To celebrate the 100th anniversary of Boston's Fenway Park, Objet used one of their Connex 3D printers to crank out a replica of the stadium, created from blueprints and photographs:

Following last year's remarkably successful inaugural exhibition at the Terminal Building, WantedDesign is back and bigger than ever as a major satellite event to the 24th International Contemporary Furniture Fair. Core77 is pleased to partner with the event in support of their first Student Design Challenge, which, along with the Live/Work design contest and the iGet.it pop-up shop, are new for 2012.

For the student Design Challenge, WantedDesign has invited students from six schools—three stateside and three French—to participate in a three-day digital fabrication workshop:

The "Design Students Challenge" will be an engaging live workshop that allows design students, ambassadors of their schools, to express their creativity and technical ability. Over the course of three days, design students from the U.S. and France will use one material, one conceptual tool (e.g. computer software), and one fabrication tool (a laser cutting machine) to design and construct a lighting design of their own invention. At the end of three days, the designs will be presented and be judged by the public and a jury of design professionals...

Participating schools are Art Center College of Design, Parsons The New School for Design, Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), ENSCI les ateliers, Ecole Boulle and Ecole supérieure d'art et design Saint-Etienne.

We had the chance to chat with the creator of the design challenge, François Brument.

Core77: Can you introduce us to your personal work and your interest in exploring digital manufacturing?

A hundred years ago, the industrial revolution had totally changed the way we conceived of and fabricated objects. A century later, how should we approach the digital paradigm? My aim is to investigate how thinking, conceiving, fabricating, distributing digitally can profoundly change the design practice.

Where did the idea for the Student Design Challenge come from? Why did you choose this particular format?

The idea came to me when I was a jury during students design diplomas. A lot of them were using laser-cutting techniques, but they were using it as a way to escape from manual modelmaking—not exploring its untapped potential as a new technology. The idea, then, is to create a very short format to explore a fast and expressive use of laser-cutting and digital conception techniques.

You've run this project before in France—how do you anticipate this transatlantic iteration to be different or similar to the previous challenges?

I've always thought the digital battles as fun moments to compete and share skills and visions... but I've been really surprised how quickly design and aesthetic approaches of each school were appearing. I'm very eager to see how students will express themselves and enjoy this moment together.

Join us Tonight at the Hand-Eye Supply Curiosity Club in lovely downtown Portland, Oregon as Sam Lanahan of Flextegrity expounds on his Buckminster Fuller inspired work with structural materials composed of icosahedral arrays!

Flextegrity "Innovations in Structural Optimization. Making things stronger and lighter- why geometry matters!"

Making load bearing materials- A new look at discontinuous compression continuous tension structures. The discussion will explore the structural and symmetrical integrity of the icosahedron and what it means to constrain the twelve degrees of freedom. From there we will weave omni-axial, omni-extensible arrays into virtually any form. We will explore the unique characteristics of the resulting arrays and potential applications.

I had the great good fortune as a young man to travel with Buckminster Fuller on a trip to Southeast Asia where he was the guest of many heads of State. His influence on me is immeasurable. Afterwards I spent two years exploring the geometry of geodesics and tensegrities with Joe Clinton at Union College. I earned a MS in Environmental Studies from the University of Oregon, after which I founded a company with others that pioneered Geographic Information Systems applications for mobile data collection in the electric, cable, and telephone industries. Naturally, this work dovetailed nicely with my interest in spatial topologies. In 2004 I reinvigorated 'Flextegrity' by continuing my earlier explorations into the development of a 'universal material.' I now hold two patents and a third pending in structural optimized materials based on icosahedral arrays.

Tuesday, May 15th
6PM PST
Hand-Eye Supply
23 NW 4th Ave
Portland, OR, 97209

Not in the greater Portland area? No problem! Join us live on our broadcast channel —the show begins at 6pm Pacific.

Thankfully that's not another pirated version of Arne Jacobsen's Swan chair; it's the work of Harlem-based knitwear designer Sinje Ollen, whose "Clothing for Furniture" project covers the classics in custom yarn, and can be seen at the upcoming ICFF in New York. "I specialize in making 'clothes' for '60s furniture that need some help rejuvenating," says Ollen.

Of all the discarded furniture I see curbside in Manhattan, the chief reason they made it to the trash heap seems to be torn, worn or cat-scraped upholstery. Knit covers seem a good way to give them some additional life, while still maintaining the original look...assuming, of course, that you recognize the original look in the first place. At least one commenter on Ollen's Facebook page wrote "I love the chair shape. Did you design that?" It's like an ID history version of Titanic tweets.

