A modular toolbelt cut down on the Nurses need to practice hand hygiene by making her tools more accessible but it nevertheless made her movement more restricted. Images and Article by Rachel Lehrer

The best part of any design process is seeing your ideas touch the real world. Prototypes bring queries and hypothesis to life. They show things that in retrospect seem obvious but in prospect are entirely unexpected. After 7 months spent researching hand hygiene compliance in a hospital, I was finally able to walk through the rotating doors and unveil a design under the expectant gaze of the nurse who was going to experience it all day.

My past life as a dancer has made my design process movement-driven. In health care, this translates to a focus on understanding the physical roadblocks to peak performance. I'm a physical therapist for environments; our bodies are our inescapable collaborators. Through enactments, observing the subtle nuances of movement and through physically knowing the process of "hardwiring" movement rituals, I've been able to look at physical behaviors and spatial intention from the strategic vantage point of the body.

In my previous article on hand hygiene, I established a series of movement lenses for increasing hand hygiene compliance in a hospital—movement scripts, muscle memory, environmental ergonomics. Now the resulting hypotheses have been tested. Each intervention utilizes my movement driven perspective but also challenges the institutional reliance on quantitative proof and bottom-line driven decisions that make experimenting and designing in a hospital almost ironic. In a place that relies on proven discrete solutions, the messiness, questioning and experimentation of a design process must win its right to be there. It's an understatement to say that a design practice—always questioning the real culprit, always probing, always wondering if there might be a better way—makes the hospital status quo nervous.

PROVOKING AND INSCRIBING

You can't change someone's behavior before you understand it and so I began my research phase by observing the nurses, whose behavior I hoped to change, and the Infection Prevention and Control staff, who wanted me to change the behavior. At a well-attended meeting with leaders from multiple departments, I presented a provocation. I wanted those who control the dialogue and data around hand hygiene to feel what consistent hand hygiene compliance was like.

For 4 hours on a cold day, the Infection Prevention and Control staff practiced hand hygiene every 6 minutes and hated every second of it. Nurses, though, have to practice hand hygiene, on average, every 6 minutes for their entire 12 hour shifts. I was looking to increase empathy, to get the rule makers to understand what following the rules feels like. The value of this type of intervention is not in increasing compliance numbers or in spurring the drafting of a new mission statement but in re-inscribing the problem on the stressed bodies of those that oversee compliance. In a bottom line driven atmosphere, it is important to remind those at desks that hundreds of unique human factors are involved in increasing compliance. It is a complex problem that can't be resolved by adding more signs that simply restate the goal in bigger type. Before the hospital gets clean hands, it must get its own dirty (and dry and itchy) too.

If you travel a lot for work, you're bound to recognize the images presented here.

If you don't, hit the jump.

This is a truly heartwarming example of some unintended side effects of product design, and this is your must-see video of the week. In 2001, Apple designed an easy-to-use music player called the iPod. In 2007, the famed author and neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote Musicophilia, a book exploring the effects of music on the human brain. And on April 18th of this year, filmmaker Michael Rossato-Bennett is releasing Alive Inside, his documentary looking at what happens when you bring iPod Shuffles into a nursing home.

This is no frothy Six Flags commercial nor an advertisement for Apple. This is about how elderly people suffering from dementia, individuals who seem locked out of their own brains, can be contacted and connected with by playing back the music of their youth. We'll say no more. Please watch.

Tuesday night in New York City, our friends over at Sight Unseen launched their first printed edition, Paper View, a collection of stories and personal reflections that document the inner lives and studio spaces of designers from around the world. The book features 24 brand-new and archival pieces that exemplify two and a half years of studio visits and interviews and was published with the support of Karlsson's Gold Vodka's UNFILTERED project.

Paper View is divided into four sections— My Mother or Father Was An Artist, I Studied X and Now I'm Doing Y, Material Obsession and Strange Ephemera—each addressing a larger theme that emerged from their interviews with designers. "For us, it's always been about discovering the universal truths behind what it's like to be a maker, regardless of medium or discipline," the editors Monica Khemsurov and Jill Singer explain in their foreword.

