We mentioned British folding bike manufacturer Brompton in yesterday's Tools & Kits entry, but as we haven't given them much ink since 2005, it's time for a little love.
Brompton's a company admirably sticking to their roots by continuing to design/manufacture in their birthplace of West London. While that can't be cheap, the company points out that "Moving production offshore in search of lower labour costs, business rates and taxes would certainly bring some obvious benefits, but these would be outweighed by the consequences of losing control over quality and, ultimately, losing the confidence of the consumer." Hear hear.
They've put together an inside-the-factory video, so you can see where the magic happens.
ROCCAT, one of the leading designers of high quality and innovative products for keen computer gamers, is seeking an experienced industrial designer. He or she will be part of a young and dynamic team with a flexible work environment in a fast growing company in an even faster growing market. Responsibilities within the Industrial Design department will include the participation in market research and the whole process from first sketches to mass production. Thus, the Industrial Designer will be in contact with ROCCAT colleagues, partners and manufacturers in Asia.
At first glance it might seem like Jim Garrison is New York's poster boy for modular housing. Amongst the most recent projects his eponymous firm has completed are the Net Zero for the 99% house, a day care center for Lehman College, homes and townhouses throughout New York state and the award-winning Koby Cottage, a guest house in Michigan that was assembled in 48 hours (you can watch a time-lapse video of the installation). All these projects are modular, aka prefabricated, a dirty word for some architects, but Jim doesn't shy away from it. In an industry that seems split over what to make of the rise of modularity, Jim is excited about its many advantages, but readily admits that "modular buildings aren't the solution to everything."
Prefabricated buildings "only have an advantage in so far as they're made in a factory under conditions that allow you to make a tighter building that doesn't lose as much air to the outside and can be more carefully constructed." But they present just as many problems as they do solutions. For starters, they must be designed to be boxed and shipped in accordance with Federal Highway Administration regulations. This, however, demands that the structures be more robust and able to withstand all the trucking, carting and shipping before they arrive to a site.
I asked Jim whether he found it difficult to work with so many limitations. "I think limitations always make one more creative," he said. "If you can define the problem in a way that gives it boundaries and something to push against and create within it almost always makes you better."
As any designer knows, Pantone chips are a small but very important tool of the trade. They're so small, in fact, that they often get lost or are mistakenly thrown away. Seriously, what are you supposed to do with the leftover chips? Throw them in a dish or tack each teeny weeny one to a cork board? It's pretty frustrating that Pantone hasn't come out with a way to organize its own product, but now there's SLIP, a system developed by Jesse Reed, a graphic designer at MoMA, that keeps your chips safe, tidy and visible.
"Like many designers, we know the frustrations of having disorganized drawers and envelopes full of Pantone chips that didn't make the cut or never made it to the printer. Our solution is simple—put your chips in a SLIP and don't feel guilty about tearing off a few extra options."
You can order a 5-pack of SLIPs for $12.95 and a 10-pack for $19.95.
In Korea, the Internet is everywhere. I had the privilege of living and working in Korea for a month this past summer and constantly found myself with opportunities to get online. The country is legendary for being the fastest, most wired in the world, but I didn't expect to find myself catching wifi signals in the midst of Buddhist monasteries and at the top of mountains.
But in Korea, business cards are all the rage as well. In business contexts, I received them almost immediately after shaking hands, whereas in more casual settings, I usually received them after dinner. It could have been just as easy to trade Facebook contact information, but the importance of the business card exchange is difficult to underestimate. All throughout Asia, I'd be met with looks of mild irritation if I forgot to bring my business cards with me.
In the US, I trade business cards much less frequently—in my circle, we just whip out our smartphones and follow each other on Twitter—but I still carry them around. And I start to wonder about how they can interface and remain relevant with a digital generation.
A creative approach to embedding a QR codes in a resume.
A simple question on the Core77 Discussion Board posed by dexigner20110 has sparked a flurry of discussion recently: "I'm in the process of designing our new business cards and would like to know if any of you put QR code on them?"
Wondered about the history of the Levi's 501? Where did the idea for the Barcelona chair come from? New York City's School of Visual Arts MFA program is presenting its first documentary film festival on Saturday, March 24th. In addition to screening a group of three short docs from the Objects of Desire BBC series and Selling the Sixties: How Madison Avenue Dreamed the Decade, the Film Festival will host the New York City premiere of The Book: the Last Chapter?, a documentary about the fate of the book in the age of the iPad and the Kindle.
Curated by Steven Heller, co-chair of the MFA Design Department at SVA, the festival will also include conversations with Alan Yentob, filmmaker and creative director of the BBC, and legendary advertising creative George Lois.
Full-day pass is $15 and you can pick one up here!
