The sixth annual DesignPhiladelphia festival is running from October 7th through 17th this year, highlighting both the historical impact design has had on the city and the current scene, from graphic design to architecture. The event is produced in partnership with the University of the Arts.
Hit the jump for a sampling of some of the events.
(more...)
Coffee and friends: a collective show organised by DesignMarketo Opening night tonight- feels like a popping over to a friends house while they are having a lovely lively drinks party!
London Design Festival On-The-Go posts are sent to Core77 via MMS by Shai Akram. For more, follow us on twitter.
(more...)
It's rare that we see a fun car commercial that really captures the spirit of any given model, but this 60-second spot of the Mini Countryman tearing up Milan does the trick.
Also check out this fascinating behind-the-scenes look at how they achieved the visual trickery. We were surprised to see the guy "driving" a virtual car with an actual steering wheel around 1:45.
In the days before digital number readouts (we're talking 1950s and '60s) electronic devices that needed to display changing numbers used nixie tubes, which were little cathode tubes filled with a stack of individual, tiny neon lights shaped like the numbers 0 through 9. Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories got their hands on one of these and ripped it open to show you the cool guts.
The limitations of the technology are obvious--numbers further back in the stack appeared fainter than those up front, and the skinny "1" is double-tubed to produce the illumination required for legibility--but the aesthetic value of the fonts is awfully elegant. Check out the full tear-down here.
Design Lead, Nokia Ovi Suite
Nokia
Tampere, Finland
Highly experienced in tackling daily UX challenges, you are comfortable acting as a user experience lead towards design, development and product management. You've also gained experience in interaction design and the ability to translate business and consumer needs into new product concepts. In addition, you are familiar with Agile development methods and feel at ease collaborating with UI designers.
The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.
(more...)
Eindhoven grad and designer Thomas Linssen, operating under his Studio ThoL brand, has combined two old things--a chair and a bathtub--and combined them to make one new thing: A tub made using chairmaking techniques, and skinned in a polyester composite.
Romans carved tubs out of stone, cowboys used large tin buckets, suburbanites had porcelain; but as Linssen points out, "due to science there are now many more materials available." Read his full description of the project, which he terms an "evolution," here.
Anyone who's ever dealt with wood rot will tell you wood has no place in the bathroom, especially not as a vessel for water; but Swiss manufacturer Ammonitum gets around the wood vs. water problem with special manufacturing techniques.
Ammonitum's wooden sinks, bathtubs and toilet seats, after being glued up and shaped, are heavily polished, soaked in mordant solution, and covered in a minimum of ten layers of varnish. Finally they're coated in high-gloss NanoCover, a waterproof Danish solution used for everything from marine applications to anti-graffiti coatings. The whole process takes about twelve weeks, and the results are pretty darn eye-popping. Hit the jump to see more.
(more...)
We're proud to introduce Kevin McCullagh as the newest Core77 columnist! No stranger to our pages, Kevin has been contributing rich articles to Core77 for years now—most recently: Design Thinking: Everywhere and Nowhere.
After a grounding in engineering, marketing, academia, product design and design management, Kevin set up the trailblazing strategy team at Seymourpowell. Then in 2004, he founded Plan, a London-based consultancy that helps companies think and act more strategically about the design of their products. Clients include Nokia, Samsung, Lenovo, Orange, Psion, Yamaha and 02.
In addition to his consulting work, Kevin makes time to write, speak and tweet on design strategy and its relationship with business and society. He teaches at CASS business school, London, and is a visiting fellow at his old design faculty at Northumbria University.
Welcome Kevin!
(more...)
At the recent DMI conference in London, Geoff Mulgan, once Tony Blair's ex-strategy advisor and now a leading social entrepreneur, politely explained how 'social designers' had 'entered his space'... and failed. The reasons he gave were their naivete, their lack of knowledge about the public sector and their inability to effect change. While this caused some squirming in seats, it was a refreshing moment of critical, but constructive, feedback from a real power broker.