Monica Khemsurov, co-Editor of Sight Unseen

Studio visits, process deep-dives and inventories of favorite things fill the pages. My favorite subsection was more of a design interlude filled with an inventory of "8 Things"—from a who's who of design publications, brands and retailers that include the founders of Roman and Williams, Sebastian Wrong (Established & Sons), Nacho Alegre (Apartamento magazine) and Jade Lai (Creatures of Comfort).

Maybe you'd like your child to show an interest in art, but you also want him or her running around outside, getting the fresh air and exercise that kids need. How do you combine these two things?

Washington-based Scott Baumann, who founded the product design firm Procreate Brands, has created a potential answer in the Chalktrail device. A wishbone-shaped arm connects to the back of any bicycle or scooter (with no need for tools) and supports a giant piece of colored chalk that drags on the pavement behind the rear wheel. This allows your child to "draw" on the pavement as they cycle, albeit with one color at a time.

A second, perhaps unintended potential use of the Chalktrail: Think of it like low-tech GPS—with the chalk attached, it should make it easy to go outside and see just where your tow-headed tyke rode off too. Unless they get hip to shaking tails and ride over grass to lose you.

We thought for sure this was a student concept rendering, and were shocked to learn it's an actual production car (albeit in limited run at just 100 units). A Canadian company called Conquest Vehicles, which manufactures "ultra-luxurious, fully armored, handcrafted sport utility vehicles" is producing the military-inspired Knight XV seen here.

The massive, nearly ten-ton vehicle was built from the ground up using high-grade steel, "ballistic aluminum" and other fun compounds; the doors are so heavy they require special hinges to support the extra weight. The gas tank holds a mere 63 gallons, though the company offers a larger tank as an upgrade, presumably in case you're looting an Iraqi oil field.

We're really digging the graffiti and illustration work of Kuala Lumpur-based artist Abdul Rashade. The shapes that make up Rashade's work are eye-catching bits of shredded fabric or bits of debris caught in mid-explosion, all mixed together with a synthesis of organic and urban colors.

Senior Industrial Designer
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Seattle, Washington

Teague is currently seeking a Senior Industrial Designer who will be responsible for the conceptualization and development of aerospace form design having a higher than average level of difficulty, complexity or breadth of scope for which few precedents exists. Includes the ability to manage and bring to completion all technical and organizational aspects of an assignment, as well as, creating aspects of form, aesthetics, physical and psychological interfaces between users and products, and system compatibility where required.

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The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.

Benjamin Hubert has clearly found his calling in furniture design that is remarkable precisely because it looks so unremarkable. Although his last work, the "Pod" armchair, all but foreshadowed a certain recent video of the recycling process, the London designer has returned to his nautical inspiration for the 2012 Salone with an update to the previously-seen "Maritime" chair and an all-new table for Casamania.

The "Maritime S" is a simple improvement on his 2011 design for Casamania: the low-back armchair now has the option of "soft upholstered panels inserted into the distinctive timber framework." Yet the addition of color and contrast has an undeniably different effect than the original ultra-restrained oak version. The "Maritime S" is less a blank slate and more an expression of a personality, at once more and less precious, in what can only be considered a welcome change of pace.

Dror Benshetrit brings his quirky brand of innovation to a product area that sorely needs it: luggage. The new Dror for Tumi line, which has "TransForm Follows Function" as its tagline, consists of eight different pieces that cover every travel need you could possibly have. But as the tagline suggests, it's not the diversity of the line that's most impressive: It's the diversity within the bags themselves, which transform into different sizes and configurations. Check it out (the backpack in particular looks pretty awesome):

If you went to ID school in, say, the '70s or '80s, it would have been adequate to teach you how to draw, carve hair dryers out of foam or sculpt car fenders out of clay. And you probably would not have interacted much with students from other majors.

These days you'd expect a lot more from your program. With mere consumerism moving into industrial design education's rearview mirror and interdisciplinarianism (how's that for a word) coming into its own, design schools have an opportunity to address far bigger issues.

