Core77's Hand-Eye Supply Curiosity Club is excited to present Trevin Miller of Mr. Green Beans, Portland's D.I.Y. coffee roasting guru!

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!

Trevin Miller:
Mr. Green Beans "Home Coffee Roasting - It's That Easy!"
Hand-Eye Supply
23 NW 4th Ave
Portland, OR 97209
Tuesday, March 19th, 6PM PST

Home Coffee Roasting is fun and easy. For a modest price and very little to no investment in specialized equipment, you can turn raw green coffee beans into a spectacular cup of coffee. It only takes a little practice and you can easily create freshly roasted coffee that will rival even the best commercially produced coffees.

Why roast your own coffee? Everyone seems to answer this in a slightly different manner, but the main ideas are the same. The biggest reason for most people is that fresh roasted coffee just tastes better. It's smooth and rich and doesn't have the acrid acidic bite that many associate with store bought coffee. Unfortunately, roasted coffee has a very short shelf life and is only fresh for about 7–10 days. Raw coffee on the other hand is shelf stable and can be easily stored until you are ready to roast it. This allows you to roast only what you will consume within a reasonable amount of time, allowing you to always have fresh roasted coffee. Another reason people choose to roast their own coffee is the price. For as much as 1/2 the price of store bought coffee and as little as six minutes of your time, you can create delicious craft roasted coffee. One big benefit of roasting at home is control. By roasting your own coffee, you gain control of the process and you can dial it in to your own personal preferences. Great coffee roasted just the way you like it, and for half the cost! Why not roast your own coffee?

As co-owner(the male half) of Mr. Green Beans, Trevin has unintentionally become Mr. Green Beans. From helping coffee shop owners who are just starting down the coffee roasting path to helping homeroasters trouble shoot their latest batch, Trevin is always willing to share ideas and pass on the insights he has gained from the many pounds of coffee he has roasted. Even though he has access to some of the best professional equipment, Trevin is quick to fire up his old popcorn popper to show a visitor just how easy it is to roast coffee.

It's that time of year again. IDSA is gearing up for Spring with five district design conferences looking at the changing practice and the impact of design on business and the society at large. Taking place throughout the month of April, the five district conferences invite educators, practitioners and business professionals to share learnings over the course of two days. Register today!

Southern District Design Conference
Raleigh, April 5-6
"Revitalize with Design"

Western District Design Conference
Long Beach, April 12-13
"Designer as Entrepreneur"

Central District Design Conference
Cleveland, April 12-13
"Design Your Ecosystem"

Midwest District Design Conference
Indianapolis, April 19-20
"New Paradigms for Design"

Northeast District Design Conference
Hartford, April 19-20
"The Color of Design"

Hit the jump for full descriptions of each of this year's district design conferences.

It was impossible to walk into OXO's booth at the 2013 International Home + Housewares Show without a swift recollection of a certain recent incident that might henceforth be known as a 'dustpan dustup.' The New York-based company hasn't missed a beat since they took the high road with their response, and their stalwart team of designers and engineers has remained focused on innovation and iteration in product development, exemplified by the new wares on display at McCormick Place.

The 3-in-1 Egg Separator

The latest generation of salad spinners, for example, have flat tops for easier storage; the smaller model was introduced for the Japanese market

We had the chance to talk to a couple of their Category Managers, who kindly demoed the new Cookie Press, for which they 3D-printed numerous prototype disks before arriving at the final dozen, and the Mouthwash Dispenser, which will be available soon.

See more from OXO, including the Mango Slicer and Silicone Steamer, in our IHHS2013 photo gallery.

Regarding their stance on intellectual property, our Twitter followers might have noticed that OXO recently hosted an IP Primer at their NYC HQ; the full presentation is available online as a PDF here.

This is the fourth article in a series examining the potential of resilient design to improve the way the world works. Join designers, brand strategists, architects, futurists, experts and entrepreneurs at Compostmodern13 to delve more deeply into strategies of sustainablity and design.

The Causes of Social Challenges are Invisible

Complex social challenges originate in a society's fundamental truths. What does this mean for social change?

