Sr. UX Design Lead
Microsoft
Redmond, Washington

The Microsoft Office Division (MOD) is seeking senior talent to work on Office and help redefine the role of design in building productivity experiences. The SharePoint team is a highly successful business, but is ready to significantly revamp its user experiences to serve enterprise customers, as well as to serve a broader set of customers via Office 365.

The Senior Design Lead will be responsible for helping to craft the SharePoint experiences for delivering products and services to customers. The challenge is about providing a cohesive and valuable set of productivity services.

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After two days of Do-ferencing, the third and final day of Design Ethos started bright and early at 8:00am, as several participants skipped the "coffee social" in lieu of dedicating more time to final presentations. "Do-ers" (aka participants of the Do-ference side of things) were scheduled to show their respective concepts for Waters Avenue to the rest of the conference at 4:30 that afternoon. The feeling of an impending deadline was universal, as designers, students, Waters Avenue residents rushed around the city of Savannah to finish on time.

The student panel with constituents from Purdue, MICA, and SCAD.

I decided to desert Team Empowering Culture during their time of need, dropping off Rhino files to be laser-cut into a stork (see below) before heading to Hamilton Hall to check out some of the panelists. Panels ran concurrently, starting with Mark Randall and Ursula Tischner, which ran at the same time as a student panel. Randall talked about how to get social innovation projects up off the ground via building community, finding connections, and getting heard in order to get funded. Tischner focused primarily on sustainable design as a full-time job, urging the audience to "make sustainability attractive."

Mark Randall

The concept of doing social innovation and making is fiscally viable was a theme seen throughout the day, as each panelist addressed how they funded their work enough to keep the lights on. , The topic of making a living as a designer working in the field social innovation was clearly on everyone's mind—it even came up in the student panel (which ended up being more of a student table discussion)—and was the topic of Noah Scalin's panel presentation.

Noah Scalin on "Making A Living As A Socially Conscious Designer."

In fact, Scalin's talk was called precisely that—"Making a Living As a Socially Conscious Designer"—based on his own experience as founder of Another Limited Rebellion, relating how he built his studio practice up in 2001 when a "socially conscious design firm" was a laughable phrase to a successful example of good business. His latest book, The Design Activist's Handbook: How to Change the World (or at Least Your Part of It) with Socially Conscious Design, is available for pre-order.

A [free] poster designed by Scalin for the 99% movement.

How awesome would it be if electrical pylons looked like this?

Sure there's a little more steel involved, but it's a damn sight easier on the eyes than what we've got going now.

Uppleva home screen

Much has been written already about the launch of IKEA's Uppleva TV furniture units, but few reviewers seem to have interacted with them.

About 10 of them were publicly shown—in a world premiere—at the IKEA PS show in the Lambrate area of the Milan Design Week event, in different colors, sizes, and furniture combinations. The event ended yesterday and the IKEA Uppleva website is expected to go online soon.

This post concentrates on the interface design—an area which has not been covered so far.

On Putting People First (the Experientia blog that I manage), you can also read more on the user research that went into the design.

The demo units in Milan were running a very advanced prototype software, but the interaction and product design provided an integrated and simple user experience, with only minor problems.

When comparing the Uppleva (which means "experience") with the Apple TV, Dave Smith says that IKEA has now set out a benchmark by "interpreting Steve Jobs' vision of an integrated television."

Simplicity first

The Uppleva home screen has only 8 items—picture, sound, PAP, options, media, smart TV, lock and setup—and direct access to most of the areas is available via the remote control.

Icons are simple and clean: off-white on a blue background.

This theme comes through in all the screens, with the TV (or video) image being turned into a subdued blue-and-white background presence on the internal screens, as can be glimpsed on the screenshots here:

Uppleva options screen

Uppleva setup screen

(Aside from the IKEA-supplied home screen shot, all other photos were taken by me, and this is the reason for the perspective and color distortions.)

The blue background makes it difficult to change the color and contrast settings, as you have to switch between settings and live image to see the effect, but other than that provides a calming and quiet visual experience, very different from the one that sometimes pervades in these types of interfaces.

In an encouraging sign that will hopefully serve as an inspiration to their exhibitors, the Consumer Electronics Association has announced that they recycled an astonishing 75% of this year's CES show materials.

