wants an Associate Designer
in Benton Harbor, Michigan

From Amana to Maytag and KitchenAide, Whirlpool Corporation leads the industry the manufacturing and marketing of home appliances. If you're interested in taking your design career to the next level, this is the place for you.

Whirlpool is looking for an Associate Designer that will be responsible for creating the customer experience for the next generation of home appliances. This means you'll have to understand emerging trends, seek out real-life insights, conceive user interface design solutions, and assure uncompromising usability.

So gather up your work samples and proofread your resume one more time before you Apply Here.

Core77 is pleased to partner with Windows Phone to bring you a series of photo diaries this summer. Based on the theme of Reinvention, we're looking to capture the fleeting moments and highlight the often-overlooked facets of the world around us through the lens of the Nokia Lumia 928, especially in the low-light settings in which its camera excels. (All photos were taken with the Nokia Lumia 928 smartphone and are published without post production.)

Reporting by Glen Jackson Taylor

Summertime in New York City is all about the outdoor events: a healthy mix of free and paid concerts, cinema in the parks, on rooftops, dance parties, river cruises and events like next week's Summer Streets festival. The penultimate installment of our Windows Phone test shoots in the wild we headed to Williamsburg Park—one of Brooklyn's newest outdoor venues—to see one of the most influential bands of the 80s, New Order. Anyone who's seen a gig in previous years at the Williamsburg Waterfront (a few streets down) is bound to be disappointed by this venue as the replacement, there's no majestic view of the Manhattan skyline and the sound quality drops significantly towards the back but on the upside, the work-in-progress park has a 7000 person capacity and unlike the Williamsburg Waterfront, all money raised at Williamsburg Park will stay in the city.

The IDSA International Conference is just under three weeks away, and if you have yet to make plans to be in Chicago from August 21–24, we strongly suggest you do so ASAP. As always, the lineup of speakers is pretty stacked, and while we've crossed paths with many of this year's speakers over the years, the IDSA keeps it fresh with the likes of, say, Paralympian Blake Leeper. Similarly, we were interesed to see Dr. Vijay Kumar's name among the presenters. I'd been curious about his work ever since the first video on "A Swarm of Nano Quadrotors" hit the web over a year and a half ago—check it out:

The research, at UPenn's General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception Lab (GRASP for short), has come a long way since then, but Dr. Kumar noted that there is still a long way to go. After spending a recent sabbatical at the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, he will continue his research in robotics—specifically, swarm dynamics. His recent TED Talk illustrates the latest developments in his research on aerial robo-collaboration:

Dr. Kumar promises to deliver a "more technical" presentation at the Hyatt Regency Chicago on Thursday, August 22, where he'll share the latest developments on "Tiny Flying Robots":

There are a number of labs and schools across the globe that have been experimenting with autonomous quadrotors—small flying robots that communicate with each other. They have already accomplished a number of seemingly difficult tasks, like juggling balls or building a tower. Given the ability to hover and fly, sense objects and communicate, there are already a thousand creative tasks they could perform.

Conversely, Dr. Kumar has long rejected the common mischaracterization of UAVs as drones, and vice versa, echoing former Air Force Chief General Norton Schwartz's comment that these unmanned aircraft are, in fact, piloted. "This is one distinction that's quite sharp that I'd like to make: the drones that we hear about in the press are actually remotely-piloted vehicles; they're not drones, they're human-driven. So this is a misnomer, and the press really should not be using that [term to describe them]."

Once he had cleared the air (so to speak), Dr. Kumar proceeded to share his thoughts on the real-world applications of swarms of autonomous quadrotors.

Core77: This is a conference for industrial designers, but you are an engineer by training and trade. What lessons do you hope to impart on the design community?

Dr. Vijay Kumar: Design is a broad thing—I suspect that [Conference attendees] are primarily interested in designing physical things, and I think if there's one thing that's changed, design is no longer about the physical thing. Every physical thing has software embedded in it, [so now,] when you think about design, you want to consider co-designing the software piece and the hardware piece. Smartphones, for example, already incorporate a lot of that—thinking about the user interface—which is an important new direction.