Saturday, March 24th
1 - 9pm
SVA Theatre, 333 West 23 Street, New York City
$15 pass includes all screenings
iStockPack offers a clear preview format so users can see the finished product and the vector file.
I love stock databases. They're the best marriage of sharing culture with graphic design, and they're a great resource for designers, especially ones working freelance or in small teams.
The site, still new, could use a few more resources, like clearer restrictions on licensing and usage. The usage section does mention restrictions, but it would be useful to include familiar language from, say, Creative Commons Licenses. It would also be great to have more social media features, to make it easier to share the ideas and inspiration on sites like Pinterest and Tumblr and to build a community amongst contributors.
But either way, iStockPack is a great pool of resources, and as they mention on their site, they're looking for more user contributions. Some contributions, like the ones below, offer extensive directions and resources.
This set of intersecting cubes uploaded by user ikarusmedia comes with extensive directions on assembling the finished product.
During a European backpacking trip, my friend's cheap rucksack burst open on a Barcelona train platform. With our train departing in fifteen, he sprinted to a nearby department store to replace it while I guarded his pile of crap. He returned in the nick of time carrying a garish, fluorescent orange and yellow number made for mountain climbing. "What the hell, man," I said, helping him load it up.
"It was all they had!"
That was in the '90s, and in the years since bag manufacturers have diversified, realizing that not everyone shopping for a rugged backpack wants one that can be spotted from a rescue helicopter. I'm reminded of this by the recently-announced Nomadic Pack shown here, borne out of a collaboration between surf lifestyle brand VSTR and NYC creative studio Partners & Spade. While the Nomadic Pack has that same top "cap," overall shape and similar compartment location as my friend's mountain climbing atrocity, it's done up in a much more urbane style while deftly side-stepping the Army/Navy rip-off look.
While some aspects of the design are a tad aspirational—being able to carry a laptop and an included hammock in the same bag is outside the bounds of realistic usage for me—I'm digging the removable messenger bag, and find the overall look far preferable to what's been on offer in previous years. I'm sure my friend would agree, as I got a lot of ball-busting mileage out of his last-minute purchase.
Bicycle Film Festival founder Brendt Barbur wants to go to hell: not literally, of course, but to the notoriously cobbled roads that define the storied Paris-Roubaix, a cycling race that is considered to be the Spring Classic par excellence since its inception in 1896. The ~160-mile (260 km) course features brutal stretches of "centuries-old" cobblestone that warrant the nickname "The Hell of the North" and "A Sunday in Hell."
This latter term of endearment is the title of Jørgen Leth's brilliant 1976 film about the day-long journey through damnation, widely regarded as not only a seminal cycling documentary but a classic sports documentary. In fact, A Sunday in Hell is not just a must-see for cycling fans but a compelling work of art in itself, and Barbur—representing a new generation of storytellers—was so inspired by the documentary that he hopes to turn his cameras towards the Danish filmmaker himself.
The Commentator, which takes its name from Leth's current role, is equal parts reprise, homage and contemporary reexamination of the Paris-Roubaix. After 11 years and running of soliciting DIY shorts for the Bicycle Film Festival, Barbur is no stranger to emerging crowdsourcing platforms; hence, his Kickstarter campaign to cover production costs. He's put together a nice pitch, interpolating clips of Leth's landmark film of some 36 years prior... and if that's not incentive enough, Albert Maysles is on board.
Architecture magazine eVolo has announced the finalists and winners of their 2012 Skyscraper Design Competition, and even those that didn't make the top three are well worth a gander. Check out the Migrant Skyscraper concept pictured above, by Damian Przybyla and Rafal Przybyla of Poland, which won a mere Honorable Mention but caught our eye for being equal parts crazy and alluring.
The "Migrant Skyscraper" is literally mobile: A giant, thin tire with a building and green space in the center, this skyscraper is ready to roll.
The concept behind this structure is that in an unstable world, people need the stability of self-sufficiency to truly be free, and the future of the architectural field can help provide that to people. By constructing a safe haven for residents to live in that ensures they will have food to eat and water to drink, the Migrant Skyscraper affords people freedom despite what natural and social disasters may come. The building-inside-a-wheel can stay stationary for however long residents please, but, for example, if political upheaval destabilizes a region, residents can fire up the biofuel-powered engine and cruise to a new location.
Another standout Honorable Mention winner is the Human Rights Skyscraper in Beijing concept by Ren Tianhang, Luo Jing, Kang Jun of China, a blistering critique of the government's handling of land acquisition.
The structure is the same length as the Forbidden City, and is located directly to the east of it. ("Ironically," the designers say, "it confronts the Forbidden City, the symbol of the superpower of despotism, emphasizing the priority of human rights in a dramatic and symbolic way.") Living spaces within the structure measure 25 by 30 by 25 meters. This proposal was not made by politicians, they stress, or economists. "We are people. We just want a house, and land."