An encouraging example of this is the Healthy Food Project, a collaboration between RISD, Brown University and Design for America, an organization that uses human-centered design and multidisciplinary teams to solve problems. The Healthy Food Project seeks to tackle a very American problem—we eat like crap—and incorporated students from industrial design, graphic design, architecture, international relations, and urban studies.

While the project appears to be ongoing, there does not appear to be any website, beyond this video, where we can follow their progress. If you HFP guys are reading this, please let us know how we can keep abreast.

Pebble is a fully customizable e-paper watch that interacts with your smartphone.

It's hard to remember, but there was once a time, at least according to Dick Tracy, when we thought we might be speaking into our watches to communicate with each other. That vision of the future seemed to be a distant memory when cell phones came along.

Pebble, an e-paper watch, might just get us talking into our watches again. Brought to us by the same folks who developed the Blackberry-ready inPulse watch, Pebble is a fully customizable interface that syncs up with an iPhone or Android phone via Bluetooth. The 144×168 pixel display may be small but the device can stream plenty of data, with features to rival its smartphone 'host organism.' The developers suggest apps for exercise, among other things, where the e-paper provides a lighter display that is easier to read in bright sunlight. The watch can even interact with your phone's caller ID or an mp3 player to control music over Bluetooth.

But the killer app is that anyone can make an app, and that's where the potential lies. Aside from what you can download from their watchapp store, you can create your own functions using if this then that or tap into the full SDK, using a familiar structure from Arduino and simple C. That means savvy developers can customize the four buttons, motor and accelerometer for any number of uses.

There are a numerous additional "soft" benefits to conducting design research, that are often overlooked. As we continue to explore how design research works, and how it might relate to the ongoing public discussion of "design imperialism," I'd like to begin by listing these soft—yet very important—benefits. Here they are:

• Design research sets a more appropriate tone for the relationship between the organization commissioning it and its existing or future customers. Ever walked into a group discussion where the gulf between their assumptions and yours was so large that you felt like you were in a different world? In multinational organizations, where there is both a cultural and physical gulf, this happens all the time, and it is acute in organizations that for the first time want to address markets of very low income consumers.


• The process generates rich, storied material that is excellent at raising awareness across an organization of the broader opportunity space. A well run project will engage people in the topic well beyond the scope of the project.


• It builds a more tightly knit team. A highly immersive approach puts the design team in situations where they learn more about one another, motivations, family life, each other's cultural perspectives. The impact of this is especially effective when team members are arriving from very different cultural landscapes.


• Hiring a local team lays the groundwork for a meaningful, extended network of practitioners that can be drawn on later. Every study I've done over the past decade has led to a rich network of fixers, guides and practitioners that can be tapped on future studies—some of whom I've worked with for a number of years.

While everyone likes to focus on the tangible outcomes—things that were made as a result of the research, design research is also good at helping organizations understand the folly of going in a particular direction at the expense of others. The opportunity cost of bringing product A to market is that products B, C and D are less likely to get a look in.

In 2005, while at Nokia, I was asked whether the company should design a mobile phone for illiterate consumers—many illiterate people were already buying Nokia's products that were designed for people who could read and write—and the current experience was recognized as being suboptimal. After a few rounds of design research, my answer was that it was better to sell another half a billion phones of the models that were already being sold to literate consumers (with a few subtle but important user interface tweaks) than to develop something fully optimized but new.

There are many reasons why a dedicated product for illiterate consumers was not appropriate at that time: the social stigma associated with buying a device that was seen as being for "disadvantaged" consumers would be a disincentive to purchase—they wanted a device like "everyone else" because they aspired to be treated like "everyone else;" the cost of a new device, versus the economies of scale of selling a few hundred million more of those that were already on the market; the challenge of designing something that made a genuine difference to illiterate consumers is non-trivial. I like to think of illiterate consumers as "just like the rest of us, only more so." There is also what I refer to as proximate literacy—that it is better for illiterate consumers to be able to turn to their neighbor and ask them for help because they own the same or similar device, than to struggle with a new interface that needs to be learned. And there are many types of illiteracy. The classic definition refers to textual illiteracy, but it might be technical, mobile, financial, numerical—all of which impact use.

