While there's a tendency among designers to obsess over pens, we all know that you can draw with just about anything; Leonardo da Vinci was scratching stuff out with a rock on a slate, for chrissakes.

The "papercraft" movement shows the same can be said for modelmaking. While it's nowhere near as time-efficient as scraping modeling clay off of a buck, paper can be transformed into stunningly complex surfaces—for those with the patience and raw talent. First off, check out designer Taras Lesko's take on the Pagani Zonda supercar. (Music warning, turn your speakers down.)

This mind-boggling interface design from MIT Media Lab's Fluid Interfaces Group essentially adds another layer of interactivity over your physical life. What I mean by that is: Right now, in real life, you look at your desk and see a bunch of objects. With the F.I.G's "Smarter Objects" system, you pick up a tablet, look at the objects on your desk "through" your tablet, as if through a window, and the tablet's screen shows you virtual overlays on the very real objects on your desk. You can then alter the functionality of these wi-fi enabled "smarter objects" on the screen, then go back to manipulating them in the real world. Tricky to explain in print, but you'll grasp it right away by watching their demo video:

The work was done by researchers Valentin Heun, Shunichi Kasahara, and Pattie Maes, and as they point out, none of the things in the demo video are the result of effects added in post; everything you see is working and happening in real time.

One commenter on the video suggested this interface design be adapted to Google Glass, but I think the tablet is a necessary intermediary, as you can tap, drag and slide your fingers across it. Your thoughts?

Clockwise from top: Anne Frank, Kaler Abdolah, Vincent Van Gogh

Dutch creative director Raphael Dahan has nearly 20 years of experience as a digital artist and photo retoucher, and he demonstratess his expert hand in a series of images of books that are intended to look like busts... which is to say that you the images are remarkably photorealistic renderings, easily mistaken for photos of actual books that have been carved to resemble faces.

Dahan created several of these images for Bookweek 2011; the digital portrait of Anne Frank features an excerpt from her diary.

wants a Lead Industrial Designer
in Santa Barbara, CA

Do you believe that music should be accessible in every room of the home? Do you get excited at the idea of joining HiFi with rock-solid WiFi? Would you like to help build the products and experiences that define the future of music listening for the next generation?

Say hello to SONOS. They just want to make listening to music an awesome experience, and if you answered yes to everything above, they want to meet you too.

The Lead Industrial Designer they seek should have a strong point of view, but value collaboration as well. This person should also be ready to define product offerings as well as the broader user experience. If you're a passionate maverick who is ready to make a big difference for music lovers everywhere, Apply Now .

Industrial design is like surgery, auto racing or a military operation in that things can go horribly wrong. And they often do, although no one really talks about it. In this new section for Core77, we'll take stories from working industrial designers—namely, our readers—willing to recount some of the humorous, maddening or just plain stupid things that have happened to them on the job. While the stories you'll read here are true, companies, clients, and of course designers are all anonymized to protect the innocent.

Got a "True I.D. Story" yourself? Find out down at the bottom of this entry how you can talk to one of our editors and win yourself a $25 gift certificate to Hand-Eye Supply.

First up: "NewbieDesigner" tells us about his/her first on-the-job I.D. disaster.

As a freshly-minted Bachelor of Industrial Design, some years ago I landed my first job at an exhibition design firm. It was a small operation, just eight people, but very successful due to the patronage of major corporate clients like [Telecom Operator] and [Consumer Products Manufacturer]. We did everything for them environments-related: Exhibits for tradeshows, signage, retail environments, even custom executive offices and residences for some of the corporate bigwigs.

I had to share an office with a junior designer, I'll call him JD. Nice enough guy but I couldn't stand him—he was the kind of guy who said accidentally racist or idiotic things, like the time the office ordered Chinese takeout and I started eating it with the provided chopsticks. (I'm Asian-American.) JD commented that chopsticks were stupid, from a design standpoint—fair enough, that's his opinion—then went on to say that anyone living in America shouldn't be using chopsticks no matter what kind of food they were eating. I told him my parents use chopsticks, and he said "Yeah but I mean American people." (Both of my parents are U.S. citizens.)

