Remind me again how this isn't clickbaiting?

The first thing I thought of when I heard about Hot Malm was that I'd heard about it before. Except that it wasn't a faux-porn website featuring anthropomorphized IKEA furniture—it was a Tumblog of IKEA furniture that happened to be in the background of prurient videos, transformed into the bite-sized image format du jour, the animated GIF. It turns out that the new site, HotMalm.com (SFW, for all intents and purposes), was developed by droga5's Asa Ivry-Block & co., presumably as a viral campaign for the Swedish furniture powerhouse (all of the links drive traffic to IKEA product pages). If nothing else, it's a cheeky exercise in copywriting, predicated on lewd puns—"Hot Malm from Behind" is the most PG; rest assured the captions allude to porno tropes from top to bottom—and, as Ivry-Block told Animal New York, "We were inspired by a mission to share Malms of every size and color with the world."

As for the Tumblr—well, that's where it goes from off-color into a gray area, so to speak: JustAnotherIKEACatalog.tumblr.com is a tongue-in-cheek compendium of IKEAspotting... in amateur pornography. (It should go without saying that it's entirely NSFW; Animal's write-up includes a couple of softcore, borderline SFW images, for reference. Emphasis on borderline.) Per the about page, "JAIC is a non-IKEA affiliated project... Every post includes an animated gif from the amateur pornography video enhanced with some more information about the IKEA product in the video. A link at the bottom sends you straight to the IKEA website to check if the product is available at your local IKEA store." If HotMalm.com is an IKEA catalog disguised as an X-rated website and Just Another IKEA Catalog is precisely the opposite.

wants a Product-Industrial Designer
in Santiago, Chile

Electrolux is a global leader in household appliances and appliances for professional use, selling more than 40 million products to customers in more than 150 markets every year. They're looking for a product designer-industrial designer to join their Santiago, Chile team and work on their home appliances range - White Goods.

This is the perfect opportunity for someone who loves concepting and bringing products to life while also building relationships between various project teams.

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Of all the branches of industrial design that one could pursue, the design of medical devices is arguably the most important to society—and the least sexy-sounding. Automotive design probably wins the Most Sexy title, at least in the eyes of your average starry-eyed design student, so it's ironic that medical design gets short shrift, in that the price points of the finished products can easily keep pace with automobiles. A high-end endoscope, for example, doesn't sound like much more than a glorified camera—but they can set a hospital back some 70 grand.

That means endoscopes are developed-nation-only devices, despite their universally lifesaving potential. But a company called Evotech, which is dedicated to "[designing] medical devices for the bottom of the pyramid," wants to change that. In partnership with IDEO.org, they won Gold in the Social Impact Design category of the 2013 IDEA program for their low-cost endoscope. "Using frugal innovation techniques," Evotech writes, "we developed a light, portable endoscopy prototype for a fraction of the price of existing solutions."

Evotech and [IDEO.org] redesigned the Low-Cost Portable Endoscope with off-the-shelf parts as a $250-$2,500 device powered by a laptop, making the endoscope smaller, portable, energy efficient, durable, waterproof and with the ability to manufacture at scale.

The challenge was to improve the device's industrial design and develop a business model that would sustain it—and get the device to doctors whose patients would benefit from its use. With regard to the device's design, the endoscope needed to enable doctors to make more precise diagnoses and to perform surgeries through a small incision, reducing patients' risk of infection and recovery time. The endoscope also had to have the ability to be sterilized.

Bloomberg terminal photo via Quartz

Over on our Discussion Boards, design student seandavidson has recently solicited Workstation Help! from his fellow forum members. At 45 posts as of press time, the thread has grown to just under four pages of power-computing expertise (mostly in the first 48 hours, no less), and even though the OP is just about ready to pull the trigger on his dream machine, there's lots to dig in to, especially if you expect to be cranking out renderings on a regular basis.

