You kids today don't know how good you have it. In the past, if you wanted to see visuals like the ones in the video below, you'd have to build a time machine and/or take hard drugs. But nowadays you can just attach a digital camera to a power drill:

The video is the work of Oscar Lhermitte, a London-based product designer originally from France. Speaking of which, the ending of another video he did in this series is soooo French:

Software Engineer - Front-End
Yelp Inc.
San Francisco, California

Front-End Engineers at Yelp lay down the polish on each of their core properties: they are our engineering front line. From implementing new user interfaces and features to battling browser inconsistencies and everywhere in between, they walk the HTML, CSS and JavaScript stack with ease. Their Front-End Engineers are the glue between our engineering team and the more than 61 million people who visit Yelp every month. The fruits of their labor are released on a daily cycle.

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The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.

We are excited to announce our next five jury teams that will join the Core77 Design Awards! Our newly confirmed teams are for the Interaction (London), Service (New York), Social Impact (Pretoria), Soft Goods (San Francisco) and Furniture & Lighting (Chicago) categories.

Their Jury Captains have selected an inspiring group of local experts working in different areas of the field. These individuals will come together in their home city to judge their category and reconvene in July to participate in live jury announcements. So drumroll please: Check out our second group of distributed jury teams. They are ready and waiting for your projects.

Be sure to enter soon, our early bird deadline is approaching fast. March 13 is the last day to submit your projects at our reduced early bird discount rate. Start by registering today and we will send you one of our stunning limited edition posters for free.

See the first six jury teams here.

Visit the Core77 2012 Design Awards for full details.

It may seem incomprehensible to the latest generation, but we used to choose what art schools we'd apply to by looking at printed paper brochures that came in the mail. In an era before social media and the internet, a school's reputation wasn't easy to ascertain, particularly if you lived far away from it; your high school art teacher—who might've been anything from an out-of-work landscaper to a bored housewife—would tell you they heard RISD was good, for instance, and that was about the extent of it.

Technology being where it's at today, I'm frankly surprised we don't see more art schools pushing themselves with promotional videos. I hope more schools follow CCA's lead, as they recently released a blitz of videos showing students from various majors discussing what their experience is like at the school.

Below is the Industrial Design one featuring a student named Haley—who went from bike shop mechanic to ID student—talking about the program and how it led her to an internship at Nike.

Dan Provost and Tom Gerhardt, the guys behind Studio Neat, improved our iDevice experiences in the traditional ID way: By designing physical products, like the Glif and the Cosmonaut. In search of more cool things you can do with an iDevice, they're now branching out into software.

Their just-released Frames app makes it easy to create time-lapse and stop motion videos, without having to export and string individual shots together on your computer:

Frames gives you lockable control over the shutter, exposure and focus, provides the option of a grid overlay, and even lets you adjust the frames per second. Here's how it works:

Last week, Cooper-Hewitt hosted the Social Impact Design Summit, a one-day event that brings leaders from design, academia and the community together to discuss the state of socially responsible design, specifically how design can be used to improve "access to services such as healthcare and education and increase social, economic and environmental sustainability."

Not being a leader in the field myself, I asked Bill Moggridge, the Cooper-Hewitt's Director, as well as Jason Schupbach, the Director of Design for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), to weigh in on the day's events.

"We managed to convene a powerful group of international design minds for the Social Impact Design Summit, so we could tap into the knowledge of the people who engage in this work every day," said Moggridge. "We talked about how to advance the field of socially responsible design, spending the morning focusing on three key issues: gaps in the field; successful organizational models; and preparing future generations of designers in the field. In the afternoon, we broke out into small discussion groups to brainstorm solutions and possible action points.

"We never expected to solve these complex problems in one day, but we certainly did get people talking. Ideas, both big and small, were put forth and will be shared through a white paper to be released this Spring, along with videos and next steps for this growing area of design. Several participants will also be contributing blog posts in the coming weeks, and we invite everyone to use our social media channels to add their own ideas on developing the field of socially responsible design."

For Schupbach, the NEA Design program plans to support "social impact design projects through our core grant-making. It is our hope that the information collected from this convening will allow us to assist in building a stronger structure of support for this emerging field of practice, and to also potentially clarify strategies for American designers to design for their local communities and with the other 90%."

Let Moggridge and everyone else at Cooper-Hewitt know what you think on their Facebook page. Let's start a discussion that includes both leaders in social innovation and us regular folk, too.

