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Philips is seeking a Sr. Online Design Consultant (Digital Creative Lead) in Andover, Massachusetts

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Sr. Online Design Consultant (Digital Creative Lead)
Philips

Andover, Massachusetts

The Digital Creative Lead is responsible for the design of our digital customer experience. This individual will work with a multi-disciplinary design team to leverage research insights and knowledge to design distinctive, attractive and impactful digital communications, tools and propositions. He or she will also be responsible for establishing and maintaining the design guidelines and standards that define our user interfaces, interaction principles, common behaviors and principles for navigation and way-finding across all digital touch points.

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An Unexpectedly Morbid Chair

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The harshest criticism that I would level against designer Trust in Design's minimalist "Tulp" chair for ZwillinG is that it comes across as a bit cold and sterile. It turns out that this is the point:

The Tulp Chair draws its inspiration from the design of medical furniture used to perform autopsies. It mimics the dual functionality of autopsy equipment, by providing users with both a high chair position and a standard chair position. Embracing a most minimal design approach, the Tulp Chair's frame is composed of only inox tubing similar to that of austere medical equipment.

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Inox, of course, is a French term for stainless steel, and while the material alludes to medical settings, it also happens to make for sleek, durable furniture—in fact, we've seen that the alloy can symbolize immortality for its anti-corrosive properties. So too are the clean lines of Joran Briand's design more suited to a modern loft space than a mortuary.

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New Zealand ID Student & His Mates Bring the Pixar Lamp to Life

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It's been nearly a year since our series on the Angelpoise lamp, the iconic desk light co-opted by Pixar. Now three students at New Zealand's Victoria University of Wellington, industrial designer Adam Ben-Dror, programming artist Shanshan Zhou and digital media artist Joss Doggett, have brought the Pixar mascot to life (renamed "Pinokio").

Pinokio is an exploration into the expressive and behavioural potentials of robotic computing. Customized computer code and electronic circuit design imbues Lamp with the ability to be aware of its environment, especially people, and to expresses a dynamic range of behaviour. As it negotiates its world, we the human audience can see that Lamp shares many traits possessed by animals, generating a range of emotional sympathies. In the end we may ask: Is Pinokio only a lamp? - a useful machine? Perhaps we should put the book aside and meet a new friend.

It's true that it doesn't yet hop around and crush the letter "i" into submission, but we're sure they're working on it.

Seriously though, I think the trio's project has some serious potential; when doing sewing machine repairs on my workbench, I'm constantly re-adjusting the swing-arm lamp to throw light where I need it at that moment. If the lamp could somehow track my eyes when prompted, leaving both hands free to adjust/remove/re-install the part I was working on, I'd pay good money for it. There's got to be craftspeople out there doing other types of benchtop work that would agree.

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Available Now: Hand-Eye Supply x Man v. Ink x Mary Kate McDevitt Bandana

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At Hand-Eye Supply, we recognize that everybody needs a solid bandana. As purveyors of quality workwear we've pined for the bandanas of yore: thick, bold, rugged pieces of cloth, hearty enough to wipe the grease from your hands or sweat from your brow but soft enough to be comfortable on the skin. Noting the scarcity of such a bandana from the marketplace, with the exception of vintage re-issues that cost upwards of $50, we made it our mission to procure one that lived up to our standards of excellence.

Enter Fred DiMeglio of Man vs. Ink. Fred hand-dyed the heavy weight cotton bandanas in small batches before discharge printing the patterns, the very method of printing that was used when creating the aforementioned bandanas of yore. As a final step they are triple washed for softness and comfort.

The design was hand-illustrated by Portland, OR's Mary Kate McDevitt, who also painted the famous Hand-Eye Supply Official Transportation Unit (our cargo bike). Mary Kate riffed on her original design for the bike, refining and reframing it for the bandana context.

The end result of this is a fantastic bandana that exceeds our stringent expectations and we here at Hand-Eye Supply are incredibly proud of them. Available now!