Though the concept is a Chinese one designed for China that does not mention the U.S. at all, if it came out of America I'd consider it a scathing commentary on the contrived nature of American suburbs.
I know it's only Hump Day so the boss may still be breathing down your neck, but if you can steal the time I'd recommend looking through the complete list of the competition's finalists/winners. If you don't have the time, at least check out these highlights:
I'm guessing an igloo-building Inuit would call it cheating, but Norwegian architecture studio Gartnerfuglen has designed an interesting take on locally-sourced building materials for an Arctic-ready temporary dwelling. Their mobile ice fishing hut consists of a flatpack wooden framework, with panes for the walls and pitched roof made from chicken wire; instructions for how to do this are not clear, but apparently the ice fisher draws water from the hole they've cut in the ice, applies that water to the chicken wire, and it then freezes into solid panes, providing a measure of protection from the wind.
The supreme irony: It takes two people to get the structure up, but only one person can fit inside.
The hand plane used by woodworkers for generations has a blade placed at an angle between two flat pieces, enabling it to cleanly trim the surface of wood without gouging it. In the 1700s a clever Frenchman named Jean-Jacques Perret made a version of this that men could drag across their face in order to shave. Inspired by the hand plane, he had invented the world's first safety razor.
By the early 1900s, an American inventor named King Camp Gilette invented a disposable safety razor—and a wicked business practice known as the "loss leader": the idea is that you sell the main component of a system for cheap (or even give it away), but you make all your money back selling crucial accessories for it at high prices.
This model is still being used today—look at printers and toner cartridges, or even subsidized cell phones and usurious data usage plans. And of course, disposable razors are still frickin' expensive—locally I have to shell out 30 bucks for 12 razor cartridges, nearly $3 per cartridge—while the handles are not.
Dollar Shave Club is a new company that's finally addressing this situation with reasonable prices. Sign up and they send you a free razor handle up front, like the old business model; but then they send you a package of cartridges every month (three, four or five depending on what plan you select) for something closer to what they actually cost to produce. The monthly fees go as low as a buck per month for five of their basic-model cartridges, which rings in at just 20 cents per cartridge—though the fee is suffixed with the ominous "plus shipping & handling." (What the heck is "handling," anyway?)
In any case, their explanatory video is pretty awesome (or "f***cking great," in their words). Any commercial where the CEO swings a machete near an employee gets my respect:
Cooper is seeking a Visual Design Director who will be responsible for assisting in the mentoring and development of the visual design staff. This position is also responsible for providing Engagement Leadership/Creative Direction on design projects, marketing, practice leadership and innovation. This position collaborates with interaction designers, industrial designers, usability practitioners and engagement leads, contributing a visual and brand perspective throughout the lifecycle of the product definition, design and documentation process.
As the 2012 academic year draws to a close at the Rhode Island School of Design, seniors from every department have been organizing and putting on shows that exhibit the best and the brightest of the class of 2012. This past Thursday marked the opening of the RISD Industrial Design department's Senior Show. The exhibition was publicized with hundreds of wooden cubes placed in mailboxes and around campus to advertise the show, which took place in the Woods-Gerry Gallery in Providence, Rhode Island.
The show displayed a wide range of work from wall-mounted bike holders to catheter underwear. Students in the RISD ID department have the opportunity to take Advanced Studios in a diverse array of subjects, from sustainability through the up-cycling of discarded resources in Costa Rica to material explorations in slip-casting ceramics. These radically different studios lead students down very different paths, and account for the range of work that was on display.
Speakers made from discarded plant byproducts by Alex Epstein
Mechanical exploration in copper wire by Alex Savard
Think of the possibilities of a world where social entrepreneurs are funded by venture capitalists. For the people behind COMMON, this is the world that they have made a reality with their series of COMMON Pitch events. As co-founder John Bielenberg explained in our Core77 Guide to COMMON, "COMMON Pitches are American Idol meets VC pitches."
Last week, Core77 was on-hand in Cape Town, South Africa to cover the first international COMMON Pitch event. Promoted as a satellite event for the Design Indaba conference, eleven incredible entrepreneurs pitched their ideas for affecting social change across Africa to a packed house of enthusiastic supporters, but more importantly, a judging panel of five experts— Ian Moir (CEO of Woolworths), Serame Taukobong (CMO of MTN), Ory Okolloh (Policy and Government Relations Manager for Google Africa) Carlo Ratti (Director of SENSEable Cities Labs at MIT) and John Bielenberg (Co-Founder of COMMON).