Anyway...

The Assignment

Occasionally I'd have the office we shared to myself, as JD would be sent away to oversee one project or another. Those days were heaven. But I'd only been at the job a couple of months when they said I'd be going away, too; they were going to fly me to [U.S. City] to oversee a retail installation. Ordinarily JD would do it, but he was busy with another job, and while they wouldn't normally send someone as green as me, there was no one else free.

My boss, who was a super-nice guy—I couldn't understand how he'd hired JD—told me the job would be simple: I was to fly out to [Consumer Products Manufacturer's] flagship store in [U.S. City] and after they closed at 6pm, I was to oversee the installation of the new retail display system our firm had designed. It was a straightforward operation: We had these Master Display Guide Booklets printed up that showed you where each product was to be displayed within the system, and my job was simply to see that the store display matched up with the Guide Booklet. (To give you an idea of how long ago this was, we did all of the Guide Booklets in Quark Xpress.) It all sounded easy-peasy.

I was to spend the night there at a swanky hotel, and the next morning I'd head to the store before they opened to meet one of the corporate bigwigs, a VP of something or other, to show him what we'd done. This job was my first introduction to corporate stuff, and I knew this guy was important because people used both his first and last name. What I mean by that is, we had a lot of meetings at our corporate clients' headquarters, and people were always introduced by name and department, like "This is Janice from Marketing" or "You'll need to talk to Tony from Operations." But when it was someone important, it was always "You'll be meeting with [First-Name Last-Name.]"

I was excited and a little nervous. I'd never been to [U.S City] and was looking forward to seeing it. (This was before I realized a business trip means you get to see the airport, the hotel and the workspace.)

The Mission

My flight landed on time, and I checked into the hotel without event. The store was directly across the street from the hotel—so much for seeing [U.S. City]—and I headed over to the store at 6:01pm to meet with the manager.

The center of the store was filled with crates. Our new display system had been delivered, and we started unpacking them all as the installers arrived. I should explain what the display system consisted of. This store had an entire wall comprised of painted concrete, and a grid of holes had been drilled into it, with the holes then lined with metal sleeves of which only a neat, stainless steel ring was visible. It was pretty cool-looking, and the store had done this so that wall-mounted displays could be swapped out at will; it was just a matter of designing racks, shelving or hanging cabinetry with metal tubing protruding from the back, at intervals that aligned with the grid system. You could just plug and unplug whatever unit you needed into the wall.

For this company's new line of products, our firm had designed a series of stainless steel racks comprised of square tubing welded together, and with circular support rods that would fit into the holes welded to the back. We had carefully designed these racks to fit every current product that our client wanted to display, and there was a lot of product.

The Design Fail

Going through my Guide Booklet, I located the first rack unit to be installed. The installers got up on ladders to plug it into the wall. "Hey," one of them said, "we've got a problem." I went over to inspect. The tubing protrusions did not line up with the grid, so there was no way to get it into the wall. The manager looked concerned.

And we're live! Our annual guide to New York Design Week is now online at http://www.core77.com/NYDW. With the second edition of Frieze Art Fair and the triumphant return of BKLYN Designs to St. Ann's Workhouse in DUMBO kicking off on May 10, the first ever NYCxDesign Festival will launch this weekend and runs until the end of ICFF.

Our handy web app is also optimized for mobile browsing—just pull up http://www.core77.com/NYDW and add it to your home screen. (Note: We're flattered if you still happen to have last year's guide on your smartphone, but you'll need to re-add this year's guide to your home screen in order to stay on top of this year's festivities.)

If you didn't get around to filling out our handy event submission form in the past couple weeks, don't fret: we'll be accepting submissions through the end of the week or so...

I'm pleased to share this excerpt from Chapter 2 of Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights. This part off the book sets up the overarching framework for successful interviewing: most experts have a set of best practices—tactics, really—that they follow. But what really makes them expert is that they have a set of operating principles. This ends up being more like a framework for how to be, rather than a list of what to do.