Hand-Eye Supply x Man v. Ink x Mary Kate McDevitt Bandana
Available at Core77's Hand-Eye Supply
$20.00

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An Architecture Firm Takes the Hobbit House Seriously

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Pennsylvania-based architecture firm Archer & Buchanan received an unusual commission: The client, an avid J.R.R. Tolkien fan, wanted a Hobbit House built on his property. We've seen Hobbit-inspired houses before, but most of them were labors-of-love that looked janky, handmade and amateurish; but Peter Archer proved he was equal to the task by using actual architecture skills and talented, professional craftspeople to execute a beautiful home in its own right.

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What most impressed us is Archer's attention to detail, incorporating unlikely design elements described and/or sketched by Tolkien, and addressed with real-world solutions. For example, how would you hang a circular door? Archer knew it had to be hinged at a single point to work, but a 54-inch-diameter slab of cedar isn't exactly light. Multiple craftsmen told him it couldn't be done, but he persisted until he found an ironworker who made it work. And the crescent-shaped flange is beautiful.

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Advice on How to Choose a Car: Every Auto Designer Should Watch This

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When you are passionate about driving, a car is not an object; it is an experience. For the dozens or hundreds of designers and engineers responsible for bringing a single car into existence, the myriad of mechanical components, materials choices, ergonomics decisions etc. all collectively provide an experience like an orchestra delivering a symphony.

Rauno Aaltonen, who earned the nickname "The Rally Professor" while serving as a specialist driving instructor for BMW, doesn't want for cars; MINI even released his own special edition version, seen above, earlier this year. But over dinner one night in Rovaniemi, he told us the best way I've ever heard of for a new car buyer to evaluate an automobile. The next morning I asked him to give us an abbreviated version on-camera, and I wish every car designer in the world would take note of this advice:

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Chaos Collective's DIY DOF-Changeable Camera Hack

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ChaosCollective-DOFChangeableCameraHack-setup.jpgThe POÄNG isn't the focus of this story...

Boasting a killer combo of imaging innovation and NewDealDesign's award-winning form factor, the Lytro camera is certainly at the top of the list for many tech geeks this year. We have yet to see if the rectilinear gadget will find a place in the serious photographer's existing arsenal of DSLR, lenses and the like or if it is more of a mass-market plaything. (The $400 pricetag suggests that it's somewhere in between, and it's difficult to predict the long-term adoption and impact of images with infinite focal points.)

While there might be more to Lytro than meets eye, the folks at Chaos Collective have devised an SLR hack to approximate exactly what meets the eye in depth-of-field (DOF) changeable photos. Rather than capturing this information over space, as Lytro's pricey micro-lens array does, they've repurposed good ol'-fashioned moving image recording to capture this information over time:

First, let's briefly discuss how cameras like Lytro work. Instead of capturing a single image through a single lens, Lytro uses a micro-lens array to capture lots of images at the same time. A light field engine then makes sense of all the different rays of light entering the camera and can use that information to allow you to refocus the image after it's been taken.

But since we only had a digital SLR hanging around the studio, we started looking at ways to achieve the same effect without needing micro-lens arrays and light field engines. The idea is simple; take lots of pictures back to back at various focal distances (collecting the same information, but over time). Then later, we can sweep through those images to pick out the exact focal distance we want to use.

But wait... A sequence of images is just a video! And since most digital SLRs these days make it super easy to capture video and manually adjust focus, that's all you need. Just hold the camera very still (a tripod is nice, but not necessary), shoot some video, and adjust the focus from near to far. That's it.

Since most cameras capture video at 30 fps, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that a couple of seconds will yield 60+ 'slices' of focal distance. The real trick was to accurately map out the focal clarity of the image:

Of course, once we had the video, the next step was to figure out how to make a simple tool that could process each frame of video and compute the clarity of focus for various points in the frame. We ended up using a 20x20 grid, giving us 400 selectable regions to play with. Making the grid finer is simple, but we noticed that making it too small actually made it harder to calculate focal clarity. The reason: we're looking at the difference between rough and smooth transitions in the image. If the grid is too small, smooth surfaces become difficult to accurately detect. Tighter grids also produce large embed code, so we stuck with 20x20 as grid that dense-enough without introducing extra overhead.

