phalanges (the sheer brilliance of Farnsworth's invention is beyond the scope of this article), but few of us know what it's like to lose a finger. Sure, I've broken or otherwise injured all of my digits at some point, but my hand has only been out of commission temporarily, for no more than a week or so at a time. It's frustrating enough to be handicapped for a week but I can't imagine not being able to fix my bike, cook or clean, or tie my shoes, etc., without an ad hoc workaround for the rest of my life.
Colin Macduff of Olympia, Washington, lost most his right middle finger in an explosives accident in 2010 and decided to do something about it. Where Professor Farnsworth's source of inspiration begged the question (he got the idea for the Fing-Longer from his future self), Macduff, an experienced welder/fabricator, realized he could fabricate a simple biomechanical finger out of spare bicycle parts:
As we saw in "Creatively Defaced Textbooks," it's easy enough to create drawings in a book that you take home with you, or hide behind the back of the student in front of you. It's a much greater challenge to deface—or upgrade, depending on your point of view—a streetscape, where your artistic talents may draw the unwanted attention of the authorities.
Plenty of us were taken aback by Todd McLellan's "Things Come Apart" photo series, where he disassembled a variety of everyday objects and laid all the parts bare. Now the Toronto-based shooter has gathered teardown photos of 50 design classics, from the Pentax SLR you see above (hope it doesn't have a radioactive lens) to the iPad to a freaking grand piano, and compiled them into the coffee table book Things Come Apart: A Teardown Manual for Modern Living, which hits store shelves today.
McLellan's also concurrently released a video showing what he goes through to get to those end photos:
For those of you who can't get to a brick-and-mortar that carries it, the book is also available on Amazon.
An alarming Wiki entry on Camerapedia has caught the attention of the Reddit community. Entitled "Radioactive Lenses," the original write-up notes that "There are a significant number of [camera] lenses produced from the 1940s through the 1970s that are measurably radioactive."
WTF?
Apparently the problem is that manufacturers used to use glass containing thorium oxide, which increases the refractive index of the lenses. Unfortunately for users, thorium oxide is a byproduct of uranium production and it's freaking radioactive.
What the Reddit users started asking is just how radioactive. "Anyone with an understanding of nuclear physics," one poster wrote, "care to make some sense of those readings for cavemen like me?" Here was the answer he got:
Nuclear physicist here. Typical radiation levels [on the thorium oxide lenses] can approach 10 mR/hr as measured at the lens element's surface, decreasing substantially with distance; at a distance of 3 ft. (.9 m.) the radiation level is difficult to detect over typical background levels.
10 mR/hr is more than I would want to be exposed to for prolonged periods. In my lab alarms go off if the ambient levels get above 2 mR/hr, and 10 mR is the maximum allowed dose for an 8-hour shift.
Important notes:
- My lab uses very conservative limits for occupational exposure. People who clean up radioactive waste are exposed to doses many times higher and are fine.
- That is the dose rate at contact with the lens, so it will only really matter when you are handling it, and your hands are not particularly sensitive to radiation.
- I'm curious how they measured the dose, specifically whether the alpha radiation was included. Alphas can't penetrate through shit, and will be stopped by a lens cap or filters, even your clothes or epidermis. They could, in time, damage your eye and give you cataracts if you aren't wearing glasses or contacts. Our askscience health physicist explains much of this here. He quotes a study that determined a "serious outdoor photographer" would get only 2 mrem per year, which is really negligible.
The current scuttlebutt seems to be that if you're not putting your eyeball up against the lense—i.e., using the camera backwards—you'll be fine. However, if the camera's got an eyepiece also made with thorium-oxide-containing glass, you may want to re-think using it.
There's a complete list of the known afflicted camera models and lenses here.
So yesterday, what you see above happened in the studio. I guess the photographer really wanted to buzz the model in, and somehow shattered the plastic housing in his eagerness.
The $18 part was easy to replace, and on the backside of the old one you can see a simple four-wire hookup and the speaker:
If I was a little more hacktastic I'd take the still-functioning speaker and try to do something with it, as so many others have. Remember the BoomCases we spotted a few years back?
