Wow, what a week! With 14 jury broadcasts in the bag and just three to go, the live announcement of the 2013 Core77 Design Awards winners for the Furniture & Lighting category is our final broadcast of the week (Food and Visual Communication will be on Monday, June 17, at 2pm and 4pm EST respectively).

Unfortunately, Jury Captain Matali Crasset is unable to make it, so Core77 Editor-in-Chief Eric Ludlum is stepping up to announce the winners. (Rest assured she will prepare a video with her jury comments by next week—stay tuned for more.)

Professional
Winner: David Irwin - M Lamp
Runners-up:
»Lydia Cambron and Von Tundra - 99
»Ryszard Manczak - Tango Pouf
Notable: Michael Yates Design - Giacoma Rocker

Student
Winner: Erika Cross - Vertebral Chair
Runner-up:
» Michael Neville - Rocking Lump
» Dan Ipp - Illuminated Side Table
» Ryan Pieper - High/Low' Table
Notable: Knauf & Brown - Profile Chair

Our nostalgia for paper manifests itself in more than just bespoke greeting cards and pocket-sized Moleskines. Papers of different thicknesses and colors can be cut and folded into forms that take on a strange intimacy, or even digitally recreated into characters from the craft store. Here's what's pertinent this week in pulp.

Just as beers and backyards are finally having their moment in the sun, the French design studio Zim & Zou crafts another seasonal staple: a full-sized barbeque grill made entirely of paper, complete with stacked skewers, drumsticks plump as hot air balloons and a geodesic bottle of Heinz to accompany it all. Although some of the images look like computer renderings, everything is handmade by the 25-year-old designers Lucie Thomas and Thibault Zimmermann, whose previous constructions include a paper Game Boy, a stop-motion greeting card for IBM and a lush leather-and-paper jungle for an Hermès window display.

Pro photographer Gerald Donovan isn't really content with the Instagram level of quality you and I might be fine with. "I...use what is quite simply the best digital still image equipment money can buy," writes Donovan, referring to his collection of Rodenstock lenses, ALPA cameras and Medium Format Digital Back. Of course, you and I could buy this same equipment and never get Donovan's results; to see some examples of what 40 years of shooting experience brings, check out these shots of his awesome Burj Khalifa Collection.

The globular panorama, by the way, was just made public yesterday to Gizmodo; Donovan had previously Photoshopped out the Burj itself for aesthetic effect, but decided to throw it back in. (You can see the Burj-free version here.)

It's been a while since we heard anything from Molo, the Vancouver-based design duo that famously brought paper to new heights—or widths, we should say. Architects and founders Stephanie Forsythe and Todd MacAllen, who are "dedicated to the research of materials and the exploration of space making," made a splash with their paper Softwall nearly a decade ago; they followed up with their killer Softseating, and for a period of time it seemed like you couldn't go to a design gallery event or tradeshow without encountering either or both of the products. The ease of transporting the collapsible structures, the strength of their structure, the intelligent use of materials, and the sheer novelty made Molo the darling of design bloggers and racked up a list of design awards nearly as long as the objects themselves.

We've just looked in on them, and found Molo is now touting a new application for their expanding paper creations: Sound dampening. Turns out the right-angle-free, pleated honeycomb shape of their structures provides the perfect physics for sound absorption:

Laboratory testing of softwall's absorption properties show that it scores very well, especially in frequencies of the human voice, in comparison to modern sound absorption tiling and baffles (meeting or exceeding common absorption coefficients) but with the added benefit of being adaptable, storable, and transportable.

Core77's Hand-Eye Supply Curiosity Club is very pleased to have Mike Merrill of the KmikeyM.com!

Tonight's talk starts at 6pm 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!

Kenneth Michael Merrill
KmikeyM.com: "Community Through Capitalism"
Hand-Eye Supply
23 NW 4th Ave
Portland, OR 97209
Tuesday, July 9th, 6pm PST

Mike Merrill is the world's only publicly traded person. He sells shares in himself and then asks his shareholders to guide his life decisions. They choose who he dates, where he works, and what political party to join. So far it's working out rather well.

Mike Merrill spent a year being single. He was not sure what he wanted in a romantic partner. And then he remembered, as a publicly traded person, it didn't matter what he wanted. This was a shareholder decision!

Kenneth Michael Merrill (also known as Mr. Mike Merrill, Mikey, or KmikeyM) is a publicly traded person and businessman in Portland, Ore. He is a co-owner of Manila Mac, and the owner of K5 Media LLC. He manages Urban Honking, where he has a blog, is the Editor-In-Chief of Portland Sportsman, and is a highly esteemed member of The YACHT Trust. He runs a co-operative Research Lab, co-hosts the Bright Future of Tobacco podcast, produces TV with Team Video, is a founding member of Whiskey Friends, and is currently working on some exciting new developments.