Here are the results:

NB: They note that the media is embedded with HTML5 video tag for cross-browser compatibilty, but as of press time the images weren't working in Firefox...

A few more—and Chaos Collective's "Make Your Own DOF-Changeable Image" tool—after the jump...

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Core77's Seven Designer Phenotypes: #5 - Studio Snob

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Studio Snob

Habitat: Either his studio/loft or at his loft/studio

Plumage: Elvis Costello Glasses, Pantone 11C Cardigan

Attributes: Fortifies desk with a blockade of obscure high end sketching, storage and organization tools.

Description: The Studio Snob takes the suggestion that a designer's desktop says a lot about them, aiming to put the "fun" in functional with enviable implements for sketching, storing and organizing. For someone who spends more time at the studio than at home, the Studio Snob gets things done—in style!

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For our eighth annual Ultimate Gift Guide, Core77's crack editors have identified a taxonomy of seven known 'Designer Phenotypes' who might be on your shopping list. From Designer Dandy to Studio Snob, Homebound Hobbit to Workshop Workhorse, we have something for the discerning gift giver and recipient alike.

In addition to our beloved online Gift Guide, we're also pleased to announce that we've partnered with Blu Dot in New York City and our sister store Hand-Eye Supply in Portland, OR, to open bicoastal Holiday Pop-Up Shops for your shopping convenience. Stop by before December 24th to check out the product in person and pick up a poster featuring all seven designer phenotypes, illustrated by Core-toonist Tony Ruth, a.k.a. lunchbreath (while supplies last).

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Core77's Hand-Eye Holidays #8: Just Mobile AluPen

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For our next featured item from the Core77 Hand-Eye Holidays we turned to long time Core77 friend and prolific sketcher and designer, Michael DiTullo to ask him about his preferred weapon of choice for a sketch on the go and he referred us to Just Mobile's AluPen. A recipient of a Product Design Award from the iF Design Awards, and an Honorable Mention Design Award from RedDot, the AluPen comes with high regard.

The AluPen's hexagonal aluminum body feels substantial and comfortable in the hand. At 4.75" it's long enough that it doesn't feel awkward, resting gently between thumb and forefinger, yet short enough that it could easily slide in to a coat pocket, organizer or tool roll. As for the quality of the nib, instead of mundanely describing the qualities of the rubber, we've included these sketches from DiTullo that we felt better demonstrate, at least visually, the nuances of line work that are possible with the AluPen.

Just Mobile AluPen
Available at Core77's Hand-Eye Supply
$22.00

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Hit the jump to see some of Mike's sketches...

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Arctic Snow & Ice Driving the MINI

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The weather in the Arctic was, as you can imagine, freezing cold. I'd been to the Arctic once before, in Sweden, and they had a saying there: "There is no bad weather—only bad clothes."

Perhaps MINI should adopt the phrase "There are no bad roads—only bad cars." Which is to say, the driving conditions in Rovaniemi were not pleasant—roads were covered in snow, ice, or a mixture of both—and to prove their cars could handle it, they set us journalists loose on twisty, slippery test tracks with their cars. (These were not actual tracks, but car-width areas of directionality through the wilderness, demarcated by cones and featuring plenty of curves.)

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Rauno Aaltonen was on hand to check that our physical driving positions matched rally standards; as one example, I found that the particular seatback angle I've been using for years is off by a couple of inches. Here's the check Aaltonen taught us: Put your hands at nine and three on the wheel. Now move your left hand across the wheel and grasp three o'clock, with your thumb down, as if you've just turned the wheel in that direction. At this point the back of your left shoulder should still be firmly pressed against the seat. "The seat must give you support when you take a hard corner," Aaltonen explained.