Now we've caught wind of a German outfit doing the same thing. But like the BoomCases and Ward's work, Hamburg's Soundpauli company has their own quirky aesthetic.
Part of the fun of being an industrial designer is getting to spec out different materials, like chefs assembling ingredients. For Cygnett's WorkMate line of protective cases, ID'ers Shannon Brown and Haydn Smith have whipped up a tasty stew of thermoplastic polyurethane, silicone and deliciously rubberized polycarbonate. The combination was chosen to pack a lot of shock absorbency into a slim package while still providing a measure of ergonomics; the rubbery texture means it's less likely to fly out of your hand, but if it does, the protective design does the rest.
[The WorkMate] is a tri-material extra protective case [featuring] an integrated tough TPU inner chassis with a rubberized PC shell with silicone inlay.... It has impact absorbing corners and textured panels for advanced grip....
...The silicone inner is spark-etched and treated with oil paint to repel fingerprints and minor marks. It sits inside a heavy-duty polycarbonate shell, coated with rubber paint for a matte finish. The silicone has inner ridges to create a cavity at the rear of the device and disperse point of impact shocks. The silicone protrudes beyond the polycarbonate on the front and back to create non-slip 'feet' and reduce wear to the polycarbonate.
Larger and more protective than a traditional polycarbonate case, the WorkMate is intended to be included on a tool belt or construction site. The treatments and finishes reference industrial machinery, the triggers and housing of power tools and tread plate steel.
Putting their money where their mouth is, Cygnett had Brown and Smith drop a WorkMate-swaddled Samsung S4 from increasing heights onto a concrete floor:
RISD grad and graphic designer dad David LaFerriere has a creative outlet that starts before he hits the office: Each morning he draws a new illustration on his kids' sandwich bags before they head out for school. "Each drawing is done just after I make the sandwich," LaFerriere writes. "The challenges are coming up with an idea and then drawing quickly and directly on the bag, every line counts."
Having been at it since 2008, LaFerriere has produced thousands of daily drawings, which he began uploading to Flickr. After being profiled by that website's video series last month, word of his exploits exploded across the blogosphere. Here's the original vid:
Last week Arnold Wolf, the former head of audio company JBL, passed away. Wolf was one of the few industrial design pioneers that not only formed his own studio back in the '50s, but who would also, unusually, be later asked to take over a client's company as CEO.
Wolf's career path was atypical from the start. "There is inherent irony in my having been elected to [the Academy of Fellows]," he told the IDSA upon winning that honor in 1983, "or, indeed, to my being a member of IDSA in the first place. The reason is that I have never studied industrial design formally, and so can be regarded as a largely undetected impostor."
After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science in the early 1940s, Wolf worked as a radio actor specializing in European dialects. (He presumably had a good ear, which wouldn't hurt for his later work with JBL.) By the mid-'40s Wolf was putting his natural drawing skills to use doing "commercial art" for a Hollywood studio, and later got into advertising and theater art. By the mid-1950s he formed his own studio in the relatively young field of industrial design.
That same year, 1957, Wolf landed a rather important client: James B. Lansing Sound, Incorporated. JBL was developing a crazy, and huge, new type of speaker built around audio principles developed by sound engineer Richard Ranger.
Wolf was called on to design the nine-foot beast, which was centered around a large, curved piece of wood that the mid-range drivers fired towards; the resultant audio reflection "[created] a wide, spacious stereo image."
The Paragon, as it was called, was a success. It had an almost absurdly long production life, remaining part of JBL's offerings until 1983, and today remains a sought-after collectible among audiophiles who can restore them.
One of the things I miss most about being in art school was... the casual graffiti. Students of all stripes have a tendency to make flyers, deface signage and scribble on bathroom walls, but no student does it with the flair of an art student. From the relatively lowbrow "Pratt Industrial Design Diplomas - Take One" drawn over the toilet paper roll in the men's bathroom, to more intricate fare like a flyer in the dorm stating "I lost my keys - they look like this" hovering over a photorealistic drawing of their entire keychain, there was plenty of creativity going on outside of the classrooms.
