Do you remember seeing Philippe Stark's Louis Ghost chair for the first time? Maybe you were struck by how its form is eerily highlighted by its translucent materials; the chair is a stunning postmodern translation of the classic Louis XVI armchair. As a testament to its popularity, you'll find Stark's chair littered in lobbies, coffee shops, and industrial design museums around the world. But is the Louis Ghost really that different than the classic it's based on?

Despite its difficulty, judges, juries and patent offices around the world are routinely tasked with answering some variation of this question when deciding whether designs like the Louis Ghost are creative enough to warrant intellectual property protection. To complicate matters, they're required to answer these questions as if they were transported back in time to the exact moment when the design was first created, and they're usually asked to apply these standards through the eyes of a person with a level of expertise they do not share (e.g., a consumer of these designs, expert, etc.). While they can take cues from things like the design's commercial success or the accolades it receives, it's hard to escape the inherent subjectivity of these standards.

Recognizing this subjectivity, many countries have purposely set low bars for protection. Instead choosing clarity in application (i.e., more false positives), while granting a weaker set of accompanying rights. Others have left the bar high (i.e., more false negatives), accepting the possibility of erratic application as a tradeoff for the increased competition and downstream innovation that accompanies a market with fewer intellectual property rights. Yet many nations appear to have put little thought into this calculus at all, granting strong protection to lackluster designs or virtually no protection to the most creative. And to make matters worse, regardless of the approach, the rules that govern the application of these standards are woefully complex and usually out of touch with the creative process.

In an effort to better understand these standards, the Max Planck Institute could use your help with a new study it is conducting. The Institute is most interested in the application of creativity requirements in patent law and ultimately what impact this has on innovation in design.

This survey revolves around a series of brief hypothetical juror scenarios where you are asked to apply some of the complex rules alluded to before. Don't worry, we've boiled them down to their most rudimentary forms so that you'll walk away from the short survey with a better understanding of the law. In addition, at the end of the study, the Institute will email people their results and let them know how they did in comparison to the actual court outcomes. At the end of the survey, there is a lot of helpful information for designers that are interested in learning more about these standards and other important rules that govern design protection. Regardless of your feeling towards intellectual property protection in this area (or even the dispute between Apple and Samsung that has placed a spotlight on it) you should find the study fun and helpful. Additionally, if you are selected, the MPI will give you money to donate to any design-related charity you wish.

GET STARTED NOW

-OR-

Read more about Design Patent Law in our series, The Design of Design Patents: What Every Designer Should Know About Protecting Their Work.

Industrial Design Faculty
University of Illinois at Chicago
Chicago, Illinois

The UIC School of Design seeks faculty members engaged in active creative practice with a commitment to design education and research. Successful candidates will join a distinguished faculty to shape a rigorous studio-based curriculum which builds from skill-based form-making to interdisciplinary professional practice and includes design history, writing, and research. Ideal candidates will demonstrate a commitment to formal traditions within a context of current/emerging forms of design practice. In addition to regular course and graduate advising assignments, faculty responsibilities include committee service within the School, College and University, and strong commitment to a sustained research/practice profile.

Not positive, but I think this machine is designed to turn one leg pink

More than a few industrial designers (including your correspondent) have had to pay the bills by designing something we're, ah, not exactly proud of: forgettable gewgaws and temporary tchotchkes that aren't exactly MoMA material. But the luckiest among us get to design objects with purpose and meaning. Anyone who designs medical products is up near the top of that pile, and if you're one of them, here's your chance to shine.

The 15th Annual Medical Design Excellence Awards are now seeking submissions for 2013, with a deadline of December 7th (or January 11th if you're made of money and don't mind paying an extra $100). There's ten different categories ranging from emergency & critical care to surgical and packaging (full list here), and as you can imagine of the medical field, the evaluations will be rigorous:

Entries are evaluated by a multidisciplinary panel of jurors with expertise in industrial design, engineering, human factors, manufacturing, medicine, and other design and healthcare-related fields. Selected products must not only pass design and engineering excellence, manufacturing effectiveness and innovation, but also the overall benefit to the medical and healthcare industry.

Entry information is available here.