Ben Mesker's Jokerboxes combine three of my favorite things: Industry-specific tools, objects designed to hold stuff, and the DIY ethos. Director of Photography Mesker has 20 years of shooting experience, and after the first 15 years, he had built up a steady list of "common problems found on sets everywhere." No stranger to a table saw, the handy Mesker then set about designing a portable, ultra-utilitarian way of having all the necessary grip equipment close at hand, as a way of solving those problems.

Mesker's solutions are called Jokerboxes, and while they outwardly resemble the de rigueur apple boxes found on every film set, they contain far more functionality. You need to see this explanatory video—in the following three minutes, you are going to witness an absurd amount of clever design thinking.

You catch those shots of Mesker hand-drafting? Sure to bring back some memories for a subset of us.

By the bye, Mesker has penned an article about an early on-set experience that shaped the way he approaches projects. While the central character is "The Fastest Gaffer in Pittsburgh," the lesson could well be applied to many a creative field, like industrial design, that requires technical acumen. Read it here.

Hit the jump for some cool shots of the Jokerboxes.

It's not exactly the Coroflot Design Salary Guide, but it's worth a gander. To promote their Galaxy S4, Samsung teamed up with Mashable to commission a series of unusual illustrations: Annotated drawings listing the costs of living for popular superheroes, comparing their start-up costs (from their origin years) to their current budgetary needs.

As you can see above, out of the five superheroes chosen—Batman, Superman, the Hulk, Wolverine and Spider-Man—it is the Dark Knight that has suffered the most from inflation and the unfortunate male urge to keep buying gadgets. And some of the purchases make you wonder—I can see shelling out 25 large for a hunk of Kryptonite, in case you're getting drinks with Superman and things get out of hand, but does Batman carry it around at all times?

The saying goes that "You can never have too many clamps." That's why you'll see collections like Lumberjock Canadian Woodtick's, below, decorating a woodworker's shop walls. Never knowing exactly what size clamp you'll need for any given project means you've really got to spend a lot to cover all the bases. Pipe clamps ameliorate the situation somewhat, but you've still got to buy the pipes—and carry them around if you need them for an on-site job.

Stanley Tools has thus introduced their new 2×4 clamp, designed for the tradesman on-the-go. The idea is that rather than needing to load the truck up with bar- and pipe-clamps, you bring only the 2×4 clamps to the jobsite; once there you grab something presumably in abundant supply—a 2×4, if you're putting up a house—and that becomes your "bar." Check it out:

The convenience of the portability cannot be denied, but I wonder how these things measure up during actual operation. I don't have much experience with clamps longer than 24”, but for those of you that do: How do you see these things working out? Do you think they'd be trickier than a pipe clamp to wield into place, requiring two people for the longer spans? What applications would you use or not use these things for?

wants a Sr. Front-End Developer
in New York, New York

How amazing are you at showing off your Front-End Development awesomeness? Have you already mastered the absolute latest JavaScript/HTML5/CSS3 skills and are looking for the next great challenge to conquer? Are you so good at collaborating across multiple departments and projects your coworkers wonder where you actually work?

If this sounds like you and you want to join the #1 non-fiction media company, read the rest of this stellar job description on the next page and Apply Today.

The 3D software market has never been in as much turmoil as it is right now. But this isn't meant to sound like a bad thing—quite the contrary. There was a time when CAD Jockeys stayed only in the program they knew and would snub their noses at anyone else that used another software that wasn't the one they loved. Oh, how times have changed—the past ten years have seen a variety of new developments in speed, functionally and accessibility.

