Alright app designers—you've got one week left to review, finish up and submit your App to the Future designs! The FINAL Lightning Design Review before submissions close is next Thursday, February 7th at 2pm ET. Registration for that review session closes Tuesday, February 5th at 2pm ET, but space is limited so you'll want to submit your designs for review as soon as possible. You can also sign up to watch the session live, or view previous sessions.

Don't forget to also watch the Windows Phone Design Bootcamp videos to get the most out of Windows Phone design principles. The series is broken up into five 101 and three 201 videos so you can pick how far and deep you want to dive.

Submit your App to the Future Windows Phone designs by midnight Sunday, February 10th. The future's getting closer every second!

You could be forgiven for assuming this jewelry display rack was purpose-built. But look a little closer: It's obviously an antique, and if you look at the channels cut into it, you can see that they antedate the invention of the router. Someone went to a lot of trouble to chisel those out, by hand, with a consistency that practically screams "manufacturing." But what could this thing possibly have been used to make?

Hit the jump to find out.

Recent RISD grad Jiwon Choi reached out to us about her recent travails in finding a manufacturer for her Tyvek Vase. "Since it is a relatively new material, no one is willing to experiment with it. Some manufacturers said they are reluctant to use Tyvek because they don't know what it is. Tyvek is reusable and in many cases, it has more positive side than plastic. I'm hearbroken."

The remarkably simple object consists of a sheet of Tyvek, a versatile waterproof paper developed by DuPont, coiled into a conical vessel, an elegant repurposing of the industrial material.

Designed just in time for Valentine's day, the objective was to create a simple and light (yet strong enough to stand) package for flowers. Flowers will go back to the soil, Tyvek will have have a second life too; repurposed for products like corrugated pipes and landscape material.

We wish Choi the best of luck in finding a manufacturer—surely our readers can provide some leads?

Another interesting wooden object I've recently come across is this cigar drying box. After cigars were hand-rolled or removed from their mold, they were once placed in these primitive objects and left to dry.

The reason I call them "primitive" is because of their design; while they might make you think of the functionality of flat files, the resemblance between the two objects is visual only. At first I thought these would be perfect for storing hand tools, saw blades et cetera, but these are not pull-out drawers; there are no runners at all. The pull-outs are simply individual trays that rest on the ones below them, and the exterior is a mere four-sided box (no back) to keep dust off the cigars.

In other words, if you pull a tray out of the middle, the ones above come out with it or drop down to take the removed tray's place. This is presumably because the cigarmaking workflow meant the piece was loaded and unloaded just once per batch, obviating the need (and added cost) of constructing proper drawers.

If you were to build one of these to hold hand tools, so that the trays served as proper drawers, how would you design it? My first thought was you could construct the drawer bottoms out of masonite, make them slightly wider than the drawers themselves, and have the overlap slide into kerfs cut into the interiors of either side. But I suspect drawers this wide would start to sag in the middle, depending on how heavy the tools were, so the things would need to be made narrower (killing some of their visual appeal). Any ideas?

We first looked at bike manufacturer Montague's Paratrooper Tactical Folding Mountain Bike a few years ago, but now the bikes are available for sale to the general public.

The 2013 24-speed Paratrooper and 27-speed Paratrooper Pro models break down, tool-lessly, in under 20 seconds. They're also designed for durability—unlike most folding bikes, they don't compromise the crossbar with a hinge, but instead keep the frame intact:

Ready to ride? Just one thing to get out of the way first:

Next question: How long before some extreme sportsman jumps out of a plane with the bike assembled, and lands with no chute on some massive halfpipe?

These individually folding shelf units are making the blog rounds, but I object with how they're being billed by other design blogs as "space-saving" units. While I like the pieces and think they're pretty, I'm not sure how they would save you space; for one, things left on a shelf typically stay on a shelf; it's not as if you clear all your books and magazines off it on a daily basis, and even if you did, where would you then put them? Secondly, even if you were to fold up every single shelf, it seems you're gaining mere inches of extra room.

That being said, I find the pieces handsome. Called the Klaffi shelves, they were designed by Finnish architect/designer Eeva Lithovius, come in three different finishes, and can be purchased here.