Set against the backdrop of Cape Town's City Hall, the entrepreneurs shared their plans for tackling some of the continent's biggest problems—urban farming, early childhood education, recycling plastic waste and empowering women. The winning idea was also the simplest. Dr. Johnny Anderton, a native Capetonian, captivated the audience to his EarthBagBuild System, a straightforward construction system that combines ancient building techniques with 21st century technology. His winning pitch won the project a cash and prize project worth R220,000 (almost $30,000USD)
Earthbag construction is not a new concept. The idea of building structures of layered sacks filled with locally available materials was employed in military bunker construction and flood control. What separates EarthBagBuild is a locally developed and patented high strength polypropylene bag created with recycled materials. Dr. Johnny explains more in the exclusive Core77 video below.
The homes and buildings created with EarthBags are attractive, inexpensive, structurally sound, durable, energy-efficient, acoustically efficient, rot and corrosion proof, fire resistant, non-toxic and bulletproof! The polypropylene bag, made from an industrial by-product, is re-usable and recyclable. Once the structure is built, it can be finished with stucco. The EarthBagBuild concept encourages the establishment of community home-building projects where groups learn to build their own houses, training others in aspects of the system, thus creating a viral growth of jobs, micro-businesses and self-financed or government grant assisted homes. Dr. Johnny Anderton walks us through some of the EarthBagBuild projects below:
Jouberton Preschool The Faculty of Architecture, University of Nottingham, UK, designed the project to build a preschool in Jouberton township near Klerksdorp in South Africa. The students then came over and did the construction themselves.
Urban landscape photographer Jake Dobson had a cool assignment: To snap pictures while walking from Manhattan's 34th Street and 11th Avenue to 42nd Street and 8th Avenue. The kicker was that he got to make the journey ten stories underground, in NYC's newest, still-under-construction subway tunnel.
Under contract for Gothamist, the Brooklyn-based shooter documented Manhattan's 7 Train Extension project, capturing the circular tunnel lined with curved, prefabricated concrete slabs and the vaulted new station expected to accommodate 35,000 people each hour.
Urban landscape photographer Jake Dobkin had a cool gig: to snap pictures while walking from Manhattan's 34th Street and 11th Avenue to 42nd Street and 8th Avenue. The kicker was that he got to make the journey ten stories underground, in NYC's newest, still-under-construction subway tunnel.
On assignment for Gothamist, the Brooklyn-based shooter documented Manhattan's 7 Train Extension project, capturing the circular tunnel lined with curved, prefabricated concrete slabs and the vaulted new station expected to accommodate 35,000 people each hour.
Following our entry mentioning Birzman's purty bike tools, reader Frank turned us on to Lezyne, a bicycle accessories company that's just celebrated their 5th birthday last week. Lezyne's products are borne from "a love for cycling [combined with] a passion for design—exquisitely designed, intelligently engineered, and functionally complete," says the company, which was started by former triathlete Micki Kozuschek.
Although based in California, Kozuschek originally hails from Germany, explaining Lezyne's striking, Teutonic aesthetic.
Operating under the ethos of "Engineered Design," the company produces a beautiful line of accessories including tools, pumps, bottle cages, saddle bags and most recently, LED lights.
"In the old days, everything just worked. It didn't look great, but it worked. Now some things look great, but they don't last," Kozuschek told Velo News several years ago, when the company began expanding their product range. "We're doing this differently."
The common wisdom with stacking chairs is that each one should be identical. Place one atop another, and the stack grows. But Strasbourg, France-based designer Paul Menand's take is a bit more sophisticated: Since 2009 he's been working on stacking chairs that are complementary. Through clever engineering, he's managed to create the Chaise Triplette, a single chair that breaks into three:
Skeptics will point out that the ginger way in which he handles them in the video indicates the chairs' fragility, but these are presumably prototypes made of wood; using a stronger, compound material, we could see these working just fine. Color us impressed.
Like many of our faithful readers, Australian designer and sometime filmmaker Björn Rust noticed the trend of production/fabrication/manufacturing videos and saw fit to share his own take on the same. "Made by Hands" depicts the manufacturing of an aluminum and wood bench for Street & Garden Furniture Co.
I assure you that these are the only two shots of just hands...
As with the video for Kaspar Hamacher's "Ausgebrannt," Rust opts for natural audio as opposed to a staid folk ditty or a hip indietronica tune; unlike Hamacher, Rust leaves the original audio intact instead of dramatizing the sounds with heavy reverb. The result is an uncannily understated video that mirrors the un-self-conscious efforts of the workers themselves, sans so much as descriptive text or voiceover.
QR code business card by 
iStockPack offers a clear preview format so users can see the finished product and the vector file.
This set of intersecting cubes uploaded by user ikarusmedia comes with extensive directions on assembling the finished product.
Speakers made from discarded plant byproducts by 
Mechanical exploration in copper wire by 
It gets a bit literal
I assure you that these are the only two shots of just hands...