I've talked to a lot of practitioners about their own experiences in doing fieldwork and often they try to address challenges when they experience the symptoms, but that's usually not the right time. Consider this analogy: if you have insomnia, the best solutions are not those that you roll out at 3am when you can't sleep. To effectively counteract insomnia you have to make specific choices during the day, before you go to bed. Doing research with people is the same thing and ideally you approach this sort of work with a well-defined perspective that will inform all of the inevitable detailed, specific, tactical problem solving.

I think getting to this point as an interviewer (or for anything that we do at a certain level of both passion and expertise) is a journey. I'd love to hear about your journey or any other feedback or questions that you have!

When Wayne Gretzky apocryphally explained his hockey success as "I don't skate to where the puck is, I skate to where the puck is going to be," he identified a key characteristic of many experts: the underlying framework that drives everything. This platonically idealized Gretzky could have revealed any number of tactics such as his grip, or the way he shifts his weight when he skates. Keith Richards explains his guitar sound, which involves removing the 6th string, tuning to open G, and using a particular fretting pattern, as "five strings, three notes, two fingers, and one asshole." Even though Keith is explaining the tactics, he's also revealing something ineffable about where he's coming from. The higher-level operating principles that drive these experts are compelling and illustrative. Expert researchers also have their own operating principles. In this chapter, I'll outline mine, and I hope to inspire you to develop your own interviewing framework. As you develop, the process evolves from a toolkit for asking questions into a way of being, and you'll find that many of the tactical problems to solve in interviewing are simply no-brainers. As George Clinton sang, "Free your mind...and your ass will follow."

Check Your Worldview at the Door

I've been asked, "What was the most surprising thing you ever learned while doing fieldwork?" I scratch my head over that one because I don't go out into the field with a very strong point of view. Of course, I'm informed by my own experiences, my suspicions, and what my clients have told me, but I approach the interviews with a sense of what I can only call a bland curiosity.

As the researcher, it's my responsibility to find out what's going on; I'm not invested in a particular outcome. Even more (and this is where the blandness comes from), I'm not fully invested in a specific set of answers. Sure, we've got specific things we want to learn—questions we have to answer in order to fulfill our brief. But my hunger to learn from my participant is broad, not specific. I'm curious, but I don't know yet what I'm curious about. My own expectations are muted, blunted, and distributed. Although I will absolutely find the information I'm tasked with uncovering, I also bring a general curiosity.

Now, the people I work with don't have the luxury of bland curiosity. Whether they are marketers, product managers, engineers, or designers (or even other researchers), they often have their own beliefs about what is going on with people. This makes sense: if there's enough organizational momentum to convene a research project, someone has been thinking hard about the issues and the opportunities, and has come to a point of view.

Figure 1 - Capture everything that everyone thinks they know so that it's not stuck in their heads. Portigal, Steve. 2013. Interviewing Users. New York: Rosenfeld Media. rosenfeldmedia.com/books/interviewing-users/

The Brain Dump

At the beginning of the project, convene a brain dump (see Figure 1). Get what's in everyone's heads out on the table. Whether it's real-time, face-to-face, in front of a whiteboard, or asynchronously across offices on a wiki, talk through assumptions, expectations, closely-held beliefs, perspectives, and hypotheses. Contradictions are inevitable and should even be encouraged.

The point is not establishing consensus; it's to surface what's implicit. By saying it aloud and writing it down, the issues leave the group specifically and enter an external, neutral space.

It's also not about being right or wrong; I encourage you to anonymize all the input so that people don't feel sheepish about expressing themselves. I wouldn't even go back and validate the brain dump against the resulting data. The objective is to shake up what is in your mind and free you to see new things. Think about it as a transitional ritual of unburdening, like men emptying their pockets of keys, change, and wallet as soon as they return home (Figure 2).

