I've tried to remain silent on this topic, but there are only so many times I can hear people's ridiculous ignorance of industrial design before I've gotta pipe up. The general, misguided statement I see people making is Well, all smartphones now look like the iPhone. It's impossible to design it any further. Here's the latest assertion made along these lines:

[Apple vs.] Samsung and other hardware manufacturers over who owns the rounded corner has only served to reinforce why hardware design is steadily becoming homogenous. There are only so many things you can do with a thin glass rectangle....

...As hardware evolves itself into invisibility we're well on our way to a time when the only thing that differentiates how something feels will be its software.

Yeah, I disagree. Statements like this show a real lack of imagination, along the lines of Henry Ellsworth—U.S. Commissioner of Patents in the 1840s—saying "The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end." That statement, by the way, is often twisted sideways and misattributed to future Commissioner Charles H. Duell supposedly having said "Everything that can be invented has been invented."

This statement that "There are only so many things you can do with a thin glass rectangle" isn't meaningful, because the person who made it is locked into the idea of thin glass rectangles and cannot conceive that the technology will change. One of the stories recounted to us in design school was of a wire manufacturer that made a fortune during the telephone boom of the 20th Century. They grew complacent, saying, "Well, people will always need telephones, and telephones need wires, so we'll always make good money." They could not conceive of the advent of the cell phone, and as the shift began, the company's fortunes waned. (They were saved, interestingly enough, by shifting into another emerging technology where fine wiring was needed: The manufacturing of meshes for airbags.)

There's been talk of Apple developing curved glass, and if that comes to pass, the form factor of phones will change. If further developments materialize and the phone is something flexible that can be rolled up, the form factor will change again. If holography becomes affordable, we'll see yet another change. But to me, the notion that "hardware [will evolve] itself into invisibility" is absurd.

Reporting by Teshia Treuhaft

New Yorkers take their sidewalks seriously: With over 12,000 miles of sidewalk in the city, there is a lot to care about. So who wouldn't like the idea of making one of the most used urban features just a bit nicer? The recently funded Kickstarter project Softwalks makes small design tweaks to drab New York sidewalks, transforming them into fully-fledged public spaces. At launch, the Softwalks 'kit' consists of four parts; seat, counter, planter and light reflector, all directly attachable to preexisting scaffolding using an adjustable clamp system. The team is also developing an additional screen, bench and game board to expand the kit.

Designing for existing urban structures isn't exactly a new idea; projects like Michael Karowitz's paraSITE immediately come to mind. Still, urban planning is a big job, so why not start small? By designing for scaffolding that covers many of New York's sidewalks—technically known as 'sidewalk sheds' to protect pedestrians from debris—the project has the potential to make a pop-up park practically anywhere. Considering that New York City currently has approximately 189 miles of sidewalk sheds, it shouldn't be a problem finding a sidewalk in need of sprucing.

A better boob tube?

This past weekend some friends and I rented a cabin upstate. As we divided into tasks of food shopping, cooking, bloody-mary-making et cetera, I greedily snatched up the best task for myself: Hauling in the firewood and starting a blaze in the hearth. The wood was already split and corded—I know, lame—but while there were many felled trees on the property, I'm ashamed to say that your correspondent has never even touched a chainsaw, nor split his own logs with an axe.

This cityboy would never cut the mustard in Norway, where more than a million households have fireplaces or wood-burning stoves. And Norwegians presumably do most of their own wood-chopping: Author Lars Mytting's book Solid Wood: All About Chopping, Drying and Stacking Wood — and the Soul of Wood-Burning was a bestseller and, as the Times reports, even spawned a 12-hour-long single-episode television show.

The program was called National Firewood Night, and here's the kicker: The first four hours were all about cutting, splitting and stacking firewood. The last eight hours were continuous footage of wood burning in a fireplace. And apparently it was riveting. Whereas an estimated one out of three Americans tuned into the Superbowl, one out of five Norwegians caught some part of Firewood.

"I couldn't go to bed because I was so excited," a viewer called niesa36 said on the Dagbladet newspaper Web site. "When will they add new logs? Just before I managed to tear myself away, they must have opened the flue a little, because just then the flames shot a little higher.

"I'm not being ironic," the viewer continued. "For some reason, this broadcast was very calming and very exciting at the same time."

Perhaps more interesting is that reality television seems to spawn controversy regardless of the subject matter. "We received about 60 text messages from people complaining about the stacking [of the firewood] in the program," Mytting told the Times. "Fifty percent complained that the bark was facing up, and the rest complained that the bark was facing down."

