The nice thing about design school projects is that most are meant to be conceived of and completed within the same semester. In the absence of manufacturing problems and political issues, you're presented with a problem and expected to solve it with design in a matter of months.
In the real world, of course, the process of going from problem presentation to design solution can seem interminably long. After the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, cities like New York and London began removing trash cans from certain public spaces. In 2005 London suffered their own terrorist attack on July 7th. By 2007 two entrepreneurs named Kaveh Memari and Brian James designed and began testing a bombproof trash can; we first wrote it up in 2008, and it was scheduled to land on London streets, featuring internet-connected LCD screens that could warn Londoners of local emergencies, in 2009. That release date was then pushed back to 2010, with a target of 100 cans on London streets, but the release date came and went.
To celebrate Helsinki's selection as World Design Capital for 2012, the Mint of Finland has launched a commemorative 50-Euro coin made from both gold and silver, seen above. They're also releasing a 5-Euro version, below, made from less-expensive aluminum and bronze.
Of course, the face value of the coin doesn't correspond with what it costs; collectors and design geeks will need to pony up 430 Euros for the 50 and 75 Euros for the 5. That's kind of a disheartening metaphor for the affordability of good design.
Longtime Core77 readers may remember that we wrote an entry years ago showing you how bimetallic coins are produced. The Helsinki coins shown here, the 1-Euro coin and the NYC subway token of decades past were all produced the same way. Check it out here.
Robb Godshaw is an industrial design student at R.I.T., and he's come up with a strange and brilliant invention: The Cryoscope Haptic Weathervane, which is essentially a tactile temperature indicator. Touch it and you can feel what the temperature is outside.
The Cryoscope is equipped with a heat sink, a thermoelectric-cooling Peltier element, and a cooling fan, all combined and operated by an Arduino controller that receives forecast data from a Web-based app, all neatly enclosed in an aluminium cube ready to be touched.
At first I thought these were just a Photoshopped gag, but nope, these are real and for sale. A company called Schreer Delights is selling a line of iPhone cases that reference Apple's design history, printing visual elements from the original Mac, the original iMac and the original iPod directly onto the case. Each runs a little under 50 bucks.
It's kind of a weird commentary on what exactly is cool about retro styling; if you make your iPhone 4S look like a 3G, that's dumb; but make it look like the first iPod of ten years ago and that's cool.
We've shown you OK Go's videos before (here and here), but if you'ever never seen one, all we can say is that they make Rube Goldberg look lazy. Their latest spot, done for the Superbowl and featuring a music-making Chevy Sonic loaded up with retractable arms, absolutely takes the cake:
Here's a neat way to introduce a measure of security to drawers: The Covert universal lock, a project currently under development consideration at Quirky. It's a simple magnetic latch that you attach to the inside of the drawer. Touching the included magnetic key fob to the front surface of the drawer engages the magnet, allowing you to slide the unseen latch open and closed.
While I can't imagine ever installing one of these, London-based ID firm Slam's ThreeStyle door is weird enough that I had to give it a look, hoping to find some compelling reasoning behind it. Something like a pet door for children of differing ages, the ThreeStyle is a door-within-a-door-within-a-door, adding three sets of hinges, three latches and three handles where one used to do.
The copy doesn't shed any real light on the object's purpose:
ThreeStyle is primarily an expression of contemporary design, exploring and pushing what can be done with the humble door. However, there's know [sic] denying that it's of interest to the little people in our lives. Through Threestyle we can give the younger people in the world a greater connection with their environment during their growth through childhood.
Do any of you see an application that I'm missing? Or is this a case of "Just because you can, doesn't mean...."
In an effort to distinguish their micro 4/3rds or "mirrorless" camera from the competition, Pentax turned to Marc Newson. The aesthetic look of his design for the K-01 has been drawing some fire in photography circles; for unobtrusive street shooting, for instance, the white or yellow body colors are probably not a wise choice, though we should point out that those are two of three options (with basic black rounding out the choices).