Fast forward to today's market and any designer worth their salt will tell you that they use at least two to four different software packages in the design/engineering process. Any seasoned vet will acknowledge that no one program offers everything that a design/engineer might need on any given day. Data Interoperability has become the new phase for today and is meant in ways that refer much more to maintaining geometry without losing its "topology." (More on that later)

Among the many options in today's 3D software market is a relatively new/old-comer to the scene called solidThinking. I'd best describe this 3D design creative engineering package as jack-of-all-trades for the breadth of its offerings compared to some of its other mid-range competition. If you haven't had the opportunity to take it out for a test drive, here's a quick run down of some of its offerings:

It's a familiar scene, at least for those of us NYC residents who work in certain neighborhoods of Manhattan and Brooklyn: a gaggle of Europeans or Midwesterners, idling smack dab in the middle of the sidewalk, shopping bags akimbo, stalwart leader poring over a tourist map... oblivious to the workaday New Yorkers swarming around them, en route to a meeting or just out to coffee or lunch. We pride ourselves on our ability to navigate the city—most of us are happy to offer directions, power stride notwithstanding—yet there are times when we too are at a loss, chagrined to consult our smartphones for advice on how to get to that appointment above 59th St or that friend's place in the dark heart of Brooklyn or Queens. After all, we know all too well that the City suffers from a serious deficiency of pedestrian-friendly maps and signage.

With all of the fanfare (and backlash) surrounding the launch of New York City's bikesharing program, few noticed that the dozens of Citi Bike stations—which started popping up seemingly overnight—also included brand-spanking-new infrastructural element along with the pylon-like bicycle docks. Indeed, the debut of Citi Bike this past May doubled as a quiet way to introduce an appropriately understated article of new signage that nicely complement the stations yet are not contingent on the bikesharing system by any means.

Of course, the new NYC Wayfinding System received more attention when it officially launched about a month later, starting with a few of the steel-and-glass monoliths popping up in Chinatown. In addition to the minimalist maps at each Citibike station, WalkNYC signage is intended to facilitate navigating the city by foot—hence the name—whether they've just emerged from the subway or if they've pulled up curbside on a human-powered conveyance.

WalkNYC is New York City's standard for pedestrian wayfinding. WalkNYC provides a clear visual language and graphic standards that can be universally understood, encourages walking and transit usage by providing quality multi-modal information, and provides consistent information across a broad range of environments in the city. The first WalkNYC signs are being installed during the Summer of 2013 in four areas of the City.

New York City is well-known as a walking city, but pedestrian-oriented information is difficult to find and inconsistent where available. The City's streets are a mix of named and numbered streets, with a variety of building numbering conventions, with street grids merging at confusing angles. Even Manhattan's simple street grid is difficult to navigate when emerging from a subway station or transit hub. While the City has many signs directing drivers, these provide very little benefit to pedestrians. The goal of WalkNYC is to remedy this information and navigation gap.

In addition to the abutting grids of Chinatown, three other neighborhoods will see the new signage by the end of the summer—the commercial center of Herald Square, and the up-and-coming outer borough locales of Prospect Heights and Long Island City—to bring the total up to about 100 maps, with the goal of citywide coverage next year.

I, for one, also happen to find maps to be aesthetically pleasing, and Pentagram has done a nice job of presenting the information (gathered by cartographers T-Kartor), and their planned ubiquity upped the ante for the NYC-based powerhouse. Project lead Michael Bierut related that "I did the bags for Saks Fifth Avenue and the logo for the anniversary of Grand Central, and I encounter the results every day, often unexpectedly. It would really be painful if I was unhappy with they way they looked. Same thing in this case. Luckily, we're really happy with the way the signs look."

As with most understated designs, the elegant yet information-dense signage was a major project, involving more organizations than you can count on one hand: Besides Pentagram and T-Kartor, the NYC DOT also called on wayfinding specialists City ID, industrial designers Billings Jackson and engineers RBA Group to collaborate on the ambitious undertaking. (Together, they formed the a Volton-like design consortium known as PentaCityGroup—no joke.) Bierut spoke effusively about the team effort:

Mike Rawlinson at CityID is very experienced at this kind of large scale civic project and he put together the perfect team: very collaborative, very open minded. It helps when each team member really understands their discipline and their scope of work, as was the case here. And it also helps when the job is so big that your own scope keeps so busy you have no time to meddle in other people's scope. Our job, figuring out the elements of the system's graphic language, turned out to be a real challenge. Knowing that the planning, industrial design, cartography, and engineering were all under control made it so much easier to keep our own energy focused.