Figure 2 - Transitional rituals are actions we take to remind ourselves that we are shifting from one mode of being to another. Portigal, Steve. 2013. Interviewing Users. New York: Rosenfeld Media. rosenfeldmedia.com/books/interviewing-users/

The KUKA YouBot Omni-Directional Mobile Platform with Arm is a small, arm-on-a-skateboard type of robot that can perform simple tasks. Recently Ross Knepper, a robotics reseacher at MIT, and his team hacked up a couple of them to assemble store-bought IKEA furniture. While it was primarily an exercise, versus designing a commercially-viable product, we were pretty impressed by his solution for screwing the legs into the Lack sidetable that you'll see here:

The YouBot doesn't come with an "end effector" that can perform the rotating motion you and I would do with two hands to get that leg into the table. Knepper's team devised an elegant workaround, using rubber bands attached to two different rings:

The 'clever material swap' gets to be a bit trendy in the industrial design game after awhile. We usually have trouble to finding projects that both employ a new material intelligently (and with good intent) but don't immediately fall into 'can't-believe-its-a-cement-lamp' category. Likewise, as far as bandwagons go, 3D printing doesn't seem to be slowing down in the slightest with projects like the 3Doodle pen and 3D photo booths. But while we all wait for either 3D printed houses or organs, we have to ask: when are all the innovative 3D printed consumer products going to catch up?

Upon perusing our sister portfolio site Coroflot, we came across the portfolio of Marc Levinson, the chief executive officer of Protos Eyewear. Protos boasts that their line of 3D printed eyewear is both consumer grade and yields "striking designs that are impossible to make through standard manufacturing methods."

Levinson deals with some pretty solid applications for 3D printing market-ready products. Originally considered to be a technique primarily for prototyping, many companies are looking to 3D print directly to market. Levinson's 3D printed frames for San Francisco-based Protos Eyewear are a great example of manufacturing process informing aesthetics. We're particularly fond of the Hal Pixel frames, perhaps a not-so-subtle nod to the digital age.

We were pretty impressed with Amanda Ghassaei's 3D-printed records, but apparently the Tech Editor at Instructables isn't content to blow our minds with her digital fabrication prowess just once. As of this weekend, she's back with a veritable encore: a Laser Cut Record.

Although all the documentation for that project is available here, and the 3D models can be printed through an online fabrication service, I felt like the barrier to entry was still way too high. With this project I wanted to try to extend the idea of digitally fabricated records to use relatively common and affordable machines and materials so that (hopefully) more people can participate and actually find some value in all this documentation I've been writing.

As with the 3D-printed vinyl, the laser cut record is hardly high-fidelity... but that's not the point. The point is, it's really f'in cool.

wants a Product Engineer
in Brooklyn, New York

BioLite is a for-profit social enterprise that develops, manufactures and markets distributed energy solutions for off-grid communities around the world.

If you join their team as a Product Engineer, your work will serve their main target markets: 1) developing world families living in energy poverty, and 2) outdoor enthusiasts seeking fuel-independent cooking and charging. Either way, you'll be making the world a better place!

This is a unique opportunity to join a fast-moving startup with both a technical and creative environment in the heart of Brooklyn. If you have experience creating, engineering, and detailing consumer products for manufacture, you're perfect for the job.

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[Ed. Note: This post has been updated to reflect new dates: the exhibition will be on view from Thursday, May 16 – Saturday, May 18; hours and location posted below.]

Following a very successful showing on very short notice last year, Jen Krichels and Jean Lin of DesignerPages are pleased to present the second edition of Reclaim, an organization that debuted last December with a charity auction for Hurricane Sandy recovery efforts. Along with designer Brad Ascalon, the two design editors enlisted old and new friends in the New York City design community to participate in the exhibition and silent auction.

Marius Kyking × Vidar Koksvik

This time around, the theme is "design that's more than the sum of its parts," and we're excited to see that many of our favorite designers and studios are teaming up to bring new work to the table (so to speak). Our friends at Token and UHURU are among the 50+ participants in Reclaim x2, and as longtime occupants of Red Hook—a neighborhood that was submerged under 3–4 feet of water during the storm—they had firsthand experience of the wrath that Sandy wrought. "We were very excited for the opportunity to get together and put collective energy behind this collaborative project," says Emrys Berkower of Token. "And being that it is in support of such a great cause makes it even more meaningful." UHURU's Horvath shares the sentiment:

It's too bad that it took a hurricane that trashed both our spaces, but I'm glad we are finally able to make it happen and that we can represent Red Hook at the show. It has been great working together so far, both in the initial brainstorming sessions and during our afternoon in the hot shop blowing glass into crazy forms and setting them on fire.

