Well, we butchered the locution, but only because the product at hand is kind of confounding in and of itself: business mavericks and mavens alike can now introduce themselves and distribute their deets in 3D. At one-inch in each of three dimensions, the CallingCube is billed as "the premium business card they won't throw away": "Unlike flimsy paper business cards, the CallingCube is hollow with solid walls, and features standard indented text and logos for a premium weight and feel."

The CallingCube originated at Ohio-based digital fabrication outfit 3D Bakery, who set out to reinvent the traditional business card. The result is a 3D-printed cube allows professionals to "differentiate yourself in today's overcrowded marketplace [and] stand out from the crowd" with the patent-pending product: "Don't end up in their desk drawer. End up on their desk!"

Wheras even the most memorable wooden and QR-printed cards abide by the standard wallet-friendly format, the CallingCube defies convention—and arguably convenience—as a plastic tchotchke. Nevertheless, the company notes that "the CallingCube isn't a replacement for normal business cards. It's designed to be given to your most promising sales leads and contacts (trade-shows, networking events, one-on-one sales meetings, dream-job interviews, etc.)."

The CallingCube is available now at $299 for 80 of 'em... as the saying goes, yea or nay?

Thanks to Neil Brennan for the tip!

Core77's Hand-Eye Supply Curiosity Club is absolutely thrilled to bring you Arnon Kartmazov of Portland's Bridgetown Forge who will talk about his extensive experiences hand-forging Japanese chef's knives.

Tonight's talk starts at 6 at the Hand-Eye Supply store in Portland, OR. Come early and check out our space or check in with us online for the live broadcast!

Arnon Kartmazov
Bridgetown Forge "The Hand-Forged Chef's Knife: The Japanese Perspective"
Hand-Eye Supply
23 NW 4th Ave
Portland, OR, 97209
Tuesday, February 5th, 6PM PST

Bridgetown Forge was founded by Arnon Kartmazov after many years of practicing his craft. He served his first apprenticeship with the last working blacksmith in Jerusalem, Israel, in 1985. He then spent 12 years in Japan, where he was apprenticed to a knife-maker, then a sword-maker, and then opened and operated his own shop in the hills of Northern Kyoto, where he specialized in both hand-forged chef's knifes, as well as architectural pieces designed to blend with both traditional and modern Japanese architecture. He also trained with many smiths both in Japan and in other countries, including Uri Hofi of Israel, an internationally renowned master smith.

Arnon Kartmazov's presentation will give a historical background in blacksmithing covering both traditional methods and contemporary applications and processes. Using modeling clay, Arnon will demonstrate the ancient yet still relevant techniques used to create a variety of forms in modern blacksmithing. Arnon will give a general outline of what it means to forge a quality knife, and explain the Japanese approach to creating high-performance, hand-made cutlery. The talk will conclude with a question and answer session, as well as an opportunity for hands-on time with some samples of Arnon's hand-forged pieces.

You're shopping in a store, and see something close to what you'd like to buy. "Do you have this in red," "an 8 1/2," or "a size medium?" you ask.

"Let me check in The Back," the clerk says. Customers in retail stores hope that "The Back" is some kind of magical Narnia, where all sizes and colors are stocked and neatly organized, ready to be whisked over to us. In reality, if you ever get to poke your head back there, it's often a cinderblock room cluttered with boxes and giving off a very ransacked vibe.

When Palmer West and Jonah Smith set up the new San Francisco retail outpost of their Aether clothing brand, there would be no cinderblock room. In fact it's not even clear if the store has a Back, as the space is comprised of three stacked shipping containers. So they came up with a wicked inventory system: A huge, rotating rack--like what they've got at a dry cleaners--except it's vertical, and runs three storeys high. With styles organized by both style and color on a single segment of the rack, stock can quickly be brought right to the consumer.

As you can imagine, a system like this isn't exactly the type of thing you order from Staples, and there were some attendant design/fabrication challenges. Check out how they solved them:

In my travels, I've seen a lot of crap for sale. Every point of interest has at least one spot that is crammed with some sort of object to entice you, the visitor, to spend money. Invariably, these objects are products. That is...no one is going to try to sell you a bag of Cambodian cotton while you visit a Cambodian temple, expecting you to spin it into yarn and then weave it yourself. They want to sell you a T-shirt, a scarf, a bag...something with immediate, usable value. They have taken the time to turn a material, cotton, into a product—T-shirts. Preferably a T-shirt that announces the awesomeness of your visit, such that you are glad to part with your money.

But many merchants sell their wares in the equivalent of bales and sacks, turning their products back into materials. What I've seen is that products become...well...commoditized. Travelers become numb to them, and there is much, much more supply than demand. What travelers really crave are experiences. Authentic interactions, a great story, a moment with a local; those are the things that travelers really will take home. Experiences can be made into products, of course. Tours, great hotels and restaurants take products and experiences and serve them to consumers in a (hopefully) reliable way.

But the level of entry to these experiences is hard for many locals to achieve. Restaurants take capital, planning and, often, government connections. But with some education, I think there are many ways for locals to enhance their product offerings to differentiate them and improve their connection with their markets. I've seen a few in my wanderings in the last few months. I hope that they can help define the porous boundaries between material, products and services. Exploring these borders can help us all think about the work we do and the services we offer.

While in Bagan, Myanmar, I saw several temples plazas that housed seas of cotton fabric with beautiful, intricate sand paintings. I stopped to admire them...some are based on the amazing designs slowing fading into invisibility on the interior temple walls. Here they are, in bright relief, remade for us! Others are trite design motifs that seem to reappear in various incarnations across many Southeast Asian countries: monks walking in a line with parasols, ladies with pots balanced on their heads. The issue I have, is that while they are putting tremendous effort and skill into their product, their products still look like raw materials. Arrayed across the temple plaza stones, they weigh their fabric down with rocks to keep them from blowing away. Equal thought is not going into the presentation.

I stopped to talk with one of the artists as he gave me his pitch—the sand paintings were durable—you could crumple them in your bag, get them wet even, and they stayed intact. While he spoke, he proceeded to crumple up one of his pieces, and pour water on it! I appreciated that his work might actually make the trip home in my backpack fully intact. On the other hand, I was somehow doubtful all the creases would ever come out. Either way, I feel like his product presentation didn't have the intended effect—I wasn't sold.

Product merchandising is so important...many merchants have a more-is-more approach, stuffing their stalls with products and many multiple versions of products...leaving little to the imagination. Others give their products a bit of room to breathe, and it can have the effect of drawing the eye in, and also elevating the perceived value of the product. Pairing products, or displaying them so I can imagine them in use can be really helpful. While I was walking the side streets of Battambang, Cambodia, I passed this boutique that paired sunglasses with their sweaters.

I felt like the sand artist could take an extra step and help me out—I was going to have to take it home, mat and frame it. They could have some of them framed to help me visualize the right use of his product and guide me towards purchase more easily. It may be a material now—but here it is as a product!

Following yesterday's spelling lesson, here's a quick tip to remember the difference between the three homophonous words that are pronounced "PAL-it": palate, which most closely resembles 'plate,' refers to the sense of taste; palette denotes a mixing board for paints, as in several early 20th-c. French art movements; and a pallet is a portable platform for moving goods, as in "pal, let me move those for you."

As of last May, I happen to be a bit more familiar with pallets than I ever would have anticipated: several members of our NYC team were on build-out duty for last year's "All City All-Stars" exhibition, which incorporated some 300 pallets in Laurence Sazarin's exhibition design. (You can check out the largely unseen raw making-of footage here.) All of those pallets were the standard North American dimensions of 48”×40” (1219mm×1016mm), but we did encounter a EUR-pallet (also known as a "Euro pallet") in the early stages of the build, which is how I learned that they use slightly smaller ones overseas. EPAL—the European Pallet Association, of course—specifies not only its 1200mm×800mm&times144mm (47.2”×31.5”×5.7”) dimensions but the prescribed pattern of the 78 special nails that hold them together.

However, EPAL has no jurisdiction over young German designers Yanik Balzer and Max Kuwertz, who recently sent us an upcycling project in which they transformed a Euro pallet into a set of three chairs "with almost no waste of material."

Hit the jump to see results...

Industrial Design Intern
Tandem
Newport Beach, California

Tandem is currently looking for an Industrial Design Intern with potential to hire. The ideal candidate has a great sense of form and passion for design. He or she should be majoring in ID, junior or senior year student, with strong form development, 3D modeling skills. The intern will support all areas of design with specific tasks including: product research, ideation/sketching, brainstorming, placement study, 3D rendering, presentation preparation, User Interface Design Support, product graphics support, graphics design.