The Social Impact Design Summit was planned in partnership between Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, The Lemelson Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and hosted at the Rockefeller Foundation.

We're counting down to this Saturday when we'll be LIVE from the floor of the International Home + Housewares Show. The annual event presents the most exciting product innovations from the industry with categories dedicated to cleaning, dining, electronics/appliances and international pavilions. With over 2,000 exhibitors from 34 countries, we're excited to bring you trends, design news and exhibition design direct from the floor. Stay tuned as we connect you with celebrity chefs, industry leaders, independent designers and winners of this year's Student Design Competition through carefully curated video content, product profiles and a complete photo gallery!

International Home and Housewares Show 2011: Student Design Competition 1st and 2nd Place Winners from Core77 on Vimeo.

Not only has this year's show expanded from three to four days, but the International Housewares Association (sponsors of the show) recently released their first ever app. Attendees can use the app to search for exhibitor booths, pre-plan and customize a showplan, access essential information about educational events and stay on top of the show through social media feeds. Download the app today and get ready for this year's show!

International Home + Housewares Show 2012
March 10-13, 2012
McCormick Place
Chicago

The 2012 International Home + Housewares Show (IHHS) is a four-day event held annually by the International Housewares Association (IHA) to feature the newest product innovations and trends for all areas of the home. Exhibitors, industry leaders, buyers, and professionals from all over the globe attend this world-class trade show to see what's new and discuss the future of the industry.

Check out our full video coverage from last year—22 designers, from AMAC's plastic boxes to Iron Chef Cat Cora, share the story behind their products.

Our friend Alberto Villarreal sent us details about their recent collaboration with Guadalajara's EOS México, a firm founded by brothers Mauricio and Sebastian Lara. Like many a clever design, "EOSkate" started with a mistake: the latter firm was preparing a book to commemorate a decade of their work when a printing error yield "several hundreds of (somehow) useless books."

Instead of merely recycling the flawed volumes, "the creative minds of the Lara brothers turned this 'error' into a design opportunity."

They saw this as an excuse to recycle the books into art and design pieces and invited 11 designers/firms to create objects using the books as a raw material, and gave 6 to 10 books to each invitee.

Alberto Villarreal and his team at AGENT (the Mexico City-based firm he leads), started brainstorming about what to do with the books they got. [They] roughed out several ideas and ended up designing a skateboard made out of paper (from the book pages) mixed with resin.

Villarreal tells us,

I saw this as an opportunity to experiment with materials—the book itself has so much color in the pages and this encouraged us to play up the graphic content, but when we started experimenting with the paper new things came up.

We didn't follow a logical A to B process. We didn't know what was going to be the outcome, but while experimenting and analyzing the properties of the paper, new ideas started to come out.

Artist: lunchbreath
More: View all cartoons

We've seen at least one discreet fender concept before*, and the growing popularity of cycling certainly invites further innovation. Lest we succumb to the likes of the entirely inane (and ill-advised) "Uberhood," London-based designer Mark Windsor has risen to the challenge with a pair of folding polypropylene fenders that might just do the trick.

The attachment mechanism of both the removable Quickfix and more permanent Foldnfix are both rather less complicated than the company's namesake knot: they slot through the seatstays, to which they are fastened, with a third attachment point on the seat tube. The result is invariably described as origami-like, a shorthand that also captures the fact that it packs flat (into a distinctly necktie-like shape) when not in use.

Where the Quickfix attaches with "marine-grade metal snaps," the Foldnfix is geared towards those who require "full-time protection," i.e. during the rainier months of, say, the Pacific Northwest. Indeed, it's no coincidence that Windsor's stateside business partner, Catherine Liu, hails from none other than Portland, Oregon.

Which is a long way of saying: he's looking to Kickstart his U.S. distribution, and considering that he's offering $5 off either model in order to meet a minimum shipment requirement, he should have no problem reaching his modest goal of $5,000. (Video below...)

Senior User Interface Architect / Strategist
blacQube LLC
Atlanta, Georgia

blacQube, a young, client-centric agency, is seeking a Senior User Interface Architect / Strategist to conceive extraordinary user experience that forms a customer's impression of our clients' offerings, differentiates our clients from their competitors, and compels visitors to come back.

As an integral part of our project teams, the Senior UI Architect creates innovative, clever solutions for a variety of digital platforms (microsites, corporate websites, email, mobile sites, apps etc.). This includes creating sitemaps, wireframes and detailed documentation, indicating intended functionality, specifications and content and copy requirements.

