In an unusual departure from industry practices, Autoblog was invited out to Milan to see Mazda's new Shinari concept car, rather than having to wait to see it at an auto show. Check it out:

My initial impressions of the car were of confusion. I'm used to seeing clean, well-integrated designs from Mazda, whether it's their 3 series, the venerable Miata or even their racier RX-8, but this one recalls some of Hyundai's early styling missteps in muscle car territory, i.e. the Tiburon. I realize that most cars these days are designed by committee, but I've always felt the best designs have one powerfully talented designer overseeing the process and instilling a design consistency, but this one just seems all over the map.

You know you're doing alright when an old flame rekindles interest in your current property. I'm not talking about college girlfriends, I'm talking about the 18 year hiatus and recently announced return of Autodesk's flagship design program, AutoCAD for Mac and iOS. Slated to ship this fall, AutoCAD for Mac OS X incorporates multitouch gestures on Apple's touch based input devices including MacBook trackpads, Magic Mouse, and the new Magic Trackpad, allowing intuitive document handling and a more visual approach to drawing and layout management.

The new lineup of applications also includes free mobile versions of AutoCAD for Apple's handheld products including the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. Dubbed AutoCAD WS, the free viewer app will allow users to review, edit, and share AutoCAD files on the go, making Apple's platform the sexiest lineup of products to develop products on.

Welcome back AutoCAD. Our fingers are itching to play with your new tools.

Via Infoworld.com >>

ActiveIon's Ionator HOM is a magic cleaning machine. Intended as a replacement for endless bottles of spray cleaner, the large, drill-gun-like device converts regular tap water into an ionized mist that lifts dirt off of surfaces and kills bacteria. There are no chemicals involved.

For two months we've been putting it through its paces in both a home and commercial environment to see how it stands up. Can regular tap water clean what normally requires bleach, ammonia and other chemicals?

The answer is yes, and the device is pretty darn impressive in action.

I was reading this article on Top Ten Lost Technologies and came across an interesting tidbit about Damascus Steel, one of only two materials to make the list (the other being Roman Cement). Damascus Steel was a super-strong Middle Eastern forged metal used from roughly 1100 A.D. to 1700 A.D. It was said to be able to cut through rocks and other people's swords, making it the bad-ass material of its day.

Sadly, the "recipe" for making Damascus Steel no longer exists, and they've not been able to reverse-engineer how to make it. In any case, below is the passage that struck me, boldface mine:

The particular process for forging Damascus steel appears to have disappeared sometime around 1750 AD. The exact cause for the loss of the technique is unknown, but there are several theories. The most popular is that the supply of ores needed for the special recipe for Damascus steel started running low, and sword makers were forced to develop other techniques. Another is that the whole recipe for Damascus steel--specifically the presence of carbon nanotubes--was only discovered by accident, and that sword smiths didn't actually know the technique by heart. Instead, they would simply forge the swords en masse, and test them to determine which met the standards of Damascus steel. Whatever the technique, Damascus steel is one technology that modern experimenters have been unable to fully reproduce.

The Keep Cup, a reusable cup for the takeaway espresso market.

What a great idea: a 'green' product to make a difference, make one happy, and assist in performing the menial tasks that litter an otherwise hectic day. Or is it? Consumer decision-making is beginning to follow a distinctly 'green' trend, which is fantastic in principle but often contrived in reality. What does this mean for the designer who imagines, designs and creates these goods that cater for growing consumer demand in 'sustainability?' There lies the contradiction between designing for the consumption obsessed market and designing to the core principles of sustainability, where environmental, economic and social aspects are somewhat detached from a consumer driven market.

According to Ezio Manzini, design theorist from the famed Politecnico di Milano, we have a crisis of the commons (common areas, goods, etc), a lack of contemplative time (a time poor existence, longer hours at work, etc), and most relevant to designers, a proliferation of remedial goods (Manzini 2003). The latter sees products solving every perceived problem imaginable. Whether it is a toothbrush that oscillates the plaque off in half the time, or a breakfast bar filling the five-minute bus ride, we have become increasingly, unconsciously used to products feeding our increasing wants, without a thought as to how that consumption impacts the environment. Last century, the raw materials consumed by one person in the US increased five fold (Matos and Wagner 1998). This looks more ominous when combined with the fact that only around 15-20 % of the world is highly developed to a US or western style of consumption (UN, 2009). One approach is for design to lower the user's consumption, without degrading the consumer's experience. The question is whether the new breed of 'eco' products adds to the crisis, or makes a real difference.

In this fifth post in our series, Dogs on Design, Raleigh Pop blogger Sarah F. Cox sat down with designer Michael Surtees, an interaction designer at Behavior. They talked about how humans behave on the web and how dogs behave in the park.