Social design is one of the new problem areas that designers have started to explore over the past decade, as the scope of design has expanded and the old disciplinary boundaries have blurred. Other new fields include service design, systems design, organizational design and design strategy. These interventions into new and more complex problem areas are sometimes called design thinking.
Whatever we call them, they present both opportunities and risks for design's trailblazers. The opportunities include a chance to expand the design industry into new, higher value disciplines. A risk, as Mulgan suggests, is that designers over-stretch themselves and damage their long-term prospects in these emergent domains.
(more...)
Like many guys (at least the ones I know), London-based designers Postlerferguson have a fascination cultivated from a young age: well-made machines of transport and weaponry. The duo fully embrace this boy-hood sense of wonder, and play with it in interesting ways. In the past, they have faithfully replicated AK-47's and Uzi's in paper, and constructed a full-scale model of the Concorde jet engine in styrofoam and paper (from plans purchased on Ebay for 6 pounds). The designers have now turned their attention to the industry of the seas with Buoy Lamps and Wooden Giants, both showing separately this week at the London Design Festival.
(more...)
The Human Printer, aka Louise Naunton Morgan, painstakingly prints unique one-off CMYK and B&W images by hand—dot by dot—to create a similar affect to pointillism, a technique originally developed by the Impressionist artist Georges Seurat in 1886.
As explained on the site, The Human Printer assumes the role of the machine and is therefore controlled and restricted by the process of using CMYK halftone created on the computer. The site even goes as far as to list other Human Printer "models," providing a short description of each one's particular printing style and character traits.
Louise Naunton Morgan, the founder of The Human Printer, was inspired to reclaim the art of lost production and chose to use her craft as a way to highlight this issue:
Today technology plays a huge role in everyday life...we have constructed these machines to aid our lives, making simple productions/tasks easier to accomplish. Our environment is now scattered with machine made artefacts, computer developed images and autonomous interactions—We are losing the essence of human production and craft to the machine, resulting in a soulless utilitarianism.(more...)
The Metropolis Next Generation Design Competition was set up in 2003 and has always aimed to promote environmental activism, social involvement and entrepreneurship in young designers. In partnership with US General Services Administration, Metropolis Magazine is launching its Next Generation 2011 Design Ideas competition under the theme GET ZERO, challenging entrants to transform an 8-storey 1960s era GSA office building in Los Angeles into a Zero Environmental Impact property. The deadline is set for January 31st 2011.
(more...)
At Core77, we're kinda jumping out of our pants with excitement about tomorrow's start of World Maker Faire New York, which will occupy the New York Hall of Science out in Queens Saturday and Sunday, September 25th and 26th. The list of events is beyond-huge, the list of makers is even huger, and with bookend keynotes by Chris Anderson and Mark Frauenfelder, the weekend is sure to be extraordinary.
Get your tickets at event, and hope to see you there!
(more...)
Today, we're proud to count Helen Walters among the list of Core77 regulars. Though she's provided plenty of design and business insights for us in the past, today she's become one of our columnists.
Helen is a design writer and editor—until July 2010, she was editor of innovation and design at Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Now, she's currently working as an editor and researcher at Doblin, a member of the Monitor Group. She's also the author of five design-related books and contributing editor to British design magazine, Creative Review. Find her daily on twitter.
Welcome, Helen!
(more...)
It took a moment of family trauma for Colonel Dean Esserman to figure out how he needed to transform the Providence police department. The upset arose when the police chief's son made a sad phone call from Washington D.C. to report a stolen bicycle. Esserman was pissed. Not with his son, of course (though he quickly and ruefully realized he'd be the one taking care of replacing the bike). But because it suddenly dawned on him that this type of situation epitomized what's wrong with the contemporary policing system.