After that it was off to the races. A little personal background: I'm no rally driver, but learned to drive on a five-speed stickshift with rear-wheel drive and no anti-lock brakes. For a couple years I also had to drive through extremely heavy snow, sometimes for up to 10 hours, to get to my first college. So I'm no stranger to stickshifts and adverse weather, and I'd accidentally put my car (and a front-wheel drive car I later owned) sideways on icy highways more than once.

I've never been eager to repeat those experiences, and my first instinct while driving in inclement weather is caution. But after one stultifyingly calm lap on the snow track in the All-4 Mini, which handled as if the car was on regular pavement, caution got boring. So I started pushing the car faster and harder. Then it got fun: When you put your foot down and whip it into a corner, the car feels well-balanced and only lets the tail out with predictability; it practically tells you, in a British accent, when to countersteer.

I'm not talented enough to sustain a drift all the way through a hairpin, but I damn sure tried. On the snow and ice track it was easy to force wheel slippage, but very difficult to upset the car, and it was of course impossible to lock the wheels up. I have no experience with British cars, but the stickshift felt positively German.

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Little Printers Come in Good Packages

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It's easy to criticize the newly available Little Printer as a somewhat frivolous or outright extravagant producer of waste: after all, one of the basic premises of digital media is that we can access and consume information without the baggage (or guilt) of printed matter. Why would anyone in their right mind want a device that takes the all-important "e" out of "e-ink"?

Why indeed: I'm certain that much more ink is spilled on far broader sheets on a more regular basis than that which could possibly be emitted from the coffee-mug-sized, ever-smiling printer. I bet I receive more paper in the form of junk mail than things I actually print on a daily basis, and it's simply a sad fact that saving the world will take more than boycotting a new gadget.

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All of which is a long way of introducing Burgopak's wonderful packaging for BERG's product. While we've seen some of Dane Whitehurst's (admittedly outlandish) projects in the past, but it so happens that his day job is in packaging design, and he is very pleased to present his latest project for his fellow London-based designers. Just as "the product itself 'lives in your home, bringing you news, puzzles and gossip from friends' in the form of a small personalized printed newspaper," so too must the packaging "encapsulate the charm and personality of the character."

Creating the appropriate first 'hello,' marking the beginning of the relationship between person and product was fundamental to the design. Despite the challenges in physically protecting fragile parts of the device, it was imperative to make Little Printer's friendly face the first thing you see.

Beyond the first introduction it was also essential to make every stage of the unboxing process feel considered and important. Detail is apparent in every element of the product and the design of the packaging was no different. Challenges such as finding a way to remove the main device and its power supply at the same time proved to be interesting problems in themselves.

To guide people through the unboxing process, the designers at BERG did a great job of developing delightful graphics to wrap around and introduce each part of the product. All of which connect as part of a broader narrative which encapsulates the cheery tone of voice which has become synonymous with the product.

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OgoSport, LLC is seeking a Design Generalist in New York, New York

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Design Generalist
OgoSport, LLC

Brooklyn, New York

OgoSport, a company that creates well-designed products that promotes active play and family interactions, is seeking a designer who will participate in the design and development of new products from concepts, prototypes, packaging, engineering, colors, graphics and materials, and participate in creation of marketing and branding projects.

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A Journey Towards Local Manufacturing, Part 1: Matthew Burnett Starts Big, Goes Small, Shuts Down, Then Starts Over with The Brooklyn Bakery

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After graduating from Pratt with a degree in Industrial Design, Matthew Burnett landed gigs designing watches for Diesel, DKNY, Izod and Marc Jacobs. Eventually he broke off to set up his own watch operation, Steel Cake, with a buddy. "The only manufacturers I knew of at the time were overseas," Burnett writes, "so that's where we decided to start manufacturing."

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Burnett discovered that his professional experience aside, a small start-up simply didn't have the juice of a Marc Jacobs. "[We] wouldn't receive the same red carpet treatment I was used to when designing for larger companies," he explains. "The time difference made it so that we had to set alarms to wake up in the middle of the night for correspondence." Add to that "high-production minimums, low-production quality liability, and long product shipping timetables" and the venture became untenable.