For his M.A. thesis in industrial design, Norwegian designer Thomas Larsen Røed worked with a forward-looking transportation initiative known as the Scandinavian 8 Million City. Backed by governments at the local, regional and national levels, as well as the EU, the project is a detailed proposal for a high-speed rail corridor that runs south from Oslo down the Swedish coastline to Copenhagen, Denmark. Between the two capital cities and two Swedish metropolises in between—Göteborg and Malmö—the 600km span is home to some eight million residents (over 40% of the total population of Scandinavia) and the similarly significant percentage of the region's business and commercial interests.

The website is a bit short on information in English, but a 44-page PDF provides plenty of context and data to the proposal for the "Corridor of Innovation and Cooperation" (COINCO for short). The document makes a strong case to build a multinational high-speed rail line by 2025 site, for which Røed has developed an original train design. In his own words:

I want to contribute to the HSR vision through industrial design and this diploma project. The aim is to create a HSR concept based on Scandinavian values. This includes a focus on exterior design and building a brand identity foundation. By materializing all the ideas and reports that already exist, I believe people will find the whole vision of a Scandinavian HSR more tangible and realistic, which hopefully would make them express their support—something that is essential when trying to realize a big project like this.

By exploring Scandinavian values and identity, I want to create a concept with a distinct form and expression where technical aspects and requirements of the design meet Scandinavian culture and identity.

Just to create and/or contribute to the debate of future mobility would be a valuable end result—and for this reason, the concept might benefit from being somewhat provocative rather than a generic high-speed train.

People go on amusement park rides not because they're amusing, or fun. Board games are fun. Amusement park rides are meant to be thrilling. Whatever's on your mind is temporarily displaced by acceleration, gravity and G-forces. As your body is hurtled through space in completely unnatural ways, your mind is temporarily set free; no one can calculate a mortgage payment while upside down doing 100 miles per hour at 2.7 Gs.

In his entertaining mockumentary The Centrifuge Brain Project, digital artist, designer and filmmaker Till Nowak posits that amusement park rides actually increase brain function. We see a fictional scientist/engineer (brilliantly played by Les Barany) explaining his research—and showing video of mind-bendingly fantastical rides—at the fictional Institute for Centrifugal Research. This is your must-watch of the week:

Via Colossal

I love trains, and I've ridden some of slowest and fastest trains in the world. On the Hanoi-to-Hue it seemed dogs were loping past us, and on the lightning-fast Kyoto-to-Tokyo bullet train my brain couldn't reconcile the stillness of the car with the speed of the scenery whipping past the window.

The best train trip I ever took was a New York-to-Seattle. It's a nice way to see the country (from a remove) and meet some people on board, but it requires you have time to kill—it took three days.

I've accepted the fact that the U.S. will never get their high-speed rail act together, but it doesn't stop me from staring longingly at the map above. That's artist Alfred Twu's rendition of what this country ought to have. It's pure concept work and he's selling prints of it, as well as offering a downloadable PDF that you can modify. It's currently making the rounds on Facebook—amusingly, propagated by folks who can't read the fine print and think that it's real. If only.

Amtrak's real-life paltry offerings, below, can be seen larger here.

I wish James Thomas had reached out to us sooner: as the brains behind Bicycle Design, he laments the regrettable shortage of entries in the recently closed Bike Share Design contest, a joint effort with ISUDA Bike Share of Singapore. I posted the competition to our calendar shortly after it launched last September, but I neglected to read the brief in full, because it was based on a progressive premise:

Unlike most other bike share programs, the system uses a novel redistribution method which is centered around mobile bike stations. Instead of locating the bikes at fixed stations around town to be checked out and returned, ISUDA places the bikes where the most potential users are at different times throughout the day. The system is designed to work with public transit...

An ISUDA blog post from October 2011, shortly after its inception, describes the bike share as a potential last-mile solution for commuters: "The bicycle stations can be converted to 'mobile mode' and can be towed to another location efficiently. This eliminates the time and efforts needed to unload and load each bicycle between stations [and] is also much cheaper to produce a movable station compared to the various cost to install a fixed station." Thus, the design competition solicited proposals for this concept.

Thomas recently posted the 11 submissions that met the minimum entry requirements for public consideration; the design that receives the most votes by February 28 will be named the reader's choice winner, for which the prize is a folding bike from ISUDA.

Our two cents after the jump...

"BalloonBikes" by Marcus Burnam

In one of the more coherent brand launches in recent memory, a new venture called Shinola is poised to capitalize on the trend of American manufacturing with products ranging from bicycles to watches and a forthcoming line of leather goods, all made in the Heartland of these United States.