Want to get out of your apartment without going far? Why not set up camp right down the block? The designs this week prove that urban camping has never been easier—or stranger.

Walking Shelter photos by tin&ed

The Walking Shelter is part Inspector Gadget, part performance piece. Created by the Australia and Amsterdam–based design collective Sibling, the Shelter deploys from a slightly odd-looking pair of sneakers. From the netted back of each shoe, the wearer pulls out a single-person tent stored in two parts. When zipped together, it almost looks like the real thing, save for one key design feature: the covering relies on the wearer for support. So pulling up a tent also means assuming the (seated) position.

This was printed with the Mcor Iris; video after the jump...

Findings from a paper by a handful of intrepid engineers at Michigan Technical University have been making headlines this week, concluding that "the typical family can already save a great deal of money by making things with a 3D printer instead of buying them off the shelf." Per Michigan Tech News:

In the study, [Associate Professor Joshua] Pearce and his team chose 20 common household items listed on Thingiverse. Then they used Google Shopping to determine the maximum and minimum cost of buying those 20 items online, shipping charges not included.

Next, they calculated the cost of making them with 3D printers. The conclusion: it would cost the typical consumer from $312 to $1,944 to buy those 20 things compared to $18 to make them in a weekend.

Open-source 3D printers for home use have price tags ranging from about $350 to $2,000. Making the very conservative assumption a family would only make 20 items a year, Pearce's group calculated that the printers would pay for themselves quickly, in a few months to a few years.

Cory Doctorow notes (H/T to BoingBoing) that "I suspect that the real value of 3D printers isn't simply replacing household objects, but rather, in ushering in new ways of relating to objects—the same way that email and VoIP don't simple substitute for phone calls, but rather enable entirely different kinds of communications." Similarly, commenters also note that the value of 3D printing is in creating custom sculptures, toys and other things that cannot be found on Amazon and the like. (Other critics cite the fact that most household items have rubber or metal components that remain unprintable, at least for your average DIYer.)

Having conducted my own cost-benefit analysis that I could probably glean the takeaway messages of the primary source through a bit of Internet reserch, I opted not to put up the $31.50 for the full text of "Life-cycle economic analysis of distributed manufacturing with open-source 3-D printers."

In other news, the UPS Store is launching a pilot program for on-demand 3D printing at six of their U.S. locations, starting with San Diego. It's the first major news item for Stratasys following its blockbuster acquisition of Makerbot earlier this summer, though it's worth mentioning that the merger has no bearing on the UPS partnership—in keeping with their strategy to keep Stratasys and Makerbot relatively independent. Customers will have access to $15,900 Stratasys uPrint SE Plus machines for their rapid prototyping needs.

Photographer: Scott Serfas
Athlete: John Jackson
Location: Aniak, AK, USA

The physical design of the GoPro camera changed videography, as its small, wearable form factor gave rise to POV footage previously impossible to capture. It gifted us viewers with an entirely new visual experience of the world. Along those same lines, the software that enables what's known as sequential photography is allowing us to see things that the human eye cannot naturally perceive. And produced by the right shooter, those things are freaking beautiful.

Photographer: Christian Pondella
Athlete: Brandon Semenuk
Location: Virgin, UT, USA

A handful of those shooters around the globe are making fantastic use of sequential photography, as evidenced by the finalists in the Sequence category of the Red Bull Illume Image Quest 2013 photography contest.

Photographer: Zakary Noyle
Athlete: Gabriel Medina
Location: Oahu, HI, USA

The triennially-held competition, which will hold their award ceremony at the end of this month in Hong Kong, has posted a massive gallery of the top 250 entries across ten categories.