He started over by founding The Brooklyn Bakery, a vintage revival accessory line encompassing watches, jewelry, wallets, phone/tablet/laptop sleeves, and even pet accessories. And the key back-end difference between this venture and his first is using local manufacturing.

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Burnett explains:

Finding a manufacturer in the US was a long process, but once I found the right factory, the opportunities seemed endless. I could now make quick visits to the facility and oversee the manufacturing of my product line. I befriended many of the factory owners I dealt with as they were willing to take the time to help me manufacture the best possible products. If they couldn't produce what I had in mind, they would reach out to their local community to see who could. It was these personal connections that helped me build a dependable network of manufacturers.

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The 'Aspirin Point': Micro-Ergonomics, Anyone?

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It'll be a while yet before full-blown computers get there, but storage devices are finally starting to hit what I'll call the "aspirin point."

I still remember being in a class taught by Karim Rashid at Pratt, where he was talking about immateriality and objects essentially disappearing. (This was in the early '90s, and this naive college junior thought he was crazy; turns out he wasn't.) He pointed out that the active ingredient in an aspirin pill was so miniscule that no one would be able to physically handle it, so 90-something percent of it was just powder, to give the thing enough mass for us to pick up and pop in our mouths. One day, he said, technological objects would have this same issue.

I was reminded of this by seeing this ridiculously small USB flash drive, which barely seems big enough to get two fingers on. Elecom's been selling the things in Japan, a nation crazy about miniaturization, in both 16GB and 32GB capacities.

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In any case, the point Rashid was making that day was that once the object essentially disappears, designers would have to focus on designing the experience of using it, rather than the form of the thing itself. I'm not seeing that here with Elecom's device; I want a little more context, like where this thing goes when you're not using it. Aspirin comes in a bottle, and I'd like to see something like this incorporated into a ring or something always on hand. Because while I love that they've gotten it this small, I know for sure I'd lose the thing.

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TONIGHT! Holiday Party and Design Talk @ Blu Dot NYC Pop-Up

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Join us TONIGHT for a special Core77 Holiday party with three Brooklyn-based designers from our Ultimate Gift Guide! They'll be discussing the triumphs and challenges of getting products to market:

Chris Kucinski, Critter and Guitari
Ian Collings, Fort Standard
Alex Mustonen, Snarkitecture

Monday, December 17th
6–8PM - Talk begins promptly at 6:30PM

Core77 Pop-Up Shop @ Blu Dot
140 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
rsvp [at] core77 [dot] com

About Critter & Guitari
Critter & Guitari create beautiful products for music lovers and tinkerers alike.

Their KALEIDOLOOP, available through our Ultimate Guide Guide, is a social, portable sound collector. It's designed to be taken anywhere and everywhere to gather and manipulate all kinds of sounds. Record sounds from your kitchen, the recording studio, and campfire jam.


About Fort Standard
Fort Standard is a contemporary design studio founded in 2011 by industrial designers Gregory Buntain and Ian Collings. Their collaborative work is a manifestation of their shared vision and progressive design approach which pairs timeless materials with modern process. Often using traditional methods of production in innovative ways, the designers have developed a unique form langugae rooted in simplicity and functionality. Their attention to detail, connections and materiality generate value through design in what Buntain and Collings describe as a "warm-contemporary" aesthetic.

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Fort Standard's Balancing Blocks for Core77's Ultimate Gift Guide are oak blocks tumbled in a water-based paint. Arrange these faceted "stone" shapes to create your own sculpture or choreograph a balancing act. Good for all ages.

Balancing Blocks from Part & Parcel on Vimeo.


About Snarkitecture
Fresh off the recent success of their "Drift Pavilion" for Design Miami, Snarkitecture is a collaborative practice operating in territories between the disciplines of art and architecture. Working within existing spaces or in collaboration with other artists and designers, the practice focuses on the investigation of structure, material and program and how these elements can be manipulated to serve new and imaginative purposes. Searching for sites within architecture with the possibility for confusion or misuse, Snarkitecture aims to make architecture perform the unexpected.
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Snarkitecture's Cast Light for Core77's Ultimate Gift Guide is hand-formed and individually cast using white gypsum cement creating a tabletop geography of light and shadow.