If industrial designers are largely unsung, even less sung about are the moldmaking shops that help us prototype our designs. Thankfully both of these things are starting to change; twenty years ago that look inside Nikon's ID department would never have been publicly broadcast, and now the Emmy-winning video journalist Rebecca Davis has even turned her lens on a small, quietly-successful casting operation out of Long Island City.

Queens-based Ovidiu Colea runs Colbar Art, an eighteen-person shop that produces "Custom castings, sculptures, molds, plastic molds, mold designs, prototype molds, art molds, acrylic artwork, prototype castings, high quality acrylic scuptures, model making, mold castings, architectural castings, museum sculptures & castings, & much more." The relatively tiny business also happens to be the world's largest producer of Statue of Liberty figurines—hence the title of Davis' look-see, "The Liberty Factory."

wants an eCommerce Digital Designer
in San Francisco, California

If you're a fan of Hello Kitty and you love designing exciting, fresh branded shopping experiences, this is THE job you've been looking for.

Sanrio, Inc. wants an eCommerce Digital Designer with a broad range of creative talents, from photography direction and digital design, to front-end coding. This designer should be ready to work on numerous co-brand executions, designing assets for web, email, affiliate, social and search channels.

This is your chance to have a big impact on the design, online marketing and ecommerce business objectives of a company with a global fan base. Apply Now

wants an eCommerce Digital Designer
in San Francisco, California

If you're a fan of Hello Kitty and you love designing exciting, fresh branded shopping experiences, this is THE job you've been looking for.

Sanrio, Inc. wants an eCommerce Digital Designer with a broad range of creative talents, from photography direction and digital design, to front-end coding. This designer should be ready to work on numerous co-brand executions, designing assets for web, email, affiliate, social and search channels.

This is your chance to have a big impact on the design, online marketing and ecommerce business objectives of a company with a global fan base. Apply Now

In the (soon-to-be) grand tradition of digi-fab sculptor Joshua Harker, namisu's Octavio Asensio has turned to Kickstarter to produce a new 3D-printed work of art. Where Harker's skulls harken (sorry, couldn't resist) back to the dead as a totemic memento mori, the 3D-REX brings natural history from the museum to your living room. (Two, it seems, is a trend, as Philippe Pasqua's chrome T-Rex skeleton has also been making blog rounds this week.)

We came up with the concept of a wireframe fossil, a complex geometric mesh representing one of the most ancient and iconic creatures: the Tyrannosaurus Rex! The concept really appealed to us because it represents a contrast between old and new, mixing nature's own amazing creations with technological advances of today. Though it looked good as a CAD model, the 3D-Printed result blew us away; the way the organic wireframe flows and plays off the light is really quite a sight.

Core77 is very pleased to announce that we will be partnering with the inaugural Bike Cult Show to bring you exclusive coverage of Brooklyn's own Hand-Built Bicycle Show this August. Featuring an impressive roster of framebuilders from driving distance—or perhaps cycling distance—of New York City, the new show promises to be a unique opportunity for East Coast-based builders to connect with cycling enthusiasts (and potential customers). So too are those of you in the Tri-State Area invited to make your way to Brooklyn on Labor Day weekend, when the Bike Cult Show will take place at Williamsburg's Warsaw Concert Hall—"Where Pierogies Meet Punk"—and, for two days in August, a veritable peloton of bike geeks will have the chance to meet the best framebuilders on this side of the Mississippi.

Organizers Harry Schwartzman, Dave Perry and Benjamin Peck have already lined up over a dozen exhibitors from Philadelphia's Stephen Bilenky to Parlee Cycles of Beverly, MA, representing a full spectrum of craft from lugged steel to custom carbon fiber. The fact that the balance of the exhibitors are local one-man operations means that attendees will not only have the chance to meet the men behind the machines but also to check out the shops themselves: visitors who've had their fill of pierogies but not bicycles can venture off-site to framebuilders' spaces around the borough. The show itself will be open on Friday and Saturday, with requisite afterparties each night, but the bicycle extravaganza will continue with open studios on Sunday, September 1—see the full schedule here.

There are those natural phenomena that we know are coming, like comets, the Supermoon and this year's forthcoming Manhattanhenge, causing shutterbugs around the world to prepare their cameras. Then there's the stuff we have no idea is coming, like earthquakes, tsunamis and tornadoes. But the prevalence of cell phone cameras mean we're now capturing images from the latter category too. Yesterday a series of photos out of Oldsmar, Florida, went viral as a handful of residents were able to capture a waterspout—a sort of oceangoing tornado—that formed around sunset on Monday.