When Shaun Kasperbauer submitted his project "Bubble Chandelier" earlier this week, the bulbous yet unmistakably upcycled form, "originally inspired by the cell-like shape of soap bubbles," caught my eye. We've seen several variations of bottle lamps in the past—from Matteo de Colle's charming shades to Degross's refined "Utrem Lux" series, the lush lumens of the "Lightin" to the lo-fi marvel of "Liter of Light"—but Kasperbauer's version merited a closer look.

Upon a little digging, I was surprised to find that the project dated back to April 2011. Noting that his current company Souda, which he co-founded with Isaac Friedman-Heiman, was founded this year, I inquired about the 20-month gap. Kasperbauer responded at length:

The Chandelier was originally made as a school project of mine a few years ago. Isaac and I, along with our third studio-mate Luft Tanaka, just graduated in May from Parsons School of Design for product design. I had been shopping around for commercial spaces during the last month of school and we signed a lease on our studio space on June first. We are just in the process of launching our first line, which includes a few revamped pieces that we had designed in the past along with a few new objects (and a number of items still in development). While the Bubble Chandelier was originally prototyped a few years ago, it has just now finished its first production run. The relationship with SURE WE CAN is something that came about once we started looking to produce the fixture.

After he completed his Masters degree at the Institut Supérieur de Design in his home country, Maxence Derremaux left France for San Francisco, which he describes as "the intersection of art and commerce, high style and DIY, globabl awareness and local engagement." His concept for a new approach to earbud assembly, a personal project with a certain high-end audio company in mind, recently caught my eye.

Citing headphones' general lack of repairability, Derremaux set out to design a more versatile earbud, figuratively dismantling the glue-based assembly process of cheap 'phones.

The result is indeed worthy of B&O: the geometric form factor is based on a keystone-like wedge, which slots into a Y-shaped clamp element. Additional images in his personal website illustrate the parts—a series of rings, spacers, plates and caps—which strike me as perfect candidates for 3D-printable replacement parts.

Until Ideso's PowerPac goes into production, I'm on the lookout for a human-powered charging device, inefficiency be damned. Next time I'm caught unprepared in a blackout I'd like to be able to charge my phone and iPod Nano for the radio. Eton's BoostTurbine 2000, a hand-cranked generator/battery that charges via a USB connection, seems it'd fit the bill nicely.

The device is apparently popular--as of press time, they were sold out--but puzzlingly there's not a single review of it on Amazon, the first place I typically check for things I'm thinking of buying. What I really want to know is how long it takes to produce a watt-hour, but the product copy makes no mention; they do say, however, that "in one minute the hand turbine power generator can produce enough power for a 30-second call or a few critical texts. When fully charged, BoostTurbine2000 fully charges most smartphones."

Before I take the gamble, do any of you have experience with human-powered electricity-generating products? If not, you'll have to wait until the next "Dispatches from the Dark" series to read the review.

Good gosh. Where most people see bookcases as a handy place to store tomes, the anonymous gentleman behind Q-Line Design sees prime hidden storage space for assault rifles, handguns, knives and ammunition. Check out their SafeGuard Shelving System:

(My first thought was "Does he have enough guns?" but as someone who owns 40-plus vintage sewing machines, I'd be calling the kettle black. An object fetish is an object fetish.)

Another gentleman over in Michigan produces endtables with a similar function:

Images via Red Bull

We certainly couldn't pass this one up: Red Bull continues to put its deep pockets to good use with their latest viral endeavor, the Red Bull Kluge. Its name, of course, refers to a German loanword meaning "a witty, yet inelegant solution that succeeds in performing a particular task," an ipso facto descriptor for the ever-popular Rube Goldberg machine.

Of course, in this case, machine is a relative term: Red Bull enlisted a dozen of the biggest names in extreme sports (and one from traditional sports), as well as LA's Syyn Labs (of OK Go RBM fame), to create a coherent medley of tried-and-true ad hoc mechanisms and delicately choreographed athletic feats. And even though the triggers, pulleys and plywood ramps are accompanied by exceptional human beings—Sean MacCormac (Skydiving), Joey Brezinski (Skateboard), Rickie Fowler (Golf), Danny MacAskill (BMX), Ryan Sheckler (Skateboard), Drew Bezanson (BMX), Bryce Menzies (Off-Road Truck), Rhys Millen (Auto), Robbie Maddison (Motocross), Lolo Jones (Track & Field), Pat Moore (Snowboard)—the design of the Kluge preserves the organic cause-and-effect chain of events that epitomize the Rube Goldberg machine.