Photography by Glen Jackson Taylor for Core77

There's so many events and exhibitions all over Milan during the Salone Internazionale del Mobile that you could almost be forgiven for skipping out on the long trek to the Rho fair grounds. Luckily for the organizers we're in the minority, and the exhibition halls were packed. So packed it was a little uncomfortable at times feeling more like navigating a crowd at the end of a gig than a trade show.

There wasn't much press-worthy new product launched this year, most companies were content reissuing updates to their classics which could be a reflection on the European recession. In fact, so many of the established design-driven companies focused on their legacies with the use of product timelines incorporated into their exhibition booths that we could have made it a category.

Some highlights included this minimal wall mounted desk/storage unit for small apartments by Core-faves Yael Mer & Shay Alkalay and we're loving the shadows cast by Sunrise, an outdoor table setting by Ludovica + Roberto Palomba for Driade. As usual, the SaloneSatellite was full of inspiration, especially this stunning bench by student Danah Al Kubaisy as part of a materials and fabrication class at the American University of Sharjah. At the Melbourne Movement stand, Tate Anson's Tryst Stool was getting a lot of attention with his water-jet cut pattern technique for bending timber, and Thomas Schnur's Rubber Table was just straight-up awesome!

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Rem Koolhaas led OMA's recently completed scenography project for Teatro Greco, or the Syracuse Greek Theatre, a historical landmark in Italy that dates back to the 5th century BCE. Every summer the theatre stages three classic plays, and for this season's cycle they commissioned OMA to design a temporary stage that will remain up for Aeschylus's Prometheus Unbound (directed by Claudio Longhi), Euripides' Bacchae (dir. Antonio Calenda) and Aristophane's The Birds (dir. Roberta Torre).

The stage—aluminum scaffolding clad with multilayer marine plywood—was designed in three parts, the Ring, the Machine and the Raft. The Raft, the name for the circular stage, "reimagines the orchestra space as a modern thymele, the altar that in ancient times was dedicated to Dionysian rites." The Ring is a suspended walkway that makes a half circle around the stage and backstage area, providing actors with different ways to enter a scene. The Machine is the backdrop, which can be altered to suit different productions. A sloping circular platform seven meters high, it's the mirror image of the stage. It can rotate, "symbolizing the passage of thirteen centuries during Prometheus's torture; Split down the middle, it can also be opened, allowing the entrance of the actors, and symbolizing dramatic events like the Prometheus being swallowed in the bowels of the earth."

Senior Art Director US
Digitas
Chicago, Illinois

Digitas—one of the world's leading digital marketing and media companies—is seeking a Senior Art Director, who will be responsible for the conception, design and execution of innovative visual materials for integrated, cross channel initiatives including: large web initiatives, online advertising and digital marketing. Individuals should possess strong conceptual and design skills and assist the Creative Director in improving the conceptual, technical and creative performance of staff within his or her group.

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The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.

Atlanta-based Sonya Yong James is the textile designer and fiber artist behind Modern Fiber Lab, which produces handmade, sustainable goods from animal fibers.

I work primarily with wool fibers and various felt techniques. Felt offers an extraordinary range from two dimensional design to sculptural forms for both interiors and personal ornament. No other material is as versatile. Felt is utilitarian, decorative, and completely renewable.

I source all of my fiber from shepherds primarily in the United States. Everything here is a direct link to the natural world.

It's safe to say James has a strong passion for wool felt. In addition to creating the Knit Pod Vessels you see here, she's devoted many Flickr pixels to showing you how the material goes from sheep to studio.

Graph of the Internet.

Law enforcement is an extremely complex line of work, as police officers have to keep up-to-date with events and people in the community, but usually from the sidelines or through second-hand information. Tools that can augment police officers' mental models of the communities they serve, especially in an ever increasing information-rich world, are critical to the future of policing.

And that's where graph theory comes in. Graph theory looks at objects (nodes) and the relationships (edges) between them. These objects could be people, computers, or buildings, while the corresponding relationships could be family ties, Internet connections, and roads. As Facebook and other social networking tools continue to bring our world closer together each day, social network applications of graph theory are becoming a hot topic. Ever hear of "six degrees of separation?" Thanks to Facebook, it's now closer to four or five.