Longtime member Cyberdemon is especially helpful (and sensitive to the use case), drawing a nice analogy regarding his Macbook Pro: "for the purposes of pumping cad it's kind of like buying a BMW X6 because it's a good 'off roader' sometimes it's worth it to get the Jeep and not care what people think." He also notes that "more ram [sic] will NOT improve multi-tasking while you render. Modern rendering software will eat up 100% of the available cores. That's why your computer will suck at doing anything while you're rendering even if you have 64 gigs of ram"... To which hatts responds:

Many rendering packages incorporate a "low priority" feature which will have the rendering job ease up a bit if the user is trying to do other things. Other packages let you set aside whole cores during rendering. (This is a tick in the "RAM doesn't matter" checkbox.)

However if s/he gets into motion graphics or any poly modeling, there are plenty of functions which utilize RAM. Video rendering, dynamics simulation, retopologizing, all use RAM. (This is a tick in the "RAM does indeed matter" checkbox.)

» Head over to the forums for plenty of shop talk and more.

I'm aware there's no real rivalry between the fields of industrial design and fashion design, and with friends in the latter profession it would be rude of me to publicly admit I think ill of that industry; but I can freely say we ID'ers are probably envious of their budgets. So yes, it's with a certain amount of glee that I report the hacking of Vogue UK's website.

Some code whiz with a strange sense of humor has rendered extra, dinosaur-based functionality onto their homepage. As of press time, when you visit Vogue's site and use your keyboard to type in this sequence...

Up, up, down down, left right, left, right, B, A

...and then you keep hitting "A," you get an awesome parade of dinosaurs—velociraptors, I think—wearing an assortment of fee-yancy little hats.

If the hacker responsible is reading this and targets us next, please don't give us anything so tacky; we'd like velociraptors lounging in Eames chairs.

Frustrated with the lack of decent keyboard stands on the market, Mikael Jorgensen began sketching ideas for a stylish lightweight touring stand some ten years ago—as lead pianist and keyboardist for the band Wilco, he'd spent the better much of that time on the road—but with no background in design or fabrication, he didn't really know how to proceed. He had given up hope until years later, when friend and producer Allen Farmelo, who showed him a mixing console that collapses for traveling, designed and built by François Chambard of UM Project. After an introduction from Farmelo, Jorgensen met with Chambard at his Greenpoint studio and immediately connected with his design sensibility and craftsmanship.

The stand breaks down to fit perfectly into a standard keyboard case for touring and can easily be configured to function as a desk for laptops; executed in Chambard's signature style with a matching bench, the UMJ-1 looks like nothing else on the market. I stopped by UM Project's studio to get a hands-on demo before the distinctive stand made it's debut at Wilco's Solid Sound Festival at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Chambard enthusiastically assembled the unit before my eyes, explaining the thought process behind it, as the storage room next door was being set up for the photo shoot.

Design is always a balancing act, and the best industrial designers are experts at finding that sweet spot between originality, practicality, cost, quality and the million other considerations that inevitably come into play with a new product. But recently we've seen several projects that perform a literal balancing act—designs that seem to defy gravity, plus one where the parts are ingeniously arranged to allow for one-handed operation.

Dragonfly chair photos by Diego Alta

Designers often look to nature for inspiration, but even so, the dragonfly seems like an unlikely starting point for the making of a chair. As the Milan-based designer Odo Fioravanti notes, the insects' bodies "are characterized by an imbalance in weight distribution between the front legs and their extended tail." So too is Fioravanti's Dragonfly chair for Segis, a cantilever form with four legs joined at the front of the seat. It features an injection-molded polypropylene shell with steel legs—and the structure succeeds thanks to a hidden U-shaped element under the seat that bolsters its resistance.

Early sketch models

The first prototype

In what we'd say is a particularly big coincidence, news of two noteworthy technological feats, both named "Atlas," hit the web yesterday: aerospace startup Aerovelo won the Sikorsky Prize with an aptly-named quadcopter, and DARPA officially unveiled a humanoid robot of the same name... within 500 miles of each other, in Toronto and Waltham, MA, respectively. Seeing as each breakthrough is worth a detailed investigation of its own, we'll refer you to Popular Mechanics and the New York Times for the full scoop on each story, but here's a quick rundown on just what humans have achieved this week.