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The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.

Images and Article by Rachel Lehrer

In October, 2008, Medicare—the United States' government program that pays 40% of the nation's hospital bills—decided to stop covering hospital failures. This meant that a litany of preventable mistakes, including treatments resulting from surgical errors, patient accidents and infections, were now the financial responsibility of the hospital. As a result, medical accidents went from being a source of hospital revenue to a massive financial drain. The good news is that medical institutions were finally forced into the business of disease prevention, at least once people were in their care.

What can be done to prevent costly medical mistakes? The hospital reform with the greatest potential is also the easiest to implement, at least in theory. According to the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths statistics, hospital acquired infections kill more people in America than AIDS, breast cancer and auto accidents combined. Furthermore, the vast majority of the patients that acquire such infections in hospitals—and more than 5 percent of patients do—get them from the hands of health care providers. Thankfully, hospitals have become increasingly concerned with hand hygiene. The dirty hands of doctors and nurses aren't just gross—they are an extremely expensive and potentially fatal act of carelessness. Hospital staffers, in order to follow protocol, need to wash their hands hundreds of times a day. Their failure to follow protocol perfectly is their personal responsibility but non-compliance on such a broad scale is also a failure of the medical system that creates the rules and environment that lead non-compliance.

The medical industry's acknowledgment of hand hygiene as a systemic problem has led to the establishment and growing influence of Infection Control and Prevention Units. For Infection Control and Prevention, solving handwashing takes the form of cheeky posters of doctors reminding everyone to wash their hands, developing inane training videos demonstrating how to properly wash your hands and implementing incentive programs where health care workers reward each other with certificates when they observe a co-workers consistent compliance. In the hospital where I have focused my research, these certificates were returned unused.

One increasingly popular but misguided program has to been to implement paternalistic monitoring of nurses and other providers, who are forced to undergo increasing levels of surveillance. Whether it is video monitoring systems borrowed from meat manufacturing plants or sensor systems that read the alcohol content on hands, staff are cajoled into changing their behavior by receiving real time feedback combined with their fear that their personal compliance level is now public knowledge. There is no carrot—there is only a stick.

Despite growing desperation, few designers have bothered to do much of anything that might make washing or sanitizing hands more appealing. A recent scientific study pointed to "perceived busyness" as one of the primary deterrents to compliance. But this only demonstrates the silliness of current reforms. After all, if followed literally, the prescribed protocol for hand cleaning would require so much of the health care workers time that they wouldn't actually be able to perform the rest of their job. During a recent observation, nurses were consistently walking from supply closets to narcotic storage bins to patients rooms with their hands full. How, then, can they follow protocol and wash their hands correctly when they enter the room? Are monitoring systems supposed to solve these problems? Or are we merely putting increased strain on an already stressed population without offering any design solutions?

2012 Pritzker Prize-winner Wang Shu has a sense of design that's markedly different from the more typical style of slick, mass-produced architecture prevalent in China today. In fact, his work possesses an intentionally imperfect craftsmanship that is nonetheless "astonishingly beautiful," and his recent Pritzker win can be seen as a major victory for those who boldly reject popular Chinese architecture, something he calls "a learned and copied modern architecture from the Western world [with] no relation to our local life."

Shu lives in Hangzhou, China, where he started Amateur Architecture Studio in 1998 with his wife, Lu Wenyu. He discovered early on that he didn't just want to make "good architecture. I realized," he said in an interview with the Architect's Newspaper, "that it's not just about good architecture, but about the best way to design and to construct. It was a more basic question." So he took himself out of the world of professional architects and instead spent time discussing materials with workers. He turned to renovation, "a rich experience because any time you design something in this field, it's important to see that there are some things that have existed before you. It's not just designing on an empty piece of paper or on an empty site. You have to wonder how you can create something that takes the past and turns it into the future."

Furthermore, renovating allowed him to interact closely with materials. "When you do a renovation for a building you have to touch the materials. It's not just the materials, but it's the way the materials change with time, the weather, or with people's lives. You have to design new things that can co-exist. So now when I design a new building, even on an empty site, my way is very similar to a renovation."

