Kevin Boulton is a Northampton, UK-based 3D Modeler and Animator who is a few years out from Uni, pursuing independent projects under the moniker Studio Scarlet. Frankly, he can call himself whatever he wants—the kid's got chops.

According to the description for an older motorcycle project (above): "While learning Maya on the 30 day trial I built this bike to see what I could do."

Image rotated to fit

It looks like he was duly inspired by last year's summer olympics: Boulton mentions the games in the description for the Custom Bow, and he's also dreamt up a slick TT/Tri bicycle concept.

The search is over, and the ISDA has found their new skipper: Starting today, Daniel Martinage takes over as the new Executive Director.

Martinage is what's known as a CAE, or Certified Association Executive, and a man with a reputation for getting organizations focused and on-track. Martinage's expertise lies in executive coaching and strategic planning, and he has over 30 years' worth of experience in the field, as well as having founded Association Coach LLC, a consulting company specializing in professional societies.

A professionally trained executive coach and facilitator, Martinage was the founder and principal of Association Coach LLC, an executive coaching and consulting firm that specialized in maximizing personal and organizational performance. Through his company he worked with more than 90 trade groups and professional societies. His insights on the coaching profession have been featured in dozens of news media, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Miami Herald, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Business Week, Money Magazine and Woman's World Magazine.

Martinage serves on the faculty for the Center for Nonprofit Advancement and as a reviewer and judge for "The Washington Post Award for Excellence in Nonprofit Management." He holds a master's in science, technology and public policy and a bachelor's in political science and speech communication from The George Washington University. Since 1987 he has held the Certified Association Executive (CAE) designation.

"IDSA is excited to welcome Daniel to the design community," said George McCain, chairman of IDSA's board of directors. "His training and experience will be key as we continue to expand our influence and global reach. Additionally, Daniel's proven leadership and communication skills will be invaluable in getting the message of design's benefits to business, educators and the community."

This image is not related to the competition.
It is, however, related to Kevin J. Chun's awesome Coroflot page

When we hear "Detroit" in the news, it's often followed by depressing text about abandoned buildings or stolen woodwork. [Ed. Note: It's not all bad—Middlecott (whose work we saw earlier today) is one of many Detroit-based studios looking to do Motor City proud...] But now the Product Design department at Chrysler is trying to provide some positive action with the Autorama High School Design Competition 2013.

In seeking a way to promote both charity and Detroit's heritage while engaging youngsters, Ralph Gilles (Senior Veep of Chrysler Product Design) and his team partnered up with co-sponsors CCS, the Autorama custom car show and United Way to sponsor a high-school-targeted design competition. Anyone attending a Detroit public high school is invited to draw up a Chrysler luxury vehicle for the year 2030. Winners will get passes to the Detroit Autorama (plus an iPad for first prize winners) and more importantly, free admission to summer auto design courses at CCS.

"This year our product design team has been looking at creative ways to further support United Way for Southeastern Michigan as part of our overall corporate initiatives to help improve lives for people and communities in need," said Ralph Gilles, Senior Vice President - Product Design, Chrysler Group LLC.

"With additional help from the College for Creative Studies and one of the best custom car shows in the world-our own Detroit Autorama--we'll hopefully inspire some new and aspiring automotive designers right here in our own backyard."

The deadline for entry is February 8th. While news of the competition was just announced yesterday, there is no official competition website; apparently the entries will be collected through the high schools themselves.

The forthcoming Touchscreen Cafe Table we posted on has had some good follow-up, and unsurprisingly, Moneual aren't the only ones to have visualized such a thing. Fans of the seminal '90s Japanese anime Cowboy Bebop may remember Spike and Jet ordering dishes off of a touchscreen restaurant table that presented holographic images of the dishes, and Core77 readers have chimed in with more examples. SCAD grad and interaction designer Clint Rule (update your Coroflot page please!) worked up a touchscreen cafe table concept video a couple of years ago, and at least one restaurant in London has something similar currently in existence. Whereas I was thinking of the table's potential purely as a transactional device, both Rule and London's Inamo eatery have taken it further.

To start with, Rule's concept integrates social features:

Inamo, an Asian-fusion restaurant in London's Soho district, opts for projection rather than touchscreen. Their system was created by a London-based company called E-Table Interactive, and though it's projection, it still contains some type of hand-tracking mechanism that provides similar functionality to a touchscreen.