On Thursday, July 12, the Aerovelo team, led by engineers and co-founders Cameron Robertson and Todd Reichert, claimed the Igor I. Sikorsky Human Powered Helicopter [HPH] Competition, 33 years after it was established in 1980, one hundred years after Sikorsky successfully designed, built and piloted the world's first four-engine fixed-wing aircraft (he passed away in 1972; his namesake prize is administered by American Helicopter Society International). Piloted by Reichert, the Atlas met or surpassed the three criteria for the prize: the craft must hover at least three meters above the ground in a horizontal area no larger than ten square meters for at least 60 seconds. Per PopMech:

[The prize-winning flight,] which lasted 64 seconds and reached a maximum altitude of 3.3 meters... came at the very end of five days of test flights [at an indoor soccer stadium near Toronto], after which the space would no longer be available. On two earlier flights, Reichert pilot [sic] the craft, called Atlas, to heights of 2 meters and 2.5 meters. With just minutes remaining before the team was scheduled to vacate the stadium to make way for an evening soccer practice, Reichert managed to squeeze in one last flight. Within 10 seconds a horn sounded signaling that he had exceeded the 3-meter mark.

Their accomplishment is all the more remarkable because it took them only 20 months to bring the Atlas quadcopter from concept to history-making reality. After six months of initial planning, Robertson, Reichert & Co. turned to Kickstarter to raise $30 large towards their projected $170,000 budget (no word on the final bill for the project; the estimated delivery for the prize, per the June 2012 campaign, was last September, so I imagine they sought another round of funding at some point). The quadcopter comes in with a rotor radius of just over 10m and weighs in at 55 kilos (just over 120lbs)—far less than Reichert himself, a longtime athlete who weighs in at 80kg; full tech specs here.

Of all the branches of industrial design that one could pursue, the design of medical devices is arguably the most important to society—and the least sexy-sounding. Automotive design probably wins the Most Sexy title, at least in the eyes of your average starry-eyed design student, so it's ironic that medical design gets short shrift, in that the price points of the finished products can easily keep pace with automobiles. A high-end endoscope, for example, doesn't sound like much more than a glorified camera—but they can set a hospital back some 70 grand.

That means endoscopes are developed-nation-only devices, despite their universally lifesaving potential. But a company called Evotech, which is dedicated to "[designing] medical devices for the bottom of the pyramid," wants to change that. In partnership with IDEO.org, they won Gold in the Social Impact Design category of the 2013 IDEA program for their low-cost endoscope. "Using frugal innovation techniques," Evotech writes, "we developed a light, portable endoscopy prototype for a fraction of the price of existing solutions."

Evotech and [IDEO.org] redesigned the Low-Cost Portable Endoscope with off-the-shelf parts as a $250-$2,500 device powered by a laptop, making the endoscope smaller, portable, energy efficient, durable, waterproof and with the ability to manufacture at scale.

The challenge was to improve the device's industrial design and develop a business model that would sustain it—and get the device to doctors whose patients would benefit from its use. With regard to the device's design, the endoscope needed to enable doctors to make more precise diagnoses and to perform surgeries through a small incision, reducing patients' risk of infection and recovery time. The endoscope also had to have the ability to be sterilized.

Most of us are familiar with the basic mechanics of a digital SLR camera (that's Single Lens Reflex for those of you with the Google search bar open), which essentially enables image capture through the use of a mirror and prism system. The real brilliance of the SLR is that is allows a photographer to see exactly what they are shooting and reproduce it with the click of a button—a far cry from the viewfinder cameras of yesteryear where you weren't sure how your photo might turn out. So the idea of a direct reproduction is powerful... but what if you wanted to capture a smell instead of a sight? Enter the Madeline: an Analog Odor Camera.