It is really a thought that built this portentous war-establishment, and a thought shall also melt it away. —Emerson, "War," 1909

I'm a partner at Reos Partners, which helps government, business and civil society leaders work on some the planet's toughest social challenges: war and peace, the future of countries, food and energy systems, and other problems. Our work is to help leaders see their challenge as a complex system, then plan and act together to change their system.

At the heart of our approach, we identify root causes of systemic challenges. Interventions are then designed to address those causes. Some of the causes we discern are the things you might guess—laws, policies, rules, bureaucracies, war machines—but others are less obvious, even invisible. They are "the master-idea[s] reigning in the minds of many persons (Emerson)"—the mindsets or paradigms that shape the rules, laws and bureaucracies.

Working on collective prosperity in Colombia, we hit cultural barriers dividing rich from poor. In Vancouver, we saw fear and discomfort shaping the policies that impact people with disabilities and their families. In Oakland, we learned that confederate slavery is still causing violence, 150 years later. In South Africa, we see the echoes of Apartheid in ongoing police brutality and, more intimately, in the faces of our co-workers and friends.

Systems and their challenges arise from paradigms. That's where they originate and that is where their causes live.

Remember Iris van Herpen's digitally-fabricated clothes from Paris Fashion Week? While we didn't realize it at the time, the laser-sintered dress was made from a special material sexily named TPU 92A-1, specifically engineered to provide "durable elasticity." Translation: It's bendy as all get-out, but highly abrasive- and tear-resistant, and appears to have pretty excellent shape memory.

Take a look:

Materialise, who laser-sintered the van Herpen dress, has announced they're making the material available to its professional RP services customers. It seems it hasn't yet trickled down to their consumer-level i.materialise site, keeping it out of reach for most of us, but hopefully it's just a matter of time.

The Japan External Trade Organization, or JETRO, has established itself at a variety of tradeshows here in the States, and they had doubled their presence at the International Home + Housewares Show, with a second pavilion in the Clean + Contain section to complement their row of booths in Dine + Design (Marna, which we covered last year, was in the former section this time around). Similarly, the number of exhibitors from the tsunami-ravaged Tohuku region jumped from five to 11, several of which were exhibiting in the U.S. for the first time.

Mio Kawada, Executive Director of JETRO, New York, was kind enough to give us a quick tour of the highlights from the Land of the Rising Sun.

Fukushima's Kodai Sangyo offers products for the kitchen and bath in hinoki, or Japanese Cypress

Nagatani-En of Iga-City specializes in traditional earthenware pottery, executed in contemporary design language. It is said that almost every household in Japan owns a donabe

Like their Western counterparts, Iga-yaki donabe pots have high heat capacity

The mushinabe can also be used as a steamer

Kotodo offers tin tea canisters in a choice of thousands of different Washi paper varieties...

wants Full-Time Transportation Design Faculty
in Pune, India

The DYPDC Center for Automotive Research & Studies invites outstanding designers engaged in teaching or in practice to join an illustrious group of faculty members. They are particularly interested in experienced design practioners to provide leadership to our undergraduate and postgraduate programs.

Candidates should demonstrate potential for scholarly activity through research and interdisciplinary collaboration. He or she should have a body of creative work that may include exhibition, production, construction, and /or publications.

Apply Now

After she graduated from Syracuse University in 2005, Christine Price Hamilton spent several years working as a project manager/designer at a residential architecture firm before setting out on her own—or rather, as one of the independent studios at Fringe Union in Somerville, Massachusetts. Since 2011, she's been developing the Tesselight, as well as her freelance architectural practice, with the support of her fellow Fringe members.

Launched last week, the collection of pendant lighting fixtures are made from delicately assembled translucent paper that has been "sealed with a proprietary flame-retardant and stain-resistant coating, silkscreened by hand to achieve a perfectly smooth, satin finish."

The paper is fed through a traditional windmill press equipped with our custom wood block dies. As the paper is fed through the press, the dies stamp out a series of flat shapes that together create the pattern for each Tesselight. The flat pieces then go to the worktable, where they are folded, curled and sewn by hand into a series of triangular tiles. The tiles are joined to create a spherical shape so strong that it supports itself, no inner frame necessary.

The "Atom," pictured above and at top

We had the chance to talk to Hamilton about bringing her project to life.