In the video below, Newson himself explains what he was going for:
Seeing as he cut his teeth with the likes of Max Lamb, Studio Gilthero, Martino Gamper and Julia Lohmann, it comes as no surprise that designer Phil Cuttance is well-versed in materials and processes. "FACETURE" is a series of household objects that take a vaguely crystalline appearance based on a unique fabrication process. Each vase, lamp and side table looks is made by casting a water-based resin in a handmade mold:
First the mould of the object is hand-made by scoring and cutting a sheet of 0.5mm plastic sheet. This sheet is then folded, cut and taped into the overall shape of the product that is to be cast. The mould's final shape, and strength, is dictated by which triangular facets I pop in and out. I do this each time I ready the mould for the next object, meaning that no two castings are the same. I then mix a water-based casting resin that is cast in the mould where it sets solid.
The resin is poured into the hollow mould and rolled around to coat and encase the sides, controlled by me on the casting jig on the machine. The material soon sets creating a hollow solid object. Then another, different coloured measure of resin is poured into the same mould, and swirled around inside, over the first. When it has set, the mould is removed to reveal the solid set cast piece.
The results look something like stalagmites from a virtual cave, though Cuttance notes that their origin is neither geological nor digital: "The casting appears with sharp accurate lines and a digital quality to its aesthetic, a visual 'surprise' considering the 'lo-fi,' hand-made process from which it came."
But the real gem is the bespoke machine with which Cuttance creates "FACETURE":
That there is the perfect object. It's completely functional, it's the latest evolution from a history of progressively better objects that have been around since man's earliest days, and it's freaking beautiful. It's the two-pound Velvicut Premium Hudson Bay Axe, and it's made using that perfect blend of high-tech machines and an experienced craftsman's handwork.
While I'm suspicious of outdoor tools that are pretty--when you're working outdoors, hardcore functionality is everything and aesthetics don't mean a damn thing--this one is made by Council Tool, lending it some instant cred. The North-Carolina-based manufacturer has been producing quality tools since 1886, and I dig that the company president who narrates the making-of video has the same name as the company.
In the vid you see a 90-year-old eye-punching machine, the brutal, no-margin-for-error drop forging process in action, and you learn something cool about Council's ideology: They retain and retrain. Even as they upgraded their tooling, they kept the guys who used to do the rough grinding by hand and trained them to program the machine that took the task over, rather than letting the machine replace them altogether. "There's no substitute for experience here," says Council.
Like Carousel USA, Turntable Works is another California-based manufacturer of large-scale turntables. But the latter firm has got a product I could not have envisioned: A portable, folding motorized turntable called the Pack-Man, which comes in diameters ranging from eight to fourteen feet.
Here's a sign you've seen too many building projects go wrong: At the six-second mark of the demo video, when the whole mechanism starts to tilt, I instinctively jerked my hands out towards the screen as if I could help the guy by grabbing it. But apparently it's designed or allowed, however inelegantly, to do that.
Didn't think it would fit a full-size car, did you? I like how they jump-cut the footage during loading, as I'm sure there was some finagling required to avoid driving off of the platform. But in any case the Pack-Man is an impressive feat of design and engineering, allowing one person to set the thing up in just five minutes.
Lisbon-based studio Cabracega recently collaborated with designer André Gonçalves on USMA, "a clock without a visual interface," which is intended to "bring the countryside into the city."
In Portugal, the urban population keeps growing year after year, in accordance to the world tendency for desertification of the rural space. In the urban space, the pace is increasingly fast because time is money and every second counts.
USMA is a clock without a visual interface, resorting only to sound to mark the passage of time. The sound of the church bell is the clock hand, which intends to bring home the rural experience with the definite goal of giving a new rhythm to city life.
That's right, the clock has no display: instead, it simply indicates the time by chiming the number on the hour—as well as a single chime every half hour—in the manner of a traditional clocktower.
Imagine you lived in a San Francisco home like the one below, on a downhill one-way street, and drove a stickshift. Assuming you pull into the garage head-on, that means every morning you need to back out in reverse and uphill, all while watching out for the oncoming cars that will require you hit the brake and the clutch mid-maneuver. I guarantee you're going to stall out at least a few times a month, not to mention ride the clutch a bit more than you ought.
Inside the same house we see the solution being built:
In this morning's car photography post, we caught a glimpse of the automotive turntables that we know from car dealerships, auto shows and the Batcave. Now we'll take a peek at the work of Carousel USA, one of the largest U.S. manufacturers of the devices, started by a mechanically-inclined guy named John Thomson.