Designer Amy Radcliffe employs a technique known in the perfume biz as 'Headspace Capture' to collect and record the things that emit odors. In traditional headspace capture (most often used by perfumers and botanists), a glass bell is placed over the odor of interest to create an airtight seal over the scented object. The air inside the bell is swept through a tube and into trap that is housed in the main unit of the Madeline by a small air pump. The Madeline then filters out the scent molecules from the air so that they can be analyzed. Just as a digital SLR captures light input for photography, the Madeline records an exact copy of the smell data for reproduction. Radcliffe writes:

If an analogue, amateur-friendly system of odour capture and synthesis could be developed, we could see a profound change in the way we regard the use and effect of smells in our daily lives. From manipulating our emotional wellbeing through prescribed nostalgia, to the functional use of conditioned scent memory, our olfactory sense could take on a much more conscious role in the way we consume and record the world.

wants a Product Designer
in Boulder, Colorado

If you think checking the "Eco-Friendly Ordering" option for your online food delivery is a green gesture, why not take it one step further and help Eco-Products create innovative designs for their single use foodservice product lines?

Eco-Products wants you to apply your 3D modeling, engineering modeling and product design skills to helping them bring foodservice packaging and paper products made from renewable resources and post consumer recycled content to market.

Be gentle to the planet and Apply Now

wants a Product Designer
in Boulder, Colorado

If you think checking the "Eco-Friendly Ordering" option for your online food delivery is a green gesture, why not take it one step further and help Eco-Products create innovative designs for their single use foodservice product lines?

Eco-Products wants you to apply your 3D modeling, engineering modeling and product design skills to helping them bring foodservice packaging and paper products made from renewable resources and post consumer recycled content to market.

Be gentle to the planet and Apply Now

Welcome back, once again, to Project Medusa. This final installment in our three-part How-To series aims to illuminate the last phase of any design research project: what are you to do with all the information that result from your brilliant effort? How do you decide what's relevant, and what's not? Needless to say, it can be a bit complicated. Many of the considerations introduced earlier are also helpful at this stage: remember your goals, and understand your audience (which shifts now to whoever you're preparing the research results for.) Confused? Visit Part 1 for a more thorough introduction. If you recall Part 1 but missed Part 2, now's your chance to catch up.

While there are no right or wrong answers in design research, not all data is equal. Assuming you've carefully prioritized your goals and outreach, it's now time to prioritize results. At Ziba, we use a four-part process to synthesize the data research yields.

1. Aggregate the data.

This could mean digitizing handwritten responses, stacks of sticky notes stuck to a wall, dozens of photos printed, or whatever works for you and your material. You'll need to be able to see the data—and ideally search through it efficiently—before you can plunge ahead.

2. Sort for theme(s).

Like goes with like, and making logical groupings of related information will help you identify the trends and anomalies within your data set. Embrace the granular: this is most likely the only time you'll look at each and every survey question, listen to every minute of recorded discussion, and squint at all those doodles. Stop worrying about your goals, momentarily, and evaluate your results as honestly and objectively as possible. Everything is allowed to be interesting, at this stage. If, on the other hand, you feel overwhelmed with the amount of data you're confronted with, the sorting process will allow you to reduce complexity.

Themes emerge as you connect the strongest trends in the data to your hypothesis or hypotheses. Think of it as a naming exercise, if you're stumped: with the data sorted into buckets, each bucket needs a concise handle. There may be some hard choices—fascinating but quirky individual responses sometimes need to be cast aside if they fail to play well with other, larger groups of more typical answers. Force yourself to make decisions about what's meaningful and what can actually have an impact on the work to come.

This may be the best videogame ever invented. In 1995, the illusionists Penn & Teller created "Desert Bus" for the then-popular Sega Genesis console. The first-person driving game requires you to drive an empty bus from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas along a desert highway. The drive takes eight hours and it must be completed in real time; there is no pause button.