"The reality is that in the post-modern era of America... we have lost the relationship with the community. When you're a victim of crime, big or small, you report it but you tell who you know. And you don't know the police any more," Esserman told the rapt audience at the recent BIF conference, a two-day celebration of often-unexpected innovation held at the Trinity Rep theatre in Providence, RI. (See also my report of some of the highlights of the first day.) So while policy wonks might wring their hands at the staggering statistics of unreported crime, Esserman saw a new story. "Crime does get reported—just not to the authorities, but to dads, moms, roommates, neighbors, pastors," he said. And that's when Esserman resolved to take action.
(more...)
Paola Antonelli has posted a fantastic interview with Core-fave Rob Walker. They discuss Significant Objects, a runaway literary project about how objects in the real world become significant through the telling of a good story.
Here's a tip-top excerpt; read the entire thing here.
PA - You knew this was coming: do you have a favorite object?(more...)RW - Yes, it's hard to answer and I give different and inconsistent responses when I'm asked this. One answer is my wedding ring, but the problem with that answer is that there isn't a great to elaborate on. So here's another answer. There's a book I have that used to belong to my father--it's called A Handbook For Writing, and it's just an old textbook, with a very plain cloth cover. On the back, my father, as a bored student evidently, drew a picture of a Bugs Bunny-like rabbit. I was absolutely thunderstruck by this when I first encountered it. I was a sullen twelve years old or so, and I couldn't believe that a) here was evidence of my father, a very upright fellow, having goofed off, and b) the drawing is quite good. His primary professional interest was (he's retired now) engineering, and I 'd never thought of him having an "artistic side," per se. So this object, because of how he'd altered it, had the effect of opening up a different side of him, and simultaneously opening up this whole mystery -- the mystery of what your parents were like before you existed, which is a difficult thing to comprehend at age 12. Anyway I took this book with me at some point and never gave it back. From time to time I take it off a shelf in my office and look at it. It still fascinates me.
On October 1, The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, in partnership with GE, hosts the conference entitled "Why Design Now? Solving Global Challenges," part of a program of events associated with this year's National Design Triennial. The theme celebrates and recognizes the power of design to transform the world--for the better. This, of course, involves all of us. In the spirit of global participation, we're proud to be hosting the live broadcast of the entire event, extending its reach beyond New York City to the rest of the world.
Tune in here anytime between 9am and 4pm EST on October 1st to catch up on the dialogue, or simply join in on the discussion using the twitter hash tag #designnow.
(more...)
Pivot Table by Studio Glithero, top. White Billion by Tina Roeder, bottom.
Fendi continues its collaboration with designers and artists with a show at Fumi entitled 'In Every Dream Home'.
Upstairs cabinets by Paul Keeley explore unusual material and colour combinations, while downstairs are the stunning new works by Studio Glithero, who used metal profiles to carve out plaster blocks sitting on slender wooden frames, pictured top.
(more...)
Our excitement for Maker Faire's New York debut this weekend was high before the science/craft/engineering/technology celebration even began, but now that we've experienced it, we're even more stoked. The spectacle opened today at the New York Hall of Science in Queens with tons of events, sideshows, demonstrations, lectures, and stuff galore to ogle and play with. Highlights included ArcAttack's performance with giant Tesla coils melding lighting and music, a Life-size Mouse Trap, a tent of home-made 3d rapid prototypers, and a huge shop selling everything from robot kits to books on cooking for geeks. Another great aspect is getting to see and talk with a bunch of amazing home-tinkerers about what they created. Most everything is kid-appropriate, but there are also lots of awesome kid-specific activities and demonstrations. The fun continues on Sunday from 10 am to 7 pm. Event list here, and updates here.
With things getting wrapped up in London, the city of Valencia is hoping to scoop up the attention of design community with a design week of its own, kicking off tomorrow. In recent years, neither Barcelona nor Madrid have quite managed to claim the widespread recognition of design enthusiasts, enjoyed by the likes of Paris, London and Milan. Could this be Valencia's time to make a mark on the global design landscape as a design centre for Spain?
(more...)