I'm trying to ask Michael Surtees serious questions about his design critique of the mobile application Foursquare, but I'm a bit distracted. His weimaraner, Madison, keeps trying to crawl into his lap. We are seated on a bench in Washington Square Park at 9 am on a hot August Saturday and the slanted sun is already starting to bake sunbathers while some sort of work-out club is lunging and lifting in the shade. The park is a mid-point in one of the shorter walking routes Surtees and Madison take down Fifth Avenue. For a longer walk, they'll head north on Park Avenue to 42nd Street and loop back south to 23rd Street en route to the apartment. "What I like about that walk is that the sidewalks are wide, washed daily, and I get to observe Grand Central Station for several blocks." As a Canadian import, Surtees is still struck by New York icons after four years here. "While I live pretty close to the Empire State Building I never take it for granted. It's pretty rare for me not to stop at a light on Fifth Avenue, look up to that building and smile. That this is my normal view walking Madison."

We've been hearing the moans and groans of the music industry for a while about its demise due to lack of interest in the physical music product. And some of us still love that physical experience of putting on a record--the scent of it, delicately placing the needle on the vinyl, and pushing play. Luckily designers and other creatives see these changes as opportunities, and interesting new ways of experiencing and connecting with music are finally picking up some steam. A recent example we wrote about is Boym Partners' collaboration with Ghostly Records, involving a "totem" designed to bring tactile life to Matthew Dear's Black City album.

And Arcade Fire seem to be on a roll with their new album The Suburbs, first by accompanying the digital version of the album with virtual liner notes to browse while playing it on your smart phone. Now the Canadian band has unveiled their next tech-y endeavor for Suburbs, collaborating with Google and writer/director Chris Milk in the release of a pretty incredible and personalized experience for their song "We Used to Wait." The "Wilderness Downtown" is Milk's interpretation of the Arcade Fire song, and also a great experimentation with all the bells and whistles one gets to play with by working with Google.

We're excited to hear that Ponoko, the popular, laser-cutter based, online fabrication system, is teaming up with SparkFun to offer electronic hardware as part of its catalog of materials, allowing makers to create polished, custom electronic products. Touch-sensitive, gps-enabled, music-producing robots that feed your cat come to mind.

"When I make something, which maybe is a work of art, I want this to be in the world. I want it to be sincerely and honestly and responsibly in the world. I want it to have an impact somehow."

We just found a beautiful trailer for a new documentary about Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, responsible for The Weather Project at the Tate Modern and the New York City Waterfalls. The filmmakers, Henrik Lundø and Jacob Jørgensen followed the artist for 5 years to document his working process and artistic vision on film.

Join the first Designers Accord Town Hall Meeting in Seattle, Washington!
The meeting will take place on September 23rd at the School of Visual Concepts hosted by the AIGA Seattle chapter.

The Designers Accord is a global coalition of designers, educators, and business leaders working together to create positive environmental and social impact. This town hall meeting is your chance to join fellow Seattle designers who care deeply about these issues, and share in the discussion of how we can make designing in sustainable ways a reality in our region.

6:00 to 6:30 pm: Socialize and network; light food and beverages.
6:30 to 7:30: Update about the Designers Accord movement; speakers.
7:30 to 8:30: Breakout discussions; each speaker will lead a roundtable that relates the presentations to local issues.
8:30 to 9:00: Regroup and share our discussion results.

This event is free, but RSVP is required by Monday, September 20th.

On August 5th, the Parsons DESIS Lab (of which I am a member) opened an exhibition at the Abrons Arts Center in the Lower East Side of New York City. The exhibition, running until September 15th, is part of the DESIS Lab's Amplifying Creative Communities research project, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation's 2009 NYC Cultural Innovation Fund. (DESIS = Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability, an international network of researchers.)

The exhibition is not a curation of findings at the end of the project, but a research tool in the middle of a project. It is one of a number of initiatives that are part of the Amplifying Creative Communities project to find examples of people who have taken it upon themselves to innovate new ways of resourcing their everyday lives, normally involving some sort of sharing. The assumption is that people around the world are giving up waiting for government or business to develop more sustainable (both ecologically and socially) ways of living and working, and so are starting to do it for themselves. Having found these sorts of innovations, the project is then exploring how design can enhance their effectiveness, and how design can help others take up similar innovations.

"There's no time left for warnings. We're in it up to our necks right now--in the climate crisis, Surveillance Society, the bankruptcy of the financial sector ... We've passed the points of no return."

Ars Electronica 2010 is more than just a festival - it's a call for action! The festival for art, technology and society will dive into the "mess we've gotten into" in order to move things back in the right direction.

This year's festival titled REPAIR takes place from 2-11 September in Linz (Austria) with more than 200 exhibitions, productions and events at the Tabakfabrik, a former tobacco processing plant. Core is on site to bring you the necessary lifesavers.

Ars Electronica is a yearly festival which made its debut on September 18, 1979. Since then, Ars Electronica has developed itself into one of the world's most recognized media art festivals packed with symposia, exhibitions, performances and interventions. You can check the full program here.

On physical objects becoming less and less physically weighty: Nowadays if you drop your phone, it may not survive. The other day I caught a snippet of GoodFellas, the part where Robert Deniro uses a 1970s-era telephone receiver to bludgeon a crony. Try to do that with your iPhone or Droid X and you'd have a confused, unbloodied crony and a cracked touchscreen.