Photographer: Blotto Gray
Athlete: Jeremy Jones
Location: Anchorage, AK, USA

And speaking of ten, we had to show you our ten Sequence faves. Hit the jump to see the rest.

Wouldn't a world where we could retrofit everything be amazing? Maybe... maybe not. When it comes to adding a souped up engine to just about any transportation device, contraptions like this come to mind. Likewise, when it comes to added utility there's often the notion that we should just throw it out and upgrade for 'fully integrated' design. The Rubbee however, is a neat little gadget for the casual bike enthusiast looking to add some juice to their ride. At roughly the size of a loaf of bread, the device allows you to give your bike all of the perks of being electric with only about a minute of installation.

The Lithuanian company behind Rubbee set out to fill a gap in the market for an easily installed and flexible electric conversion kit for bikes. As some of you may know, converting your tried and true two-wheeler into a super-charged electric ride requires users to switch out a tire and hook up a battery cable—not an entirely quick fix for the casual cyclist looking to bounce between the traditional and electric. The Rubbee requires only that you clamp the box on the seat post, remove the fixation pin to enable suppression system, connect the throttle and turn the system on. You can also ride with without the drive engaged and pedal normally by replacing the fixation pin. On the whole, it seems like a pretty simple bike hack... though many normal conversion kits only take about four minutes more to install and offer double the speed.

Installing the Rubbee

wants an Interactive Art Director
in Salt Lake City, Utah

ThoughtLab has a rare opening opening for a kick-ass Interactive AD, and if you think you fit the bill and have the portfolio to back it up, they'd like to meet you.

As an Art Director at ThoughtLab, you will lead the charge and set the tone for fiercely unique interactive experiences, web designs, mobile app designs, brand identity and more.

If you are among the best at what you do you're invited to work at ThoughtLab in their creative environment where they've kicked cubicles to the curb and abolished long, boring meetings. Apply Now.

Note: Throughout this piece, I refer to simplicity in relation to the operation of devices or the experience of use, as opposed to a reductive or minimalist aesthetic.

As with everything involving language, a design brief brings with it a host of cultural nuances which reveal the true meaning of the request, a design direction that is rarely explicit but resides just below the surface, unspoken but evident. One of these unspoken standards is the drive towards simplicity.

In the world of manufacturing, productivity is king. The more one makes, the more one can sell, and the more one sells the more profitable the endeavor. At some point, one faces the limits of human ability, and we engage the services of tools and devices to bridge the gaps of effort and time. A lean system takes the critical path between volition and goal. This, in essence, is the machine ethic, the driving force behind industrial simplification, a force so intoxicating that it has found its way into almost every element of contemporary design.

Taskification

Without wanting to be too binary, there are two types of activity: those which may be considered 'compressive' (chores, tasks) and those which are 'donative' (fun and hobbies).

Tools have been a part of domestic life for hundreds of years, but it was the proliferation of labor-saving devices in the 20th Century that brought the machine ethic to the fore. Washing machines, vacuum cleaners and electric appliances became commonplace tools to help complete tasks around the home. This expansion was facilitated in part by the spread of domestic electricity (a U.S. growth of 46% between 1917 and 1930), and partly by the convenient nature of simplicity as a marketing tool. 'Simpler' is a useful metric for comparison, it shows a clear progression with the promise of an improved quality of life, and thus the drive towards ease of use became part of our collective conscience.

Every design cycle brought simpler and simpler solutions. Wrinkles were ironed out, generating new devices that promised to get things done in half the time or with half the effort. Over time, traditionally donative activities began to be approached with a compressive mindset. Designers and engineers began to focus on performance and efficiency - adjectives usually reserved for industrial projects. Almost every aspect of life underwent a process of taskification, and success was judged as such.