Industrial Designer
Garmin International
Olathe, Kansas

Garmin International, the world leader in Global Position System (GPS) technology, seeks an industrial designer for our Outdoor/Fitness team. He or she will be part of a multi-disciplinary group of designers and prototype specialists working in a casual yet very well equipped studio and shop. The designer will work directly with engineering, marketing, and management to develop equipment for activities such as hiking, backpacking, hunting, paddling, and golf. The ideal candidate has the courage to drive innovation combined with the ability to work respectfully in a team.

That's supposed to be a 3D-printed question mark

You could spend three or four figures buying a 3D printer of your own—or you could design one, have a machine given to you for free, and take home $2,500 for your trouble.

A company called Layered Labs has apparently designed a prototype 3D printer, or at least the bare machinery, but apparently the thing is so ugly they won't even post a photo of it. Instead what they're doing is a sort of cheapo way of hiring industrial design talent: They're holding a competition to design the rest of their printer, and first prize means you get a free one plus the $2,500 prize.

As mentioned above they're not posting images of what they've got so far, but entrants in the contest will receive a 3D file revealing the guts you're meant to work with. "[The] file shows a prototype version of the machine with mounted panels that are bolted onto aluminum extrusions," they write. "The ENTIRE design needs to be CHANGED from a bolt-together chassis to an elegant stamped and folded SHEET METAL design with good structural characteristics and manufacturability kept in mind."

We HOPE that's ENOUGH information for YOU to GO on.

Click here for details.

When a new product called the Brolly turned up in the inbox, I couldn't help but think of Sruli Recht's "Umbuster," a more explicitly 'weaponized' umbrella concept. The Icelandic designer's concept incorporates an aluminum knuckle duster into an umbrella handle as a tongue-in-cheek comment on the smuggling of illegal arms: the product page duly notes: "Although the Umbuster is not technically a weapon, to ensure avoiding import complications please check your international laws before purchase. The regulations and control differ between countries and we regret we cannot provide refunds for returned or confiscated orders."

Seeing as it's a hefty €225, potential customers would do well to heed Recht's caveat emptor. Which brings us to the Brolly: at under $20, it offers the very same reference point without the political implications or the objet d'art pricetag. Instead of an individually CNC-milled handle, the Brolly features a consumer-friendly rubberized ABS handle.

In fact, designer Greg Edson arrived at the distinctive form factor in his quest to develop an umbrella that could be used concurrently with a mobile device, allowing users to text or e-mail in the rain.

I couldn't help but notice the hangtag on the umbrellas in the montage from 1:27–1:37, but other than that, the video does a good job of explaining the what seems like a decent product.

Andre Cassagnes, the man who invented the Etch A Sketch, has passed away.

In the 1950s Cassagnes, a French electrical technician, was installing a light switch at the factory where he worked. The switch plate had a protective decal on it, which Cassagnes removed. That decal attracted bits of metallic powder by-product present in the factory, and Cassagnes noticed that when he made pencil marks on one side of the decal, the powder gave way to the pencil tip and the marks showed up on the other side.

After observing this electrostatically-powered accident, Cassagnes spent several years harnessing this phenomenon into a handheld device. At the 1959 Nuremberg Toy Fair in Germany, he pulled the sheets off of his L'Écran Magique ("Magic Screen.") A transparent plastic sheet was lined with aluminum powder on the inside, and a joystick controlled an internal stylus that could be dragged across the screen, inside the device, to create lines. The "drawing" could be erased by shaking the device up, which redistributed the powder; small plastic particles mixed in with the powder prevented it from clumping up unevenly.

An American company called Ohio Art paid Cassagnes $25,000 for the rights—a princely sum back then—and called him in to work on a revised design. Interestingly enough, the form factor was altered to resembled the hottest home appliance of the day: The TV set. Cassagnes' joystick was replaced by two knobs below the screen, and the entire device was rebranded the "Etch A Sketch Magic Screen."