Core77: What inspired you to create Tesselights?

Christine Price Hamilton: Through an admittedly nerdy obsession with Buckminster Fuller, I became fascinated with fractal geometry and the Platonic solids. I was curious to see what kinds of patterns would emerge if the faces of those solids weren't strictly flat and linear, and it seemed like the pliable and translucent properties of paper made it the ideal material to render those patterns most dramatically. I was really just experimenting. I made the first set of tiles without having any idea what the end result would look like, or even that it would be a light fixture. That first experiment became what is now called the Stella pendant.

I imagine it took some time to refine the product and process behind Tesselights. What were some of the challenges you faced, and what solutions did you arrive at?

The biggest challenge so far has been figuring out how to pack and ship the fixtures. Each curve of paper is held in delicate tension by a single thread. Prolonged pressure on the fixture—even from packing peanuts—will squish and warp those curves, ruining the overall symmetry.

Ultimately, the best solution was to use the laws of geometry to our advantage. Tesselights are now packaged using a single chipboard insert which, through a series of voids and folds, mimics the edges of the fixture's form and squeezes gently between each tile, effectively suspending the fixture inside its box.

Detail of "Aurora"

Crowd Supply is Kickstarter for product designers. That's an overly simplistic description and a disservice to what Crowd Supply has accomplished at launch, but it's the best way to explain what it is. When you dig past the surface, into what a crowdfunding site developed specifically for product designers could mean, the differences become exciting.

The site launched this morning with nine projects and three read-to-ship products, ranging the gamut from an iPhone case with a built-in hand crank charger to a cyclocross bike to a dog collar with a built-in leash that I am admittedly thinking of Backing for my own dog.

About two weeks ago, I spoke via Skype with Crowd Supply's CEO, Lou Doctor. He was coming from Crowd Supply's headquarters in Portland and had the familiar look of someone under the gun getting ready to launch a product—happy and sleep deprived. Doctor, like the five other employees at Crowd Supply , comes with a background in engineering that has veered into business, entrepreneurship and running project teams.

I came away from our discussion thinking that Doctor and his team have smartly thought through the experience of running a crowdfunded product design project while simultaneously creating a better experience for Backers.

Let's start with how Crowd Supply is the same as Kickstarter. All of the big design issues that Kickstarter solved are kept in place. Projects are pitched by Creators. They have funding goals and deadlines. If they meet or exceed their goal by the deadline, they get funded. If they miss their goal, they don't get funded. Project pages mimic Kickstarter's familiar layout: Video and funding goal at the top, description and backing tiers below. Creators retain all ownership of their projects and give Crowd Supply 5% of their fundraising total.

Beyond these fundamentals, Crowd Supply has built a platform specifically tailored for product design and manufacturing. They've done a bunch of little things right, but I want to focus on three key areas that I think makes them meaningfully different from Kickstarter.

1. Mentorship
This has the potential to be a real game changer: Crowd Supply is staffed by product development veterans who will advise Creators throughout the course of their projects.

When Creators send their projects to be reviewed, Crowd Supply's team vets them, looking for potential pitfalls in their plans. The feedback could come in the form of, "This will be more expensive that you are thinking, you need to raise your funding goal," or "Have you thought of adding an engineer to your team? Here is someone that could help," or "Have you thought through your production plan yet?" If proposals aren't up to snuff, Creators are given feedback on how to improve their project or rejected.

This is such a great feature, not only for Creators but for Backers too. For any Creator manufacturing solo for the first, or even the second or third time, asking questions like these before launch can be the difference between success and failure. Backers can feel assured that someone with expertise has vetted the project and deemed the Creator worthy of launching a project.

Once Creators are allowed through that gate, Crowd Supply's staff offers support for the duration of the project, offering advice and even providing their own fulfillment services.

I love this approach to helping Creators, because it solves a major issue of not only crowdfunding but launching products in general. The team shares their learnings of fundamental knowledge of what it takes to launch something. We're not talking about IP issues, it's basic stuff like finding a factory or figuring out how to do fulfillment. It's one of those things you can only really learn by doing, but man wouldn't it be nice to have an Obi-Wan there to show you the ways of the force.