This notion persists today, with simplicity and ease going hand in hand with progress. By portraying an activity as a task, we can help drive products into use by focusing on their compressive performance. Convergent digital devices are particularly prone to taskification, given their multiple uses. For a device with which you watch movies, play games and converse with friends, 'multi-tasking' 'task switching' and 'taskbar' seem strange terms indeed, yet they pass by without a thought.

"...but, why wouldn't we make something simpler if we could?" seems like a perfectly reasonable question, and one which you may be asking right now, but we could also make that same thing taller, softer or more purple... Can it be that we have spent so long under the spell of the machine ethic, that we have become blinded by it?

Erich Huang (left) and Nils Gustafsson with Just Mobile's Encore iPad stand and Xtand Pro

This is the tenth—and final—profile in our series on 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.

If you've purchased a new smartphone or tablet recently, there's a good chance you've been disappointed by the quality of the available accessories—so many third-party cases, docks, touch pens, stands and other add-ons just don't display the same attention to industrial design as the devices themselves.

Just Mobile, a technology design brand founded in 2005 by Nils Gustafsson and Erich Huang, is one company trying to right this imbalance. "There has been an unbelievable boom in the market for the iPhone, the iPad and other mobile devices," Gustafsson says, "and a lot of companies are trying to get a cut of the accessories business. In this fast market, the quality is often missing. Most accessories don't reach the level of quality a company like Apple delivers in its hardware."

Just Mobile's latest releases include the AluPocket (above) and AluCup (below).

Quality design was the thing that first brought Gustafsson and Huang together. They met by chance in a German museum, where they found themselves admiring the same Wilhelm Wagenfeld table lamp. This sparked a conversation about their shared passion for stylish design and quality execution. Just Mobile initially focused on Windows mobile phones, but when Apple released its first iPhone in 2007, the company tabled every other project to focus on the new smartphone. The result was the wildly popular Xtand for iPhone. Today, the company has over 30 product lines for sale in Apple Stores and at the MoMA Design Store, among other outlets, as well as a laundry list of accolades, including several Red Dot awards. You know you're on to something when artists like David Hockney buy your AluPen, a pencil-shaped stylus for touch screens. "That was a great honor," Huang says.

It's very strange that Google Glass is not mentioned once in this news segment. Researchers at Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) have developed this eyeglass-based display, below, that uses images projected onto the lenses, and depth cameras focusing beyond the lenses, to create the functional illusion of operating a "floating touchscreen":

ITRI is simply the latest research group to use depth cameras to track our fingers, which then triggers a microprocessor to recognize that as an actionable "touch." Most recently we saw this with Fujitsu Labs' FingerLink Interaction System. So you might wonder why we're looking at this—isn't this just a combination of existing technologies that we've all seen before? It is, but so was the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad when they first came out.

Reporting by Kat Bauman

In its first iteration, the Leatherman multi-tool was a Double-Oh-Seven-worthy gadget idea, born out of a traveler's frustration and initially snubbed by major tool companies. These days, Leatherman is a synonym for any dozen-in-one dream tool you can fit in a pocket. The idea came to Tim Leatherman back in the 1970s, when the recent mechanical engineering grad and his wife Chau decided touring Europe in a questionable Fiat would be a good use of a year. Leatherman found himself regularly eyeballing the guts of the car, wishing for one tool he didn't have in his Swiss Army Knife: pliers.

Back in Oregon, he spent the next several years developing a design for the tool he had craved, patiently supported by Chau. After partnering with a friend with a machine shop, he pitched the first Leatherman multi-tool to knife and tool companies to resounding disinterest... until Cabela's unexpectedly ordered 200 for their mail-order catalog. They featured it on their back cover and ordered 500 more before the first order was filled. With that, the Leatherman snowball was off and rolling.

30 years later, the Leatherman Tool Company is still growing. Every Leatherman tool is made in Portland, OR, where the company employs 525 people full time, and runs 24-hour production at three locations. The smallest space is the site of the original machine shop, and the largest is the 90,000 sq. ft. factory, which I recently got to tour because I am an important regional figure.

