Photos courtesy of Greer Garner

We've seen plenty of decent portable speakers over the years—as one of many iDevice peripherals that designers continue to revisit, "Zooka" speaker bar for iPad and fuseproject's Jambox (a Core77 2011 Design Awards notable) come to mind—as well as a resurgence in vintage speaker restoration (an offshoot of the maker movement, perhaps): Joe Dobson and Devin Ward are just two recent examples. Designer Greer Garner has combined vintage aesthetics with handheld convenience (and digital fabrication to boot) in "Sway," a portable speaker with interchangeable hardware.

Sway is designed so the user can customise parts to reflect their own personal style. The speaker grills have changeable designs, along with a silk layer that adds a splash of colour and protects the electronics. Being able to influence the look of the music player helps build a stronger attachment to the device and encourages people to think of electronics as something to be treasured.

All of the external components of "Sway" are 3D-printed: the enclosure is made of nylon, spraypainted in navy, while the buttons and knobs are made of copper-coated resin and electroplated in gold. A strip of silk conceals the 28mm speaker cones while allowing sound to pass without muffling or distortion. The device is USB rechargeable via the 3.5mm audio jack.

Like Hannes Harms, Mimi Zou just completed her MA/MSc at RCA's Innovation Design Engineering program. Her project, "IRIS," is "a biometrics enabled camera controlled by your eye [that] understands who you are by looking at your iris signature, and lets you capture exactly what you see by tracking your eye." Thus, it has far more in common with, say, the "Nest" learning thermostat—to which it bears a curious resemblance— than IKEA's atavistic novelty point-and-shoot: Zou writes that "with this project, I hoped to bring about a refreshing new product experience, and challenge the existing interaction, typology and capabilities of cameras."

On one hand, the project can be construed as an exercise in biometrics, or "the sets of unique characteristics and traits possessed by every human being," which "could be utilized to positively identify individuals, and reflect their degrees of wellbeing over time.
"

This project explores the immense impact of biometrics, as it becomes instilled as capability in consumer electronic products. By creating more intuitive user experiences, powerful profile management networks and next-generation content-sharing possibilities, biometric technologies create significant advantages for their enabled products. Together they create a future where everything—except identity—can be shared.


Alternately, it's a new approach to photography, an investigation into the very premise of photography (short of theory-laden discourse on subject/object dualism, authorship, etc.):

Iris derived from a personal interest in photography, and the observation that photo-taking is a ritual that celebrates the photographer's unique point of view. By recognizing who we are, Iris is able to characterize itself to fit the user. And by having experienced multiple users, it is able to learn about behavior and make intelligent functional decisions over time. I've designed this camera to pick up on the sophisticated cues given naturally by our bodies in the process of "seeing," with the hopes of creating an intuitive and delightful user experience that is at the same time uncompromising in performance.

Must-see video after the jump:

One of the best things about design museums is that they usually have the best gift shops. I'll admit that there are a few museums whose shops I visit without stepping into the museum itself, and if I lived in Berlin the Museum der Dinge would easily make that list. Literally translated it means the Museum of Things, and with case after case filled with regular, everyday household items dating back to pre-WWI Germany—with a special focus on those designed by the Werkbund Archiv—it lives up to its name.

One of the many lovely things in the museum gift shop is Reline, a collection of recycled tableware by Anna Bormann, a Berlin-based designer who specializes in experimental domestic concepts and home objects, many of which are made from porcelain. For Reline she set about collecting vintage and antique white porcelain dishes and tea things. She then creates mismatched sets by printing a pink line and recycle symbol on each piece.

"The idea is to reuse and upgrade all the random, left over white porcelain cups and other dishes," says Bormann. "The simple vertical line is visible from most angles and gives an obvious indication of belonging to the different white set of parts. Once these different individuals are put together they become an original yet completely new tableware set, providing a unique atmosphere to the dinner table."

Graphic Designer
Sebago
Rockford, Michigan

Sebago, one of Wolverine Worldwide's footwear brands, is seeking a graphic designer for their marketing team. The Designer creates and executes concepts, designs art and copy layouts, and creates appropriate digital documents and layouts consistent with the goals and objectives as outlined in creative briefs. Guides the activities and development of projects assigned to the Production Graphic Assistants.