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An iOS Google Maps Design Fail

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Where am I?

This past weekend I had a car trip to make into unfamiliar territory, and I finally got to try out the newly-accepted Google Maps on my iPhone.

Google has dumped a lot of time, money and effort into amassing and updating the world's best consumer-targeted map database, and generously provided it for free. I don't want to be one of those people that complains about free stuff, like the whiners who moan about Facebook features—what do you, want your money back?—but I do have to point out how a single poor design decision can needlessly hamper an otherwise great product.

Nearly every unfamiliar-destination car trip I've taken in the past three years has been guided by Google Maps. I have the directions in my phone, which I prop onto the dashboard, in "map" view, so I can see at a glance where I am along the route.

Well, for this iteration the graphic designers have decided to make the route line blue. They've also decided to make the dot that represents you blue as well. The "you" dot doesn't blink, or have a strong drop shadow, or feature a reticle around it, and it's just a hair-width thicker than the route line, which makes it virtually impossible, while driving, to see where you are along the route.

What were they thinking? Why on Earth wouldn't you make the dot a different color, or provide some kind of graphic distinction? Isn't visual feedback basically UI Design 101? Does no one observe how people actually use the product in the real world? This is absolutely mind-boggling to me.

After spending millions of dollars and man-hours to get this product right, not a single person working at the company had the foresight to make a zero-cost change that would vastly improve the experience. It irritates me to no end when one of the world's more powerful companies ignores basic design common sense.

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IKEA's 'Life is Hard Without Textiles'

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This is kind of funny: As part of a marketing push flogging their upcoming collection of textile-based products, IKEA has released a video asking viewers to imagine life without fabric.

A place where comfortable pillows are replaced with tree stumps. Where curtains are made of sheet metal, rugs are made of sand, and sofas are made of cactus. That's a hard world. Literally. At IKEA, we have a soft spot for the soft parts. The fun and fluffy parts. The romantic and refreshing parts. The colorful and comfortable parts. The parts that put us to sleep, dry us off, help us relax and hide the stuff we don't want to see. Without textiles, life is hard.

I realize IKEA won't make these, but other videos I'd like to see are a world without metals, a world without plastics, or even something more specific like a world with no injection molding.

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Jeff Skierka's Mixtape Table, Now in Production

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It's taken half a year, but Seattle-based designer Jeff Skierka has finally nailed down the production of the previously-seen "Mixtape Table," a remarkably high-fidelity scale replica of a cassette tape in wood and glass, reimagined as a nostagic coffee table. Check it out:

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A Journey Towards Local Manufacturing, Part 2: Maker's Row, a Database of American Factories and What They Can Do for You

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Where would we be without the connective tissue that is the Internet? Amazon connects buyers and sellers. eBay lets us transfer junk from one person's basement to another. Twitter lets ordinary citizens know what's on celebrities' minds, so we can force them to apologize for it. But there are still plenty of gaps, and designer/entrepreneur Matthew Burnett is currently helping to close a big one: the one between entrepreneurial designers and domestic manufacturers.

When Burnett started up his Steel Cake watch line, he experienced headaches with overseas production. With his second start-up, The Brooklyn Bakery, he switched to domestic manufacturing—but learned that locating domestic factories was not always easy. This is as true as it is absurd; America is loaded with manufacturing facilities sitting idle—New York City alone is bursting with them—and you've never heard of any of them.

A personal, but relevant, aside: In my industrial vintage sewing machine hunting, I've visited HUGE manufactories in Brooklyn, gargantuan spaces in the tens of thousands of square feet, with one of them down to just four workers; lined up along the walls, dozens upon dozens of high-end manufacturing machines, some covered in tarps, others in thick dust. The owner of that particular factory knows a lot about fabrics, and doesn't know a damn thing about the Internet; I was the only fanatic to answer his terse, barely-literate Craigslist ad. And outside of that one ad, his factory has zero Internet presence. In short, he possesses tons of manufacturing capacity and a lifetime's worth of production experience, but no one knows he's there and his business is dying.

