April 2011

Greetings Design Fans,

In celebration of Earth Day (April 22nd), Core77 will be exploring new frameworks in sustainability with a series of feature articles, video interviews and focused blog coverage throughout the month of April. Although we recognize that sustainability should always be at the forefront of the conversation in Industrial Design, we are excited about curating a selection of forward-thinking articles that will survey the current landscape, challenge designers in their approach but most importantly provide thought leadership in the field of sustainable design.

Today we are proud to kick off the Designers Accord Sustainability in Seven series, your daily dose of smart thinking direct from 18 of today's most interesting sustainability experts. Design educators have always found ways to illuminate new ideas, and this month Michael Sammet lays out a Design for Sustainability 3.0, while Core77 contributor Aart van Bezooyen starts a series on sustainable ideas from design schools and cities around the world. Design for America's Sami Nerenberg shares a solution for answering her students' fundamental question of "What is Design?" And finally, our book editor Robert Blinn reviews Carroll Gantz's history of The Industrialization of Design. Exploring the history of our field, we hope to discover ways to move forward towards a more sustainable future.

Earth Day, Everyday!
Core Jr.

BUILDING ADAPTIVE CAPACITY: TOWARDS A DESIGN FOR SUSTAINABILITY 3.0

Ten years after Cradle to Cradle, design for sustainability is now moving towards a new qualitatively different area of exploration: designing to build adaptive capacity. Design educator Michael Sammet explores new directions in sustainability design through the lens of adaptive capacity—designing for resilience, designing for resourcefulness and designing for empathy.

CORE77 PRESENTS THE DESIGNERS ACCORD SUSTAINABILITY IN 7 VIDEO SERIES

The Designers Accord Sustainability in 7 series stared with simple idea: How can we make the abstract subject of sustainability personal? The Designers Accord asked 18 sustainability experts to each make a short video of the top 7 things every designer should know about a specific topic in sustainability. Throughout the month of April, we will be posting a video-a-day. This bite-size professional education series is the first of its kind and we hope that it will help the design community fill the gaps in knowledge around integrating sustainability into design practice.

IT'S NOT EASY BEING GREEN

On March 1st, Core77 contributor Aart van Bezooyen and Paula Raché embarked on a unique project focusing on sustainability in materials and design, It's Not Easy Being Green. Instead of the usual desk research, they are on an 184-day creative journey around the world conducting lectures, student workshops, exchanging ideas with designers and taking notes on sustainability examples and challenges in the cities they visit. This month we follow their journey in Brazil in their first installment in a series on global lessons in sustainability design.

DIMENSIONS OF DESIGN

Through the work of many, including thought leaders such as Roger Martin and Tim Brown, design has become a key process and way of thinking that transcends disciplines and offers a roadmap for navigating and creating solutions. As the notion of design expands, it becomes more and more important for designers to continue to raise the curtain and democratize design by simply articulating what design is. Design educator Sami Nerenberg presents a simple and straightforward framework for tackling the question, "What is design?"

BOOK REVIEW: THE INDUSTRIALIZATION OF DESIGN, BY CARROLL GANTZ

Rarely is the history of industrial design given a publishing focus in the United States. Carroll Gantz's The Industrialization of Design is the first history of design we've seen in quite a while that also gives editorial space comparing the arc of industrial design in the United States as compared to Europe. The book opens tracking the "Twin Revolutions" in industry in the United States and Britain, walking the reader from the origins of design in both countries into the seamless multinational production effort that is most ID today. Reviewed by Robert Blinn.

LIVE FROM THE 2011 INTERNATIONAL HOME + HOUSEWARES SHOW

Not only did Core77 provide live video coverage from this year's Home and Housewares Show in Chicago, we also have product highlights of all our favorite water bottles, rainbow-colored kitchen gadgets, indoor firepits and houseware baubles collected in a one-stop-shop photo gallery!

Glenn Jones
Auckland, New Zealand

James Cogbill
Berkeley, CA

Ana-Maria Ghinita
Timisoara, Romania

Nenad Gucunja
NS, Yugoslavia

Shaun Chen
Turin, Italy

Senior Industrial Designer
Nottingham-Spirk Design
Cleveland, OH

Design Strategist, Aviation
Teague
Seattle, WA

Lead Designer
Whirlpool
Delhi, India

Product Design Manager
Bresslergroup
Philadelphia, PA

Toy Designer
Kid Robot
Boulder, CO

Industrial Design Manager
Vodafone
Dusseldorf, Germany

Find more jobs on Coroflot!

Featured Event: First Annual Core77 Design Awards
Deadline: May 3, 2011

IDSA Northeast Conference - Design 4 2011
April 8 - 9, 2011
RISD, Providence, RI

Salone Internazionale del Mobile
April 12 - 17, 2011
Milan, Italy

Present Tense: The 2011 D-Crit Conference
May 4, 2011
Visual Arts Theater, New York City

IIT Institute of Design Strategy Conference
May 12 - 13, 2011
Chicago, IL

New York Design Week and ICFF
May 14 - 17, 2011
New York, NY

Exhibition: Color Moves: Art and Fashion by Sonia Delaunay
Through June 5, 2011
Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, New York City

Find more design events on our calendar!

Biometric Designers Take Note: Goat Hooves Confer Ninja-like Climbing Abilities

"Clean" vs. "Dirty" Loft Conversions: Which Do You Prefer?

A Revolution in Mind-Blowing Video Made Possible by the Design of the GoPro

Monster Review: The iPad2 Form and Function

Using Geometry to Drill Non-Round Holes

Some sound advice from John C. Jay
"Just saw these great ten lessons for designer by Wieden+Kennedy’s Executive Creative Director, John C Jay..."

by bepster

Worst A$$hole Design Moves?
"So, what in your mind are some of the biggest design faux pas that are out there?"

by ip-wirelessly

Chris Bangle to design for Samsung
"'Chris Bangle, known as one of the most revolutionary and innovative automobile designers in world, has agreed to cooperate with Samsung Electronics to design new mobile phones and netbooks. Samsung Electronics recently signed the former design chief for BMW Group to help oversee major design projects, although he will not be an exclusive designer for the company, according to senior officials at Samsung.'

Jonny Ive may finally have a decent competitor. Too bad though Samsung is on Android/WP7 so doesn't have much hope in really competing in the holistic device realm."

by rkuchinsky

No Kooks
"Did something change in the last 5 years or so in job requirements for designers. Lately, I frequently see in job ads phrases like: must be nice, no kooks, no d bags, no evil people. I thought this goes without saying but is there a propensity for these types to respond to designer ads, so therefore employers have to explicitly list this as a requirement? Wow, I wonder what hiring managers have been getting in the work pool for designers."

by idguy88

Are Smartphones about communication or about control?
"I think all the successful telecommunication innovations of the last 10-15 years (text messaging, email, social media) have been not about communicating but about controlling the information you communicate. A phone call means you have to engage with someone else, whereas text/ email/ Facebook allows you some distance from the other person, and you can decide when and how you reply. I also think this is why video calling has not taken off, as looking at someone conveys so much more information than just speaking to them- you can’t control the communication nearly as well."

by sanjy009

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