His 'materials first' approach is clear in projects like the Xiangshan campus for the China Academy of Art and the Ningbo History Museum (above), a brutalist masterpiece and my favorite of Shu's work. In fact, Shu is one of few architects who views building as a work in process. Instead of creating hard and fast site plans, he discusses the project with the workers and builders as he goes along, making changes and adjustments to his design up until its completion.

"I prefer to talk about natural materials that aren't artificial. It's not just about an interest in recycled materials. But if you think you are a modern architect or a contemporary architect you should be critiquing reality. Maybe in the next 10 years I'll use other kinds of materials. But in the past 10 years, I felt there was too much demolition and I wanted to propose an answer to that. Of course this is about attitude. On the other side, using this material has led to an architectural way—the craftsman's skills."

Shu views his Pritzker Prize not only as a source of personal encouragement at a moment in his career when he was going to take a step back to focus on his family life, but also as a source of inspiration for younger architects fighting against China's shiny, pseudo-Western architectural style. "In China, "Shu says, "we have many projects, but only a few good projects. Good architecture is not just design, but I think it's closer to a struggle."

Imagine having so many cool chairs just lying around your office that you're unwittingly (and literally) sitting on a major design exhibition. That was the situation Dr. Diane DeMill Jacobsen, who heads up the Jacobsen Collection of American Art, found herself in. Through the persistence of a former curator at the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Jacksonville, Florida, Jacobsen was talked into lending the pieces out for a traveling show.

The Art of Seating: Two Hundred Years of American Design...presents a survey of exceptional American chair design from the early 19th century to the present day. The chair is experienced not only as a functional item, but as sculptural in view—the chair as art.

Each of the approximately 40 chairs in the exhibition are chosen for their beauty and historical context with important social, economic, political and cultural influences. Selections from The Jacobsen Collection of American Art are joined by contemporary designs offering a stylistic journey in furniture with show-stoppers by John Henry Belter, George Hunzinger, Herter Brothers, Stickley Brothers, Frank Lloyd Wright, Charles & Ray Eames, Isamu Noguchi, and Frank Gehry among others.

It's nice to see an American design show that stretches back to the early 19th Century, when we were not a wealthy nation and had to make do with what was on hand. It's also nice to see that the show is traveling outside of the major U.S. cities, to spread some goodness where design is not necessarily a hot topic; after kicking off at MoCA in Jacksonville, the show has landed at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, where Jacobsen will deliver an attendant lecture entitled Global Influence on American Design on the 16th of this month.

In the video below, Jacobsen talks about the genesis of the show and one chair in particular, the House of Representatives Chamber Arm Chair. (Sign of the times: The Congressmen of 1857 rejected a particular design element of the chair because they considered it excessively expensive.)

To be perfectly honest, there's not too much I can say about this functional work of art—the pictures speak for themselves—except, of course, to share what industrial designer Greg Opatik recently divulged on his employer's blog. While his day job as Director of Design at Genesis Seating, which manufactures Eames Classics for none other than Herman Miller, might simply require their signature attention to detail, Opatik has taken the liberty of extrapolating their design philosophy to his instrument of choice: the electric guitar.

He's been at it for five years now, handcrafting sculptural instruments under the moniker Sinuous Guitars with three goals in mind: "ergonomics; [strengthening] the intimate relationship with the player and the instrument; and how to create something special and truly authentic."

Thus, the luthier is entirely justified in his assertion that "the Eames would call this "how-it-should-be-ness."

Don't be fooled by the possibly-Cheetos-inspired text treatment...

DARPA's mission statement conjures MI6's fictional R&D Department, headed by Q in James Bond films or Lucius Fox's subterranean lab in The Dark Knight:

DARPA's mission is to maintain the technological superiority of the U.S. military and prevent technological surprise from harming our national security by sponsoring revolutionary, high-payoff research bridging the gap between fundamental discoveries and their military use.

In other words, DARPA is more or less tasked with turning science fiction into reality, if their recent viral video of a svelte robot cheetah hitting its stride at an impressive (and weirdly terrifying) 18mph sprint.

That's a solid 40% increase over the previous record, set by MIT Leg Lab's Planar Biped back in 1989. (Indeed, the Cheetah was developed less than ten miles away from Cambridge—a half-hour run for the Cheetah—by Boston Dynamics of Waltham, MA ,for DARPA's Maximum Mobility and Manipulation (M3) program—it should come as no surprise that acronyms figure heavily into their project names.)