Keyboards are less substantial now too, and typing on my laptop doesn't make the racket an old metal-on-metal typewriter did. But just as we've seen old phone receivers nostalgically connected to cell phones, David Schultze's Philco PC, Mac Classic iPad holders, and J. Stephenson's wonderful retro computers, here comes Jack Zylkin's Instructable for a typewriter USB keyboard.

I once accidentally shot a girl I was trying to date in the head with a champagne cork. She was standing next to me as I opened the bottle; the cork slipped my grasp, shot straight up, hit the ceiling, and came down squarely atop her noggin. It all happened in a second and I didn't even realize what had happened--I basically opened the bottle, heard a pop and then she fell down, holding her head and going "Fuuuuuuck!" (Afterwards she was fine, though our budding romance was not.)

The amount of pressure inside a champagne bottle, in addition to being calibrated to destroy my relationships, is much greater than what's inside a bottle of beer. To prevent explosions, champagne bottles are made extra-thick and extra-heavy, nearly two pounds each. Multiply that by the 300 million bottles of Champagne that France ships every year and you've got a lot of carbon emissions. To combat this, the French are developing a new, slimmer-walled champagne bottle that weighs less.

Danish industrial design firm KiBiSi and Danish bicycle manufacturer Biomega have teamed up with Puma to release the Mopion cargo bike, a sort of pickup-truck version of the Puma Boston bike:

[The Mopion] mixes city bike features and cargo bike features, making it a sturdy companion. It comes with a super-size innovative front carrier for heavy duty transport of your groceries or other needs. Developed for city dwellers, Mopion features a light aluminum frame, making it a one-of-a-kind lightweight cargo bike weighing only 22 kilos. The geometry holds the body in a slightly inclined, but still heads-up position for navigational ease and exceptional balancing.

The stretch two-wheeler will officially launch in mere hours at Eurobike and goes on sale in Spring of next year.

The Delft University of Technology's Industrial Design Engineering department has posted their "Delft Design Guide" online, for free PDF download. The content in the guide is drawn largely from five of their design courses: Introduction to Industrial Design, Concept Design, Fuzzy Front End, Materialization and Detailing, and their Final Project course.

Posted alongside the guide is this video interview with Jeroen van Erp, an alumnus, faculty member, and part of the Dutch creative agency Fabrique. (Warning: The sound is horrible, as if it were recorded with one of those snazzy DSLRs with amazing video capabilities but a terrible microphone. Get ready to lean in close to your speakers.)

Hit the jump to learn more about what's in the Guide.

We're excited by the recent trend toward open-source design approaches, with Continuum's Open for Branding project, Betacup on the Jovoto platform, and the recent announcement of Open IDEO. So, we're especially thrilled to be able to announce and track, first-hand, Open Planet Ideas, a promising collaboration between Sony and global conservation group WWF, utilizing the Open IDEO platform.

This challenge is a great one for designers: using existing Sony technologies, either on their own or in unique combinations, how can we address key sustainability issues in new ways? Sony provides information about all their available tech, the WWF provides all the latest environmental facts and figures, and participants provide their fresh inventor minds. Casting a wide net, Sony is betting on the myriad of ideas that can come from a community of people both interested in environmental issues and capable of re-purposing anything from GPS units to dye-sensitized solar cells. Participants can also propose disruptive new applications from nine 'seed' technologies, used alone or in new combinations.

Today kicks off the initial inspiration phase, open through October 1, in which participants upload inspirations and observations in the form of photos, stories, or videos. With community input, the best insights will be synthesized, and the challenge will be re-framed to kick off the concept phase.

Aside from some beautiful shots of the cast off-camera, Rolling Stone's coverage of Mad Men also caught some delightful moments capturing the contrast between life in 2010 and 1965. Enjoy.

Don Draper (Jon Hamm) checks his iPhone 4.

Roger Sterling (John Slattery) looking more suited for Brooklyn than Madison Ave.

Kenny Cosgrove (Aaron Stanton) and Harry Crane (Rich Sommer) perhaps admiring the new iTunes 10 on a MacBook Pro.

Given Mad Men is so well-respected for its attention to period detail (i.e. the Helvetica poster we all saw in the new creative lounge at SCDP early this season) I find this even more entertaining and jarring in their mid-century environs.

Via Armin Vit.
Photos by James Minchin III for Rolling Stone.

As various print magazines like Gourmet scramble to reinvent themselves as Ipad apps, we are happy to see that some people still believe a physical printed product can be quite nice. A staple in our daily blog roll of creative delights, It's Nice That, is going against the grain with the fourth issue of their bi-annually printed publication. The publication serves as an archive of the blog's best editorial content, as well as a venue for more in-depth stories, and this issue sounds juicy with features, tons of work, and interviews with Neville Brody, Miranda July and others.

Issue #4 is now available for pre-order, with an incentive for those who appreciate cute illustrated blob-men and the lovely details in printed matter: a free screenprint by James Jarvis (two-color with spot UV gloss, unfolded at 185 x 245 mm).

Fuseproject
Industrial Design Intern
San Francisco, CA

The intern's role within the product department is primarily to support all areas of design with specific tasks including; document layout and production, research (with image gathering), preparation for presentations as well as conceptual sketching / ideation and model-making.

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