Even better, the steering alignment on the bus is off, so it constantly pulls to the right. In other words you can't take your hands off the wheel. The bus maxes out at 45 m.p.h. and all you'll see is the dull desert scenery, the odometer slowly turning over, and the clock ticking by in real time. There are no other cars on the road, nobody else on the bus with you, absolutely nothing to provide narrative interest. And if you go off the road, you get towed all the way back to the beginning—purportedly for repairs, though the steering alignment problem remains—and you have to start all over again.

Should you successfully complete the entire drive, you get one point. One.

So, why on Earth did they create this game, and why have you never heard of it? Obviously the game is a satire, and some of you may recall that in the mid-'90s, there was an anti-videogame-violence movement. "Desert Bus" was Penn & Teller's joking response to this. "It's a boring job that just goes on and on repetitiously, and your task is simply to remain conscious," Teller told The New Yorker. "That was one of the big keys--we would make no cheats about time, so [videogame opponents] could get a good idea of how valuable and worthwhile a game that just reflects reality would be."

As for why you've never heard of it: Sadly, the completion of the game's development process coincided with the demise of Sega's Genesis platform. Imagineering, the videogame company working with Penn & Teller, went bust shortly thereafter. Only a handful of review copies exist.

Amazingly, a group of die-hard gaming geeks got their hands on one of these copies, and a working Sega Genesis console. In 2007 they set up an annual charity, Desert Bus for Hope, that took donations for miles driven in the game. Proceeds would go to Child's Play, which donates videogames and consoles to children's hospitals around the world. The take has been impressive: While the first-year run only took in $22,000, the haul for last year's event netted $443,630, pushing the total to over one million dollars.

This year's Desert Bus for Hope is slated for November 16th. If you want to get involved and need to practice, but don't have a Genesis, you're in luck: "Desert Bus" can now be downloaded for iOS and Android.

Via The New Yorker

This is the seventh profile in our 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. Read last week's profile here.

In 2007, Dwell magazine described the Brooklyn-based designer Jason Miller as witty, youthful and enjoying a "meteoric rise" in the U.S. design scene. Today, Miller, 41, laughs at the notion of sudden success. "I've been doing this for many years," he says, "so it doesn't feel meteoric."

Still, Miller did cause a splash when he opened Jason Miller Studio in 2001 and released lighting designs like his Antlers series, which captured the animal-head-as-decor trend with a chandelier composed of glazed ceramic replicas of deer antlers.

In 2010, Miller spun off a new company, Roll & Hill, to manufacture high-end contemporary lights by a variety of designers. "We sell relatively expensive things, we make them on demand, and we make them to the customer's specifications," Miller explains. "While we are a manufacturing company, we are not a mass producer; we still make everything to order."

Above and below: Miller's office in his Brooklyn studio

Miller now helms his studio and serves as the creative director and CEO of Roll & Hill. He has 20 employees between the two businesses and is having to deal with fast expansion. This, ahem, meteoric rise in company growth means that staff needs have outpaced the infrastructure of business management. "When you have two or three people working with you, it's easy to stop in the hall and ask questions and have an impromptu meeting," Miller says. "But now that I have 20 employees, it's easy to get lost in that world. It's easy to be in meetings all day. My door, unfortunately, is glass, so people peer in thinking that any minute I'll be free."

Although the waterspout photos were a new one for us, we've become aware of natural disasters in a way that would have been impossible twenty years ago, now that everyone with a cell phone camera is a de facto AP photographer. But there are plenty of disasters we have yet to see the inside of, because in the worst situations, your cell phone may have no juice, and you may be more worried about contacting emergency services than Instagramming a tornado.

It's for that scenario that Alan Cymberknoh of SpareOne XPAL Power designed their titular SpareOne emergency cell phone. Although we took note when it first launched, it recently won Gold in the 2013 IDEA Communication Tools category. A "game-changing preparedeness device," the SpareOne will always have power, provided you keep one commonplace object handy: A single AA battery.

I can see how 'flamping' might be mistaken for a phenomeme-non of dubious SFWness; I gotta admit, I wouldn't have guessed what the portmanteau neologism is short for without a hint either. Turns out it's short for "fly camping"—as in loading up your trusty flying bicycle and skipping town for quick weekend getaways in rather more sylvan environs.