Criminal networks are really just a specific example of social networks. Currently, law enforcement agencies use link analysis, a basic application of graph theory, to attempt to understand these networks. Link analysis produces a visual output of relationships between nodes, but "people tend to believe that actors in the center or at the top of a graph are crucially and most important." Instead, Renee van der Hulst describes a framework for using social network analysis (SNA) for crime analysis. Beyond just outputing a visual graph, SNA provides a mathematical approach to quantify the "characteristics of network activity, social roles, positions and associated social mechanisms."

A simple graph of a social network, including nodes and edges.

In 2011, researchers from Virginia Commonwealth University implemented a pilot program of SNA in the Richmond, VA Police Department to test its effectiveness. The Richmond City Police Department asked the researchers to identify the reason behind why "two groups of previously friendly males" were now engaging in a "rash of violence" against each other. The researchers mined a police informational database for details concerning twenty-four persons of interest, as well as any connections four people out.

You can never have too many wall hooks in your apartment, and mine are always full. But given that your average piece of bent metal will run you $5 a pop at a Manhattan hardware store, I've limited my urge to line my walls completely.

If only I lived out in the sticks, I could use sticks.

Etsy seller Gabriel Rutledge makes hers out of green maple twigs mounted to a distressed wooden board.

John Robohm's Live Wire Farm is a Vermont-based outfit that manufactures goods from local hardwoods, and judging by all of the SOLD stamps on their website, does a brisk business in hooks.

With useful but unsexy products, presentation is everything. Until now I thought Dollar Shave Club had the lock on irreverent commercials, but Schticky—whose namesake product is an arguably boring reusable lint roller with a business end made from silicone—availed themselves of the services of motormouthed pitch man Vince Offer. Their original commercial, from earlier in the year, might not best Dollar Shave Club's:

But if you then watch the (admittedly puerile) R-rated version they shrewdly released last month, you see the ingredients of a viral video:

It's been almost exactly two years since New Zealand-based 'maker' Mike Grobelny first set out to make an alaia and over a year since he posted his accomplishment in an extremely thorough time-lapse video, but it's worth a belated post because the project is as relevant as ever. Not to mention the fact that it's pretty awesome.

The surfboard (and culture of surfing) represents conflict between industry and the environment. The physical act, and the culture of surfing, provides an intimate connection with nature and natural forces. It is this emotional and physical engagement with nature that makes the surfing experience powerful and enriching for many people. In direct contrast to this natural experience is the use of toxic materials in the manufacture of surfboards, with negative impacts for both board manufacturers and the natural environment. These toxic synthetic materials provide a high level of performance, which most surfers are looking for and is not easily achieved using natural materials.

The combined aesthetic of the surfboards beautiful form and natural materials, moves the surfboard from a relatively short-lived disposable sport product to a treasured artifact, increasing its inherent value and challenging the disposable mentality prevailing in current surf-culture.

I can't speak to the ins-and-outs of surfing—much less their fabrication by hand—which is precisely why we appreciate Grobelny's painstaking documentation. It's not quite an Instructable, but credit to the Aucklander for putting the video together:

photo via the selby

Sculptor Tom Sachs happens to have his studio just up the block from me, but the goings-on inside are well-shielded from the street. I'll occasionally pass by just as the doors quickly open and close to admit or discharge one of his employees, and I always catch that distinctive shop whiff that screams they're making stuff in there.

Sachs (whose "Space Program: Mars" exhibition opens today at the Park Avenue Armory) has a quirky sense of humor fully on display in this "Love Letter to Plywood" video:

The video was directed by Sachs collaborator Van Neistat—remember his brother, Casey?--and is part of a trilogy called "Energies and Skills." Check out the other two, "How to Sweep" and "Space Camp" for more Neistat & Sachs goodness.

Creative Director
LIQUID
Lima, Peru

LIQUID, a full service online marketing and communications agency based in Lima, Peru is seeking a multidisciplinary Creative Director who is ready to set trends and mark the way for the Peruvian industry. The ideal candidate is a strong strategic and conceptual design thinker who will be responsible for the creative strategy and direction of our work. He/she must look at all projects as an opportunity for innovation. He/she must have digital experience in platform development, story telling and team leading. The Creative Director will work with the Art Director, Copywriters, Senior UX Designers & Senior Visual Designers.

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The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.

If you're going to make design predictions, you have to get used to being wrong. I'd have told you Quirky's Click n Cook system of cooking utensils wouldn't sell, and I'd have been incorrect.

Invented by Fred Ende, the Click n Cook consists of five commonly used utensils and just one handle, which snaps into each like a razor handle does with disposable blades.