We're starting with watches first, a product that hasn't been mass-produced in the US for decades. We've built a state-of-the-art watch movement and assembly factory in Detroit with the help of Ronda AG—a legendary movement manufacturer based in Lausen, Switzerland—and our workers have already begun assembling the Argonite 1069, the movement at the core of our watches.

But we're not stopping with watches. We're also producing American-made bicycles using hand-welded frames from Wisconsin, high-quality notebooks through a partnership with Michigan-based bookmakers Edwards Brothers Malloy, and a wide variety of leather goods—including iPad cases, MacBook envelopes, rucksacks, and handbags. Through hard work and collaboration, we believe we can establish ourselves as an iconic brand, while expanding the capacity—and reinvigorating the spirit—of manufacturing in America.

If it all sounds too good to be true, it's been a long time coming: they launched their website nine months ago and have been developing the products for nearly twice as long as that. The brainchild of Tom Kartsotis, founder of Fossil watches, the brand takes its name from a popular shoehine brand that is best known for its cheeky alliterative slogan. Both the bicycles and the watches are assembled in Shinola's Detroit factory in the same building as College for Creative Studies' A. Alfred Taubment Center for Design—a former GM factory. The design school has already proven to be an invaluable talent pool for its upstairs neighbor.

Switzerland-based designer Tomas Kral's Homework Desk is unusual: Made from cast aluminum sandwiched between two sheets of ash, it contains a sort of gutter that runs around three edges. Rather than being for drainage, it's meant to store desktop items, well, off of the desktop. For his part, he describes the wraparound as "A toolbox to store documents, objects, photos that you need or simply desire to work." No drawers necessary.

Here's a shot of an early mockup made with cardboard and particle board:

Sr. Interaction Designer
Disney Interactive
Glendale, California

The Disney Interactive Family group comprises a portfolio of online products that marry exceptional content with engaging tools covering all facets of parenting: pregnancy, child care, the toddler and early years, health, food, family celebrations and activities. They're looking for a Senior Interaction Designer to join our stellar team. He or she will take projects, large and small, and move them from idea through scoping and all phases of design and implementation, championing the integrity of the user experience throughout. Our process is agile, iterative, and transparent. The Designer will be empowered within that framework to make a significant impact on our product portfolio.

We've all seen it: the teenagers with one earbud in, feigning interest in conversation; iPad users brandishing the device like a radiation barrier to snap a photo; the veritable hypnosis of the "cell trance." In fact, maybe you're reading these very words on your smartphone, killing time in line while you wait for the next express train or your double-shot skinny latte. No shame in that—we all do it.

These behaviors and over 20 other digital gestures are duly catalogued in a research project conducted at the Art Center College of Design by Nicolas Nova, Katherine Miyake, Nancy Kwon and Walton Chiu, in July and August of last year. The four published their findings on our gadget-enabled society in an ongoing blog and a book [PDF] as of last September. "Curious Rituals" is nothing short of brilliant, a comprehensive index of the gestures, tics and related epiphenomena organized into seven categories of vaguely anthropological rigor. (The authors also extrapolated their findings in a short film of several hypothetical not-so-distant future scenarios, which I found rather less compelling than the book.)

While the blog illustrates their process—along with related videos and imagery—the final report, published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License, offers an incisive examination of "gestures, postures and digital rituals that typically emerged with the use of digital technologies."

Regarding digital technologies, [this endeavor shows] how the use of such devices is a joint construction between designers and users. Some of the gestures we describe here indeed emerged from people's everyday practices, either from a naïve perspective (lifting up one's finger in a cell phone conversation to have better signal) or because they're simply more practical (watching a movie in bed with the laptop shifted). Even the ones that have been "created" by designers (pinching, taps, swipes, clicks) did not come out from the blue; they have been transferred from existing habits using other objects. The description of these postures, gestures and rituals can then be seen as a way to reveal the way users domesticate new technologies.

Dan Hill of City of Sound sets the stage with a number of own observations in his fluent introductory essay. The designer/urbanist/technologist sets the stage by taking a casual inventory of gestures from the "wake-up wiggle" (impatiently jostling a mouse to awaken a sleeping computer) to iPad photography (which "feels awkward and transitional") and instant-classic iPhone compass calibrator (later referred to as the "angry monkey"). I'd add that this last gesture looks something like twirling an invisible baton or fire dancing—or, incidentally, 'skippable rope' from Art Hack Day.