Wait, what?

Last week, we caught up with the nearly-two-years-in-the-making saga of Aerovelo's Atlas quadcopter, a human-powered helicopter that garnered international recognition for achieving a controlled flight to Sikorsky prize-winning specifications, hovering at 3.3 meters for just over a minute. If Aerovelo co-founders Cameron Robertson and Todd Reichert are the heirs to the aerospace pioneer's legacy—which, by the way, came with a $250K purse—John Foden and Yannick Read have more in common with Terrafugia's Carl Dietrich, who is looking to bring a flying vehicle to the general public. Where Dietrich has been working on bringing the flying car to market for several years now, Foden and Read have developed a marginally less ambitious conveyance. The XploreAir Paravelo is essentially a hybrid folding bike + paramotor, a single-passenger vehicle that achieves liftoff through a detachable, motor-driven or human-powered fan.

1. Ride
Use the bicycle on its own as you would any other bike. Fold it up to store or carry on the bus, train or metro.

2. Tow
Hitch the air frame trailer to the bike and you're ready for expedition, flight and adventure. Designed to carry the powerful motor, the air frame trailer also houses the wing, fuel and any additional supplies you'll need.

3. Fly
The bike docks with its air frame trailer to form a para-trike configuration for optimum expedition autonomy. In this set-up you can carry all the equipment you need to ride, fly and camp.

Alternatively, detach the bike and air frame trailer and wear the powerful fan on your back for a foot launch. This set-up gives improved performance in the air and allows for take off in higher and changeable wind conditions. In most territories, no licence required to fly in this configuration.

Where the Atlas is a VTOL (Vertical TakeOff and Landing) aircraft, the Paravelo addresses a different set of constraints: the entire vehicle folds to fit into the trunk of a car; like other folding bikes, the pedal-powered portion is small enough to be carried on public transit. Deployed in full, it's capable of upwards of three hours of flight time at 25mph and up to 4,000 ft. elevation.

nest / Kanda SU (1999-2004)

They say your home is your "third skin," after your clothes and your actual skin. Our second and third "skins," just like our actual skin, have a significant effect on our lives. If your clothes are wet, or aren't warm enough, you might catch a cold. If your house is designed and built without natural, eco-friendly materials... well, you may not catch a cold, but the space you live in, its materials, its design, surely has an affect on your well being.

Tono Mirai is an architect who believes this, and has focused on making houses out of, for lack of a better word, "earth" for nearly 15 years. His series of "earth houses" began while experimenting with traditional Japanese plastering techniques—which have a deep, 1,000-year history in Japan—used to make "tsuchikabe" (literally "mud walls") in an effort to create a more natural, healthy home for his wife. Through this experimentation, he realized how soil, wood, and other natural ingredients could be used to fulfill the three things he wanted to achieve with his architecture: sustainability, health and beauty.

Future House (2010)

Future House (2010)

Photography by Sam Dunne for Core77

Serving as a platform for design graduates in the United Kingdom to launch their career, the New Designers 2013 Show took place at the spectacular Business Design Centre in London with over 3,500 emerging designers exhibiting their wares and ideas in disciplines ranging from industrial design and furniture design to textiles, ceramics, jewelry and applied arts.

As usual, the work ranged from good to great, and we've duly taken stock of our favorites from the show. Head over to the New Designers website for more about the show, or check out the ArtsThread blog for more info on the young designers in this year's show.

» View Gallery

wants a Sr. Brand Design Manager
in New York, New York

Did you know that Pepsi has a new design studio in SoHo? Did you know they're looking for a Senior level Brand Design Manager to work for Mauro Porcini, the new Chief Design Officer at Pepsi? Did you know this is your chance to get hands on and help lead the creative initiatives for all Pepsi products?

Now that you do know all this, spruce up your resume, double check your portfolio is looking great and Apply Now so you don't miss out on this amazing opportunity.