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The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.

Female readers, I'm not sure there's an equivalent experience to this for you. But male readers, remember the first time you walked into a bathroom at a restaurant where their policy was to fill the urinals with ice? What did you think of that?

At one point in human history, ice was precious. Few of us reading this were alive back then, but back in the day you had an "ice box" that wasn't plugged into anything, and in places like Japan, some dude on a bicycle-like contraption rolled up on your house with a massive block of ice. (Check out the Japanese movie Always if you get a chance.) You paid the guy and he chipped off a bunch of ice for you to throw in your box, and we called that guy the Ice Man.

Google Image fail

Imagine telling someone from back then: "We now have so much ice we're literally peeing on it."

People are doing more interesting things with ice, however, using common molding techniques familiar to the industrial designer. If you go into certain bars in Japan, or the excellent B-Flat Tokyo-style speakeasy in Manhattan, and order a Scotch on the rocks you'll find a large, single sphere of ice in the glass. The thinking goes that with less surface area than a bunch of little cubes, there's less melted ice adulterating the flavor of your booze. We've showed you the contraption used to make it before.

More recently, companies like Williams-Sonoma have been selling molds in both bottle-chilling size and in a large ice cube size, the latter made from silicone. I imagine that with the flexible silicone on the latter, you can both get the mold off of the steel tool and create cubes that have no draft angle, for all of the 0-degree delight that will provide you production methods geeks.

We all know Brad Pitt yearns to be an architect, but are there any Hollywood stars with industrial design leanings? (And I'm not talking about Lady Gaga "designing" a pair of headphones; something tells me she wasn't working the AutoCAD.) When GadgetLab posted a list of "19 Patents Invented by Ingenious Celebrities," I eagerly scoured the list to find anything vaguely ID related.

Closest thing I found was exciting... then disappointing: Steve McQueen, it turns out, designed a bucket seat in 1969, and the patent was granted in '70.

I say disappointing because there isn't a single mention of any functional or ergonomic improvement in the entire filing, which merely describes it as "the ornamental design for a bucket seat." So why'd he design it, just for looks? Was the shape more comfortable?

It's no GoPro, and it's badly in need of stability control, but earlier this week Pivothead released some new footage shot by their Durango video recording eyewear. Have a look:

The tiny right-between-the-eyes sensor can capture stills at 8MP and shoot 1080p HD video, with options for both 30 and 60 frames per second. Files are transferred to your computer wirelessly, obviating the need for cables, and there's even an onboard microphone tucked into the side.

I don't think that GoPro, as the incumbent wearable camera company, has anything to worry about; Pivothead's test video above started to make me seasick almost instantly. But competition is always good for product design, and it will be nice if GoPro counters with their own sleeker form factor. If these two companies keep at it, in the future photographers and cinematographers will be able to walk around with all of their gear perched on the front of their faces.

"Why would somebody do this, Doc?"
"Because people in the future are idiots, Marty."

Yesterday quite a few people were taken in by this image, which went full viral on Facebook and Twitter:

It indicates, on the display of Doc's time-traveling Delorean, yesterday as the day Marty McFly traveled to in the future. However, the image above is a hoax.

Those who faithfully remember the Back to the Future series of movies will recall Marty skipped thirty years at a time, traveling backwards from 1985 to 1955—and forwards to 2015, not 2012. Some Photoshopper created the image above.

Every time you flush the toilet, you waste liters or gallons of water, and the waste goes to a costly sewage treatment facility or a septic tank that needs to be periodically emptied. That's not a really smart or sustainable way to handle human waste, but that's the system we have in place.

Researchers at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University, however, have struck upon a more sensible solution with their No-Mix Vacuum Toilet. The device was designed with two goals: 1) To reduce the amount of water wasted in flushing, and 2) To wring some useable energy out of your poop.

"Waste is not waste, but a misplaced resource," said associate professor Wang Jin-Yuan, who led the team. "With this new toilet system, 90 percent of water can be saved, so can you imagine how much water we waste every other day?"

The toilet system has two chambers that separate the liquid and solid wastes and uses a vacuum suction technology, similar to those used in aircraft lavatories.

Liquid waste is diverted to a processing facility where components used for fertilisers such as nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium can be recovered.

Solid waste is sent to a bioreactor where it will be digested to release bio-gas which contains methane that can replace natural gas used in stoves or converted to electricity.

Retrofitting the toilets within an existing city's infrastructure will be tough, as there is extra piping required. But the research team believes it would make a good fit for a new town constructed from the ground-up, and is planning on testing it out in a new community being constructed in Singapore within the next two years.

via yahoo news

The entrance to Punchouse 234 features a sunken playspace. The lawn is made from synthetic turf that requires no water for maintenance.

On a quiet street in Santa Monica this past week, Marco DiMaccio Punchouse Design Group unveiled his latest architectural design, PUNCHouse 234, the new home of journalist Lisa Ling and her husband Dr. Paul Song. But as much as the home is distinguished by its celebrity owners, it also holds distinction under the more rigorous LEED Platinum rating it earned. What's more, the studio tells Core77 that it's Santa Monica's first zero emissions home.

To meet these standards, DiMaccio and his team applied a number of strategies, starting quite literally from the ground up. They relied on "100% waste diversion," namely, taking apart the previous structure and either recycling it, repurposing it for the new project or donating it—in this case, to Habitat for Humanity. Rainwater is collected to supply for irrigation, while synthetic turf eliminates the need for water entirely in large swaths of the space. Other strategies, such as solar panels, aim to provide for all the electricity needs—including for the electric BMW ActiveE parked in the back—while Angelenos' beloved air conditioning has been discarded in favor of a design that uses air flow to passively cool the home.

The Punchouse team with the new homeowners.

"To deal with contractors to get this to happen a certain way is the most challenging," noted DiMaccio, who had to maintain tight oversight on the entire process to ensure LEED compliance. "It takes an extra level of energy to monitor [contractors]," especially those drawn to the glamour of constructing a celebrity home. "The details are always a challenge."

And the details are everything. Although low energy consumption was the primary design consideration, the home is also gorgeous to behold, and I saw visitors casually running their hands on the different features and trying to determine the materials. DiMaccio took time to show me the tracking system for the sliding glass door, which few guests paused to notice. We knelt down as he explained the particulars of what made it effective, with sealed bearings to keep out the elements (and keep in heat) and a precision frame from Switzerland.

The backyard space is perfectly suited for cocktails and entertaining.

Here's a gem from the MCM archives (via Visual News): "'The Expanding Airport' was created for the presentation of the new international airport for Washington, D.C. in 1958. Through familiar sounds and experiences, comparisons and basic infographics, the Eameses were able to distill complex concepts into something digestible and clear."

According to Lin Morris:

Charles and Ray Eames made this film for their friend Eero Saarinen so that he could concisely tell the history of his breakthrough idea for Dulles Airport in Washington DC. Saarinen had only two hours to meet with the heads of the major airlines and he had found in rehearsals of his presentation he used most of that time setting up the history. Charles and Ray did it in less than ten minutes, and lacked nothing in charm and appeal.

With this short, the Eames Studio achieved a different kind of timelessness, at least to the extent that all mistakes offer lessons to posterity. In fairness to Charles & Ray, the animated short was perhaps the most successful part of Eero Saarinen's concept for an "Expanding Airport," which was a bit more ambitious than, say, a house of cards, perhaps to its own detriment: today, the notion of a 'mobile lounge' sounds more like a padded room for making calls (à la smoking lounge) than a modular waiting area.

All photos by Carren Jao

Furniture that folds and hides away is always a good idea. These two companies have taken completely different directions, borrowing on the same core principle of space saving.

Folditure just launched in June.

Folditure

Designed by New Jersey-based Alexander Gendell, Folditure's Leaf chair packs flat When folded, it comes up to less than 3/4 of an inch thick and can be hung on a standard-depth 24-inch closet.

The chair flips open with surprising ease with a simple hinge on the backrest. Made to dining chair height, the folding chair isn't simply meant for the living or outdoor, but even around the table. The outdoor mesh fabric on the seats comes is a variety of colors and can easily be swapped out. Colors on the backrest can also be painted depending on the customer's preferences. Though the Leaf chair has a lot going for it, the chair does have a strong futuristic industrial look that make it hard to match in anything but the most contemporary homes.