Naturally there's video of it too; unsurprisingly most of it is grainy and ill-composed. After wading through a bunch of it, we found Oldsmar resident John Bosker's footage, which he showed to ABC News, to be the cake-taker. It starts around 0:44 below, and you can of course ignore the news hype before and after the footage:

This second video is kind of funny because you can hear the typical American parent-child interaction in the background (NSFW language):

Our favorite Japanese purveyor of no-brand quality goods is pleased to partner with All Nippon Airways a new sweepstakes to promote MUJI to GO, "a category of MUJI products curated based on the concept of 'Good Travels with Good Products.'" The global campaign "Mini to GO" will launch at the Times Square location on July 12, and run for just over a month. From this Friday until August 15, customers who shop at the MUJI stores can bring their receipt to the store at the New York Times Building to get a 3D photograph taken. Participants can enter for a chance to win one of ten free 3D-printed figurines (from the scans) and the grand prize, a vacation courtesy of ANA.

The MUJI Times Square store is located at 620 8th Ave (at 40th St), New York, NY 10018. See more details here.

This is the sixth post of an ongoing series about wood. Understanding its nature, the way it moves and changes, and the implications for designers. Check back every Wednesday for the next installment.

The previous posts are here:
» How Logs Are Turned Into Boards, Part 1: Plainsawn
» How Logs Are Turned Into Boards, Part 2: Quartersawn
» How Logs Are Turned Into Boards, Part 3: Riftsawn
» Why Does Wood Move?
» Controlling Wood Movement: The Drying Process

We are all familiar with this type of design for a door, also known as panel door. This one has four panels, but you'll often see them with six, and occasionally with more. And as you've probably guessed by reading through this series, those panels were traditionally not placed there for aesthetics, but for functionality. This is a time-tested, very clear-cut example of how you use design to cope with wood movement.

First off, let's get some basic terminology down by looking at a smaller version of the same concept: A cabinet door.

There's a reason demolitionists use explosive charges to take buildings down: Abject destruction is a relatively quick way to dismantle rebar-reinforced concrete. But boy does it create one helluva mess to clean up:

Smaller-scale demolition techniques require massive machinery to pulverize buildings chunk by chunk, while workers spray the destruction with a steady stream of water to keep the dust down. The resultant mess is then carted off, load by load, to landfill or a recycling center tasked with the difficult chore of separating metal rebar from the concrete fragments.

Look no further than the 2013 IDEA Winners for a better building demolition concept.

Omer Haciomeroglu, from Sweden's Umea Institute of Design, won Gold in the Student Designs category for his ERO Concrete Recycling Robot. Haciomeroglu's excellent concept not only takes buildings down in an energy-efficient way, but it systematically recycles as it goes along. "In order to overcome later separation and ease the transport of materials," writes Haciomeroglu, "the process had to start with separation on the spot. It was a challenge to switch from brutal pulverizing to smart deconstruction."

For those of us who "only use the best" in our kitchens (regardless of how much cooking actually goes on in there), "Tsubamesanjo" is your new word for the day. Tsubamesanjo is a rail station located exactly on the border of two cities, Tsubame and Sanjo, in Niigata Prefecture in the Northwestern region of Japan. While the Niigata region is known within Japan for its high quality agriculture (famous for its top grade rice and consequentially, great sake), the region around Tsubamesanjo, oddly enough, is actually known for its high quality metalwork.

Back in the early 17th century, there was frequent flooding of the river, which caused major problems for the farming industry. In response, the local magistrate invited nail makers from Edo (present day Tokyo) to teach the farmers the craft of nail making, which is how the tradition of metalwork began.

Today, there are numerous manufacturers within a 30km area of Tsubamesanjo that carry on this tradition of high quality metalwork that grew from nails to kitchen knives, hand tools, and other household and industrial wares.

While tradition and craftsmanship is venerable, it can also go out of style. That's exactly where FD Style (founded by Mitsunobu Hagino) fills the gap. Hagino's FD Style blends the traditional craftsmanship of the Tsubamesanjo region with a modern design aesthetic with their stylishly designed stainless black kitchenware.

wants a Furniture Design/Build Assistant
in Brooklyn, New York

This small furniture design/build company in Brooklyn looking for team member to assist with preparation of shop drawings and fabrication. They want someone who is looking to learn and is not opposed to a wide variety of tasks.

Design responsibilities will include sketching, renderings, 3d modeling (rhino or 3dmax preferred, Sketchup OK), and creating shop drawings in CAD. This person will also assist in the design of our furniture line in addition to custom commissions.