Designer Alexander Lervik is pleased to present Lumière au Chocolate, his latest project in the Lervik 100 collection, which he is presenting at this very moment in his current home of Stockholm, Sweden (the opening is tonight, February 4th, from 6–10PM at Galleri Kleerup). Produced by Scandinavian LED specialists SAAS Instruments, the uncanny chocolate ark belies a latent luminosity:

The Poetry of Light chocolate lamp, unlike other lamps, is completely dark when you first turn it on, mimicking light spreading along the horizon at sunrise. The heat from the lamp causes the chocolate to begin melting, and it takes several minutes for the first rays of light to penetrate. Holes soon form and as the light grows the chocolate melts. The material and structure of the lamp are the result of pure curiosity. Alexander Lervik wanted to explore the possibility of creating a contrast to light, i.e. dark. The shape of the lamp has been devised based on extensive testing involving the melting process.

This clock is lying. And that's why you don't have a broken ankle

It was the advent of railroads and the Industrial Revolution that really pushed the clock into widespread usage. Timekeeping devices had been around for centuries, but with much of the world living in an agrarian society, there wasn't much need to know the precise time; you woke up when the sun rose, worked the fields, and went to bed when it got dark. But once you needed to be at the factory by 9AM, or catch the 11:53 to Chicago, it was better to look at a mechanically-powered circle with indicators than to squint up at the sun and guess.

So we're surprised to see that a particularly famous train station has been gaming their clocks for years, eschewing honest accuracy for the sake of social engineering. It turns out that New York's Grand Central Terminal, more popularly known as Grand Central Station, purposefully sets their clocks to all be one minute fast. Why?

The idea is that passengers rushing to catch trains they're about to miss can actually be dangerous—to themselves, and to each other. So conductors will pull out of the station exactly one minute after their trains' posted departure times. That minute of extra time won't be enough to disconcert passengers too much when they compare it to their own watches or smartphones ... but it is enough, the thinking goes, to buy late-running train-catchers just that liiiiiitle bit of extra time that will make them calm down a bit. Fast clocks make for slower passengers....

You might call this time-hacking; you might call it behavioral engineering; you might call it comical. Regardless, it seems to be working. Grand Central boasts the fewest slips, trips, and falls of any station in the country—quite a feat given how many of its floors are made of marble.

Via The Atlantic

Image via Metro

Regarding the previous post, I was curious to see that the four-finger grip design invariably alludes to brass knuckles, whether it's made from aluminum or ABS. But the handle is perhaps less intimidating a quasi-weapon than the business end of the umbrella: even a compact umbrella can be a makeshift bludgeoning implement when the chips are down. Hell, a Charlemagne-quoting Sean Connery even took down a fighter plane with one in his memorable turn as Henry Jones, Sr.... and then there's also the legendary "Bulgarian umbrella," which allegedly delivered a lethal dose of ricin to Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov during the Cold War.

It so happens that I learned of Markov's assassination via Wikipedia, when I was looking up the toxic substance during a Breaking Bad binge (you know how it goes); so too did I discover another interesting umbrella concept via the all-but-omniscient encyclopedia when researching the Brolly.

Image via Tuxboard

About two years ago, the Daily Mail reported that the security detail of the least popular leader in French history would be equipped with a bespoke kevlar umbrella in case of inclement weather or malcontents. Apparently, former president Nicolas Sarkozy felt so threatened by March 2011 that his bodyguards were packing an an all-but-bulletproof parapluie, known as the "Para Pactum" ('prepare for peace' in Latin). The otherwise unassuming aegis deploys in the same fashion as your $5 Chinatown umbrella but offers protection from "knives, acids, rocks and most other projectiles" in addition to more commonly-encountered nuisances such as water falling from the sky.

A source at the elite RAID police unit, which tested the umbrella alongside the Institute of Aeronautical Engineering Institute in Saint-Cyr, said it would prove invaluable to Mr Sarkozy.

"He's had all kinds of missiles aimed at him from above, especially on visits to high-rise housing estates where he's particularly unpopular,' said the source. "This umbrella will keep him pretty safe. It won't stop bullets, but it will reduce their impact considerably."

This is the future we were promised! Flying cars, baby. Anyone in the 1950s would have surely thought we denizens of 2013 would be whipping around in them, but we are not. And the simple reason why, is because engineers are lazy. All of them.

Someone who's not lazy is photographer Renaud Marion, who shoots photos of ordinary cars and painstakingly Photoshops them into the floating, tireless creations you see here. He calls it the "Air Drive" series and I hope he continues it beyond the six shots you see here.