The six-minute final edit took four hours to film... and the structures themselves took over 100 builders a total of 3,400+ hours over the course of 17 days of construction, to say nothing of the months of planning. Without further ado:

If this works as advertised, it will be quite the design coup. France-based designer Julien Vidame has posted a link for his Extendable Table, which amazingly doubles its length (and halves its thickness) by an unspecified action that rotates each individual slat comprising the tabletop surface. While Vidame claims a prototype is available, no video exists; all we have to go on is the tiny GIF file below.

Anyone want to venture a guess on how this works? (My first thought was magnets, but that probably wouldn't jive with metal tableware.)

User Experience Designer
Telefonica Digital PDI
Madrid, Spain

Telefonica Digital PDI is seeking highly motivated and talented people to join their User Experience and Research team. Designers and researchers collaborate with project leads, strategists, engineers and domain experts to generate innovative concepts and solutions for multiple screens: TV, PC, mobile and more. Their current vacancies are Senior Visual Designer and Senior Interaction Desginer.

The other night, I caught myself riveted to one of those blocks of cable programing one stumbles upon with increasing frequency: back-to-back episodes of some show you've never heard of. On this particular evening the focus was Animal Planet's Monster Inside Me. For those who haven't had the pleasure, each episode is a gruesome account of parasitic infestations and the effects they wreck on their human hosts. While not quite appointment viewing—the show is definitely compelling in an 'I-can't-believe-what-I'm-seeing' sort of way. On this night, as I settled into my 3rd straight episode, I found my thoughts drifting towards creativity; specifically to how organizational operations, like outsized autoimmune systems, often function in pitch-perfect opposition to creativity and innovation efforts.

This idea first started knocking about in my head a few months back when a client lent me a copy of The Other Side of Innovation by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble. The book presents some interesting arguments as to why innovation efforts frequently fail. It's not merely that these efforts generally traffic outside the norms of the organization, according to Govindarajan and Trimble, they operate in direct conflict with them. Think about it: an organization strives to achieve a certain measure of success and that success, if met, leads to growth. Overtime the organization necessarily figures its business out; they learn how to do what they do. Growth is the proof that they've cracked the code for doing it in a manner that's repeatable and in balance. This state of equilibrium, and the mechanism that keeps it all humming along smoothly and without friction—is the performance engine. A codified system of hard won practices and truths that keep the flywheel spinning 24/7. It's the recipe that works within the context of the business as it is.

There have been at least a couple ultra-popular wallets on Kickstarter lately, typically variations on ad hoc solutions dressed up in premium materials. In fact, the crowdfunded wallet category has attracted enough backers for me to wonder how many people are going through what should be one of their most prized personal possessions so quickly as to warrant throwing down for a new one at every turn (shelling out cash or credit from their unsatisfactory or nonexistent wallet, no less).

So I was understandably skeptical when I received an e-mail entitled "Super Fun Wallet" in my inbox. Long story short, I was pleasantly surprised by the pitch on the other end of the link: the Flip n'Grip wallet lives up to its billing as a clever, playful-yet-practical cardholder. Distinctive for its trigger-style finger loop (the 'flip'), the minimal, RFID-blocking aluminum body is nicely executed but unremarkable otherwise; rather, the Flip n'Grip is noteworthy for its integration of a neat bit of sleight-of-hand (the 'grip'). Watch:

Curious to learn more about the Flip n'Grip (the barebones website sends potential customers to the KS page, as is often the case with product design projects), I replied to co-creator BJ Minson for more details about his project. He gladly supplemented the information on Kickstarter with the full story behind the Flip n'Grip.

Dan [Loveridge] and I met in school, where we both recently finished our degrees. He is a chemist by training, but an inventor at heart. Before he started school, he already had several patents from products he developed working for a dental company. I'm a mechanical engineer, a handyman and a machinist. I've always loved looking at the way things are designed, especially the way people interact with products; specifically, I've done a bunch of stuff with robots and medical equipment. We got along really well because we love designing and creating new and fun things—it's kind of funny that we have the technical degrees that we do, when we both really love the more artsy side of design and things.