Video Production by Outlier Solutions

After chatting with ID honcho Blair Barnes, I left the aggressively air-conditioned design and business offices and entered the stream of activity on the factory floor. Like most factories, this one is laid out for efficiency. Production flows from one side of the building to the other, starting with the lifeblood of the factory: a custom die shop. The die shop (curtained off to outsiders) houses what I imagine to be wizardly figures, conceiving, crafting and repairing the dies used in each machine. Having the designers and machinists in close proximity with production makes it quicker to design new dies and fix broken ones than sending things out of house.

wants a UI Lead
in Los Angeles, California

You have a broad range of talents, a deep passion for the history of design, a knack for understanding communication, a love of creating mind-blowing experiences, and a strong finger on the pulse of trends across entertainment, science fiction, video games, pop-culture, fashion, art, design and technology.

If you also have a strong desire to help DIRECTV build a meaningful, long-lasting relationship between their brand, millions of people, and the entertainment they all love, you are the new UI Lead for DIRECTV.

Apply Now.

This is the latest installment of our Core77 Questionnaire. We'll be posting a new interview every other Tuesday.

Name:Sandy Chilewich

Occupation: I'm kind of a hybrid. Designing is a huge part of what I do, but I'm also very involved in the business of design. So I'd say I'm a hybrid of a designer and a businessperson.

Location: Our design studio, customer service, sales and so forth are based in New York City. And then we have a really large facility in Chatsworth, Georgia, where we distribute and do a lot of manufacturing.

Current projects: We're in this kind of weird moment because we're about to start all of our trade shows for the fall 2013 introductions. We're about to photograph spring 2014. And we're designing fall 2014. So my head is always in three places at one time. It's terrible, because it makes your life move way too fast—you're always ahead of yourself.

Mission: Finding underutilized manufacturing processes that I can do something truly original with—but with the caveat that the product is not simply unique or beautiful but that it be functional and accessible, price-wise. I'm always trying to have the widest audience I can without compromising or diluting the aesthetics.

Left: Sandy Chilewich in her New York City office. Right: The RayBowl, introduced in 1997, was her studio's first effort.

When did you decide that you wanted to be a designer? Well, I have a wacko background. I had no idea what I was going to do. I barely got out of high school; I never finished college. I never expected to be a designer. I didn't even know what that was, really. I thought I would maybe be a psychologist, but I didn't really like school.

The one thing that was consistent through my life was that I always did artwork. And when I finally gave up on school, I thought maybe I'd be a fine artist. No galleries brought in my work, but one very important one said, "There's something very commercial about your work."

That made me really unhappy when I heard it, but I found myself taking a lot of the stuff I was doing in my artwork, which was very two-dimensional, and I started to design jewelry. That was in the mid-1970s. And while I was doing that, making my own stuff and selling to some fancy stores in New York, I met a neighbor in a loft building in Noho and we became friendly, and it's a long story but we started a company called HUE, which is still a very well-known brand. It didn't start out as hosiery, but it ended up being a very innovative hosiery company that we built from zero to $40 million when we sold it many years later, in 1991.

When I left HUE I had a lot of ideas, and I introduced the RayBowl. It was a very innovative concept and I got a lot of mechanical utility patents on creating a concavity with a textile. That kind of launched me into the design world. And in my search for other textiles, I discovered this material which I then started a very long love affair with, which is woven vinyl. I introduced my first product using that material in 2000. And I've focused on textiles since that point.

Education: As I told you, I'm a college dropout—and I'm really proud of it. I like to speak to students and tell them, "Listen, education isn't everything."

First design job: I never had a design job. I kind of scratched my way up.

Who is your design hero? There are so many. I love Issey Miyake. I love Lucienne Day. In every discipline I have different favorites. What inspires me is the unexpected, when somebody does something that I've just never seen before. I like originality, wherever that is.

A preview of Chilewich's new collection, which includes placemats in black-and-white mini basketweave and bouclé textures