If you've ever been to CES--or any large tradeshow, for that matter--you don't have to look far to notice the enormous amount of potential waste that can be created: There are enormous foamcore signs and vinyl banners everywhere, every attendee is wearing a badge in a plastic holder, and the tradeshow floor is covered in miles of carpet.

For this year's event the CEA rolled out recycleable carpeting for all of the exhibit halls, switched the signage from foamcore to a 100%-recycleable cardboard-like material, and used banners from last year's event to make the attendee badges for this year's. In addition to that they've donated $25,000 to an organization that transformed other large show banners into sunshades for local community centers, and donated $50,000 to another organization that used the bread to make solar panels for the local Salvation Army.

After the show, come cleanup time the CEA gathered more materials to be recycled: Upwards of 35,700 square feet of magnetic banners, 28,600 square feet of vinyl banners, 16,000 square feet of other signage and 50,000 pounds of show publications.

"Every year, we work tirelessly to make the International CES even more environmentally sustainable than the year before," said Karen Chupka, CEA's Senior Vice President of Events and Conferences. "This year, we exceeded years past, increasing the overall reuse and recycle rate to 75 percent of all CES materials." In the following video, CEA execs and partner organizations explain the initiative and the results:

Italian rug manufacturer Nodus exhibited their beautiful collection of limited edition and high design rugs, befittingly in the courtyard of the Theological Faculty of Milan.

Belgian designers Studio Job are known for their unique storytelling through intricate patterns and playful use of textiles and materials. Their 2008 Bavaria collection for Moss has always been a favorite of mine and we saw their entry into rugs last year for both Nodus and Established & Sons. At this year's Nodus presentation, Studio Job transformed their 2009 stained glass piece, "The Birth" into a hand-woven wool rug (above). The abstracted patterns of organs, blood vessels and bones employed in their more recent "Quack" Cabinet found a new life in the kaleidoscopic Quack rug.

"The Birth" by Studio Job for Nodus

"Quack" rug by Studio Job for Nodus

For the review of Crumpler's Dry Red No. 5 laptop backpack, I'll be using it in two capacities: First as an airplane personal carry-on bag, where its job is to hold things I'll need during a seven-hour flight. Secondly I'll be using it on the ground as a sort of journalist's bag to cover a press event.

Packing for Travel

I keep my carry-on bag as light as possible, for reasons mentioned in the travel methodology post. I don't carry adapters, chargers and cables in there, as I'm rarely in an airplane seat with an outlet. Just the bare in-flight essentials.

For me that's (clockwise from center) a set of noise-canceling headphones, an inflatable travel pillow, a print book, an iPad, my laptop, eyeglasses, a writing pad, a business card holder and a pen.

Kids playing with their Clump-O-Lumps creations. All images courtesy Knock Knock.

Mix and match, design and customize. We can do it cars, with phones, with outfits. Why not with stuffed toys? Clump-O-Lumps, a new line toys out of gift and stationery company Knock Knock, features mix-and-match plush dolls designed for kids and kids at heart.

Start with, say, Tig-o the Tiger, a smiling tiger with an overbite, and then put Tig-o together with bucktoothed Bee-o the Bee. Zip off the head of Bee-o, and place it on Tig-o's head. Suddenly, Tig-o has the head of a bee, literally.

"While the animals each have their own unique identities," states Knock Knock in their release, "their insides are the same—red with a white circle running through the center that one could call Bone-o the Bone. Each child will have the ability to use his or her imagination to create new creatures by mixing and matching Clump-o-Lumps and making up original stories about them."

Design Max Knecht with his creations at the New York International Gift Fair.

The adorable designs are the brainchild of Max Knecht, an industrial designer and graduate of Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Knock Knock's head, Jen Bilik, fell in love with Knecht's prototypes immediately upon seeing them, and they mixed and matched heart, brain and business sense to bring the products into the real world.

"To zip and match," suggests the release, "the intended age range is five to ten years old, though children younger than five love to hug their Clump-o-Lumps and take them apart." But the dolls are so irresistible that I suspect kids older than ten will be zipping and mixing and matching in no time (hint hint, anyone shopping early for a Christmas gift for me).

This is it! Tuesday officially ends the Core77 2012 Design Awards call for entries. So stop what you're doing now and register here; entering is easy. Already started? Log in here to get to the finish line. Our hardworking jury teams are ready and waiting.