Whilst the outcome sticks in the craw of the purists and ideologues—a notionally sub-optimal device is better than a "good enough" one that is engineered/designed better but misses the bigger picture. An obvious example? I'm writing this on a suboptimal QWERTY keyboard, but do benefit from the standardization of suboptimal QWERTY keyboards on many of the laptops I come in contact with. My recommendation back then, when I was at Nokia, was that a dedicated device for illiterate consumers was the suboptimal choice.

It's worth pointing out that my answer today would be different for a number of reasons. Many of these illiterate consumers are now on their 3rd, 4th or 5th phone; connectivity is both more reliable and faster—which makes the learning experience easier. The cost of devices is significantly lower. And because touch screen technology—which Huawei and Nokia are increasingly putting into the hands of lower income consumers in emerging markets enables far more direct manipulation. That makes more complex tasks easier for an illiterate person to accomplish. (My research on designing for illiteracy is a few years old but the fundamentals are still sound—you can read it here.)

You might think that conducting research in a country halfway around the world, in languages and dialects that the core team doesn't speak, would present the biggest challenge. Or that pulling a project together at a week's notice, gathering sufficiently meaningful data in the few days the team is on the ground, struggling with trying to have a life outside work when you spend half the time on the road/in the skies/on hi-alt mountain trails are the biggest tests a design researcher faces. But the real challenge is setting the right tone for the relationship between the team that is going in, and the people they are going to be interacting with.

There are four things that I've found consistently set the "right" tone for the research:

• Stay and spend local


• Build a trusted local team


• Recruit through extended networks, rather than go through a recruiting agency


• Provide participants with sufficient control of the research process.

Rotterdam's Nightshop is the brainchild of Ward van Gemert and Adriaan van der Ploeg, who started the studio to explore "new and surprising products with a reference to everyday life and focus on bringing aspects of 'low-culture' into our designs." Ventura Lambrate will see the debut of a new household object from the Dutch pair: the "P.O.V." vase joins the "Lightweight" lamp among their product offerings.

As with another previewed piece, the vase's name captures its essence without betraying what it actually looks like. Indeed the "P.O.V." vase purportedly shares a trait with the iPad—"quite magical if you ask us"—though its interactive aspect is simply a function of circumambulating the piece.

It comes in at 40 cm (about 15.75 inches) tall, with a maximum diameter of 18 cm (~7 in.). "Made out of different kinds of plastics, the P.O.V. vase... will come in an endless variety of colors and patterns."

Shiny:

When we first saw the rumor, reported by AFP news this morning, that Philippe Starck was collaborating with Apple on a project, we dismissed it as there was no attribution of where such a statement came from. But within hours Forbes picked up on the story and lent it some credence, citing it had come from a French radio interview. The Google-translated remarks are as follows:

French designer Philippe Starck announced today on France Info that it is working with the U.S. computer group Apple in a project "revolutionary" that would emerge in eight months. "Indeed, there is a big project together which will be out in eight months," said the designer in the show "Everything and its opposite."

Invoking the "religious cult of secrecy" of the California firm, he declined further detail, except to talk about a project "quite revolutionary (...) if not very".

Let the speculation begin!

Designer Brooke Davis reminds us that you don't have to be showing in Milan for your furniture designs to get a little love from Core. Insofar as her most recent project, "Tablescape No. 1," is as much a work of art as it is an article of furniture, the 58”×90” dining table also marks the intersection of sculptural craft and contemporary fabrication processes. Where CNC tooling is typically associated with consistency for mass production or precision for, say, hardware-less joinery, Davis hopes to "push the boundary of CNC as a tool" with "Tablescape No. 1," a three-month labor of love that required some 100 hours of hand sanding to remove every tool mark:

This remarkable design pushes the boundary of using the CNC as a tool. Davis's personal process involves using drawing, clay and 3D CAD computer modeling interchangeably until the designs are finished. Her latest designs embrace using the CNC as part of the production process but also allow for hand manipulation afterwards making each piece unique.

The design itself evokes everything from a topographical map to a Georgia O'Keeffe painting, from Lucio Fontana's slit canvases to a fantastical door. Davis herself refrains from indicating her inspiration, noting that "an object should beg to be discovered, for when one is enamored with an object, it transcends words."

Minimalist design in a high-tech kitchen.

Elegant Italian styling combines with Samsung touch screen technology in the Prisma kitchen, designed for Toncelli Kitchens by international experience design company Experientia.

Introduced by Toncelli as the "futuristic jewel" in their collection at Eurocucina 2012, the Prisma is a stylistic departure from Toncelli's other kitchens, where the emphasis is on prestigious materials and traditional workmanship.

Conceived as an entry-level luxury kitchen, the Prisma features crisp prismatic shapes, gleaming surfaces, and an interactive bench top, with a touch screen and internet connection.

Interactive workbench with Internet connection and touch-screen technology by Samsung Electronics

While the Prisma also sports a stand for a personal tablet computer, the more high-tech element is the Samsung-driven touch screen table, integrated right into the transparent bench. Designed for tech savvy home chefs, the Prisma kitchen picks up on the trend of tablet computers migrating to the kitchen, and then takes that idea to the next level.

The Keyano repurposes a keyboard into a musical instrument.

We buy them, we love them, we use them, and then we toss them. Our gadgets are ever present until they're not, and while it would be nice if we could just drop them into a black hole, our gadgets end up somewhere, and that's often in landfills around the world. Bigger gadgets like ecoATM help you take your smaller gadgets and earn money for recycling them.

But what about all that waste already out there? What can be done? That's the challenge taken up by designer and technologist Dhairya Dand, who came across a striking image while backpacking in Cambodia.

"I was around suburban Phnom Penh and came across enormous land fills stretching miles and miles," he told me in an email interview. "These were piled with eWaste dumped from the developed world. What was more appalling, was that kids who should be in school were working here in the landfills. Most families had migrated from villages leaving behind agriculture to these landfills for a rich pay of a dollar a day."

Dand launched ThinkerToys, an initiative to solve these dual problems--massive amounts of electronic waste in landfills in the developing world, and a lack of educational resources for children in those countries. Thinker Toys picks up basic electronic equipment, like keyboards, mice and speakers, none of which need to be modified or brought back to factories. For now, Dand has been using Arduino but he plans to develop low-cost chips, called openTOYS, that make the project more scalable and accessible.

Photography by Glen Jackson Taylor for Core77

Marking the end of auto exhibition season, this year's show was decidedly mainstream with an abundance of plug-in electric options on parade. Stealing the show was the 640-horsepower, aluminum and carbon fiber 2013 SRT Viper (formally known as a Dodge) but our personal favorite pictured top was a classic 1966 Chevrolet Impala SS 427 Convertible.

The next generation BMW i series are getting closer to production and up close the i3 city car and i8 Spyder look amazing! Mini delivered on their April Fools' Day press release and presented the hilarious Yachtsman, an amphibious car/boat combo complete with snorkel — awesome!

Checkout the gallery for more highlights.

The snazzy-looking Skyline Lab kitchen is designed specifically for the wheelchair-bound, providing a high level of functionality without sacrificing style. Produced by Italian manufacturer Snaidero, the kitchen features tons of thoughtful design touches that place everything within reach for the chef who cannot stand, tiptoe, or crouch to dig through the back of a low cabinet.

There are no cabinets at all beneath the sweeping counter, allowing a wheelchair user to belly right up to the surface; the shallow sink basin leaves plenty of room for legs. A garbage can on wheels and a roll-out shelf unit can be maneuvered in and out of the way.

The circular shelves provide Lazy-Susan-like storage, allowing whatever's in the back to be quickly brought to the front. They are purposely left unenclosed so the user can see where everything is.