The Cheetah's impressive 3:20 mile is appreciably faster than a human at a clip, though it's worth noting that Usain Bolt has been clocked at a top speed of 28mph... and the animal for which the robot is named tops out at the oft-cited 70mph mark.

In fact, the biomorphic aspect is paramount: "The robot's movements are patterned after those of fast-running animals in nature. The robot increases its stride and running speed by flexing and un-flexing its back on each step, much as an actual cheetah does."

But enough chit-chat, you want to see the effin' thing in action:

Yes, there's a car in this photo

Mercedes' new F-Cell Hydrogen Electric Drive car produces zero emissions, making it, as the automaker states, "Invisible to the environment." To drive this point home they commissioned an "invisible" version and drove it around town, recording the car (and passersby's reactions) for viral video purposes.

Obviously it's not quite real invisibility, but I won't spoil the surprise of how they did it (and you may be able to guess before you see the video):

The problem with tool collections is that there's no end to them. Whether you fix cars, computers or carbines, you could spend the rest of your life amassing better and more specific tools to help you get the job done quicker. So it's always fascinating to see manufacturers trying to wrangle an unruly assortment of implements into something comprehensive, yet manageable in size.

Take bicycle repair tools, for instance. At the high end of the scale you've got Park Tool's Master Mechanic Tool Set, a turn-key package for someone looking to open up a bike repair shop. It consists of 218 tools, gauges, lubricants, fixtures, and even a stool to park your ass on while banging out the repairs. If you order one of these you'll help keep the local UPS guy in shape, as it arrives at your doorstep in four boxes totaling nearly 200 pounds in weight.

Stepping down a bit, you've got smaller, self-contained kits from manufacturers like Revolution (pictured at the top of this entry), Shimano and the aformentioned Park Tool with tools numbering in the low dozens rather than low hundreds. These are aimed more at the self-sufficient cyclist looking to do their own maintenance rather than open up a shop, and come with their own little kit boxes meant to ride on a workbench rather than populate an entire Craftsman cart.

Down at the individual and small-set tool level, manufacturer Birzman gets particularly design-y with their wrenches and sets, which have a sexiness I haven't seen in, say, auto repair, gunsmithing or woodworking tools. Some of them have even won iF and Red Dot Design Awards.

We hadn't heard from the fellas at Diatom since they sent us their Kickstarter project, the Open Source Sketchchair, last spring. Eleven months later and one world tour later, the dynamic design and digital fabrication duo from Down Under (and less-alliterative London) have partnered with a couple of collaborators at Carnegie Mellon's Computational Design Lab to present "Piccolo," a purportedly "pocket-sized stand-alone CNC platform for under $70."

It's essentially a kit to turn your trusty Arduino into a very basic, very small CNC machine. The video below illustrates its functionality (namely, drawing tiny pictures):

Sharing ideas using 16,800 pencils and 10,000 post-it notes at the Capetown World Design Capital 2014 booth

With over 400 exhibitors, the Design Indaba Expo showcases a diverse range of South African design. Featuring everything from furniture to jewelry, fashion to homewares, we were just two of over 40,000 people to walk the floors of the Expo over the three day showcase. Below we've identified some of our favorite products from this year's show...

Consol Sun Jar - Sometimes the most simple solutions are the best. For over 60 years, South African glass manufacturers Consol have been creating packaging solutions for both commercial and consumer applications. Their newly introduced "Solar Jars" leverage their brand's history while providing a simple, lowcost light for indoor/outdoor use. A Consol mason jar lid is fitted with a solar panel and LED lights—a full charge emits up to six hours of light. It's a straightforward version of Tobias Wong's Sun Jar at less than half the price.

The Soft Machine - Debuting at Design Indaba, the Soft Machine is a food design venture that serves deliciously fresh soft serve ice creams in whimsical South African flavors like Honey Bush Tea, Sweet Corn with Tomato Jam and Moer Koffie. Because ice cream is a small delight best shared, we love the bespoke stools built for two. The tricked out soft serve truck was conceptualized by Cape Town digital creative agency CowAfrica, using graphics from local studio Radio, the Soft Machine is a converted 1960 Gypsy Caravan designed and built by Thingking.

Bike Bench - Finalist for the student category of the annual Western Cape Furniture Initiative competition, the "Bike Bench" is a dual-purpose public bench and bike rack. Designed by Pierre N.F. Roux, a recent graduate of Cape Peninsula University, the h-shaped design can be strung together to expand the seating for a variety of different public spaces.