We have some fantastic plans in the works that you will not want to miss. So put yourself in the running for the most awesome design award out there! It all ends on April 24 at 6pm PDT.

Design Facility is a conceptual "design research facility" composed of 3 instructors and 8 students from Singapore Polytechnic's Experience and Product Design program. At this year's SaloneSatellite show, the group presented a collection of thoroughly considered products under the title basic luxury.

In our explorations within the theme of 'basic luxury' it became clear that the notions of 'basic' and 'luxury' are never valid premises within our everyday. Instead, their meanings and definitions are in constant flux, occasionally complimenatry and at other times, perversely contradictory...our pursuit of 'basic luxury' today will be dictated beyond rationality and expectations, driven by eccentricities, hyper-reality and questions that provoke the most fundamental aspect of our inetraction with the everyday.

This provocation resulted in an interesting if understated show: paint(s), table lamp, chair and decorative objects have an element of surprise embedded in the seemingly mundane. The work of the group is summarized in a similarly understated publication sprinkled with interviews, construction diagrams, quotes and research notes to accompany and contextualize the work.

"Can wall painting depart from mere cosmetic and surface protection?" These three paint concepts explore a new functionality for wall paint, creating unexpected spaces for our daily needs. I especially love the custom paint-brushes for applying the paint.

Texture paint includes "dodecahedron granules" to create small hooks on the surface of the wall:

As always, Milan's Ventura Lambrate district was absolutely jam-packed with awesome, avant-garde and otherwise amazing work by designers hailing from all over the world.
We'll have more from some of the schools that were there shortly, though recent grads made a strong showing as well. As in Tel Aviv's TLV Express, several young designers from the Hague united to represent their hometown in "Haagswerk."

This year's Salone del Mobile is the first fair Haags Werk is participating in. The designers that are part of the exhibition are: Marlies van der Linden & Raúl Wallaart, Celine van Raamt, Tiddo de Ruiter, Inge Simonis, Barbara Vos and Geanne Welles. Together they will be presenting their newest work in the fields of product, ceramics, textile, furniture design and architecture.

While all of the designers are based in De Besturing, a creative studio complex in the Hague, organizers hope to bring recognition to the city's emerging design talent. Thus, organizers de Ruiter, Vos, Welles and Dennis Slootweg hope that Haagswerk will become a platform "for young designers to be able to participate in large fairs to show the world their newest work."

The Haagswerk booth was an installation unto itself: architects Marlies Van der Linden and Raúl Wallaart designed the modular "Haagse Binckjes" stood out despite their simple construction and aesthetic, which is precisely their appeal. Intended to divide interior spaces, the structures are "easily constructed, [requiring only] two people, two wrenches and a ladder." Besides the exhibition setting, "Haagse Binckjes are also perfectly suitable as small office spaces in a workshop, as a stand and as an entrance desk in a public building."

In the three years since Celine Van Raamt returned to her hometown of the Hague (after completing her bachelor's degree in Delft), she's completed her graduate studies and launched several products. The lamp was inspired by wallpaper, achieving a particularly elegant effect when arranged in sequence (as pictured on her website; I'd also be curious to see it inverted as a wall sconce...).

Van Raamt's "Fruitstand," on the other hand, envisions the conical section as the trunk of a tree. Where Rogier Martens' 'pear-shaped' fruit bowl concept resulted in amoeba-like glasswares, Van Raamt's locally-produced version is rather less organic for its symmetry.

Inge Simonis starts with the clear and functional aesthetic of minimalism, adding just enough surprise and chance that make for housewares with distinctive details. For example, a pair of decanters—one for red, one for white—was inspired by the shapes of chimney-pots. It comes in two sizes, with cups to match.

Her lighting designs, on the other hand, was inspired by childhood papercraft: "in Holland, children produce garlands for festivities through folding and cutting." Thus, Simonis's pendant lamps alludes to both cultural tradition and design heritage.

Now that you've had your morning coffee, what to do with the leftover grounds? Winner of the 15th edition of SaloneSatellite, Spanish designer Raúl Laurí debuted his DECAFÉ collection last week in Milan. Created entirely of heat-and-pressure treated coffee grounds, DECAFÉ hopes to "give a second life to coffee ground as a biodegradable and renewable material while taking advantage of its emotional aspects."

Laurí's collection includes table, pendant, and floor lamps as well as decorative tableware.