Even still, this American thinks it's better to argue about wood than Kardashians.

seeks Lead Prod. Design Eng.
in Manchester, NH

Remember the time you went camping and after that super long hike (not to mention the argument about whether or not your friend saw Bigfoot) you were SO thrilled to eat a hot meal and drink a warm cup of cocoa?

The folks at Jetboil, Inc. make awesome outdoor cooking experiences (like that one) possible and they want you to bring your product design expertise to their team. You'll work with a variety of departments to create new product concepts, then support their development and eventual launch.

Camping experience and believing in Bigfoot are not required for this job, but technical/design skills and a proactive attitude are. Check out all the details by clicking the link below.

Apply Now

On my last flight out of JFK, I was in the final boarding group to be called. I observed the bulk of the passengers boarding before me all hewing to the current luggage trend: A roll-on bag topped with a little "buddy" bag that slides over the retractable handles.

Boarding the plane, the overhead bins were all filled, not only with roll-ons, but the "buddy" bags as well—along with people's coats. Person after person put both of their bags in the overhead in order to provide themselves with legroom by not having anything beneath the seat. As you can guess, a handful of us in the final boarding group thus had to check our carry-on luggage.

I can't speak for other countries, but in America the in-flight experience perfectly mirrors how we behave in public: We try to selfishly maximize our own comfort to the inconvenience of others. This is how we drive, this is how we ride the subway, this is how we behave in movie theaters, and even how we walk—I've been behind people who stepped off a moving escalator or through a revolving door and simply stopped to look around, heedless of the people trying to exit behind them.

Here's an example of this me-first approach embodied in a physical product design, one that's ten years old:

The Knee Defender is a pair of plastic gewgaws that you bring onto an airplane and slide onto the arms of your tray table, for the express purpose of preventing the person in front of you from reclining their seat.

I can't decide if this is good design combatting bad design, bad design versus good design or two bad designs that taste horrible together.

As Google's Project Glass moves closer to completion, they're making a two-pronged push to draw eyeballs, both figuratively and literally. For the former, they've released a video with actual footage captured through actual Glass prototypes:

It's funny how quickly I've become accustomed to the fineness of GoPro's smooth footage; Google's comparatively primitive video quality leaves no doubt that the footage is real.

Viewing the footage, we see Google pushing several applications:

1. Exciting athletic or action-packed POV footage, à la GoPro.
2. Voyeuristic or "memory-making" POV footage, as with the ballerina about to hit the stage, folks playing with their children and dogs.
3. Practical real-time referencing, as with the ice sculptor pulling up images of his subject.
4. Hands-free photography.
5. Real-time sharing, à la Facetime, as with the man sharing footage of a snake with (presumably) his wife and child.
6. Real-time navigation.
7. Real-time translation (though I think choosing tone-based Asian languages like Chinese and Thai will present some implementation challenges).

What's interesting is that Glass promises such a broad range of applications—quite a different tack from Apple's approach of making their devices do a few things well. For us designers, the video raises questions of interface design: Glass presumably taps into Wi-Fi, how do we access the network and enter passwords? Will the voice control work on a crowded sidewalk or a noisy train station? How fine is the camera's voice-prompted shutter timing? How, and how often, do users charge the device? And how do users get footage off of the device?

Americans can be a little hard on Canada. A rebranding for the benefit of the United States seems a little extreme, but it does seem difficult for the average American to discuss much about Canada beyond hockey, moose and maple syrup. To help Americans, Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen recently asked Bruce Mau Design to give the USA a short lesson on Canadian culture as part of their series "Redesigns." While recent controversy surrounding the redesign of the $20 dollar bill doesn't bode well for Canadian graphic design, this concept does away with the maple leaf completely. You have to admit, if we owe the walkie-talkie, peanut butter and 20% of the worlds freshwater to Canada, maybe they do deserve a little more respect.

"In our redesign, we begin with an assertion that Americans simply don't understand Canada. Our view is that Canada doesn't need a redesign; rather, Americans need to be educated." -Bruce Mau Design

For the sake of fairness to our northern neighbors, the Canadian radio program Q with Jian Ghomeshi also took a shot at Redesigning America. (And lest we forget, Bruce Mau's identity for Toronto's OCAD University was the 2011 Core77 Design Awards winner for the Visual Communication category.)