Apply Now

Like so many others, we were duly impressed with the first videos of Ross Nanotechnology's proprietary superhydrophobic coating NeverWet when they hit the web just under two years ago. The product has since been licensed by Rust-Oleum, allowing "NeverWet to focus on developing and refining products without getting lost in the issues related to manufacturing and selling them." The Lancaster Online article continues:

"We look at ourselves as an innovation company, not as a manufacturer," [Daniel Hobson, NeverWet's chief executive officer,] said.

The Conestoga Valley Industrial Park company's first innovation began as its then-parent's solution to a basic, industrial problem. About five years ago, Ross Technology Corp. needed a better way to reduce corrosion on the steel products it makes here. When they couldn't find one, they decided to make something on their own.

But soon, the small group of scientists working on the anti-corrosive coating saw a lot of new possibilities for the nano-particle coating that kept things clean, dry and free of bacteria and ice. The group became Ross Nanotechnology, a subsidiary of Ross Technology Corp.

As of about four weeks ago, NeverWet has been available at Home Depot for just under $20 a pop. After seeing the video above and a similar (unembeddable) demo on the product page on Home Depot, I was strongly considering getting my hands on it to try it out... until I started reading the reviews.

Building blocks taught children to stack things. Legos teach kids to build objects systematically. Now a company called littleBits wants to push building blocks to the next level by integrating electronics, teaching children that they can achieve more sophisticated results by combining a series of predetermined components with specific technological functions. And they're easy to snap together, via magnets that prevent incorrect connections.

Designed by Ayah Bdeir (whom we interviewed earlier this year during a littleBits/MoMA team-up), Paul Rothman and Jordi Borras, littleBits won Gold in the 2013 IDEA Awards in the Leisure & Recreation category. Writes the littleBits team,

Electronics are everywhere. People now produce, consume and throw out more electronic gadgets and technology-enhanced products than ever before. Yet, engineering is mysticized, electronic objects are black-boxed, and the creativity of today's designer is limited by the tools and materials available to them. With the democratization of technology and the DIY revolution gaining more momentum, creativity with electronics will explode when they can be used as (and combined with) other materials.

In Part 1 we covered basic webbing materials for the design student on a budget.

In Part 2 we covered the tools you'll need to work the webbing.

Here in Part 3, we show you how to set your sewing machine up for webbing, and how to perform test stitching to get the stitches correctly balanced.

If you've never used a sewing machine before, you'll need to familiarize yourself with one first. There are already tons of blogs and videos on this topic, and rather than duplicate those efforts, we're relying on you to do a little homework. Here's one example of such a site, this one run by Tilly Walnes (whom our British readers will recognize from The Great British Sewing Bee). Once you've got the basics in your head, watch our video below, then hit the jump for the review points.

The throwable panoramic ball camera first turned up on our radar just under two years ago, when Jonas Pfeil's eye-catching SIGGRAPH 2011 presentation hit the web prior to the conference. Unfortunately, his team has kept mum since then, save for a quick update that Angela Merkel had a chance to check out the device (accompanied by a photo of the German Chancellor holding it as if testing the ripeness of a melon). In the meantime, we caught wind of a couple other contenders that were specifically geared towards tactical reconnaissance applications, including a barbell-shaped variation that led us to question whether a sphere was the way to go after all. If Steve Hollinger's recent innovations for a "Ball with camera and trajectory control for reconnaissance or recreation" are any indication, we have our answer.

"Throwable camera innovations are accelerating with advancements in sensor and imaging microelectronics," stated Hollinger. "And with the advent of low-cost, high-speed cameras for outdoor recreation, an affordable throwable camera is finally within reach."

Hollinger's patent describes a ball-shaped camera with position and orientation sensors determining the relationship between a spiraling or spinning aperture and a subject of image capture. Such a relationship allows, for example, images to be captured, re-oriented and stitched into a panorama. The technology further allows for the stabilization of video, making a camera capable of registering frames captured in sequence. Images and video are transmitted wirelessly to the user's phone, tablet or desktop.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the so-called Squito is the fact that it's able to capture impressively seamless 360° images with only three cameras, thanks largely to the now-patented sensor technology. As with the GoPro, consumers will likely use the tennis-ball-sized device for "recreation, professional sports, architecture [and] landscape photography," while industrial applications include "reconnaissance, search-and-rescue, first responder scene assessment [and] 3D mapping applications"—such as SLAM, which refers not to dunks but to Simultaneous Localization And Mapping, the process by which robots or other autonomous vehicles acquire knowledge of their local environment (known or unknown).