Why would a company that creates baby products have robotocists on staff? Well, check out what 4Moms' Origami stroller can do:

How awesome is that? In addition to the physical feature it has—the onboard storage and the peekaboo window that I'd imagine are de rigueur—it's the technical aspects that most impress me. Having a generator in the wheel that automatically charges your cell phone seems particularly brilliant.

Then there's the LCD dashboard, which sounds gimmicky at first, but useful on closer inspection: While you might be able to do without the speedometer, an odometer tells you how far you've traveled and the current ambient temperature is displayed, helping you decide whether you ought throw another layer on your tyke.

And of course, there's that crazy power folding/unfolding operation. (And yes, it's got baby sensors, so it cannot accidentally be activated while the child is onboard.)

An architect and environmental designer by training, it should come that Jerome Daksiewicz's visual sensibility tends towards cleanly presented schematics. Under the moniker Nomo Design, the Chicago-based jack-of-all-trades offers everything from interiors to advertising to photography; he also had a hand in a noteworthy bicycle light project last year. (Regarding Sparse, he notes that the team is "making a few final revisions to the lights but we should be cutting tools in the next week or so (just slightly behind our original schedule).")

His latest Kickstarter venture is rather less ambitious than a new product launch... which, as Daksiewicz notes, means it will ship in time for Father's Day. Disappointed with the quality of extant golf-related artwork, he's designed a series of Golf Course serigraphs (a fancy word for screenprints) for the discerning fan.

I want to create a series of prints to celebrate the world's top golf courses but in a simple way that still captures the unique character of each course and is at home in any interior. I'm starting with the hosts of the 2013 Major Championships, Golf Magazine's #1 Course in the World - Pine Valley and one of the top US public-access courses in Pebble Beach.

I can't even come close to pretending I know enough about golf to offer any insight into the accuracy or appeal of the prints, but the imagery strikes me as conceptually compelling as abstracted topography.

As someone who sits through a lot of product demonstration videos, I can tell you that most of the homegrown ones suck. Not the products themselves, the demo videos. They're poorly shot by untalented people, commissioned by folks who do not understand the value of talented videographers and editors, or even the importance of camera lens choices.

Now, you've probably heard the joke that the internet's greatest value is in sharing footage of cute dogs and cats. But there's also a lesson in there about effective videography and editing techniques. While not all of the tricks you're about to see can be integrated into a product demo video, at least consider how boring this footage could have been—it's essentially just an athletic house cat—and how much attention-getting drama the shooter was able to wring out of it. By the end it practically feels like you're watching an Olympian:

The internet is clogged with cat footage, but I maintain the reason this one is on its way to 2,000,000 hits is because of the way s/he shot it.

World renowned, Parisian-based trend forecaster Lidewij Edelkoort sat down with Core77 to share insight into the show she curated for this year's Design Indaba, Totemism: Memphis Meets Africa. Showcasing the works of 53 South African designers, the exhibition drew connections between the pop aesthetic of the Memphis movement and contemporary trends in South African design and craft. Founded by Milan-based architect and designer Ettore Sottsass in the '80s, the work of the Memphis Group was characterized by a democratic philosophy, bold colors, simple geometries and stacked forms produced with industrial materials. As Sottsass proclaimed, Memphis, "is everywhere for everyone."

Vumela Umsebenzi Totem, Rudolph Jordaan and Micah Chisholm

Post-Apartheid South African designers reappropriated African icons in their use of animal prints, spears, wooden masks and African crafts in interior design. As the movement became saturated, the South African design community turned to art, crafts and textiles instead. As Edelkoort writes in the call for entries:

Now these long-lasting trends can gain inspiration from new ideas working with colour, craft and pattern, liberating themselves in pretty much the same way that Memphis did. Working on my trend forecasts for 2014 and beyond, it suddenly became very clear to me that there is a kinship between the Memphis ideas and South African style, between shantytown colours and Italian kitchen laminates from that period. The use of tactile matter, coloured patterns, wild animal skins, fringes and finishes, lightbulbs and neons are all reason to believe that we can expect an '80s inspired revival of some magnitude.