That factory is not alone, of course, and Burnett's latest venture aims to not only let you know they're there, but exactly what they're capable of and how you can contact them. Burnett's co-founded the newly-launched Maker's Row, which catalogues factories and materials suppliers, explains their capabilities, and in some cases introduces you to the actual people you'd be working with via produced videos. It's a brilliant idea—factory tours from the comfort of your laptop, searchable by product type, geography and keyword.

"As we were trying to expand [The Brooklyn Bakery]," writes Burnett co-conspirator Tanya Menendez, "we realized that there was a huge lack of transparency and community within the industry. It would take us months to find the right factory, so we decided to create Maker's Row to solve this problem."

Our mission is to make the manufacturing process simple to understand and easy to access. From large corporations to first time designers, we are providing unparalleled access to industry-specific factories and suppliers across the United States.

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What Do We Mean by 'Designed in China'?

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The change in perception of goods being 'made in China' to 'designed in China' is very important to Chinese industry. Whereas the former is indelibly associated with high volume, low quality production, the latter signals a long-overdue transition from decades spent as a producer of throwaway objects to the creator and manufacturer of world-class products.

At least, it should do. When it comes to China, instead of defining 'design' as a broad discipline, encompassing mass-produced products to hand crafted objects (and everything in-between), the global design press often seems to be focusing on arts and craft, to the exclusion of almost anything else. Any mention of the nascent design scene in China on design blogs or in magazines invariably focus on 3D designer/makers and 3D artifacts that are products only in the loosest sense of the word: that they are physical things that have been man-made. That this is not the be-all and end-all of what is being designed in China seems to be going largely unnoticed.

I am conscious that as an industrial designer I am tempted, by default, to define design as being limited to products like consumer electronics or vehicles. There is no such limitation, of course, but it is true that if you were to stop someone in the street and ask them what 'design in Italy' means, they would undoubtedly say: Ferraris, suits, handbags, stylish homewares, yachts... all consumer products.

This discrepancy has come about because although China is in many respects a very modern country, a country of smartphones, soon-to-be 4G mobile data networks, high-speed inter-city trains and some of the world's best and most precise manufacturing, it is also a country that celebrates its history and its connection to the present far more so than do Western countries. This affects not just broad political issues but the way many Chinese consumers behave too. For instance, whilst browsing around furniture department stores looking for things with which to decorate my apartment in Qingdao, I was left with the distinct impression that Chinese consumers are far more likely to buy a timber bed carved with an obtrusive and ornate pattern in an ancient style than are their European counterparts.

This veneration of the past, and its influence on the present, is unusual to us in the West. Whilst we remember and respect our histories, we tend to view our countries as distinctly modern, post-war. I do not think we extend the same understanding to China, and this skews our interpretation of, amongst other things, the creative output of the country.

This, coupled with the fact that there are not yet many internationally recognizable Chinese brands, only serves to reinforce a stereotype that Chinese industrial design is all old-fashioned and traditional and, by extension, not ready for application to the sort of consumer products that, say, South Korea or Japan are famous for.

Few people, for instance, will have heard of Haier or Hisense, beyond those who have encountered the small number of their low-end white goods that find their way to European shops, and yet these two companies produce some great-looking and innovative products. Both companies have a very sophisticated understanding of the power of industrial design. Yet, where is the coverage of Haier's new wireless charging home appliance range, their exploration of unusual materials in refrigerators or the integration of a multi-room, audio & visual home entertainment system?

Haier has all the potential to be as well-regarded as LG or Samsung, and in purporting to support the creative industries in China the design press is doing Chinese industrial design a disservice by focusing largely on the kind of art and craft design that is interesting to the few rather than some fantastic consumer product design that will appeal to the many. Perhaps it is time we shift our thinking away from the individual towards the wider design community, and broaden our understanding of Chinese design.

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