CSI fans know we leave traces of ourselves on the objects we touch. Increasingly we leave digital traces as well, and recently the Texas-based artist Irby Pace has capitalized on that for his "Unintended Consequences" project. In a nutshell, Pace gathers his material by cruising Apple stores and e-mailing himself what he finds on the display models:
The photographs in "Unintended Consequences" come from camera equipped devices in Apple Computer stores. On a daily basis people are leaving their portraits behind on iPhones, iPads and iPods. Customers are disregarding their own discretion and abandoning these photographs. Since these images are anonymous the participants can represent themselves however they chose to without scrutiny. Taking these images explores the change in behavior when people do not consider how these images will be used.
An intended consequence of "Unintended Consequences" is a gallery showing at Texas' Cora Stafford Gallery, with a reception on February 9th. (Our apologies, but at press time the gallery website appeared to be broken.)
The avocado is venerated the world over. The fleshy fruit, native to Mexico, can be found as far as Bali or South Africa. Its bulbous shape and dark rind became the subject of a nuanced correspondence between designers Christiane Büssgen of Germany and Jesús Alonso of Mexico.
Through emails and sketches the two romanced the fruit to hypnotic levels, fleshing out projects in tableware with mixed materials in porcelain, wood, and metal. The avocado silhouette became the basis for the duo C4's Project Avolution presented at New York Design Week in 2011, combining a passion for food and natural materials, where each item on the table is related to a part of the avocado through its material or shape. Think skin, shape, and pit. Then add the avocado as ingredient.
The two designers first met in 2010 during New York Design Week and kept a vigilant avocado log. Christiane had been making porcelain avocado prototypes for more than a year, excited by their porous skin and bowl shape. Jesus extended the dialogue with poetic sketches and his own cultural context.
In Roman times people would gather to watch singular spectacles like gladiatorial combat. But nowadays we stage spectacles to promote spectacles, using viral marketing stunts to promote theatrical releases. The latest is this "Flying People in New York City" video by guerilla marketing agency Thinkmodo (the same people behind that Times Square stunt for Limitless) and the flying people, alas, are not real people:
The movie being promoted is the superhero sci-fi flick Chronicle, being released today in the UK and on Friday in the 'States.
Before stadium seating, the design thinking behind staggered seats in theaters was to provide line of sight. Better to view the stage partially obscured by two people's shoulders than stare squarely at the back of someone's head.
Photovoltaic arrays on solar farms have a similar problem, in that they must be placed in such a way that each panel does not block the sun's line of sight from its neighbors:
A sociologist might say television mirrors our desires as a society. But one thing I've wondered is why television manufacturers, now that TVs are flat, don't design their screens to be actual mirrors. The TV is always placed as a room's centerpiece, and when it's off you've got a large, black rectangle staring back at you. Wouldn't that be the perfect place to have a reflective surface?
A company called Seura thinks so, as they manufacture and sell an ultrathin television-covering mirror in a variety of frames and sizes, allowing the TV to completely disappear. Their bathroom series even allows you to tuck a monitor over your sink, though the somewhat hazy product photography doesn't present a clear image of how well they're able to pull this off.
Another company manufacturing TV mirrors is The Art of TV, who demonstrates a neat trick: The mirror and TV needn't match in size.
However, given a choice I'd opt for a perfectly-fitting one so that the image completely takes up the mirror. I don't need to catch a glimpse of my ice-cream-covered face and trash-strewn apartment while watching "Shipping Wars."
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.
A team of five guys in New Hampshire have developed and are now selling the MiVeu, a wearable, iPhone-holding harness that can be strapped to your chest, lower torso or even your leg. The get-up, which protects your iPhone in a housing that also slaps a custom-designed fisheye lens on it, seems aimed squarely at the GoPro crowd:
The goal of The New Museum's Proposition series isn't so much to answer questions or present cohesive, fully developed ideas, rather it invites speakers to wax theoretic on whatever topic they happen to be puzzling over. Past Propositions include Matthew Barney's "Ancient Evenings Storyboards," Byron Kim's "A Cosmology of Doubt" and Kara Walker's "The object of Painting is the subjugated Body. The Painter is the colonizing entity. How do Paintings understand the concept of liberty? And who will teach them?"
Last Thursday night, Anthony Huberman, the director of The Artist's Institute, spoke about "The Letter 'T'," specifically the words Tuned and Touched and what they mean in the context of the confounding and bizarre video work of Harold Thys and Jos De Gruyter (think of them as the Tim and Eric of the art world) and Rosemarie Trockel, who will (perhaps not coincidentally) be "taking over" the New Museum in the Fall.