The Picnic, Keri Muller (simpleintrigue)

In the video below, Edelkoort speaks about a resurgence of interest in the Memphis movement as evidenced in fashion, interiors, color palettes and pattern while highlighting the innate humanity in creating totems.

Check the jump for more images from the exhibition:

Well, it's hard not to be flattered by this one: at the end of a post about Samuel Bernier's recent 3D-printed IKEA hack, I idly mused that he should join forces with fellow DIYer Andreas Bhend of Frosta remix fame. It so happens that Andreas did read it, and the two actually acted on my suggestion to get together and "collaborate on a series of IKEA hacks with bespoke 3D printed parts and instructions..."

It so happened that Andreas, a student from Switzerland, was only a short train ride from Paris, where Samuel works at le FabShop, a 3D printing startup. Even though they didn't know each other (nor do I know either of them, for disclosure's sake), they accepted the challenge and came up with a couple projects during a two and a half day charrette: a child's sled and a balance bicycle. Samuel shared the whole story:

This project has a lot of improvisation into it. When they decided to work together, Samuel and Andreas still didn't know what they would do. Andreas had made his marks with the IKEA's Frosta, a 10€ stool that was inspired by Alvar Aalto's classic. Samuel, on his side, was famous for his use of affordable 3D printing. The idea for a Draisienne came from thin air. Or maybe the wheelless bicycles that young children ride on Paris's sidewalks inspired Samuel. Few details were decided when Bhend brought the stools to Paris. The assembly, the wheels axis and the final proportions were all left for the imagination.

All these choices were made while manipulating the industrialized parts. The only tools they had were a drill, pliers, a metal saw (not appropriate) and... a Makerbot Replicator 2 (from le FabShop). There was a debate about what colour to choose for the printed parts. Since yellow didn't have enough contrast and blue was a little bit boring, they chose orange, a reference to Bernier's Project RE_.

Illinois-based Superior Joining Technologies is "a Woman-Owned Business," as they proudly point out; for several years they've also been the owners of an incredibly bad-ass machine called the Trulaser Cell 7040, a 5000-watt beast manufactured by Germany's Trumpf.

The Trulaser 7000 series are multi-axis laser cutting and laser welding machines that run off of CAD file input. What can these machines do with metal? A better question is what can't they do. Observe their sheer majesty:

By the bye, while I rate this video highly for the machine's kick-assery, I still think the cat guy would've made this video awesome.

wants a Sr. Industrial Designer
in Los Angeles, California

Nectar Product Development is seeking an Industrial Designer with the ability to translate front-end research/strategy into design opportunities.

The designer must be able to develop solutions as a result of understanding the human factors, marketing and manufacturing parameters of the product and incorporating it into an appropriate and beautiful form. He or she will collaborate with multi-disciplinary teams on a continuous basis.

Apply Now

Core77 is very pleased to present an exclusive look at an IDEO creative ideation exercise, "Brand New IDEO," centered on a 24-hour global Make-a-Thon that will take place next Monday in their ten offices around the world, starting in Tokyo and ending at their San Francisco headquarters. In anticipation of this unique event, IDEO offers a bit of background on the history of their brand identity and how the project came about. Be sure to tune in on Monday, March 25, when Core77 will host an (almost) live blog of the process as it unfolds.

When Paul Rand designed the IDEO logo in 1991, he didn't anticipate the complex challenges IDEO designers would take on 20 years later. Who could have? It's crazy how many changes the world has undergone during the past two decades—34 new countries, tablet computing, Netflix, the Euro, and the Prius, just to name a few.

Like the world around us, IDEO has evolved too. Where we were once a handful of specialties, today we are dozens. Doctors, biologists, filmmakers, and storytellers rub elbows with industrial designers and engineers—all in the service of creating positive impact through design. And why not? If you listen to futurists, the next 20 years will be a combination of Mad Max and Xanadu. Ferns will become hard drives. Space tourism will be a thing. Thousands of new cities will emerge. We need all the bright, creative minds we can get!

Given these heady challenges, how might we evolve our identity to become even more dynamic in a complex and diverse world? To answer this question for ourselves, we've designed a maker experiment that explores extremes and helps us create a brief for the future. We call it "Brand New IDEO."