Folditure's Leaf chairs can be hung in a regular closet.

The junior seats come in a range of bright colors.

CoolKids

When it was first introduced to the market, the Flux chair for adults received multiple awards in London, Rotterdam and New York. At this year's Dwell on Design, CoolKids Company introduces a junior line for even more active youngsters and harried moms looking to clean up after them.

Like its adult version these polypropylene, flat-packed seat is waterproof and 100 percent recyclable. it can be used indoors as well as outdoors and weights only five pounds. It takes a few pops along pre-determined grooves to fold everything flat, plus its range of bright colors are a fun addition to any playroom.

A quick demonstration of the seat's ease of use.

It has now come to my attention that the same guys working on sensor-equipped robots, who are clearly hellbent on our destruction, are now developing them so that they can consistently defeat human beings in competitions. The geniuses over at U. of Tokyo's Ishikawa Oku Lab have developed a dishonorable robot hand that uses its lightning-quick vision to cheat at Rock-Paper-Scissors:

Nice going, guys. When are you gonna get around to teaching them how to box and fire handguns?

"The purpose of this study," write the researchers, "is to develop a janken (rock-paper-scissors) robot system with 100% winning rate as one example of human-machine cooperation systems."

Uh, that is not cooperation.

A nod to Daft Punk?

Don't be fooled by the pictures, this light-up headgear is more DIY tech than discotheque. The brainchild of Wouter Walmink, Alan Chatham and Floyd Mueller of RMIT's Exertion Games Lab, the "LumaHelm" certainly isn't the first bicycle illumination concept we've seen, but it might be the smartest one... not least because it's attached one's cranium as opposed to one's conveyance (no offense to Mitchell Silva et al). The prototype is an off-the-shelf helmet that's been augmented—at once hacked and adorned—with several LED strips, such that the array of 104 multicolored lights is mapped evenly onto the hemisperical surface (they left the padding intact to ensure that it still meets safety standards). An accelerometer serves as an input for Processing via Arduino: deliberate motions of the head activate corresponding sections of the surface, approximating left and right turn signals, as well as braking (with a quick backwards tic). A translucent vacuum-formed shell serves to protect the LEDs and diffuse the light they emit.

While the safety applications of the LumaHelm are obvious, the designers abide by a broader outlook, emphasizing the potential of light as a medium for expression.

LumaHelm turns the helmet into a display through which we can communicate, express and play. We are exploring how this can make cycling safer, skateboarding more expressive, improve communication on construction sites, and affect any other activity requiring a helmet. Through this design and research process we want to find out what wearable technology in the future may look like and how it can be more intimately integrated in our everyday lives.

In an interview with ABC Radio, Walmink notes that the materials cost them about $400 and that they're planning on releasing instructions so that the average DIYer have the means to make their own LumaHelm. And while commercial availability is still a long-term goal, he comments that an LED-embedded hardhat might bypass the noise issues specific to construction sites as a new form of communication.

Photo by Craig Sillitoe for The Age

Thus, the project is as much a thought experiment as a cycling solution, a new way to broadcast our thoughts in an RGB dot matrix that happens to enclose their very source.

Packaging Design Team Manager
Unilever
Birkenhead, United Kingdom

Unilever is seeking a Packaging Design Team Manager for their Personal Care Design Group to shape the future development of packaging for a truly global FMCG business. The ideal candidate is a passionate designer with big ideas, solid management experience and boundless energy to bring us a healthy balance of strategic and fresh thinking, as part of their senior design management team. Using his or her creative brain and people skills, the designer will inspire the team—allowing their ideas to shine.

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One more from the graduating class of RCA: Marjan van Aubel, "a product designer with an inquisitive, almost scientific perspective," presents "The Energy Collection," a set of solar glassware that discharges through a matching bookshelf, which serves as a rather large battery. It's a vaguely biological ecosystem: the tableware 'drones' gather energy during the day, 'feeding' the shelf, which can be used to power a lamp or charge a phone... but the real magic lies in the physics:

Within each glass is a photovoltaic layer of dye Synthesized Solar Cell. This means that the properties of colour are being used to create an electrical current. This technology was invented by Michael Graetzel at EPFL. It is a technique based on the process of photosynthesis in plants. Like the green chlorophyll which absorbs light energy, the colours in these cells collect energy.