Remember the wicked Oeben mechanical desk we showed you back in November? If you don't, let us refresh your memory:

In the original post, we expressed our hope that someone like Brian Grabski would take a crack at recreating the 18th-Century masterpiece. Grabski's a little busy running his own business, but unbeknownst to us, another craftsman had actually decided to recreate Oeben's work.

John J. Leko is an Alabama-based woodworker and furniture builder, a graduate of the Marc Adams School of Woodworking, and is currently pursuing a Fellowship at that school. Last June he had an opportunity to study Oeben's original mechanical desk at L.A.'s Getty Museum, and he's decided to reproduce it for the Fellowship:

His instructors might have said "No," but the Kickstarter community said "Yes": Leko's met his $6,000 target and there's still nine days left to pledge.

Speaking of days, several hundred of them will go by before this fiendishly-complicated project is complete. Leko's anticipating the sheet will come off by July 2014.

Thanks Steven!

After gaining good blog traction, the Orp bicycle horn (which we wrote up here) recently surpassed its Kickstarter target of $90,000, and is on the way to 100 large. We're following it up here not only to inform you of the funding success, but to illustrate how well Kickstarter can be wielded by a veteran industrial designer with a popular product idea.

Tory Orzeck and his team have continued updating the Orp's project page, showing the process shots we love to see, along with updated renderings and diagrams that provide the quiet assurance that these guys know what they're doing. We dug seeing things like what appears to be a 3D-printed mold used to cast silicone models for testing, and copious shots of them working out the kinks of their "engineering mule."

Last week, we covered Jiwon Choi's Tyvek Vase in an effort to connect her with a potential manufacturer for the minimalist product. Lest she become known as a one-hit wonder for a polyethylene vessel, her portfolio includes several interesting experiments in furniture—she studied Furniture Design at RISD—such as her latest work, the Chair Morceaux (not pictured), which reminds me of RO/LU's "Primarily Primary" chair.

However, I was particularly impressed with the Chair+Chair=Bench, which is like a vaguely Duchampian variation on the theme of convertible seating. The mirror-image siamese connection evokes both a canopy and a world turned upside-down (Ai Weiwei also comes to mind). Yet it's not as absurd as it seems: where the title suggests a pair of chairs 'joined at the hip'—i.e. side-by-side—to form a bench, the result is far more interesting: it functions as both an art chair and a functional bench without compromising the form of either object.

Refrigerator shopping in 1941.
All images via Shorpy Archive/Juniper Gallery.

If you liked the old photos from the Detroit News Archivist post, you'll also dig Shorpy's offerings. Shorpy is an Alabama-based high-quality printer of gorgeous old photographs, from the Juniper Gallery's archives, of some of our favorite topics: Cities, industry, architecture, interior design, grand municipal spaces.

There are some hidden "History of ID" gems like the Futuramic Lounge, designed by Raymond Loewy for JFK Airport (then called Idlewild) in 1962...

...but the site lends itself well to random browsing, where you'll encounter things you'd never think to Google. Like this beautiful Dodge dealership in the Bronx circa 1948:

Or this absurdly ornate statue and fountain in the middle of a New York department store in 1910, when a department store was an amazing temple of commerce:

As you walk hand in hand with your loved one, we know that you have only one thing on your mind: that project you left behind in your shop while you went on your walk. Well, stop it. Focus.

What does your special collaborator need for their project? A bandana to wipe that beloved greasy brow? Safety glasses to protect those captivating eyes? A tool box, roll or bag to get their precious workshop ship shape? Perhaps a journal to capture all of their incredibly genius and charming ideas? To help you in your search for that perfect gift, we at Hand-Eye Supply have put together a little collection on the theme of empowering your partner in crime and at the same time invoking the hue associated with Valentine's Day paraphernalia.

Although it seems that we've been soliciting your opinions with a simple "Yea or Nay" quite a bit lately—regarding this and this, for starters—we just as often herald instances of "hell in a handbasket" to connote examples of design or specific products that confound us. And while I'd surmise that a new product called the Automee S is an example of chindōgu, the fact that it will reportedly available for 1575 Yen (about $17) next month seems to be at odds with the spirit of 'unuseless design.'

Unfortunately, the product page is in Japanese, so we're relying on New Launches' translation regarding details and specs. They write that "the little one has three tires for maneuvering and two made of paper which do the cleaning. The onboard sensors prevent the Automee S from falling off the edges and also lets it clean the entire surface evenly."

New Launches also notes that it takes four minutes to clean a phone and eight to clean a tablet, which makes it good for 45 and 22 complete cleans on a single AA battery.