We first reported on Canon noodling around with augmented reality, which they branded "Mixed Reality," back in '09. Their system had this clunky two-handed viewfinder:

By last year they'd refined it into a smaller set of goggles, though they artfully added some protruding antennae, to prevent the user from looking too cool:

The system was pitched specifically for industrial design applications, getting our hopes up, however guardedly. We've seen plenty of pie-in-the-sky technologies promised and never delivered, but this morning Canon announced the system is ready for roll-out. While some media sources are reporting a March 1st launch, Canon's saying it's available now. And if their press photo is to be believed, they've done away with the dorky antennae:

"You make huge globes too? Wow, small world"

We'd previously reported that Matt Binns of Giant Globes Inc. is the go-to guy if you need a big-ass scale model of Earth, but as it turns out, Binns isn't alone. A Maine-based mapping and GPS company called DeLorme has constructed a whopping 41-footer. This thing is so big, the Indiana Jones boulder has nightmares about being crushed by it.

Designated the "World's Largest Revolving/Rotating Globe" by the Guinness Book of World Records, DeLorme's creation is called the Eartha, presumably because they're fans of Eartha Kitt. Or maybe because it sounds like "Earth," I don't know, I'm not a linguist. Anyways the gi-normous globe is on display at their HQ in Yarmouth, encased in a three-story glass structure that can be seen from the nearby highway.

It rotates at a rate of one revolution every 18 minutes, though it can be accelerated to one revolution per minute, which will teach those pesky kids not to climb on it.

So how's it made? With six thousand pieces of aluminum tubing forming a skeleton, which is then skinned with nearly 800 surface panels.

"Every continent is beautifully detailed, with vivid colors illustrating all levels of vegetation, major roadways and cities," says DeLorme. "Ocean depths are also completely represented."

Some Falkland wise guy stole a panel

Via Wired

It seems like only yesterday that Chris Bangle stepped down as BMW's chief designer, but it's already been four years. Dutch designer Adrian van Hooydonk filled his shoes, until being promoted to the overarching SVP of BMW Group Design position. Now the task of heading up BMW automobile design has fallen to the relatively youngish (42) Canadian industrial designer Karim Antoine Habib.

In this video we not only get to see cool shots of Habib checking out the International Design Museum Archive (where I was surprised to see the TV collection supported on sagging, melamine-covered particle board shelves!), but we also hear him break down how he translates BMW's DNA into design work, as well as what it's like to manage and oversee a team of designers. It also doesn't hurt to see him whipping around town in that sweet 2002* with the Jetsons beltline.

*Hardcore classic Bimmer fans: Is that a '68?

wants an Industrial Designer
in Neihu District, Taiwan

Fragile iPhones without cases... Brand new Droids with no screen protectors... Beautiful and capable devices all around the world are trapped inside boring, dull and frighteningly single-purpose accessories, or worse, have no accessories at all!

You have the power to put an end to these horror stories. Apply for this Industrial Designer position with PureGear in Taiwan and join a team that's changing the game for mobile device accessories.

You'll need strong 3D modeling and rendering skills, a powerful imagination, slick graphic and layout skills, plus a mastery of Adobe Illustrator ,Photoshop and InDesign. If you happen to be fluent in Mandarin, that's great, but not a requirement.

Click below to start saving those devices!

Apply Now

We're very happy to announce that Lindsay Howard and Igal Nassima of 319 Scholes are hosting the second annual Art Hack Day at the Brooklyn gallery space. Starting next Thursday, February 28, event founders Olof Mathé, Paul Christophe and David Huerta will work alongside 50+ fellow artists, designers and hackers in the converted warehouse to collaborate and produce as many projects to be exhibited two days later, when the one-night-only exhibition will be open to the public. "Visitors are invited to engage and interact with the works as they are uploaded online throughout the hack and join the teams on Saturday March 2nd starting at 7:00PM for an exhibition, live performances and party."

Learn more about ScratchML in our 2012 event recap

This time around, Art Hack Day has a theme—one that geeks, nerds and technophiles of all stripes are sure to appreciate:

What would you do if you were granted the power of invincibility? It's an age-old question and one that game developers have been playing with since the early 80s by incorporating a feature called "God Mode" which offers players unlimited strength, seconds of invulnerability, a change in camera perspective, or access to previously unreachable areas. Since then, God Mode has reached beyond gaming and become pervasive in digital life. It's the secret backdoor embedded in all our electronics, it's the jailbreak, it's how phone companies know where you are, it's how ISPs know where you surf, and it's how the NSA can eavesdrop on your communications.

Check out our coverage of the inaugural Art Hack Day and head over to Art Hack Day: God Mode website for a full list of participants and the latest news about the event!