Web Designer
Warner Bros.
New York, New York

Warner Bros. Consumer Products Inc. seeks a Web Designer for the E-Commerce department. The Web Designer will assist in all areas of design for WBshop.com and a number of other online shops for the eCommerce group. Work will range from creating images, ad banners, promotional touts, HTML email, and promotional landing pages, all the way to designing entire eCommerce web sites.

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The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.

There's more than one way to skin a cat, and recently we've seen this maxim holds true for creators looking to produce a video of their object rotating in space.

With 3D software, it's not difficult to create a video like this of a virtual object you've modeled. And with Autodesk's 123D Catch software, you can use a point-and-shoot to photograph real-life objects, giving you the data you need to achieve the same. But Comp Sci professors Jason Lawrence and Abhi Shelat are attempting to Kickstart the Arqball Spin, a sort of hi-tech/low-tech hybrid that combines software with a physical, rotating platform:

I'm not convinced a physical turntable will trump Autodesk's 123D Catch solution, which requires just the camera; but at press time it seemed Arqball Spin could go either way, with 25 days left and about $14,500 of $40,000 in the bag.

Image courtesy of Living Principles.

President of Emergent Structures, a 501c3 non-profit organization dedicated to reducing the landfilling of building materials, Scott Boylston teaches in the Graphic Design, Design Management, and Design for Sustainability programs at the Savannah College of Art and Design and is the founder of the Design Ethos Conference. It is impossible to measure the impact of Boylston's work, but Design Ethos showed us the tip of the social innovation iceberg Boylston has brought to the city of Savannah.

Core77: How did you get the idea for Design Ethos?

Scott Boylston: The first one was in October of 2010 and that was really a result of a conversation that was probably five years old by the time between a number people who were speaking via the internet about changing design and design education. Most of the people I had never personally met; I knew their work and corresponded [with them]. We shared our work, we shared our students' work, and we said, 'Alright, what would be the best first step in terms of getting together?' 'Well, how about a conference?' In any case, the seeds were sewn about five years before.

During the first one, we were talking about the need to challenge ourselves to kind of 'walk the walk'—not to say, everyone here [the Do-ference participants themselves] isn't already walking the walk in their own cities—but the idea was having a convention with a 'designed function.' When you have people sitting there, talking about the importance of engaging with community, and then you have a conference where everyone goes right to that little sweet spot and doesn't go anywhere else, there could be something else.

So, that's the conversation we had. Let's try to do something different with a conference. There could be something else totally. That's where the Do-ference idea came from. I was like, 'Alright, let's ask them to come and show what they do rather than talk about what they do.'

How did you go about structuring the Do-ference?

The idea had been floating out there, but, really, when you talk about conferences, they pour more energy into old conversations. So that conversation had been out there, and we all came together and were like, 'Maybe we should try this.' A conference is a design; it's like anything else.

I started going to a lot of people I know, just through projects in Savannah, city folks, MPC (Metropolitan Planning Commission), locals and all that and that's when we focused on what was happening.

So, looking at a conference as a design, how did you approach that as a design problem?

Re-design the idea of convening so that they are doing.

In Sustainable Design, we talk a lot about 'wicked problems.' Design for Sustainability is very much about entering into a system in a way where you first assess. I use a web as an example, all these strings being not people, not organizations, but the relationships between them. So, if you imagine a cobweb, those are relationships. Those are the intangibles, and we just happen to get a glimpse of those.

Pluck a string. Assess the system. Know you'll never understand it fully. Know that you might not be able to effect change; the frustration is built into it, but somebody has to be addressing it. Someone has to be looking at it with a tolerance of discovery, being able to really wade through all the complexities, manage the ability to explore that without too much frustration, but with all the human complexities.

The Do-ference was this idea that you have in every city, you have archetypes, in terms of problems. You have poverty, you have racism, you have social inequity, economic inequity, you have all of these problems. This is the South, so you have another layer of social dynamics. It's historical and it's typical. Yet, it's Savannah, so Savannah is it's own unique mix of those things.

The composition of the Do-ference teams.

Were you to arrange Phaidon's Wallpaper City Guides by color, the new Tel Aviv edition would sit directly beside New York, a happy coincidence for my bookshelf as my most recent travel took me between the two cities. Perhaps the similar shades were chosen because Tel Aviv is often referred to as the New York of the Middle East? Though New Yorkers like to imagine that everyone who lives anywhere else has city envy, a local who has lived in both cities confided to me that while he likes New York the best of any American city, he'd much rather live in Tel Aviv. "It's like New York with good weather," he said.