Ladies and Gentlemen × Nicholas Nyland

Once again, we had a chance to catch up with Jen and Jean on the occasion of Reclaim x2, which will take place in the middle of the first annual NYCxDesign festival (see the first Q&A here). Some two dozen pieces by twice as many designers—per the collaborative theme of the show—will be on view from Wednesday, May 15, through Friday, May 17, at 446 Broadway, 3rd Floor, with a reception on the night of Thursday, May 16.

Core77: How did the inaugural Reclaim event go? Lessons learned? Any good stories to tell?

Jean Lin: We had so much fun organizing and executing the first exhibit. I think a lot of its success can be credited to pure adrenaline after Hurricane Sandy. We all wanted to help so desperately that all of us—both Jen and I, and the initial group of designers—sort of fed off of each other's energy and enthusiasm for the cause. I still marvel at the fact that we were able to pull it all together in little more than a month.

Jen Krichels: Because the first event came together so quickly, we didn't have much time to think about whether Reclaim NYC would have a future after the first show. But the night of the event and in the days after we were asked so many times when the next show would be (both by designers who wanted to participate and by people who wanted to attend or support the cause) that we started planning a Design Week show right away.

With the luxury of more time, we are launching an online presale before Design Week, which will be followed by the exhibit and sale on May 15–17. We also have a range of price points to allow people to make a range of donations to Brooklyn Recovery Fund. The presale, which will be hosted on at60inches.com and shop.lin-morris.com, will give collectors more time to consider some of the heirloom-quality pieces that are part of the show.

JL: Honestly, my biggest regret was not buying anything at the first show. I was so busy during the auction that the items I had my eye on were snatched up from under me. Jen bid on and won a gorgeous UM Project lamp for an amazingly reasonable price. I kick myself every time I see it in her apartment. Hopefully the presale will prevent this from happening again.

Egg Collective × Hangar

Egg Collective × Hangar

An alarming Wiki entry on Camerapedia has caught the attention of the Reddit community. Entitled "Radioactive Lenses," the original write-up notes that "There are a significant number of [camera] lenses produced from the 1940s through the 1970s that are measurably radioactive."

WTF?

Apparently the problem is that manufacturers used to use glass containing thorium oxide, which increases the refractive index of the lenses. Unfortunately for users, thorium oxide is a byproduct of uranium production and it's freaking radioactive.

What the Reddit users started asking is just how radioactive. "Anyone with an understanding of nuclear physics," one poster wrote, "care to make some sense of those readings for cavemen like me?" Here was the answer he got:

Nuclear physicist here. Typical radiation levels [on the thorium oxide lenses] can approach 10 mR/hr as measured at the lens element's surface, decreasing substantially with distance; at a distance of 3 ft. (.9 m.) the radiation level is difficult to detect over typical background levels.

10 mR/hr is more than I would want to be exposed to for prolonged periods. In my lab alarms go off if the ambient levels get above 2 mR/hr, and 10 mR is the maximum allowed dose for an 8-hour shift.

Important notes:

- My lab uses very conservative limits for occupational exposure. People who clean up radioactive waste are exposed to doses many times higher and are fine.

- That is the dose rate at contact with the lens, so it will only really matter when you are handling it, and your hands are not particularly sensitive to radiation.

- I'm curious how they measured the dose, specifically whether the alpha radiation was included. Alphas can't penetrate through shit, and will be stopped by a lens cap or filters, even your clothes or epidermis. They could, in time, damage your eye and give you cataracts if you aren't wearing glasses or contacts. Our askscience health physicist explains much of this here. He quotes a study that determined a "serious outdoor photographer" would get only 2 mrem per year, which is really negligible.

The current scuttlebutt seems to be that if you're not putting your eyeball up against the lense—i.e., using the camera backwards—you'll be fine. However, if the camera's got an eyepiece also made with thorium-oxide-containing glass, you may want to re-think using it.

There's a complete list of the known afflicted camera models and lenses here.

Clockwork from top right: Matt Shaw, Tiffany Lambert, Brigette Brown, Cecilia Fagel, Bryn Smith

Each year the SVA MFA Design Criticism department hosts a conference, where the students present their research, as well as choosing the theme and format. This year's theme is "counter/point" and each student will present their work in counterpoint with that of a speaker whose views may differ from their own. We asked the D-Crit Class of 2013 to explain how they selected their speakers and what discussions they think will ensue at the conference.

Can you explain why you invited your speaker and why their areas of research or design practice relate to your thesis topic? What can the audience expect from your pair of presentations and the discussion to follow?

Matt Shaw: I think that Mark Foster Gage provides a good counter/point for my topic because at first glance we appear to have very different agendas. In my thesis, I advocate for the communicative possibility of what is called "roadside vernacular," or buildings shaped like giant objects. His advanced digital aesthetic is very different, communicating more viscerally and less directly, which he writes about in his book Aesthetic Theory. However, we both place an emphasis on the visual, and we agree that this could be the key to making architecture which re-engages broader publics. I think we agree about what needs to happen, but disagree about how to best accomplish it. These similarities and differences are nuanced and should make for a stimulating discussion in many ways.

Tiffany Lambert: You can anticipate a glimpse into a future universe—one with mountain-shaped trains and cars grown from organic materials—and hear about how design mediates broader cultural and social experiences that go well beyond aesthetics alone. My research project interrogates the way design citizens (or end users) have become more engaged in processes of design. This participatory culture manifests itself in a variety of ways, shifts the roles of both citizens and expert designers, and raises important questions for the field and its surrounding discourse.

While my work aims to expose the implications of participation in order to establish a critical framework, Fiona Raby's most recent experiment with Anthony Dunne—now on view at the Design Museum in London—explores cultural and ethical impacts through speculative (and spectacular!) design solutions. Their project uses the design proposal as a participatory tool, involving the larger public and designers alike.

Based on the usual bit of cursory investigation, Alexandre Chappel's minimal online presence is a felicitous albeit frustrating complement to a video he's posted: according to his now-defunct Wordpress blog, he was an Industrial Design student at Oslo School of Architecture and Design as of 2011, at which point his "main passion is cars and everything that has something to do with them."

Lately, however, it seems that he's turned his attention to a more mundane object: the lowly pen. That, and motion graphics, as he ably demonstrates in the beautiful video below, entitled "Precious Lines."

The HUD- (or Google Glass-) like information mapped onto the world offers a tantalizing taste of the grail of augmented reality largely because the simple vector schematics complement the close-cropped shots of machining to a tee. It's all about the details: the fact that the text echoes the focal length of the shot at 0:55; the way the shaving at 1:45 looks like a line; and the text aligned with the drawer at 2:42 are all executed flawlessly.

Looks like Ian Schon has some competition.

Plenty of us were taken aback by Todd McLellan's "Things Come Apart" photo series, where he disassembled a variety of everyday objects and laid all the parts bare. Now the Toronto-based shooter has gathered teardown photos of 50 design classics, from the Pentax SLR you see above (hope it doesn't have a radioactive lens) to the iPad to a freaking grand piano, and compiled them into the coffee table book Things Come Apart: A Teardown Manual for Modern Living, which hits store shelves today.

McLellan's also concurrently released a video showing what he goes through to get to those end photos:

For those of you who can't get to a brick-and-mortar that carries it, the book is also available on Amazon.

Last fall Core77 got the chance to participate in the jurying of a chair design competition sponsored by Wilsonart and held at the University of Oregon's Product Design Department. It was a semester long assignment for the students and challenged them to use Wilsonart's laminates to produce a NW cafe inspired chair. This coming week the results of that competition are going on display in NYC at the ICFF and we encourage you to stop by and see the winners yourself; the high level of thinking and polish applied by the class is well represented by the champion chairs. Here is a teaser of the work, continued from above...

wants a Technical Developer, Bags
in Baltimore, Maryland

The high school wide receiver dodging defensemen on a frigid November 40 yard line. The marathon cyclist smoldering beneath the relentless Hawaiian sun during her first Iron Man Triathalon. The dedicated gym goer who will run his first 10 minute mile today and feel like a super hero when he steps off the treadmill.

These individuals rely on Under Armour to achieve their goals and Under Armour relies on brilliant Technical Developers like you to help them deliver those performance supporting products.

Bring your passion for bags/packs industry and accessory products, your excellent communication skills, and your ability to crush problems through analysis and creativity to this career opportunity and you'll fit right in with Team Under Armour.

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Reporting by Zach Hyman

Before beginning my Fulbright research in China, I had previously spent three years living and working in Yangon, Myanmar (formerly known as Burma). My time in Myanmar was formative: my firsthand observation of the extent that the country's residents relied upon tuolaji, their flexible and powerful tractor-like vehicles, to perform many tasks provided inspiration for my present research.

However, not all of the inspiration for what drives my research today came from the Myanmar's vehicles. During my time in such a resource-constrained context, I recognized the mixture of challenges and benefits that comes with relying upon many things to be handmade instead of mass-produced. While the Western world shifts toward coveting handmade objects as a sign of status and taste for craftsmanship, denizens of resource-constrained environments have no choice in the matter, and could benefit greatly from some of the very mass-produced goods that today's design-minded individuals tend to eschew. Although I knew this fact in the abstract, confronting this apparent contradiction up close made it obvious how much more costly it is to dwell in both a resource- and choice-constrained environment, where hand-crafted items are the norm rather than the exception.

Consider the things you carry with you each day. In Jan Chipchase's latest book, Hidden in Plain Sight, he identifies the most commonly carried objects around the world: keys, money and mobile phone. Besides these things, however, there is something else we always carry with us, whether consciously or unconsciously, and that is our identity. Most all of us are familiar with situations in which we must prove who we are, whether to obtain government services or benefits, gain access to a controlled area, verify identity in the case of legal sanction, and so on. While different contexts each have their own processes and differing degrees of formality for proving identity, the need remains nearly universal, and until technological solutions such as facial recognition are sufficiently widespread and accurate, identity will continue to take the form of a physical artifact—namely, a personal identification card.

The differences between identity cards—physical material, size, storage behavior, personal data, authentication mechanism, etc.—and the range of situations for which they must be shown comprises a common set of attributes to investigate across different contexts. Although an in-depth comparison of China and Myanmar's respective identity cards (and surrounding behaviors) is beyond the scope of this article, residents of both countries share the perceived need to protect their cards, whether for fear of damaging the ability to read the embedded chip in the plastic card (China), or to protect one's relatively flimsier paper identity card (Myanmar).

In Myanmar, individuals address the need of "How do I protect my important cards from being damaged?" with a custom solution. Plastic covers are individually crafted to each customer's document sizes, made directly in front of the customer by a single individual's hand, one at a time, using an elegantly simple, candle-powered tool. This solution is notable for both the amount of effort expended by the craftsman—which may seem excessive by an outsider's standards—to achieve the result of successfully protecting a single card. In 2012, this vendor was charging 100 kyat (US $0.13) to protect a single card. Technically, the craftsman need not create a bespoke, sealed cover for each document as part of his job, as there are only so many distinct sizes of identity card in the Myanmar context that require protection. However, he has no choice, given the materials that are available to him.

Maybe I shouldn't have been so blown away by the so-called "must-see video" that I posted yesterday: commenter Peanut pointed us to a manufacturing video with a similar visualization treatment by a Greek film production company called Deep Green Sea. It turns out that "Alma Flamenca" is but one episode of an ongoing series of videos called "The Art of Making," which are essentially poetic (and well-executed) takes on the tried-and-true how-it's-made vid.