Image via PTI Prototype

Injection molding is awesome. It's also freaking expensive, with high tooling costs that keep it out of reach for your average independent designer, craftsperson or hobbyist. For those seeking to create smaller runs of smaller objects, the production method known as spin casting provides similar capability at a fraction of the cost.

To dumb it down a bit for the non-production-method-initiated, injection molding requires the mold—typically made from steel—be precision-machined, which is where the high cost comes in; obviously it depends on the size of what you're molding, but generally speaking you'll pay anywhere from high four to low six figures. Manufacturers offset these costs by producing high runs.

In contrast, with spin casting the tooling cost is absurdly low; if some of the spin casters', well, spin is to be believed, you'd pay in the tens or hundreds of dollars for what would cost the aforementioned four to six figures to tool for injection molding. That's because spin casting uses cured rubber molds that are cast around your initial object, providing good accuracy at a much lower cost (and an attendant shorter lifespan for the mold, though it's still capable of cycles in the thousands).

Image via Contenti Spin Casting

The way spin casting works is that your initial object(s), represented by the white circles in the image above, is surrounded in a circular vat by molten rubber, represented in blue. The rubber is then vulcanized, "locking in" what will be the negative space after your piece is removed. The vulcanized mold then has the gates and vents, or channels that the final molten material will flow through, cut into it as seen below. As opposed to a milling machine cutting channels into steel, this is done here by an expert wielding a knife.

Image via Contenti Spin Casting

Your object is removed, and the mold is placed into a spin caster, which is essentially an industrial turntable. Like VCRs of yore, they come in both top- and front-loading models.

Image via PTI Prototype

The turntable is spun up, and molten material is poured into the center of the mold through a hole at the top.

Image via PTI Prototype

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Playing Pictionary with a group of art students, or fellow designers, is what the Brits would call "terrific fun." (Your American correspondent can't describe it without using a meliorative preceded by the F-bomb.) Inventors Robert Angel and Gary Everson could not have created a better parlor game for people who can draw their asses off, and it makes "Exquisite Corpse" look lame in comparison.

Which doesn't mean we shouldn't stop trying to invent more communal drawing activities. Core77 Boarder sketchroll has come up with his own plan which combines the "Geography" game with chain letters. Called "Chain Drawings," the scheme he cooked up last night starts with his shoe sketch. The next person then drew an eraser, which sketchroll followed with a robot.

So...who's next? T-square, telephone or turbocharger, anyone? And how long until someone introduces an abstract concept like "trust?"

Here's a theoretically interesting pair of design bedfellows: Mercedes has partnered up with BoConcept on the SmartCar you see pictured here, which carries a title longer than the car itself: It's called the "smart fortwo BoConcept signature style," and it will make its first appearance in Berlin next week as a "brand ambassador" vehicle.

Okay, fine, let's get honest. One, I know I lured you into this entry with an alliterative parent-company/sub-brand bait-and-switch in the title. So sue me. But two, looking at these photos, you're probably as underwhelmed as I was by the nature of the collaboration, which seems more like a BoConcept designer text-messaged some Pantone numbers over to Smart HQ rather than the two bodies engaging in a real meeting of the design minds.

So why'm I bringing it up? Because wouldn't it be interesting if a design outfit and an auto manufacturer actually did an earnest design collaboration, going beyond mere color schemes and materials swaps into real ID? Sure, there are some aesthetic risks—I could see a Lincoln kitted out with Ethan Allen couches, or an IKEA/VW collaboration that introduced more particle board than we'd like, but think of the possibilities: Would you not like to drive a Karim Rashid Porsche with an obscenely sensual stickshift? Or a powerful piece of Detroit steel, like a Dodge Charger, tricked out with fellow Michiganite Herman Miller's seating? Or anything with a dashboard designed by Dieter Rams?

All I'm saying is, car companies like Porsche, BMW and now Peugeot have been steadily encroaching into product design territory for years. It'd be nice to see it start going the other way.

wants an Interaction Designer
in San Francisco, CA

The game of finding love is evolving, so the technology that supports it needs to catch up! Zoosk improves the lives of its users by helping them find love, and they need you to improve their interaction elements for all those seeking love.

In order to build the ideal experience for Zoosk users, you'll need to be an interaction designer who constantly puts themselves in the user's shoes and knows how to play well with others without rolling over completely. Start-up experience, cutting-edge knowledge of usability best practices and the ability to dodge Nerf darts are great to have as well.

If you think this is a match made in heaven (or online) click the link below.