Sputnik Zurich isn't your average a mobile repurposed apparel and accessories outfit: much as Joshua Zisson did with his retroreflective bicycle, they've developed a stylish visibility solution for urban environments; however, Sputnik Zurich has a decidedly more DIY, scalable approach to elevating safety into an aesthetic. From simply sewing vests into totes to actually retailoring the source materials into articles of clothing, founders Stefanie Sixt and Chelsea Rose Morrissey "[draw] from the city's urban development for its inspiration, material and production."

I was curious to learn that the "design and production of the products take place in containers at construction sites throughout the city, [which are] open to the public for new ideas." In other words, the designs are implemented and "produced at the building sites where they originated." Thus, the small-scale operation has 'exported' the concept from their headquarters in Zurich to satellite sites throughout the Europe and the States, with workshops as far-flung as Buenos Aires and Tokyo.

Fun fact: Ton Haas reportedly listened to 50's Cuban singer Benny Moré for a bit of oblique inspiration while creating his latest chair for sister companies Workware/Harechair. The Moiré chair takes its name from the optical illusion that it embodies—often seen in finely patterned textiles—featuring a distinctive hollow grid that enables the interference pattern. "The double layered shell with its unusual transparency plays with light and shadow, giving a subtle edge to its plasticity."

Made in the Netherlands, the stackable polypropylene chair is available in seven colors, with a four-leg base, a sledge base with armrests, or a five-wheeled swivel base for office use (all in steel). The standard model comes in at just 3.1kg, or about 6.8 lbs, thanks to advanced manufacturing techniques:

The complex forms and geometry of the Moiré were only attainable through the use of advanced digital technology, including rapid prototyping. For the first time in history a double layered grid has been produced as a one-part injection moulded piece without the need for fibreglass reinforcements. The Moiré's lightweight structure is therefore characterised by its small mass relative to the applied load.

Design Director - NSW Footwear Materials
Nike, Inc.
Portland, Oregon

Nike is seeking a Design Director - Nike Sportswear Footwear Materials who will leverage materials to deliver a premium, recognizable and consumer relevant brand point of view in the marketplace through strategic vision, design direction, storytelling and editing. The Design Director will lead the development of the materials creative vision and strategies for category/consumer groups, maintaining hands-on involvement in Materials design and development, in support of creative direction, seasonal initiatives and go-to-market strategies.

In earlier days I worked on tons of bottle designs for consumer products, and never once got to spec the color out. It was all decided by marketers privy to the unassailable Focus Group Results. They handed me a Pantone chip, and I made sure the renderings matched.

Those of you who are in a position to spec colors might want to look at this, at least if you're designing containers for products meant to be ingested: A recent article in the Journal of Sensory Studies, a scientific journal published by the Society of Sensory Professionals (I swear I'm not making that up) reveals that the color of a dish, plate or bowl affects how the food tastes.

[Researchers] raised an experiment where 57 participants had to evaluate samples of hot chocolate served in four types of plastic cups, the same size but of different colors: white, cream, red and orange with white.

The results reveal that the chocolate flavor served in orange and cream colored glasses [were liked] best [by] the volunteers who tested it.

[Other examples include using] more yellow cans to better perceive the taste of lemon soda or cups if they are painted in cool colors like blue, seem to quench thirst better than the warm, like red. And if they are pink, the liquid [has an] even more sugary note.

In other cases, it has been shown that a strawberry mousse dessert [is perceived as] more intense on a white plate [than a black one].

For coffee, a majority of respondents associated the brown package [with] a stronger flavor and aroma, while red is attenuated, and if colored blue or yellow, [drinks are perceived as more soft.]

If you're wondering why there are so many brackets in the excerpt above, these results were translated from a Spanish-language newspaper. Which means that my former nemeses in Marketing at a U.S. corporation may not have access to the data yet. That's fine; they loved those GD Focus Group Results so much, I hope they freaking married them.

Garth Johnson runs the irreverent ExtremeCraft website, "A compendium of Art masquerading as Craft, Craft masquerading as Art & Craft extending its middle finger." He's also the author of 1000 Ideas for Creative Reuse: Remake, Restyle, Recycle, Renew. And in his TED Talk entitled "Recycling Sucks! The History of Creative Reuse" Garth points out that recycling is the last of the three R's (the first two being "reduce" and "reuse," of course) and ought be done as a last resort only.

To be clear, Garth's not anti-recycling, but we've all seen just how resource-intensive and inefficient recycling can be, in no small part due to human behavior (an unwillingness to pre-separate recycleables, for instance). Despite the sensationalist title, the point of Garth's talk is to show examples of creative reuse throughout world history, going way back to the Romans and coming up to present day.

This is one of your longer TED Talks at nearly 20 minutes, but it's worth sticking with; you're bound to get a chuckle out of some of the re-carved statues in his slideshow, and I guarantee you'll learn a thing or two.

CES has kicked off in Las Vegas and we're covering the show this year to bring an ID perspective to the usual fan boy tech banter. One project we have been tracking to its debut at CES this week is Definitive Technology's Sound Cylinder. You may not have heard of Definitive, but these guys have been making audiophile gear since 1990, including the recently released SoloCinema XTR, a killer sound bar for your living room housed in an aluminum extrusion. Building off the learnings of the SoloCinema, Definitive brings us the Sound Cylinder, a sound bar designed for your iPad and Macbook. The Cylinder has a perffed aluminum housing with an injection magnesium kickstand and grip mechanism.

Side-firing driver on the Definitive Cylinder handles the bass

As nice as the minimal aesthetic is to look at, where this thing really shines is when you crank it up. We had an opportunity to test run a prototype here at the office in December and were pretty impressed. There are no shortage of bluetooth speakers out there, but most of them don't play very loud, or the low end frequency starts to drop out when the volume is pushed. The Cylinder has two forward firing 32mm drivers that give great reproduction of the mid and high range, and a 43mm side firing driver that handles all the low end frequency. What that means is you get crazy bass from a small package even when you are 20 yards away. Playing video games and watching Mad Men on our iPad just got way more interesting. The digital signal processing on this thing is intense. The same engineers that design the acoustics on Definitives $6,000 systems developed the Cylinder and it shows. 20+ years of audio engineering definitely pays off.

Bluetooth means you can easily connect it to just about any laptop, tablet, or phone, and there is a 3.5mm aux in just in case. The silicone blades open wide enough to grab an iPad even with a case on it, and grip it snugly enough that we couldn't easily shake an iPad out. The front blade has a little jog to dodge the camera on the top of for laptop or tablet which we thought was a nice detail. The pop out kickstand is great when you want to watch a full length movie, or stream some audio. The Cylinder is $199 and will be available next month. Check it out in person at the iLounge at CES and be sure to follow Rain Noe's live posts from the show this week!

Amid the veritable downpour of CES coverage this week, we were interested to see a gadget that is tentatively set to launch in 2050. Quentin's Debaene's hypothetical "AIRBLOW 2050" umbrella concept is worthy of James Dyson himself... at least to the extent that the French design student hopes his design will be deemed so: it looks like he's entered it into the British innovator's eponymous annual awards program.

Once Debaene had identified the fabric portion of the umbrella as the root of all of its problems, the solution was clear as day: to get rid of the bulky, easily inverted membrane entirely. Instead, a vacuum draws air through the telescoping shaft to deflect raindrops around a small radius of the device, creating an invisible overhead barrier to the elements. (Besides describing what it does, its somewhat dubious name seems to be a play on "Airblade.")

I'm sick of sawdust. I use a circular saw and a router by Hitachi with hacked-on plastic ports that I can attach to my Ridgid shop vac, and frankly speaking, the dust collection sucks. The problem is either the vac, the port connection or the design of my (admittedly low-cost) power tools themselves, as they're not designed for the stellar dust collection of the much-pricier Festool offerings.

For starters, let's say it's the vac. Cleaning out a shop vac filter is a holy PITA, as just using an air compressor isn't enough; you really need to blow from inside the filter while scraping between the vanes, which takes freaking forever, to say nothing of the mess created. But if you don't do it on a regular basis the sawdust trapped in the vanes becomes impacted, and your vacuum's efficiency drops way down. You also need to do this outdoors (no easy feat in my crowded Manhattan neighborhood), unless you plan on vacuuming up the mess again with the same vac, defeating the entire purpose of your exercise.