My rationale for dismissal would have been that the footprint of the base isn't much smaller than a cylinder you could throw five full-sized utensils in, thus negating any countertop space savings, but consumers disagree: Since hitting production the Click n Cook has shipped more than 10,000 units, paying out nearly $16,000 to the developer(s). That might seem like a drop in the bucket to corporations targeting Target, but I think it's a handsome payday for Ende and his contributors, considering it took just one month to develop.

I love that Quirky enables these possibilities, and also dig that they put together a nice vid detailing the design and development process:

TOKEN's founder's Emrys Berkower and Will Kavesh have a massive workshop on the ground floor of an old factory on the water in Red Hook, Brooklyn where they're set up to work with glass, metal and wood. They can draw up plans for a chair, for example, and walk into the next room to build it. In other words, it's a furniture maker's dream. A few weeks ago they were nice enough to set some time aside from their busy preparations for ICFF to talk about how they grew their studio, what they're working on now and what makes a good 'hangover chair.' Scroll through all the photos below to see a sneak peek of the new pieces they'll be exhibiting this weekend.

Origins
After Will and Emrys met at Alfred University in the mid 90s, they moved to New York where Emrys settled into the glass blowing community and Will began building furniture for Rogan. When Will needed some help he'd call up Emrys, and the two worked like this, collaborating on lighting and furniture projects until they decided to strike out on their own. They continue to handle Rogan's Objects line, but after doing custom design-build jobs, beginning with their first gig converting an NYU classroom, they needed their own space and so they made the move out to a spacious studio in Red Hook.

Even though custom jobs for clients took up most of their time, their goal was always to start their own line of furniture. "After two years of prototyping we finally just said, we're not going to do it unless we just start making it ourselves and building it," said Emrys. That was in 2009, when they officially began the TOKENnyc product line.

They still take on design-build jobs because, as Emrys explained, "Those custom projects are challenging and inform your own work because you're problem solving and coming up with different production or manufacturing systems to build something."
"It's like still being in school, in a way," Will added.

Ethos
Will and Emrys describe their designs as promoting purposeful and considered living. "It's about living with objects that have a real task in mind," said Will. "TOKEN would never design a really super fluffy down chair or couch that you want to be inside of when you're recovering from a hangover - we would never design something like that."
"Although," Emrys is quick to add, "there's a place in the world for that. But that's not what we want to promote. We would promote something that's more active and engaged."

Take, for example, the TOKEN Lounge Chair. "If you sit in that chair it's definitely a relaxed pose," said Emrys. "It's definitely a comfortable chair, but you don't want to curl up and watch a movie in that chair. You feel a relaxed engagement. You might want to read a book and not fall asleep reading it." That very purposeful aesthetic is evident in all aspects of their work, right down to the joints, which Will describes using the the industry term "work holding, a structural solution that would be used while making something, but we've adopted that vocabulary."

During the recent CicLAvia, cyclists stretch as far as the eye can see on 7th St. from MacArthur Park into Downtown. All images by the author.

Los Angeles is a city of cars. This we know. Public space is few and far between, taking the form of long streets like Melrose Ave or the Venice Beach Boardwalk. Public-private spaces like the Grove and the Third Street Promenade create the illusion of a walking city, but most people first have to drive to get there.

But Angelenos are yearning for public space, and recent interventions are pointing at a way to create that space. The most prominent, certainly, is CicLAvia, a biannual event that celebrated its fourth installation this month.

CicLAvia is inspired by the ciclovías of Latin America, a tradition started by Bogotá, Colombia, a traffic-heavy city which shuts down streets every Sunday. In Los Angeles, this means shutting down over 10 miles of streets, stretching west from Beverly and Vermont, through to MacArthur Park, Downtown and Boyle Heights, with a north-south trail from Olvera Street to Central and Olympic. The distance pales in comparison to Bogotá's 85 miles of street closures, but as any Angeleno would attest, 10 miles alone would have been impossible to imagine just a few years ago.

It was my first CicLAvia this year, and it was stunning. The city that I grew up in suddenly felt smaller, more free, disentangled from the traffic that makes it so infamous. I could feel the city air, see the smiles on my fellow cyclists, gaze up at the buildings and notice details I never had time for when driving by. Key areas created an open public space on the streets for cyclists and non-cyclists alike—in MacArthur Park, for example, you could sit down, listen to live music, eat tacos, and just people watch.