The ongoing quest to design the most minimal wallet ever is something of a race to the bottom: my colleague hipstomp, for one, has resorted to using a Japanese train pass holder, and we see so many Kickstarter projects that (for better or for worse) we have to pass on some of the more worthy ones. At least one of my friends has opted to forgo leather or PVC for perhaps the most minimal system of all: a humble but practical rubber band.

Designer Chieh Ting Huang does him one better: Nothing Fancy is a collection of seamless, stitchless leather accessories—a wallet, a coin purse, an iPhone case and a passport holder—that consist of single pieces of leather that are cut into foldable patterns and secured with a simple elastic.

Nothing Fancy, aka the non-stitched minimalist wallet, is the first product in a range of everyday accessories reimagined for a contemporary lifestyle. The wallet has its origins in the classic image of the bundle of banknotes held together by a rubber band. The mission was to create a design with the minimal amount of materials, simplifying the object to its basic function.

Each wallet is created from a single piece of leather, requiring no stitching—shortening the time it takes to produce each one and saving on materials. The custom-made rubber bands make placing banknotes and credit cards into the pockets easy yet maintains the security of a traditional stitched wallet. The use of minimal material also reduces the thickness otherwise found in a traditional wallet.

Interaction Designer/Analyst
Bresslergroup
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Bresslergroup, a leader in integrated user interface & industrial design, is seeking a hybrid information architect/usability expert. The ideal candidate has experience with conducting user research and designing interfaces for diverse platforms such as handhelds, desktops, public kiosks, consumer electronics, and medical devices to name just a few.

Ok so this is sort of just a pet peeve, but it's relevant enough in this day and age of push-button journalism and SEO to warrant a quick post here: As an editor and former philosophy student, I have an abiding interest in the English language and I generally can't help but notice typos that I invariably encounter in my daily media consumption. Case in point: the commonplace omission of the first "o" in "skeuomorph."

I'll refrain from pointing a finger at the perpetrator of the typographical error—I figure an eagle-eyed copyeditor will eventually spot the mistake and dutifully insert the absent vowels—and I take no issue with the content of the article itself, but this particular instance of the common misspelling happened to inspire a bout of etymological investigation on my part. I knew that the word was derived from the Greek word skeuos, which means 'vessel' or 'implement.' "Skeuomorph" and its related forms are the only instance of the word in English, but the root has biblical significance as well, and based on those definitions it also seems to mean 'instrument' to underscore a direct relationship between form and function.

Origins aside, I would venture to guess that the common misspelling is due to the word's pronunciation: it is typically vocalized as "skew-morphic"—an easy (albeit imprecise) shorthand for its actual definition, at least to the effect that one thing is bent or contorted to resemble another—and even the proper pronunciation, "skew-a-morph," is phonetically equivocal. The heterographic ambiguity is compounded by its highly unconventional spelling: the letter sequence "-euo-" is extremely rare in the English language. In fact, the only other words that I could find with this highly unusual three-vowel sequence were scientific names that started with the prefix eu- (i.e. good).

Corollary: "Skeumorphic" may also seem like the correct spelling precisely because the prefix eu- is understood to mean good, where the sibilant "sk-" somehow cancels—i.e. "x's out"—the meaning of a back-formed quasi-root "eumorph," which would mean 'good or proper form.'

The irony, then, is that the word itself is decidedly not skeuomorphic: its spelling doesn't look like any existing words, that which might inform one's best guess as to its spelling. It's another one of those weird cases of a term that must be committed to memory: a possible mnemonic might be to remember the root as skeuOS, as in a certain highly skeuomorphic Operating System.

Of course, this admittedly discursive linguistic analysis has little bearing the actual practice of design, skeuomorphic or otherwise: the UI/UX phenomenon is not so much a case of Justice Potter Stewart's oft-repeated notion that "I know it when I see it" but rather "I know it because I see it... all the f'in time."

As our own An Xiao Mina noted in our recent Year in Review series: "While skeuomorphism sometimes has its place, it's often mired in an unnecessary past, rather than open to a expansive future."

Photo by Ozier Muhammad for The New York Times

Cliché though it may be, it's hard not to describe it as anything less than a gift that keeps on giving: still from the devastation of Superstorm Sandy, a Long Island waterfront community has united to upcycle some 3,000 Christmas trees as an ad hoc solution in the interest of rebuilding protective sand dunes. Several Long Beach residents proposed the solution, which was approved by city officials and implemented by volunteers last weekend. Per the New York Times:

Healthy sand dunes are the first line of defense for coastal towns during storms because they keep the ocean from invading backyards and basements. But sand alone is not enough. An anchor, often naturally growing grasses, is needed to prevent the sand from blowing or washing away.

But the grasses cannot grow without a significant accumulation of sand, and in Long Beach these days there simply is not enough. That is where the Christmas trees come in.

"The trees act in place of natural plant growth," said Charlie Peek, a spokesman for the parks service in North Carolina, which has been using Christmas trees to spur dune revival for years. "It gives it a little head start, a little bit of a helping hand. In an ideal situation, the plant growth comes in after it and starts building a natural dune."

The method is not uncommon, particularly in areas like the Carolinas and Florida that are prone to hurricanes. It can take two to three years for dunes to become fully re-established after a major storm.

The commendable community effort is an uncanny echo of an art installation from almost exactly a year ago to date, Klara Lidén's widely acclaimed Pretty Vacant at Reena Spaulings, a second-floor gallery space that happens to be above one of my regular dim sum spots. The main attraction of the solo exhibition, "S.A.D." (after the mood disorder), consisted of a medium-sized room filled with a faux forest of some 80 discarded but otherwise intact Christmas trees. New York Magazine's Jerry Saltz nicely captured the redolent sentiment of the installation.

Immediately inside, you're confronted with the startling sight of a space filled with discarded Christmas trees, all scooped up from the sidewalks of New York by Liden and her cohorts. A disruption of the senses comes, thoughts of the Brothers Grimm, the foreboding of forests, inchoate uneasiness. You see only a few feet in front of you. Still, there's space enough between the trees to proceed. Make your own way in, push trees aside, slide through...

Unlike almost all artists who fill a gallery with one thing, be it glass jars, wooden beams, or cotton bales—a trope so worn-out it should be banned—Liden places a leather couch in the center of the room. It churns up everything, getting you to stop, look, listen, smell, and maybe shudder.

Photo by Michelle Feffer for NY Mag

In high school we were taken to meet a guy who made "antiqued" furniture. It was all freshly made in his shop, but he had an array of objects—chains, bottlecaps, and even carefully-selected rocks—that he'd flay, pound, drop and grind against each piece to give it a calculated weathering. The results were convincing, but one of my classmates sniggered something about it being fake. The man asked the kid if his jeans were pre-faded, or if he'd bought them like that.

Whether clothing or furniture, there's a history for beating things up for aesthetic reasons; but how far should we take that? Francesco Pavia, a designer who hails from Venice, has extended it into luggage with his Crash Baggage line.

What is the first thing we think about when we buy a new suitcase?

We worry that it might get ruined.

The damaged case! An innovative travel philosophy that has opened the way to a whole new way of conceiving the suitcase: that of the non-handle with care, where damage is no longer a problem.

Crash baggage already has the typical dents that are caused by frequent use. Indeed, over time, the new dents give even more personality to the suitcase. All this without forgetting the functionality and comfort of an object that has been created using the most advanced materials.

I kind of wish he'd make these perfect and then throw them down a concrete staircase, but the consistent dents indicate these come out of a mold.

In any case, what say you—yea or nay?

See Also: "Free Fall" Chair by Ezri Tarazi; "Do Hit" Chair by Marijn van der Poll for Droog

Team 7 is an Austrian outfit that manufacturers furniture out of (gasp!) natural wood, using walnut combined into three plies. Led by experienced wood designer Jacob Strobel, they've created a byoootiful extending table with well-concealed extra panels. I've seen similar mechanisms before, but the easy, elegant precision of this one, coupled with the gorgeous walnut finish, has me drooling.

It's called the Flaye, and unsurprisingly there's no video of what we designers all want to see—what's going on below the table during the action. All they'll say is that it works via "revolutionary non-stop synchronised pull-out technology."