If you don't clean out the filter, you wind up with a weak-ass vacuum, which means the tool it's hooked up to blows more dust all over the place. This might not be a problem for those of you with dedicated shop areas, but since the only workspace I have is in the photography studio I run, I need to eliminate every mote of dust before the next shooter comes in. So I've been searching for an alternative.

All of you that work in small shops that cut wood have heard of cyclones, which drastically reduce the amount of dust that clogs up your shop vac's filter. The idea is that by attaching your vac to this conical intermediary, then feeding a second hose to the actual tool, most of the dust (and particularly the fine particles) gets sucked away by the vortex and into a bucket for easy disposal. Using physics, or aerodynamics I guess, even a modestly-powered vacuum can create a powerful cyclone. Just ask Dyson.

There are a bunch of cyclones on the market, but which to buy? I was able to find just three options within my modest budget: Oneida's Dust Deputy, ClearVue's Mini CV06 and Rockler's Dust Right Vortex, all for around the same price of 80-90 bucks. Oneida's of course a prominent manufacturer of vacuums, ClearVue's larger CVMAX system has an awesome reputation in big shops (though I can't afford a full $1,845 CVMAX system) and Rockler's stuff is pretty hit-and-miss; they're one of those companies that I've found has no problem stocking junk alongside some stellar products, which for some reason pisses me off more than if they'd just sold junk.

If you've ever seen a dust-collecting cyclone in person (I checked one out in Dino Makropoulos' New Jersey shop), you'll be surprised at how simple and jeez-I-could-build-wunna-these it looks.

Woodworker J. Phil Thien figured he could build a dust cyclone, and make an improvement to boot. Thien's innovation was to add, at the top of the conical chamber, a baffle to reduce what's called "scrubbing"; that's when dust swirling around in the cyclone, rather than gathering on the bottom, burps back up into the top (and hence into the shop vac, the place you're trying to keep it out of). By providing a circumferential slit in the baffle for the material to drop down into (the centrifugal force of the cyclone drives the dust towards the edges), but with the baffle blocking most of the bottom from the top, he figured he'd fix the scrubbing problem.

Two years and fifty prototypes after conceiving of it, Thien had produced a baffle that was up to snuff. With the shop vac on and his baffle attached to the cyclonic intermediary, he found he was getting very little dust making it into the vac; most of it wound up in the bottom of the cyclone. Despite his success, Thien has opted not to bring his design into production, and since its creation dozens of woodworkers have built Thien Cyclone Baffles based on his design.

Wanna see it in action? This guy below built one with plexiglas sides so we could see the vortex/dropdown action:

By the way, although Thien has opted not to commercialize his design, he has patented it. So don't you Quirky Kickstarters go getting any ideas.

Today we're in Vegas at at the opening of CES, the electronic geek Mecca of all trade shows. There's a good 150,000 people expected to converge on this year's event, piling into blimp-hangar-sized rooms filled with 33,000 vendors and their gadgets. We managed to sneak into one of the convention halls 90-minutes early, not that it did us any good—the sheer amount of product on display is staggering, and it would take us weeks to get through it all. Instead we've got two days and one man on the ground.

The good news—or bad news, depending on how you look at it—is that most of the stuff is repetitive from an industrial design point of view. China has 1.3 billion people, and it seems 1.2 billion of them are making flatscreen TV's. Then there are the world's tablet and smartphone manufacturers; add all those things up and we've passed thousands of illuminated rectangles this morning, with little to distinguish them (except for one manufacturer, which we'll get to). While we can't hope to match the manpower of other media outlets—CNET brought a team of ninetypeople—we will try to weed out the repetitive stuff, and find whatever would catch the eye of an industrial designer strolling through the show.

Stay tuned.

While we got sucked into the Polaroid area by the iDevice lens add-ons display above, it was what we saw deeper inside that really caught our eye: They've gone into Bluetooth speakers in a major way. The reason we gave this post the title it's got is because it doesn't look like their design director said no to anything. It looks like the assignment came in to design a portable Bluetooth speaker, the team cranked out twenty cool concept sketches, and all of them got greenlit.

There were longitudinal ones roughly equivalent to what the competition's got...