You asked and we've delivered: for the past few months, we've been hard at work on an updated edition of our annual salary survey. Each fall for the past 11 years, we have collected and reported on design and creative salaries from thousands of people around the world. Today we're excited to unveil our brand new Design Salary Guide (f.k.a. Coroflot Salary Survey), completely redesigned and rebuilt for 2012 to complement the new Coroflot. Here are some of the highlights:

- We have a pool of over 20,000 data points, with meaningful data on dozens of job titles from around the world.
- The new guide is a rolling tool, available year-round and reporting the results in real-time.
- We've expanded our range to include over 50 job titles—there's something for everyone!
- We're collecting data on a city level, which allows us to report results on a more granular, hyper-local scale (in addition to broader trends).
- You can now enter freelance hourly rates, and in turn we now report on freelance hourly rates.
- We collect and report on salaries and hourly rates in local currencies around the world.
- Our sweet new charting tool shows the 25th percentile, median and 75th percentile of earnings at all times. If we have enough data, we split it up into more detail.

We're also excited to announce a forthcoming set of infographics describing non-monetary aspects of design employment, such as insurance benefits, job mobility and educational profiles. These charts will help paint a picture of the industry as a whole, so keep your eyes peeled for Salary Guide news—we're looking to publish those infographics in three weeks or so.

For now, we invite you to take a peek around and add your info. And of course, share it with your friends!

images via Designed & Made

For your average industrial designer, it's not enough to know that furniture with built-in secret compartments exist: We want to know how these things are built. Sometimes there are simple construction tricks we can use, as with the first neat hidden compartment revealed in the video below:

The video above is by Popular Woodworking, who revealed how to make the spice drawers above in an article from last year. Other companies are hawking DVDs on how to construct hidden compartments in a variety of objects, as in this somewhat odd match-up between magician James Coats and contractor/designer Dan Hamann:

Following his "#1 most-funded sculpture project in Kickstarter history," Chicago-based multicreative Joshua Harker's on the crowdfunding site once again. Expressing his signature blend of art and design, Harker's not hawking a functional object per se; his beautiful, 3D-printed sculpture, which combines the skull that was so successful the first time around with a new set of articulating wings, was created "In honor of the developing 3rd Industrial Revolution."

Representing the project is a 3-piece sculpture entitled "Anatomica di Revolutis" (loosely intended to mean "Anatomy of the Revolution"). Each component is designed to assemble together to present a larger narrative about the developing 3rd Industrial Revolution. The fully assembled sculpture... symbolizes liberty & prosperity through an empowered participatory populace. It is designed to hang on a wall or other vertical surface.

...The wings are comprised of 75 separate mechanical moving pieces that are printed in their entirety as a single working assembly. They are symbolic of the mythical Phoenix rebirth & spring from the fire theme interpreted by my "tangle" aesthetic.

Join us tonight at the Hand-Eye Supply Curiosity Club in lovely downtown Portland, Oregon as Chana De Wolf of Cryonics NW dispels myths and disseminates facts about life extension through Cryonics.

Tuesday, Nov. 13th
6PM PST
Hand-Eye Supply
23 NW 4th Ave
Portland, OR, 97209

What does the word "cryonics" bring to mind? Creepy scientists freezing dead bodies? Plumes of liquid nitrogen vapor as corpses are committed to the dewar? Dying people, desperately grasping at straws for another chance at life?

Chana will talk about these and other common images of cryonics as she leads a frank discussion of the history and the current state of cryonics as it is practiced in the real world. From "straight-freezing" the first human in 1967 to the development of carrier and vitrification solutions for optimal cryoprotection of the brain, cryonics advocates have made significant advances in cryobiological knowledge and cryopreservation technologies in hopes of extending and saving lives.

Despite these advances, cryonics still struggles to maintain credibility in the scientific mainstream and popular media. Chana will address this issue by inspecting how demographics have shaped the culture of cryonics and what cryonics organizations and members can do to get their image and message right.