As for in-classroom creativity: While these may or may not be from art students, Student Beans has compiled a list of the best textbook and exam-paper defacements they could find from around the globe.
They vary in quality, but they all have that twisted art school vibe. Click here to check them all out, but beware that some are outright disturbing—we've posted the tamer ones here—and many are NSFW!
Well, the name kind of gives it away, but for some reason it's still surprisingly delightful... probably because the small purse is a dead ringer for the office supply it's based on.
But by that same year, the $5 bill was taking on a shape remarkably similar to the one many of us grew up using. It has a centralized portrait within an oval frame and a symbol in each corner (though they're still hanging onto that Roman numeral thing).
Cool as it is, that bill remained a design anomaly and the centralized portrait would not become a standard design element for decades, though it would make an occasional appearance.
Later in the decade, however, money really started to get cool. In the late 1880s Congress had authorized the creation of special bills backed by silver, and by 1893—after a presumably exhaustive search—the Treasury's Bureau of Engraving and Printing finally settled on a small group of artists with the skillz to create these new Awesome Sauce bills. As we saw in a previous entry, carving intricate images into metal takes forever, and it wasn't unitl 1896 that their kick-ass Silver Certificate bills were ready to go. They were unlike any that had come before:
Will H. Low's design for the $1 note, entitled History Instructing Youth, shows a female History with a young student standing beside her, gesturing to an open book of history before her. An olive branch rests against the book, holding it open to show the Constitution of the United States upon the page. Both the Washington Memorial and the Capitol Dome can be seen in the background landscape. The outside border of the note shows 23 wreaths, each bearing the name of a noteworthy American - not surprisingly starting with Washington, Jefferson and Franklin, but also including such names as poet Henry Longfellow, inventor Robert Fulton, and author Nathaniel Hawthorne, among many others. The seal of the Treasury appears in the lower right.
Here's the flip side, done by different artists in the crew than Low, who probably had his hands full with the front:
The back of the 1896 $1, featuring intricate geometric lathe work and a winged, shield-bearing Liberty in each of the upper corners, carries traditionally-styled portraits of both George and Martha Washington. The portraits were engraved by Alfred Sealey and Charles Burt, respectively, and the overall design of the back was the work of Thomas F. Morris.
Take a closer look at how exquisitely intricate the carving was:
The new $100 bill we looked at is loaded up with anti-counterfeiting measures. As a result, the thing is butt-ugly, no? Way too crowded with design elements, and some of you will insist that older money is a lot classier-looking. Well, not so fast--let's go back to the 1860s, when the U.S. Treasury first began issuing paper currency. Have a look at this $1 bill from 1862:
The $2 bill from the same year doesn't look much better:
And 1862's $5 bill gets even crazier, wedging in a statue of Freedom personified under a Romanesque arch, with Alexander Hamilton hanging out on the lower right:
While the precise details of how the U.S. manufactures currency are secret, the overall design and manufacturing steps are not. On this page the U.S. Department of Treasury lays out the entire production process, describing the design phase, engraving process, offset printing, platemaking, et cetera. They even describe how the paper comes in on palettes of 10,000 sheets.
More fascinating is listening to Larry Felix, current Director of the Treasury's Bureau of Engraving and Printing, explain how "19th-century craftsmanship" is at the heart of designing and manufacturing currency. Human beings carve insanely detailed images into metal plates (backwards, of course) using hand tools like this:
The craftsmanship required to wield these tools becomes the defacto first line of defense against counterfeiting. "If I were to ask any one of my banknote engravers to engrave the very same design, exactly the same, twice, that person can't do it," Felix explains. "Because of the subtle human nature of designing. The human aspect of engraving a banknote is unique to that individual process and unique to that time."
How can you ensure your product design never gets knocked off? By manufacturing it with proprietary production methods and materials no one else has access to. That's always been the government approach to making currency, which is arguably the number one thing you don't want people knocking off. But as manufacturing techiques trickle down, and now that digital imaging has become child's play, the design of physical currency has to continually evolve. That creates a situation essentially the opposite of what industrial design is: Currency makers have to design something that's as complicated as possible to manufacture.