CicLAvia's success has been a thrill to witness, but its ambitions and scale are also difficult to reproduce. Costing about $100,000, mostly for street closures and the accompanying safety presence, CicLAvia represents the extraordinary collective effort of a 13-person board, whose talents range from social media strategy to arts organizing to civil engineering. A recent piece in LA Weekly described the original founders, "As if casting for some kind of prisoner-of-war escape film, the group's initial members each had the exact higher-order specialties you would need to produce an impossible-sounding seven-mile, open-air, closed-streets, public event in Los Angeles."

CicLAvia raises much of its funds through donations. In a quieter section on the northern trail, a sign asks cyclists to text in a donation to keep the project going.

This invention is the opposite of the Schticky situation we posted about earlier, where you've got a mundane product and need to spice it up with a lively video; the Une Bobine coil is such a good idea, with merits so instantly obvious, that the boring video (below) does nothing to increase its appeal.

A great example of exploiting material properties, the Une Bobine takes the segmented, flexible metal cables of the sort used in industrial light fixtures and adapts it for iPhone charging, allowing the cable itself to serve as a stand.

While the idea is simple, manufacturing it isn't so easy: "Each end of the connector requires multiple injection molds to create the custom fitting in the housings that we need to securely attach to the flexible cable," writes designer Jon Fawcett in his Kickstarter pitch. "The connector housings are also sonically welded together, which requires additional tools to produce each end. Your pledges will directly pay for these startup costs required to produce the cable."

Perhaps he should change "will directly pay for" to "have directly paid for;" at press time this was yet another wild Kickstarter success, with the $25 device garnering $70,000, handily smashing its original sub-$10,000 goal with 29 days to spare.

And now for aforementioned boring video:

If you thought Field Notes, the now famous 48-page memo book, was just another Futura-fueled riff on retro design, you obviously never read the statement on the back flap. "Inspired by the vanishing subgenre of agricultural memo books, ornate pocket ledgers and the simple, unassuming beauty of a well-crafted grocery list, the Draplin Design Co., Portland, Oregon—in conjunction with Coudal Partners, Chicago, Illinois—brings you "FIELD NOTES" in hopes of offering "An honest memo book worth fillin' up with GOOD INFORMATION."

Draplin Design Co. is the brainchild of Aaron Draplin, a thoroughbred American who's serious about graphic design and how it's evolved over the past century, especially when it comes to everyday items for everyday, working people. After two decades of trawling to swap meets, flea markets, yard sales and antique fairs for gems of Americana (otherwise known as junking), Draplin has amassed an incredible collection of old memo books, simple, saddle-stitched pocket books that were once given as freebies to farmers and those in the agricultural business to advertise products like feed, tools or machine parts.

Draplin wasn't only interested in the books as ephemera, he wanted to know who designed them, who printed them and who stitched them together. He describes them as "purely utilitarian and free of anyone attaching anything cool or uncool or ironic to it...Some are really colorful and others are really, really spare. They're all different, so I want to think that someone was actually going through and laying every little bit and piece out."

Audi is known for their four-wheel drive prowess, with the Quattro mentality embodied in their very logo. But at yesterday's Worthersee AutoNews 2012 show in Austria, they pulled the sheets off of a two-wheeled creation: Their lithium-ion-battery-powered E-bike Worthersee concept.

We've seen automakers design bicycles to tuck in the trunk before, but this one isn't intended as a crunchy green adjunct to driving; instead it's meant to be an unabashed display of Audi's design and technology prowess. They make no bones about the fact that the bike is intended for "sport, fun and tricks," which explains why the thing produces more torque than my VW Golf did and has a top speed of 50 freaking miles per hour.

The Audi e-bike Worthersee combines the Audi brand's principal competences - design, ultra, connect and e-tron—and explores the limits of what is technically feasible in terms of design, lightweight construction, networking and electric mobility. [The] ultra-light carbon-fiber frame weighs only 1,600 grams (3.53 lb). It makes use of bionic principles derived from nature. Material reinforcements are needed only at the points where loads actually occur. The swinging arm for the rear wheel is also made of CFRP. All in all, the Audi e-bike Worthersee represents the full extent of the brand's expertise in ultra-lightweight design.

The bike has three levels of power: You can either provide all of the juice by pedaling, provide some of the juice with the electric motor taking up the slack, or have the electric motor do all the work. Beyond that are two somewhat bizarre-sounding "Wheelie" modes, where you're meant to tip the bike back on its rear wheel and ride it like a Segway, with the motor taking care of the balance and braking or accelerating when you lean forwards or backwards.

Click here to read more details.