Graetzel uses a porous Titanium dioxide layer soaked with photosensitive dye—a natural pigment extracted from the juice of blueberries or spinach. He discovered that the dye that gives the red or blue colour to berries, gives off an electron when light strikes it. One side of the glass is positive, the other negative and when the cell is exposed to light, the dye transmits its electrons to the titanium dioxide and releases an electronic current.

Sounds like pretty heady stuff; I'd be curious as to whether the technology can be implemented at scale, especially given the material advantages of the dye (as opposed to traditional silicon cells): "The glassware uses sunlight as a sustainable source of energy, but can also work under diffused light. This makes them much more efficient for use inside the home compared to standard solar panels, which only work in direct sunlight and are not suitable for indoor use."

You can always count on the exceptional fabrics from Maharam to breathe some life into NeoCon's mostly commercial and contract offerings. This year the company debuted an eye-catching line up of brand new patterns from fashion designer Paul Smith, experimental Antwerp-based Studio Job, artist/designer Hella Jongerius and conceptual artist Liam Gillick.

Gillick displayed his patterns at NeoCon in an installation called Directed Expansion System that's "reminiscent of a production line or supply system [and] expresses Gillick's interest in sites of production as opposed to consumption." That's all very well, but no matter what Gillick meant to say with the way he designed his display, I was too enthralled with his lively, intricate patterns to notice. Perhaps it's the dawn of digital printing (admittedly, a technology that's been around for a while now but only seems to just be entering the commercial market now) that's inspiring designers to get smaller and more precise. Certainly Maraham Digital Products has put out some wonderfully minute, illustrative patterns in recent years.

While we're new to the infinite scroll game ourselves, Pinterest is perhaps the best example of the tiling effect known as masonry, in which images can be neatly arrayed regardless of dimensions. Couple with an autoloader script, Pinterest ensures that the fun never ends... inducing what NYC digital agency Firstborn has dubbed "Scrolling Slumber." Their client, Japanese clothing megachain Uniqlo, wanted to do something about it. Hence, the (dryly-titled) Dry Mesh project:

I don't know if there's a world record for tallest skyscraper ad unit, but the image heights on Uniqlo's Pinterest page (still live as of press time) measure in the web-optimized 1000s. Not to get too 'meta,' but here are a couple resized versions of the pinned graphics:

All of these T's were originally in a single column...

This gradient was originally 8000+ pixels high...

Firstborn explains the brief and the M.O.:

Coroflotter Matt Pauk is a footwear design pro: he's been at New Balance for the better part of a decade, and it shows. As Senior Designer in the Innovation - Wellness category, he's pleased to present his latest project: the "Aneka" lifestyle shoe.

This concept is the result of research into the body improvement market. Aneka is something truly fresh for the wellness space. Drafting success of yoga, with participation up double digits, Aneka strives to provide a shoe with a similar mind set. This is a pure and honest concept that is physically provocative through each step you take. It targets the active, style-driven woman looking for a truly unique footwear solution.

Besides the fact that Pauk's clearly a natural, he's done a great job documenting the entire design process.

Image courtesy Food+Design Lab

The inaugural International Conference on Designing Food and Designing For Food kicked off yesterday at London Metropolitan University. Presenting research, discourse, case studies and wacky boxed lunches (!), the 2-day event is the first of its kind to reflect on the multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary nature of food design. The conference presents 29 papers and 7 posters from academics, researchers and students alongside a "Projects" session that includes an exhibition and discussion of 12 selected food design projects. Each day ends with roundtable discussions that tackle subjects like the role of co-creation, product development and dining as Gesamtkunstwerk.

More of an academic colloquium than food-fun-fair, the conference kicked off with keynote presentations that focused on the role of "thrill" in food experience by Brendan Walker. Described as the world's only "Thrill Engineer," Walker was originally trained in aeronautical engineering before researching and teaching Interaction Design at the Royal College of Art. His work offered a lens on the most fundamental consequence of food experience: emotional stimulation.