Apply Now

It's not every day two organizations come together to create something even greater than the sum of their parts. It is with great excitement that we announce a strategic partnership between Core77 and the Industrial Designers Society of America.

Over the coming year Core77 and IDSA will work together to mutually promote programming offered by both sides to our respective audiences. In keeping with tradition, Core77 will host the portfolio review and a social event at the annual IDSA International Conference (taking place this year in Chicago, from August 20-23). Core77 will implement a new job board at the IDSA web site, welcoming IDSA as a partner into the Coroflot Job Network.

IDSA is the voice of the industrial design profession, advancing the quality and positive impact of design, so a partnership with Core77 is a natural fit. "An official collaboration between our organizations makes perfect sense," said Stuart Constantine, cofounder of Core77. "Our motives are well aligned and we are both committed to providing the broader design community with unparalleled professional and creative opportunities."

"While IDSA and Core77 have been cooperating informally for several years, we are happy to have a formal agreement in place to share job board postings and promotion of events that will bring value to designers and the design world," said George McCain, IDSA's chairman of the board. "IDSA has the utmost admiration for the online community that Core77 has built and is honored to become an integral part of it."

Also, if you haven't done so already, there's still time to enter your best work in the 2013 IDEA awards. The final deadline is tonight (Monday Feb 25) so stop procrastinating and get your entry in now!

By Jan Chipchase, Mark Rolston and Cara Silver

In the coming week we'll be publishing posts by frog's researchers drawing on their experience of working for commercial and non-commercial clients in some of the less predictable places of the world: Afghanistan; post-revolution Egypt; Rwanda; Burundi; Brazil, Ethiopia; South Sudan; India and China—the list of countries is extensive, the global insights team ratchet up more than 150 projects a year across industries— financial inclusion, healthcare, automotive, fast moving consumer goods.

In this series, the posts are written by Jan Chipchase, Cara Silver and Mark Rolston to coincide with the publication of their new report: In The Hands of God: A Study of Risk and Savings in Afghanistan that explored issues related to the design and adoption of mobile money services. As you might expect from a country at war, Afghanistan is very much an outlier, but as such it can reveal behaviours that are far more difficult to spot elsewhere in much the same way that lead users are different from mainstream users. It's a journey that revealed the best and worst of humanity: from the bonds family; trust; betrayal and even an attempted kidnapping.

And we're live from Cape Town at Design Indaba this week covering the presentations, films, music and products that are making a difference not only in South Africa, but around the world. An impressive roster of international speakers includes John Maeda, Steven Heller, Louise Fili, Paula Scher, Asif Khan, Martí Guixé, Core77 Design Awards winner Daan Roosegaarde, Oscar Diaz, Jeanne van Heeswijk, David Adjaye and more. We'll be covering the ideas and inspiration from over 30 speakers representing the broad, transdiciplinary nature of this conference.

This year's events include a stellar film festival hosted at The Bank on Canterbury Street. Screenings of documentary and feature films include some personal favorites: Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, Waste Land, Marina Abramovíc: The Artist is Present, Beauty is Embarassing, and Design & Thinking. The first annual music circuit presents 32 artists in 8 venues around Cape Town. And the perennial favorite Expo presents emerging designers from around the continent in a lively tradeshow setting.

Beginning on Wednesday, follow us on Twitter @Core77 for live tweeting or if you're a student or young designer in Johannesburg, Port Elizabeth, Cape Town or Durban, you can participate in one of the local Young Designers Simulcasts.

I had one particularly severe design professor who hated materials swapping for the sake of materials swapping. For example if you brought in a design for something ordinarily made of leather but spec'd it for steel, and you couldn't back up your reason for the materials choice, he would excoriate you. "That's not profound, that's not clever," he would rant. "The materials are supposed to serve the design, not whimsy."

Still, sometimes it's fun (particularly when there's no danger of an "F" looming over your head) to see videos like this one, where materials experimentation is done just for the hell of it. To create a piece of "ride-able art," the guys at California-based Signal Snowboards visited some of Italy's master glass manufacturers to see if a glass snowboard was do-able.

The first stop was the Vetrerira Aurora glass factory in Brescia, where the board is first cut and formed. (Who knew you could hot-bend and laminate multiple layers of glass together, like a skate deck?) Stop two was glass magicians Viraver Technologies, where the glass was tempered, bonded and cooked. Then came the biq questions: How would it perform on ice, hard pack, powder? Check it out, and dig the crazy amount of machinery required to crank one of these out: