Heart of Architecture installation photos © Jon Meade

An embrace of the low res is popping up in more than just "deal with it" memes. In sculpture, architecture and interiors, designers are taking on projects square by square. The results are purposefully pixelated.

Giles Miller Studio required 2,433 pieces of curved stainless steel and etched brass to construct the large reflective disk currently on display in London for Clerkenwell Design Week. As the outdoor light changes, so do the lines of rectangles, which reveal new patterns at different times of day. The installation, called Heart of Architecture, is a brighter take on a project the studio built last year for the event—a similarly styled archway made up of 20,000 wooden hexagons.

My main question: Why is the inside of your apartment so dark?

Yesterday Yves Behar and tech entrepreneur Jason Johnson pulled the sheets off of their August Smart Lock. It's an intelligent keyless entry system, operated via Bluetooth, that can be retrofitted to an existing door with just two screws.

There are two killer apps for the system: One is that you no longer need to use your key to get in. August detects when your smartphone is in proximity, then open-sesames. Two is that you can program August to let other people in—houseguests, dogwalkers, repairpersons, that ex that talks a good game and swears it will be different this time around—and it will recognize their smartphone, allowing access at a time of your choosing.

This video has been making rounds for a hot minute now, but considering that it's a fitting follow-up to my post on the mad skills of Ines Brunn (and, of course, the inimitable Danny Macaskill), Tim Knoll's "Original Bike Tricks" are well worth a look if you haven't chanced upon it yet:

Image courtesy of IAMECO

I recently met Colin Fitzpatrick at the International Symposium on Sustainable Systems and Technologies, where he spoke about the IAMECO (pictured above), a product service system that he and his research group worked on with an Irish SME, MicroPro Computers. Colin is at MIT this summer, researching "Conflict Minerals," which are the raw materials used in electronics that come from the war torn Democratic Republic of the Congo. Needless to say, he's doing great work in the area of sustainable electronics. And lucky for us, he had some time to chat about his work and where he thinks all of this is going in the near future.

Xanthe Matychak: So, tell us about yourself. Who are you and what you do?

Colin Fitzpatrick: I'm a lecturer in electronic computer engineering at the University of Limerick in Ireland and I've been working in the "Electronics and the Environment" area since about 2004. I teach a course at Limerick called "Electronics and the Environment," and I lead a medium-sized research group there on the topic. We look at anything to do with technology and sustainability. Product design, energy, smart grids, you name it. We go where the opportunities take us in that whole space.

When I heard you speak at ISSST, you shared a project that you and your students worked on with MicroPro Computers, the IAMECO.

Right. To be clear, MicroPro is their brand and we worked as consultants. They had an ambition that they really wanted to have a credible environmentally friendly product, not a greenwash sort of fashion. So we helped them make sure they didn't leave anything out, any bits and pieces along the way. We helped them consider the whole life-cycle of the product, as much as a SME (Small-Mid Sized Enterprise) can do so. We sat down and said that it isn't just the product but the product-service system that is important.

At this rate, bicycle mudguards are the new iPhone cases: it seems like every other bike-obsessed industrial designer is looking to develop an ultraminimal solution to the problem of protecting one's back from the grit and grime of the streets. The now-on-Kickstarter Musguard splits the difference between Windsor detachable fenders and the recently-seen Plume. It's a blade-like strip of polypropylene that is affixed to one's seat tube with a velcro strap, fixed in place at the seatstay bridge such that it sits almost directly above the rear wheel.

The slick (pun intended) video showcases the product on what I conjecture to be the mean streets of Ljubljana, as well as shots of designer Jurij Lozic's studio and glamour shots of fixed-gear riders (in fact, one of the bikes is available as a KS reward). The Musguard itself is produced locally in Slovenia, and is not only removable and rollable but also recyclable as well:

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Last year at an event in Los Angeles, Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed he'd come up with the idea for an entirely new form of transportation. He called it the Hyperloop, and here's how he described it:

...How would you like something that can never crash, is immune to weather, goes 3 or 4 times faster than the bullet train... it goes an average speed of twice what an aircraft would do. You would go from downtown LA to downtown San Francisco in under 30 minutes. It would cost you much less than an air ticket than any other mode of transport. I think we could actually make it self-powering if you put solar panels on it, you generate more power than you would consume in the system. There's a way to store the power so it would run 24/7 without using batteries. Yes, this is possible, absolutely.

Naturally this got people's curiosity up, and at this week's AllThingsD conference he was asked about it again. Not wanting to divert attention from Tesla, he briefly allowed that the Hyperloop would be a "cross between a Concorde, a railgun and an air hockey table."

This sounds a lot like the futuristic ET3, or Evacuated Tube Transport Technology, we wrote up last year (pictured directly below and up top).

Earlier this month, we took a look at Sunglass, a product design collaboration site where users can download plug-ins to connect their local CAD environments to the cloud. Their partnership with Cadenas Part Solutions, a company that creates digital catalogs for major parts manufacturers, is starting to reveal the promise of such a system.

The two companies' newly-announced joint venture, the Sunglass Parts Library, provides users the ability to instantly access parts files—gears, motors, hinges, etc.—and integrate those parts directly into their CAD files. "It's the first interactive application with the ability to integrate an enterprise-grade manufacturing library directly into the 3D design environment," they write. The analogy isn't perfect, but the team-up is sort of an industrial design version of the iPod-and-iTunes ecosystem: Its success is dependent not only on the interface's ease-of-use, but also on the ability to sign up multiple bodies—in Apple's case, the music labels; in Cadena's case, the parts suppliers.

This is the first profile in a new series on American design entrepreneurs, looking at how they got where they are, what they do all day, and what advice they have for other designers running their own businesses. We'll have a new profile every Monday.

To understand the design philosophy of the Eindhoven-based American designer Max Lipsey, watch the making-of video for his latest project, the Temper Chair. Lipsey begins by welding steel to form a clean-lined seat with a curved back. The welds are barely buffed, allowing the bulbous seams to speak of the production process. The chair is then suspended inside an oven where high temperatures unleash the metal's hidden hues. "Steel has within it these striking colors from straw yellow to red to deep blue, and I thought it made sense to let the color palette come from the material," Lipsey says.

This is typical of Lipsey's intuitive design approach, and it was this respect for raw materials and elemental production techniques that first led him to pursue design in Eindhoven. Born in California and raised in Colorado, the 29-year old received a B.A. from New York University in 2005 before entering the renowned Design Academy Eindhoven. The work of Dutch designers like Maarten Baas drew him to the Netherlands. "[Baas's] Smoke series, where he burned furniture, really blew my mind in terms of how an object could have a sense of wry humor, be a little tongue-in-cheek, but also be poetic and very expressive," Lipsey says.

It seems like nearly every video from the MIT MediaLab is bound to be come a "holy-crap-technology-is-awesome" viral hit, and the latest one from the Mediated Matter group is no exception. Unveiled last week, the Silk Pavilion "explores the relationship between digital and biological fabrication on product and architectural scales."

Inspired by the silkworm's ability to generate a 3D cocoon out of a single multi-property silk thread (1km in length), the overall geometry of the pavilion was created using an algorithm that assigns a single continuous thread across patches providing various degrees of density. Overall density variation was informed by the silkworm itself deployed as a biological "printer" in the creation of a secondary structure. A swarm of 6,500 silkworms was positioned at the bottom rim of the scaffold spinning flat non-woven silk patches as they locally reinforced the gaps across CNC-deposited silk fibers.

Those photos above are from the shop at Autologistics Japan, a company in that country that specializes in converting the driver's position from one side of the car to the other. While the before/after shots don't appear to be of the same exact car—unless they switched the transmission from automatic to manual as well, which I understand can be done—the company claims they can convert some 30-odd models at a rate of 80 to 100 per month. In Australia, a company called Performax does similar work using digital manufacturing tools.

On the interwebs you can find decidedly jankier belt-driven conversions:

From the tender age of 14, Oliver Grabes knew that he wanted to pursue industrial design. He liked cars, he liked objects, and wanted to have a hand in shaping these things. "I knew I had to become an industrial designer," Grabes says. "That was lucky in that I didn't have to make up my mind of what to study; it was more a question of which design school to go to and which branch of industrial design to pursue."

After earning a degree in product design from Offenbach College, Grabes spent nearly twenty years working for design consultancies, from his native Germany to Seattle to London. Cutting his teeth on technical products in the '90s, before user experience became a part of the public consciousness, was a good time to learn: "Using a computer was so awful at the time, that I really started to become aware of how design had the potential to help make technology be a great experience for people," Grabes explains. "You saw, fundamentally, why you got into design; you saw there was a real need for making technology more human, giving people an easier, better, more intuitive experience of using it."

In 2006, having done work for the likes of AT&T, Boeing, Bosch, General Electric, Microsoft, Sony, Nike and others, Grabes became a Professor of Industrial Design at the University of Wuppertal, which has one of the highest-ranked ID programs in Germany. And when Braun asked him to become their Head of Design in 2009, the opportunity was too good to pass up. Braun had been aware of Grabes' work for years, but Grabes had admired Braun's work for decades—here he shares his thoughts on growing up with Braun, Dieter Rams' legacy and how to get a job at Braun.

Core77: As a youth, what were some of the earliest objects whose design you became aware of?

This sounds a bit awkward, but it really was many of the Braun products at the time. Growing up in Germany, there were very few families that didn't have at least one Braun product at home, because they made so many household products—we had them in the kitchen, the bathroom, the living room. I was particularly fascinated by Braun audio products at the time, like the famous Atelier stereo system. We didn't have one of those. My friend's family had one and when I would go to their house, I would study it very closely.

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There's less than one week before our 2013 Core77 Design Awards Live Broadcasts start! We couldn't be more excited for our annual celebration of the best design from all over the globe. We saw a lot of inspiring and innovative work from every corner of the world, and we are looking forward to sharing all of it with you. Starting Monday, June 10, our 17 categories from 10 different countries announcing—LIVE—our incredible 2013 Winners.

So be sure to check out the schedule and set your alarms, because these announcements are something you don't want to miss! Without any further ado, the final schedule:

2013 CORE77 DESIGN AWARDS LIVE BROADCAST SCHEDULE
June 10–17
8 Days. 17 Categories. 10 Countries. 74 Jurors. Live!!

All times and dates are based on Eastern Standard Time.

Please Note: A couple of our times have changed since our announcement last week, so please take note.

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.

This next True I.D. Story comes to us from "Design Minion."

The Job

I was the only industrial designer on staff at a small watercraft company down South. Working on boats was cool; as the sole designer I got to do everything from the earliest concept sketches to modeling the parts, designing the boats' graphics, doing the tool drawings, and I'd even be out on the line for the first builds. Real A-to-Z of product development.

I was also the only creative person on staff. My boss was the head of Marketing, and anything even slightly having to do with art—or really, just anything he didn't want to do—he pushed off his desk and onto mine. So on top of the rest of my workload, I was also doing POP displays, our tradeshow signage, our brochures, sketches for big-box stores on how to display our product, et cetera.

Illustration by Alex Basio

SIGGRAPH isn't an acronym—if you must know, it stands for "Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques"; its qualifier, ACM, stands for the Association for Computing Machinery—hence, ACM SIGGRAPH. The organization was originally founded in the late 60's and its annual conference launched just a few years later, which means that this is the 40th Anniversary of the event (they've since launched a second yearly conference, in Asia, as of 2008).

As one might expect, SIGGRAPH2013 itself is chock full of the same events as any given academic conference or trade gathering, including a full itinerary of speakers, presentations, social events, etc., which collectively represent the latest breakthroughs in computer graphics and interactive techniques. However, I was interested to see that they've also produced a quick video teaser for the Technical Paper presentations, which is actually quite compelling from an outsider's perspective:

As we've mentioned in some of our earlier posts on tool storage, when designing your own system there are two opposite poles you can lean towards: Broad-and-shallow, or tight-and-dense. The first approach means you can see every tool in the collection, which makes selecting a tool much quicker, but requires a large surface area. The second approach is better for a space-tight or mobile application.

Here's a good example of the former that has tinges of the latter. Oregon-based cyclist Josh C., who runs The Simplicity of Vintage Cycles website, is a self-taught bike mechanic. When he found the pace of his restoration work suffering from poor shop organization, he resolved to build a better tool storage system. "My workspace is small and physical real estate comes at a premium," he writes. "I needed a solution to keep my growing bike tool collection organized, within my reach and mobile."

"He's just a guy who makes YouTube videos" is probably about as dubious as it gets when it comes to a description of someone, but I assure you that at least a couple of Dave Hax's vids are worth watching. He's a DIYer in the loose sense of the word—meaning that he just as often takes the acronym to mean Destroy-It-Yourself. He recently posted a short tutorial on how to make a miniature bow-and-arrow, with flaming ammo to boot. I have yet to try it myself, but it looks pretty neat:

"He's just a guy who makes YouTube videos" is probably about as dubious as it gets when it comes to a description of someone, but I assure you that at least a couple of Dave Hax's vids are worth watching. He's a DIYer in the loose sense of the word—meaning that he just as often takes the acronym to mean Destroy-It-Yourself. He recently posted a short tutorial on how to make a miniature bow-and-arrow, with flaming ammo to boot. I have yet to try it myself, but it looks pretty neat:

You couldn't make it up—or could you? The fact that a London-based artist/designer is turning to a popular crowdfunding platform to launch her latest project is hardly newsworthy, but it turns out that Ilona Gaynor is looking to plan an extremely elaborate bank robbery (a somewhat ironic twist on a certain topical New Yorker cartoon).

Gaynor has been plotting "Under Black Carpets" for some two years now, waiting for the perfect opportunity to strike her hitlist of five major banks at One Wilshire in downtown Los Angeles. What originated as an architectural observation—she notes that "particular events or moments could be hidden from view behind protruding floors, light refractions from the mirrored glass and thick palm tree heads"—has now evolved into an obsession: to get away with the perfect heist.