Years ago, we needed Paul Rand to design our own brand identity. Today, with communications designers and brand experts in every IDEO studio, we're looking inward to evolve our identity—and we're doing it in public.

Brand New IDEO is a "maker experiment" for everyone inside IDEO's four walls. For many of our designers it means rolling up their sleeves and making something new. For other IDEOers, it means sharing inspiration that explores one of six themes.

Talisman - A memento of the future; a totem capturing our spirit; a talisman bringing fortune to those who encounter it... Let's create objects that represent who we are and who we will become.

Biological - Living, growing, reproducing, aging and dying; perpetuating through offspring; symbiotic with neighbors... Let's create a living identity system that matures and mutates through time.

Powers of 10 - Cellular to spectacular; micro to macro; neutrons, neurons and nebulas... Let's create an identity system that is too large to comprehend, too small to see and every step in between.

Code Junkies - Born in the digital world, forever a resident; viral, logical, & combinatorial; obedient to math- made laws... Let's create an identity that originates from binaries and algorithms.

Writer's Block - High brow and low brow; short stories, poems, lyrics; bumper stickers and billboards... Let's create an identity that lives in the written word- no graphics allowed.

Alternate History - China 1991,* the birthplace of IDEO... Let's create an identity that is unique to its origin, celebrating culture, materiality, craftsmanship and industry. *and/or Munich, Tokyo

L: Michael Hendrix; R: Paul Bennett

Recently, IDEO's Chief Creative Officer, Paul Bennett, sat down with IDEO Boston Creative Director Michael Hendrix for a chat about the experiment. Below is an excerpt of their conversation.

Well folks, it looks like 3D printing is about to get a lot bigger, literally, for consumers. In January a company called re:3D debuted their Gigabot, a large-scale 3D printer with an enormous 24" x 24" x 24" build area. The larger capacity was designed to print out the things re:3D wanted to make, namely, rainwater collecting devices and composting toilets for the developing world.

After the Gigabot was unveiled at Houston's Mini Maker Faire, interest was so high that re:3D subseqently launched a Kickstarter campaign for mass producing them. With prices starting at $2,500 for a kit and up to $4,950 for a flatpack requiring some assembly, buy-in was not cheap; despite that, the interest was real, as they've topped their $40,000 target with $105,000 at press time.

While there's nearly 48 days left to pledge, those looking to get in on this had better hurry—there are just a handful of machines available starting at the $3,250 price bracket.

Here's a closer look at the machine, its capabilities, and re:3D's original mission for it:

Hand-Eye Supply is excited to roll out our second quarterly lookbook, Selections for Spring 2013! The small quatra-annual publication gives you a look at what's good in gear and gifts for the coming season. Art Directed and Photographed by Christine Taylor and concepted by the team at Hand-Eye Supply, we've created a series of gifs highlighting a special selection of tools, bags, workwear and trappings to prepare you for getting outside and into the dirt.

Our featured model is the lovely and talented Lauren Hall-Behrens, the landscape designer at Lilyvilla Gardens. Lilyvilla Gardens is a garden and landscape design studio specializing in connecting person to place; creating meaningful spaces in the nature that surrounds your home. Lauren's passions for nature, sculpture and the creative process made her an ideal subject for this edition of the Quarterly.

'Tis the season for getting green, we want you out there making it bloom. Keep an eye out for the Hori Hori serrated steel garden knife, imported from Japan, the exquisite Ernest Wright & Sons scissors from Sheffield and USA-made waterproof notebooks from Rite in the Rain.

What does it take to design a bestseller for the MoMA Store? Industrial designer Lawrence Chu knocked one out of the park with his Tuck storage box, designed for Umbra back in '09 and subsequently picked up by MoMA scouts. The scale of the photos might be deceptive; the bamboo box is roughly 5" x 5" x 5" and rings up at $35, making it a popular gift.

Where is Chu now? After departing Umbra to set up his own shop, Chu—a Hong-Kong-born native Chinese speaker educated in Canada—jumped on an opportunity. He's now helping American home appliance company Bissell expand far beyond their Grand Rapids, Michigan home base, by setting up their China-based industrial design branch in Shenzhen.