This week the Federal Reserve announced that a new, redesigned $100 bill is coming out, and as you'd expect, the thing is a cornucopia of proprietary manufacturing techniques. It's got embedded thread imprinted with "USA" and "100," and when you hit it with a UV light the thread glows pink; it's got the X-ray thing where a blank space on the bill reveals a hidden face (Benny Franklin) when it's backlit; the copper-colored "100" turns green when you tilt the bill.
It's also got a "3D Security Ribbon" (that blue stripe you see) containing images of a funky bell that visually transforms into a "100." So where's the 3D part? The bell/100 appear to move and shift in a 3D, holographic way while you wave the money around, as we in the Core77 offices do during our weekly dice games in the hallway with the building superintendent and the FedEx guy.
Last week, we posted a set of wooden knives and posed the age-old question, "Yea or Nay?" (I, for one, was curious as to how FDRL bonded the metal blades to the wood; based on a verso photo on their site, it looks like they're actually riveted.)
In any case, Andrea Ponti does them one better. The Italian designer set up shop in Japan after completing his degree at the Politecnico in Milan and his latest project, a series of ultra high-end, handcrafted-in-Kyoto wooden knives, is known as "Fusion" not for their physical attributes—they're made of solid wood—but for their twofold cultural inspiration:
East and West. Industrial design and craftsmanship. Two cultures and two design languages usually far apart from one another blend in the common language of design and tell the story of a project that spans from research to the creation of innovative products for markets around the world. This design and cultural blend produced Fusion: two kitchen knives made of ebony and white maple. Handmade in Kyoto as a limited edition by Japanese artist/craftsman Issei Hanaoka, these knives are inspired by the traditional Japanese art of wood crafting and they have a minimalist design: extremely simple yet modern and universal.
Each of the two sizes is available in either material with an option for a serrated blade (for bread) for a rubric of eight options in all; every Fusion knife features "an ergonomic handle for slip-resistant ultra-comfort grip." Anticipating concerns about care and durability, as was the case for the previously-seen knives, Ponti notes that"the seamless design allows for unparalleled cleanliness and easy care. Thanks to their ultra-fine edge, the knives are extremely sharp but also easy to sharpen."
[Ed. Note: Thanks to reader kblack for pointing out that the image captions were backwards]
Bud's new beer can comes out in May, and Sly Fox's 360 Lid can is out now. Recently there's been word that a major brewer is introducing a yet another new can this summer. How much more design variance is possible in an aluminum beer can?
Samuel Adams' parent company, Boston Beer Co., hired IDEO to find out. The Sam Adams brand has famously eschewed cans for years; company founder Jim Koch, displaying a Steve-Jobs-like asceticism, felt that cans offered an inferior customer experience and refused to deal in them. But beer sold in cans is some 57% of the U.S. market, and are the only way beer can be served in certain places, like airplanes and stadiums. That translates to millions of dollars' worth. So two years ago, Koch decided he'd consider cans and contracted IDEO to design a better type.
The Boston Globe'sgot the skinny on what the subsequent research turned up, and it might surprise some of you beer drinkers:
The big discovery: Conventional cans don't allow enough air into people's mouths as they drink. Turns out much of what consumers believe they taste is actually smell.... Increasing exposure to the beer's aromas of hops and fruit can make a big difference in taste, said Roy Desrochers, a professional beer taster at GEI Consultants in Woburn.
So the team began looking for ways to improve air flow. Over several months, IDEO proposed dozens of designs and created eight prototypes that expanded the size and shape of the can's opening. Larger apertures—one shaped like a bell, another like a peanut—were supposed to enhance the air flow and access to aromas. The most promising idea, according to Koch, was a design that allowed drinkers to tear off the entire top.
...But there were problems [with the open-top design]: the tear-off top violated litter laws in most states. And the gaping opening made people nervous. They were worried about cutting their nose or lip on the edge, afraid of bugs flying inside, or the drink spilling.
What IDEO finally came up with is a can with a wider lid (as seen at right, below):
The wider top pushes the aperture closer to the rim (again, below at right), which means beer tips more readily into the mouth.
While Budweiser's new bowtie-shaped beer can is a couple of weeks away from launch, a series of smaller breweries have already launched another new type of can: One with a "360 Lid" that peels completely away, allowing tipplers to drink brew through a circular, drinking-glass-like aperture.
Here at the Core77 offices we rarely drink beer out of cans. (That's not snobbery; unlike bottles, cans cannot be broken against desks and wielded as weapons during editorial squabbles that devolve into melees.) But the few times we have, we've never had a problem getting beer to pour from the tab-sized opening into our gulping mouths. So why the new can? Pennsylvania-based licenser Sly Fox Brewing Company insists a circular opening "allows the full flavor and aroma of the beer to hit the drinker's senses." And yes, the drinking rim is rounded over, so you don't cut your lips with each swig.
Longtime friend of Core, proud Staten Islander and current Director of Product Design at Parsons, Rama Chorpash has been on sabbatical in order to get back to his craft: product design. His recent design for a cleverly-manufactured potato masher was selected for the 11th edition of the MoMA Design Store's "Destination: Design" series, which celebrates geographic diversity in design through a collection of products from a certain region. After traveling far and wide—from Buenos Aires to Seoul to Istanbul and half a dozen other countries—the MoMA Store turns to its hometown for the latest (and largest ever) collection, which is set to launch in May on the occasion of the ICFF.
Here, Chorpash presents a brief history of the Spiraloop.
As a combined venture between my creative-practice and academic scholarship, I have been investigating how America's broken chain of once-networked facilities and factories, struggling to function as a whole, might employ overlooked and standalone industrial processes. Utopian Gardens is a series of project-based investigations that imagine a new future for production. Artifacts such as the Spiraloop are intended to seed conversation around innovative visions of more localized production and social use.
Why this local spring manufacturer? Over the last two years, I have been gathering what I call 'Stand Alone Manufacturers,' whom I could work with to create Utopian Gardens. When the MoMA Design Store's Destination: NYC (Made in the USA) open call went out, I saw it as a challenge to not only have product made in the US, but made hyper-locally. In my matrix of categories, I had a long list of spring bending facilities (along with many other industrial categories), but nothing local. It turns out that, my research assistant had met a young Australian spring engineer through a fellow student; he had come to New York and found employment at Lee Spring through the phone book. He has been great to work with—very knowledgeable. His father owns another spring maker in Australia, inherited from his grandfather...
I live on the north shore of Staten Island, so I wanted to find a producer within a short distance. The producer is a 10 minute drive across the Verrazano Bridge to the Brooklyn Army Terminal. Made in Brooklyn, New York, the product is manufactured with minimized energy output, labor, material waste, and shipping cost. While Lee is an international company (with plants also in five other locales with two additional distribution centers in the UK and China), they primarily produce mechanical springs, not consumer products. The proposal was demanding as I had to imagine what would catalyze the imagination of the MoMA Store curatorial team and their public while working within the core manufacturing constraints of the spring industry.
As someone who previously worked in structural package design (that's basically bottles and cans, for you hotshots in automotive or furniture), I freely admit there's a whole slew of products for which the aesthetics of the package design don't really matter. I'd never buy a bottle of booze or can of beer because of the way the vessel was shaped, or how pretty the label was, for instance; I'd buy them because I want to drink what's inside of them.
Beverage giant Anheuser-Busch InBev, however, disagrees. On May 6th they'll be rolling out the new Budweiser can you see above, shaped to resemble that brand's bowtie logo. Now before we get to the big question, let's take a look at how regular straight-edged beverage cans are made, a pretty fascinating process in its own right:
FRIEZE NEW YORK 2013
INTERNATIONAL HOME + HOUSEWARES SHOW 2013
TOKYO DESIGN WEEK 2012
BEIJING DESIGN WEEK 2012
Looks cool...
Note: Animated GIF for purposes of illustration only
Looks cool, but what does it actually do?