Viewed through the lens of speculative realism (an object-oriented philosophy that's way too cerebral to get into here, just check out their Wikipedia page for now), Tuned refers to how one object (a person, an animal, a thing, even an idea) can be "tuned into" the vulnerability of another object, and Touched refers to what objects we respond to—what we're "touched" by—and why.
I went to The New Museum that night thinking "object" referred to design object, not every single animal, mineral, vegetable and intangible concept out there. I thought Huberman was going to discuss why we're drawn to certain objects—why, for example, I'm so drawn to Meret Oppenheim's "Object" (better known as the fur teacup), or the purple Peacock Chair or anything robin's egg blue—and he did, but in a much more abstract way than I had anticipated.
I read an article about a summer camp where one of the activities was showing the kids a bunch of old pieces of technology, and having them play around with them. The astonished author reported that most of the kids could not figure out how to dial a number on a rotary phone; they'd place their finger in the hole for "0" and drag the dial to the number they wanted to "activate," then release the dial.
This video here is similarly funny: Writer and blogger John Scalzi shows his 13-year-old daughter a vinyl LP, something she has never seen (or apparently heard of) before:
One of the odd things you derive pleasure from as an industrial designer is knowing how various things are made. You see an ornate table leg and you picture the lathe; you choose one metal product over another at the hardware store because you can see the stamping quality is better; you touch a plastic housing and find yourself instinctively looking for the parting line.
Every once in a while you run across an object that makes you shudder, because you have just a vague idea of how it was made and you suspect it was a royal pain in the ass. That was what I felt when I first saw Texas-based Johnny the woodworker's checkered boxes, pictured here. I almost felt irritated when I saw them, because they instantly reminded me of those times when you were waiting to use the table saw in the ID shop at school, and you saw the complicated thing the person in front of you was working on and realized you were going to be waiting for a while.
Capitalism says that competition will yield the best results for consumers. I like that concept and can get behind it, even at the expense of my own country, the U.S., since playing that game well is what made the U.S. successful to begin with. If a developing nation like China can manufacture goods superior to American goods at a cheaper price, the market should reward them. What bothers me is when an organization can succeed by making shoddy goods at a cheaper price and still be rewarded.
Pictured up top are three spoked balance wheels that fit on vintage and antique Singer sewing machines. One was made in America circa 1900. Another was made in America circa 1920. The third is a replica manufactured in China in the 2000s.
All three are made from cast iron and intended to be heavy, as they serve a flywheel purpose and need to be weighty enough to store momentum. All three are made the same way: They're sand cast in a foundry, and a hole is subsequently machined into the center, as the wheels are intended to fit onto a spindle on the rear of a sewing machine.
A thin, leather (or these days, rubber) belt is then placed into a groove on the inner surface of the handwheel. The belt is driven by a foot-powered treadle and the handwheel rotates, driving the shaft.
A cursory examination of the Chinese replica features several glaring flaws.
From the You've got to be kidding me department: Azerbaijan-based artist Rashad Alakbarov creates images by setting up ordinary objects (sometimes suspended in mid-air via wires) and shining a light onto them, turning the wall behind them into a canvas "painted" with light and shadows.
Whether you play Angry Birds, Infinity Blade or Scrabble, the one thing our smartphone games have in common is that they're all virtual; everything takes place on screen and in your mind. But now a Colorado-based robotics company called Orbotix has added a physical element to phone games, going way back to play basics: An actual ball.
It's no ordinary ball, of course. The Sphero is a self-propelled orb that you control via your phone or tablet, using your choice of interfaces depending on what game you're playing with it: A real-time driving app that lets you play pilot via tilting or button tapping, a "Draw N' Drive" app that has the ball follow a course you scribe on-screen with your finger, and a golf-like app that lets you "flick" the ball with on-screen gestures. Another cool thing is that you can change the color of your Sphero via on-screen commands, allowing you to differentiate yours with others you're competing against.
DESIGN MIAMI 2011
TOKYO DESIGN WEEK 2011
DUTCH DESIGN WEEK 2011
VIENNA DESIGN WEEK 2011
All photos by Petr Krejci
A ceramic by Rosemarie Trockel