You can't exactly fault him. The weather in Tel Aviv is miraculously warm all year round. When I left New York on a 55° morning and landed in Tel Aviv on a 70° night, I dropped my bags at my hotel and took a leisurely stroll through the buzzing city streets, which are safe, even for a young female traveling alone. But even with a nightlife scene to rival New York's, the city's best spots are spread out; Having the City Guide with me (it came out the day after I landed back in New York) would have been a big help.

The Guide does a good job of illustrating Tel Aviv's strengths and struggles in an introduction that describes it as "the world's first modern Jewish city...blessed with many of the amenities needed to be a sophisticated global destination." Tel Aviv not only has a promising culinary movement and a growing art scene with plenty of bars, shopping and miles of beaches, but the city is "aggressively permissive, tolerant and open-minded—a blend of European progressiveness spices with Levantine and Arab traditions... resolutely Jewish but today as gay, multicultural and wealthy as many European cities."

As we unraveled the story of the Angelpoise (here's parts 1, 2, 3 and 4), the iconic and influential desk lamp designed by George Carwardine, it occurred to us that someday someone would update it with LEDs. But we never expected design student Louis Rensch's take on it: In a clever expression of how LEDs can conform to the flat shapes a conventional bulb can't, Rensch literally turns the Angelpoise upside-down.

The lunar lander shape of the original head, shaped that way to house a bulb and fixture, is now freed from that task and can rest at last; and after eighty years, the flat base can finally take on the lamp's key role.

Germany-based Rensch is a third-year ID student at Stuttgart's Staatlichen Akademie der Bildenden Kunste.

Breathlessly billed as "Space Travel on Earth," a transportation concept from Evacuated Tube Transport Technologies, or ET3, would reportedly be able to whisk passengers from New York to L.A. in 45 minutes. The science sounds a little breezy, but the idea is that a long, airtight tube is constructed between point A and point B. The tube has the air sucked out of it, creating a vacuum, and a cylindrical "car" carrying six passengers is then propelled via maglev at speeds up to 4,000 miles per hour.

ET3 claims we would not arrive all flat-faced, but would somehow experience just 1G of atmospheric pressure during the ride. On the green front, they say much of the energy expended to accelerate the capsule would be recovered during the braking process. Then there are the outright incredible claims:

After unpacking at the hotel, the Dry Red No. 5 laptop backpack I was testing out was emptied and refilled with slightly different goods. (And no, I didn't carry that plastic grid with me to the hotel; the photos I took there were poor due to the hotel room's lighting, so I re-shot these photos back at my apartment, post-trip.)

For the plane ride the bag needed to hold a few, mostly large items; for its next intended use, serving as a journalist's bag to cover an event, it would need to hold a variety of smaller items, some of which I'd need to access quickly.

Here we see I've got the laptop, my eyeglasses, a pen and pad, a business card holder, a thumb drive, assorted cables and chargers, a camera, an audio recorder, a backup camera battery, and backup SD cards.

Since 1979, the Nilufar Gallery has been one of the most active and influential Italian design galleries. Founder Nina Yashar has consistently championed fearless designers like Martino Gamper, Bethan Laura Wood and Gaetano Pesce. A signal of the fast-changing times, on the occasion of this year's Salone del Mobile, the Nilufar Gallery launched two new initiatives: Nilufar Unlimited.com and Nilufar Storage.

Nilufar Unlimited.com is an online venture for the gallery that exhibits, advocates and sells reproducible objects. After years of exclusively exhibiting "rare and unique" pieces of 20th and 21st century designed objects, the launch of Nilufar Unlimited.com marks a huge change for the gallery. "Nilufar wants to open towards a wider public...a public being the collector of an even wider and variegated range of proposals by the gallery. Images and objects surveying and innovating the features of materials, lines, shapes, functions, remodelling space, creating unexpected ways to perceive and live it." See more images from Unlimited after the jump.

Nilufar Unlimited - Massimiliano Locatelli "Cai - Ban - Cai Ghe"

Nilufar Unlimited - Giacomo Ravagli "Tunisia" lights

Nilufar Unlimited - Bethan Laura Wood "Shrine" Candelabra