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

Chana de Wolf is a business manager and biomedical researcher in Portland. She holds a B.S. in Experimental Psychology, a M.S. in Neuroscience, and has extensive management and laboratory experience. She is a Director and researcher for Advanced Neural Biosciences, where she and her husband conduct cryonics-relevant research.

Chana became aware of cryonics while studying the neuroscience of aging and memory in graduate school circa 2003. She worked as a Research Associate at Alcor Life Extension Foundationin Scottsdale, AZ, from 2006-2008, where she also participated in human cryopreservation cases.

As a Director of the Institute for Evidence Based Cryonics, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization dedicated to supporting research, education, and information dissemination in cryonics, Chana is uniquely situated to answer questions, address concerns, and dispel the many myths surrounding the practice and purpose of human cryopreservation.

One of the wonderful things about industrial design as a profession, versus your design school classmates' other majors, is its sheer breadth. For example illustrators are typically locked in to producing images, fashion designers are tied to wearable goods; but ID lets you do furniture, spaces, tabletop objects, packaging, vehicles and more.

It's also fascinating to see how one job can lead to another, enabling good designers to skip across product genres. A good case in point are the recent design doings of Scott Henderson, founder of his eponymous design studio as well as co-founder of the design collective MINT. Henderson's Slat Chair, above, debuted at the ICFF in 2011; of the many people who saw it, one happened to be editor of the UK's Super Yacht Design.

Once Henderson was on their radar, it was a manner of months before they ran this piece on a Henderson sculpture called Vulgaris, below:

The yacht link? Vulgaris is an aluminum CNC-milled octopus, and it turns out that Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen owns a mega-yacht called The Octopus; the article playfully suggested Allen bid on Vulgaris, which Henderson had created for an auction to benefit the World Wildlife Fund.

Industrial Design Manager / Aviation
Teague
Seattle, Washington

Teague is seeking an Industrial Design Manager who will be responsible for managing a dynamic, highly motivated and multidisciplinary team of creative professionals to create innovative designs with a focus on the aviation industry. He or she will work at the leading edge of commercial aviation, collaborating with airlines and suppliers to imagine and build their future.

Although yesterday saw the launch of the Design Salary Guide, we were also interested to hear that Pratt's student-designed, -managed and -organized magazine the "Prattler" recently did a survey on the student body. The data covers a range of categories, from Cumulative Debt by Graduation to Sexuality and Who's Voting.

Pratt's student run magazine illustrates data, through, well illustrations

Many third party sites offer statistical data about colleges, such as rate of acceptance or more importantly male to female ratio. This information, however, is a current representation of the views and opinions of students, putting a face to the data point.

The execution of statisitcal data, which can be relatively uninspired, is presented in a refreshing and clear manner in this month's "Prattler." For example, the dominating theme of dollar bills is used to illustrate the various ways that students spend their money.

In the 1870s you needed to be a big shot to have your portrait taken, and in the 1970s you needed to star in something made by 20th Century Fox to have an action figure of yourself. But here in 2012, technology has advanced to combine those things for the average consumer.

On November 24th, Eye of Gyre, an art exhibition space in Tokyo's Harajuku neighborhood, is pulling the sheets off of their 3D Shashin-kan. Literally translated as "3D Picture Space," it's what they're calling the world's first 3D-printing photo booth. Visitors can have their "portraits" taken in the form of whole-body scanning, and end up with a detailed figurine of them in 10-, 15- or 20-centimeter heights, depending on how much they'd like to pay.

Instant gratification this ain't, as the figurines will take a month or more for fulfillment and delivery. (We're guessing that they need to clean up the scan, and that an artisan paints the colors on after printing.) There's also a capturing restriction similar to when daguerrotypes were first developed: The subject must remain completely still during the scanning process, which is six minutes in this case, meaning Fido-san and small children are not ideal capture subjects. Beyond that, reflective clothes, eyeglasses, hoop earings, fine patterns, and fur are all no-nos, because these either muck with the scanning process or are impossible to faithfully reproduce under their system.

Visitors will need to sign up in advance here, but you'd better hurry: The exhibition closes on January 14th, and the slots are filling up quickly.

via spoon & tamago