This is officially the craziest woodworking tool I've ever seen. German power tool manufacturer Mafell makes a track saw called the PSS 3100e. You say, big deal, Festool makes a track saw, Eurekazone makes one. But Mafell's is freaking automatic.

The PSS 3100e from MAFELL is the worlds first self-driven, rail-guided and mobile panel saw. In a single operation, the portable panel saw system handles cutting of lengths of up to 2800 mm (110 1/4 in.) and with the follow-on fence even longer cuts are possible.

"2800mm"—By the way guys, once we get into the thousands with the millimeters, can't we just switch over to meters? It's like saying your baby is 64 months old. Anyways check this crazy thing out:

Pretty sweet that it's got a scoring setting, so you don't have to manually raise and lower the blade each time. I do wonder about the safety of the thing: For example, let's say it's making a 2-meter (sorry, 2000mm) cut, and while it's just 3/4s of the way through, someone bumps into the still-attached waste side of the material behind the blade and closes the kerf. What happens, does the resultant binding and kickback cause the thing to shoot backwards, or does it just shut down?

Still, I love that it comes back to home base after each cut. And Mafell, like Festool, is preoccupied with dust collection: They claim the PS 3100e operates "virtually dust free" when hooked up to a vac, even if you're cutting plasterboard.

I'm scared to ask how much this thing costs, but it's probably moot for us Yanks; looks like Mafell's keeping it Euro-market-only.

Creative Interns
Hallmark Cards
Kansas City, Missouri

Hallmark Cards, Inc has multiple creative internships available including Sculptor, 3D Product Designer, Animator, Video Production, Graphic Designer, Hand Lettering Artist, Writing and Editorial.

These paid summer internships are located at Hallmark's corporate headquarters in Kansas City, Missouri. Relocation assistance is provided. The internship program is 12 weeks long, 40 hours per week, beginning in mid-May and ending in early August.

In my experience, the strain of road rage that afflicts cyclists is entirely unlike that of motorists: easy though it may be to satirize or dismiss our sense of self-righteousness, the underlying truth is that cars are still king, and regular riders learn to grow a thick skin when it comes to sharing the road, where they are quite literally marginalized (on streets without bike lanes). Between the legal system's troubling aversion to holding drivers responsible for their (at times fatal) actions and the countless close calls that happen every day, entrepreneurial cyclists are increasingly taking matters into their own hands.

We've seen plenty of illumination and visibility solutions in the past, but Boston-based research engineer Jonathan Lansey saw an opportunity to fill a metaphorical blind spot for urban cyclists. Thus, the successfully Kickstarted LOUD Bicycle Horn affords cyclists a nonvisual cue on par with those of automobiles:

As usual, I have a few thoughts on the project... but first, here's Lansey in his own words:

About a year and a half ago a friend was hit by a car that was making a left hand turn. The driver was distracted by a loud radio and didn't hear my friend screaming. She was lucky, and wasn't injured very seriously, but I thought that we shouldn't have to rely on luck when faced with life-threatening situations. Drivers recognize car horns and react really well to them so it just makes a lot of sense to have a car horn fit for bicycles.

The horn has both a high note and a low note which together makes it sound exactly like a car. Its easy to install and security bolts make it difficult to steal. The battery pack is small and light, but so powerful that a single charge will keep you honking for one to two months. The trigger snaps on to either handlebar and honking does not interfere with steering or braking.

A protoype

The largest CES crowd we saw so far, generating an audible buzz, was dogpiling into the huge Samsung section. What we saw there was astonishing, in a way that the photos probably don't accurately convey: There appeared to be floating windows looking into a different, better-looking-than-reality world.

They weren't windows of course, but high-def TVs. The crispness of the picture and the thinness of the border lent them their jarring effect. A team of designers clearly slaved over these things—getting up close, you only expect craftsmanship like this from Apple—and their manufacturing must be conducted by magic elves. The TVs "small" enough to be mounted on tables (I put small in quotes because these things were freaking huge) had beautiful polished metal legs and seemed just an inch or two thick when viewed from the side.

Fighting the sleek, modern Bluetooth-speaker-aesthetic here at CES are a few companies going the retro route. For starters, Sylvania's got a model that looks like a traveling salesman's record player (above) and another that looks like a cross between a suitcase and a Cadillac (below).

Studebaker goes further back in time, conjuring up the 1930's wooden cabinet-style radio grill: