What's more fun that putting callouts on an ID sketch? Nothing. Everyone loves drawing that little squiggly line and a row of rakish text describing various design features, as in the sketches above from the supremely talented Rhett Miles' Coroflot page.

For the most part, we ID'ers use language on callouts that anyone can understand; but callouts on more complicated items—like, say, Wehrner von Braun's design for the Saturn V rocket—are too jargon-filled for anyone outside of the Johnson Space Center to understand. So Randall Munroe, the cartoonist behind XKCD and a former NASA roboticist, whipped up an annotated sketch—using only the 1,000 most-commonly-used words in the English language. ("Saturn" is not one of those thousand words, hence the spacecraft has been retitled the "Up Goer Five.")

Yeah—and that's just the nose. You'll want to hit the jump to see the entire drawing. (Or at least you'd better want to, since the thing is huge and took us forever to upload.) Look for the Hindenburg reference!

Core77's Hand-Eye Supply Curiosity Club is very enthusiastic about tonight's presentation from Anne Berblinger of Gales Meadow Farm.

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!

Anne Berblinger
Gales Meadow Farm: "What It Takes to Produce Great Vegetables"
Hand-Eye Supply
23 NW 4th Ave
Portland, OR 97209
Tuesday, August 6th, 6pm PST

Fresh vegetables produced by conscious, hands-on farming practices are tastier and more nutritious than fresh vegetables produced by industrial farming practices. In this talk, I will get into detail on the specific differences in practices, from the choice of seed to how the vegetables are harvested and cared for after harvest, and how the choices we make in our farming practices make a difference in the quality of the vegetables. I'll also give a few suggestions on how you can maintain that quality in your own kitchen.

Anne Berblinger and her husband Rene' began farming in the Gales Creek Valley in western Washington County, Oregon in 1999. Gales Meadow Farm produces more than 300 varieties of vegetables and herbs, including many heirloom varieties. The farm employs up to seven full and part-time workers, several of whom are aspiring farmers. They market directly to consumers through the Hollywood Farmers Market in Northeast Portland, the Cannon Beach Farmers Market, and the Hillsdale Farmers Market; and through sales to several fine chefs. Early in the season, they sell starts of almost 100 varieties of vegetables and herbs to market customers and growers.

Anne is integrally involved in the fresh, local, seasonal food industry cluster in the Portland region through the Farmer-Chef Connection, Oregon Tilth, Slow Food Portland, Friends of Family Farmers, and the farmers market community. She serves on advisory committees for Friends of Family Farmers and Adelante Agricultura. She recently finished serving a term on the board of the Hollywood Farmers Market, and she continues to serve on the HFM Vendor Committee. She had taught classes in vegetable varieties, seed selection, harvest techniques, and post-harvest handling. Anne will be teaching a class on Organic Farming and the Food System at Pacific University in the upcoming fall and spring semesters.

Our friends at Designers & Books are pleased to unveil a new iteration of their website, introducing a new layout with several new features as of the August 1 launch, with several more features and content areas to debut in weeks to come. As the premier website at the intersection of design and books, the site will now be updated daily (as opposed to weekly) with original content that goes beyond the world of design books to that of design in general, alongside book lists from leading designers, which Designers & Books has offered since it launched in February 2011

Of course, the content has grown from the lists—over 150 designers have shared their faves—to include reviews, interviews and even lists of lists, not to mention an IRL book fair last fall (an Online Book Fair—presumably the first ever—will tentatively launch in September).

It's not just a re-skinning of the site, just a new look to match their expanding world of content. The new episode of Debbie Millman's Design Matters podcast—part of a five-part series developed in a collaboration with D&B—is as good a place to start as any; the longtime Design Observer contributor chats with frog Founder Hartmut Esslinger about his latest book, Design Forward: Creative Strategies for Sustainable Change, among many other topics.

A website called Plastic Bag Ban Report documents that trend (encompassing paper bags, too) with a grinding regularity. Last month, L.A.'s City Council voted "No store shall provide a plastic or paper single-use carryout bag to a customer." This month, Santa Fe got plastic bags banned and attached a fee to paper bags. Now Laredo, Texas and Vail, Colorado are mulling over similar policies.

Just yesterday, an interesting development in recycling—one that you're bound to have mixed feelings about—as brought to our attention. As more individual businesses and municipalities are starting to ban both paper and plastic bags, or impose fees to discourage their use, it's pissing off a certain group of people. No, not consumers. Recyclers.

The Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, or ISRI, yesterday fired a blast out of their e-mail gun stating "Policymakers are banning bags and creating fees without considering the real impact on recycling, and the recycling industry... Rather than bans and fees that take away jobs and increase costs to consumers, policy makers should take advantage of the great economic and environmental opportunities associated with responsibly recycling these bags." They followed this up with some surprising statistics:

Our first Resource Furniture video, displaying some of the coolest space-saving furniture currently available, is still our highest-rated vid of all time. And it's not surprising why: In addition to the showroom demos, we've got company President Ron Barth discussing the RF philosophy and why space-saving matters in people's lives.

One of the company's trademarks is that you can't tell, just by looking at it, that the furniture transforms; the pieces are all brilliantly designed and engineered to hide their multifunctionality, and completely absent any clunky compromises. And under Barth's curation they've become the go-to providers for folks who want good-looking, functional furniture but live in less space than they'd like to have. Most recently, in partnership with the Citizens Housing Planning Council (a nonprofit dedicated to housing and urban planning), Resource Furniture has kitted out a killer transforming micro-apartment on display at the Museum of the City of New York. The 325-square-foot space, called "Launchpad," is part of the Museum's "Making Room: New Models for Housing New Yorkers" exhibit.

Check it out:

The exhibit runs through September 2nd.

Need to watch the original video again? Here you go.

wants a Service Strategy Intern
in Boston, Massachusetts

Are you passionate about influencing the world through the design interventions that you've helped develop? Are you an aggressive problem solver, the kind of person who can't stop thinking about a problem until you've finally created just the right solution?

Continuum's Service Design group is looking for an intern to support their service-oriented strategy. You will learn about the role of customer research in their work, sharpen your skills in rapid-prototyping and iterative design, and help them define signature customer experiences for their clients.

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Jonathan Ota and Ethan Frier are the brain and brawn behind Project Aura, a lighting system for the wheels of your bicycle. What once started as a design school experiment is now a product. They are finishing development of the prototype and are currently looking for another company to partner with to produce and distribute Project Aura.

Project Aura illuminates the wheels of your bicycle, increases your visual presence on the road and better communicates to drivers your presence and behavior. But it is more than just a beautiful bicycle light, it is a platform for drivers to better understand bicyclists. By illuminating the wheels, drivers are immediately aware that a bicycle in the road is, in fact, a bicycle, a human-powered vehicle with two wheels... no two ways about it. It's also smarter than your average bike light, conveying speed by changing color and automatically turning on and off based on ambient light and bicycle motion.

Freshman year at Carnegie Mellon, in the midst of a particularly difficult point in one of the first ever studio projects, a professor told us that design was like birthing a baby. "It's messy, painful, and takes hours upon hours of emotional and physical labor. But in the and you have a beautiful thing which you have created from nothing and brought into the world."

In a way, the birth of Project Aura was an accident, an unplanned pregnancy, if you will. It was our sophomore year of college, things get crazy, you know, and before we knew it we found ourselves with this little beautiful accident. It wasn't the actual product that was an accident—we worked tirelessly for months in addition to our regular studio and course conceiving the prototype. But its success was very much an accident.

Jonathan Ota and Ethan Frier are the brain and brawn behind Project Aura, a lighting system for the wheels of your bicycle. What once started as a design school experiment is now a product. They are finishing development of the prototype and are currently looking for another company to partner with to produce and distribute Project Aura.

Project Aura illuminates the wheels of your bicycle, increases your visual presence on the road and better communicates to drivers your presence and behavior. But it is more than just a beautiful bicycle light, it is a platform for drivers to better understand bicyclists. By illuminating the wheels, drivers are immediately aware that a bicycle in the road is, in fact, a bicycle, a human-powered vehicle with two wheels... no two ways about it. It's also smarter than your average bike light, conveying speed by changing color and automatically turning on and off based on ambient light and bicycle motion.

Freshman year at Carnegie Mellon, in the midst of a particularly difficult point in one of the first ever studio projects, a professor told us that design was like birthing a baby. "It's messy, painful, and takes hours upon hours of emotional and physical labor. But in the and you have a beautiful thing which you have created from nothing and brought into the world."

In a way, the birth of Project Aura was an accident, an unplanned pregnancy, if you will. It was our sophomore year of college, things get crazy, you know, and before we knew it we found ourselves with this little beautiful accident. It wasn't the actual product that was an accident—we worked tirelessly for months in addition to our regular studio and course conceiving the prototype. But its success was very much an accident.

The most talented creative minds can draw connections between seemingly unrelated things—like diapers and a field of crops--in order to produce new solutions. That's how Mexican chemical engineer Sergio Jesus Vaelasco created Solid Rain, a highly absorbent polymer scientifically known as potassium polyacrylate. Originally intended to make diapers more absorbent, Vaelasco's blend can soak up water to about 500 times its size, and it looks like large salt crystals:

For landscape architects and environments designers it could mean more creative options for plants in drought-heavy areas. Solid Rain could ensure that green landscapes exist and thrive even in water-scarce urban areas, and other places where greenery has a tougher time surviving and so is conspicuously missing.

And the stuff is fairly inexpensive: For $25 you can buy a pound of it, which can go a long way—10 grams of the crystals can absorb up to a liter of water.

When full of water the crystals form a translucent gel blob that can then provide moisture to plants for up to one year, depending on the size and amount of Solid Rain used. The water never evaporates or runs off—it is only absorbed by the roots of plants. And the plants don't absorb the polymer because it is, oddly enough, insoluble in water.

Photos courtesy of Ezra Caldwell

We've devoted a fair number of pages and pixels to that singular design object known as the bicycle, and whether you're a leisure rider or all-weather commuter, weekend warrior or retrogrouch, there's no denying the functional elegance of the human-powered conveyance. Thus, when Harry Schwartzman reached out to us about lending our support to the inaugural Bike Cult Show, a celebration of the beautiful machine and a local-ish community of individuals dedicated to building them, we were happy to support the cause.

"I think the bike is inherently the most perfect thing that people have ever designed."

So says Ezra Caldwell, who isn't exactly known to exaggerate, a framebuilder who holds a unique place among their ranks, not least for his unusual background. At least a couple of clichés—Jack-of-All-Trades and Renaissance Man—come to mind, yet his story is anything but: the son of a woodworker, he enrolled at the University of Arts as an industrial design major, only to discover that he disliked the curriculum and "ended up in the dance department somehow and got stuck dancing for 15 years." Despite the fact that Caldwell was talented enough to land a cushy part-time teaching gig after a decade in the dance world, he eventually found himself back in the shop; by 2007, he decided he liked bicycles (and had grown disenchanted with the performing arts) enough to dedicate his life to building custom bicycle frames.

Fast Boy Cycles was barely a year old when Caldwell received a devastating diagnosis of colorectal cancer; up until that point, about five years ago, he "really did get everywhere on a bike." I first learned Caldwell's story via this beautifully executed short film in the documentary series "Made by Hand":

If the short doc successfully transcends the tragic trope of a gifted artist stricken with a terminal illness—a trait that threatens to consume the victim's identity even as he accepts his fate—it's a bit surreal to see him in the flesh, and in high spirits no less, when I visit him in his basement workshop in an unassuming brownstone in Harlem. "It may not seem possible to believe, but I am so happy right now," he declares. "There are parts of it that really bum me out, but on balance, I would say I'm the happiest I've ever been."

This Wood Species series of entries comes to us from guest writer Rob Wilkey, an Atlanta-based woodworker and industrial designer whose expertise is in small home goods, furniture, and large installations.

Over the next few articles, we'll be analyzing a number of common North American wood species. This week's featured species:

Maple lumber is sold under two distinct names: Soft Maple, which is harvested from a number of different species and has a Janka hardness of 700 to 900lbf; and Hard Maple, which comes from the Sugar Maple tree and has a much higher Janka hardness at 1450lbf. Hard Maple is the maple of choice for most woodworkers due to its density and structural stability, although the softer maples make a fine substitute in less demanding applications. Soft Maple is also cheaper, partly due to the fact that the softer species tend to grow faster, but also because many of the harvestable Sugar Maples are reserved for the production maple syrup.

Maple is a pale cream color when first cut, but will darken to light yellow or pale reddish brown with exposure to sunlight. Maple is diffuse-porous with small pores, and sands to a smooth, even surface. It is easy to cut and shape, but can be prone to tearout due to its occasionally interlocked grain pattern. Despite its density, even Hard Maple is susceptible to decay and suffers from a fair amount of seasonal movement, especially when left unfinished. Maple lumber should be joined securely and finished thoroughly to prevent any shifting with changes in temperature and humidity. The various species of maple are known to exhibit a wide range of figured grain patterns and are also prone to spalting. Spalted and figured pieces of maple are usually more expensive than plain boards, but their striking visual effects can make a project very unique and eye-catching.

The wristwatch is perhaps second only to the wheel in terms of products that are in dubious need of reinvention, but designer Product Tank has a couple tricks up his sleeve (so to speak). Over on our forums, he was wondering if he had indeed invented a new enclosure system for a watchband: "I've come up with a way of putting the watch on, which must have been done before, but I can't find anything like it on internet searches, please watch the short video below and if any one has seen it etc., let me know?"

The packaging—a dead ringer for Apple products—is a nice touch. He also offers a preemptive disclaimer that the production version of the locking mechanism would be much thinner, and that the strap can be adjusted under the face of the watch.

wants a User Experience Designer
in Las Vegas, Nevada

Are you interested in joining a whacky, enthusiastic, and passionate user experience team? If you're looking for a challenging yet fun environment that encourages out-of-the box thinking, this could be the fit for you.

As a Zappos User Experience Designer, you will have the ability to reach millions of users each day by innovating and iterating on our expansive website and ever growing mobile presence. This role will allow you to dive right into crafting the experience of Zappos.com as you continue to develop and grow your own skills in the field.

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Jonathan Ota and Ethan Frier are the brain and brawn behind Project Aura, a lighting system for the wheels of your bicycle. What once started as a design school experiment is now a product. They are finishing development of the prototype and are currently looking for another company to partner with to produce and distribute Project Aura.

See Part 1 of their story here

As pleased as we were with the first prototype, it had a major drawback: the lights and the bicycle were one and the same. With that design, we would have to produce and sell an complete wheelset, which would require engineering beyond our expertise, not to mention a significantly higher price point. We want as many people as possible to have access to our lights, so we decided to design a product that can be retrofit to any bicycle wheel.

The new prototype required additional research into digital computation and battery power, as our first prototype detected speed with purely analog means, based on the voltage output of the hub dynamo. The new prototype was built on Arduino, a powerful hardware/software platform that grants non-technical people (such as ourselves) access to all of the possibilities of digital control in an easy programming environment. Switching to this digital model opened up a whole world of possibilities for the functions of the product, and it took a number of iterations to figure out all the electronics required. (Remember, we are just two design kids with no technical background.) For the longest time, we sat crosseyed, trying to decipher LED driver data sheets, debug grumpy poorly written code and hone our soldering skills. We have since hired people who are far smarter than us because we knew we were in over our heads.

Years ago, when we'd first learned that Ford's F-150 pickup truck was the best-selling automobile in the world--and purportedly had been for decades—our reaction was "Uh-oh." For a gas-guzzling behemoth to be flying off of dealer lots was, we felt, bad news for the planet. But global sales that year remained strong, and since no one buys a 14 m.p.g. vehicle because they enjoy spending a lot on fuel, it proved that there was worldwide demand for a big-ass vehicle that can haul stuff.

Strong demand means Ford will keep making the F-150, but it doesn't mean they have to keep making it the same way. The Dearborn-based manufacturer has set an ambitious target of shaving 700 pounds off of the 2015 model, and the current version is part of Ford's push to increase the amount of sustainable materials going into all of their cars.

To that end, the company is now starting to use a polypropylene composite made with rice hulls for the new F-150's wiring harnesses. A wiring harness might not sound like a large item, but spread across the breadth of their sales, it means the company is getting 45,000 pounds of rice hulls off of the street, where they would otherwise be used to commit violent crimes. Okay, maybe the crime part's not quite true, but the point is that they're using 45,000 pounds of a natural material that is ordinarily considered waste, and putting it to good use.

Furthermore the F-150 contains seat cushions, seatbacks and headrests made with soybeans; "the equivalent of 10 pairs of jeans" worth of recycled cotton for the carpet insulation and sound absorbers; recycled tires for the underbody shields; recycled plastic bottles for the wheel liners; and recycled post-industrial plastics for the interior finish panels.

"Researchers in Dearborn are constantly searching for the next sustainable material that can feasibly be used in Ford vehicles," writes the company. "Finding a source of material is only the beginning of the process, however, because before making it to production, components made from recycled content must perform as well or better than comparable virgin-grade material." Which is why the rice hull material was tested for more than a year; the final stamp of approval was announced on Tuesday.

Big-ass American trucks are not going away anytime soon, particularly when they deliver sales units to the tune of 650,000 a year. But it's nice to know they're at least attempting to make them greener.

Years ago, back in college, I remember rigging up a 16-foot length of LED rope lights along the sides and edge of my fixture-less closet. While it was particularly useful for finding random things (skeletons, if you will) I'd tucked into the back and off to the side, the diffuse ~3,000K glow wasn't particularly useful for distinguishing, say, my black hoodie from my navy blue one. (Solution: all black everything.)

If only I'd had the Philips LightStrips: Along with the awkwardly-named LivingColors Bloom, the recently-announced lighting solutions mark the expansion of the Dutch lighting innovators' Hue "Personal Wireless Lighting" system, which we covered when they debuted in late 2012.
The introduction of the new so-called "Friends of Hue" extends the powerful app-controlled lighting system to interesting new potential applications, though the examples in the teaser vid strike me as rather uninspired:

Fight commentator, podcaster and comedian Joe Rogan has referred to the Ultimate Fighting Championship as two guys climbing into the octagon "and essentially throwing their bones at each other." One could argue that the damage each fighter tries to inflict on the other is much more incisive than it is in American football, and one needn't go further than YouTube to see examples of those bones being broken in the ring; what's miraculous, given the forces every fighter's bones are subjected to, is how often they don't break.

Why don't they break more often, given the impacts they're sustaining? And what could an industrial designer learn from this? Dr. Markus Buehler, a civil engineer and materials scientist at MIT, may have the answer. Buehler's research specialty is as odd and focused as a Chuck Liddell overhand right:

...Our goal is to understand the mechanics of deformation and failure of biology's construction materials at a fundamental level. The deformation and failure of engineering materials has been studied extensively, and the results have impacted our world by enabling the design of advanced materials, structures and devices. However, the mechanisms of materials failure in biological systems are not well understood and thus present an opportunity to institute a new paradigm of materials science at the interface of engineering and biology.

In weight and external texture, a human bone might seem very similar to ceramics. But as Buehler noted in a 2010 research paper [PDF], "Catastrophic breakage of brittle materials such as ceramics is usually triggered by the rapid spreading of cracks." Bones don't shatter this way, at least not commonly. And this year, Buehler began to understand why. After exhaustive laboratory experimentation and analysis via supercomputer, Buehler "finally unraveled the structure of bone... with almost atom-by-atom precision."

Collagen party up top, hydroxyapatite business on the bottom

Buehler and his team have been investigating how two key constituents of bone—soft, flexible collagen and hard, rigid hydroxyapatite—work together, on a molecular level, to make bones extraordinarily resilient. Because of the specific way that the latter material is embedded within the former, "Hydroxyapatite takes most of the forces in the material, whereas collagen takes most of the stretching."

DesignCrowd is the name of a graphic design crowdsourcing venture that bills themselves as "The world's #1 custom design marketplace." Businesses seeking designs for logos, websites, T-shirts, flyers, brochures or business cards submit design briefs, then the site's 133,000-plus designers submit concepts; DC estimates that concepts start rolling in within hours of posting a brief, and that they will typically add up to over 100 submissions per project. Businesses can then request changes of their selectees, and eventually money changes hands. The cynical ID'ers among us can think of it like a version of Quirky where you don't need to know anything about injection molding. In any case, here's how it works:

To draw publicity, DesignCrowd recently held an informal, internal design competition asking its users to re-design iOS 7. The submissions are different enough that they're bound to be divisive. But it makes me wonder if Apple would ever let iOS users choose their own icons, and if people would be willing to pay others for them, as with ringtones.

Earlier this year, Fox News reported that Dutch researchers found that video games that promoted fruit consumption failed to influence childrens' snack choices: the study illustrated a correlation between food-themed 'advergames' and hunger, but not healthy snacks over their less nutritious counterparts. However, I was interested to learn that a separate study, conducted by Georgetown's Sandra Calvert, found a positive correlation between Pac-Man and snack choice (fruit vs. chips). Per the article, "It might have to do with the game. He's a very famous and familiar icon and he gets rewarded for eating healthy food and punished for eating unhealthy food."

Which is a long way of introducing a video game that actually does encourage healthy eating habits by gamifying them. "Pixelate," a project by RCA Design Interactions students Sures Kumar and Lana Z. Porter, is billed as a "Guitar-Hero-style eating game in which players compete in a one-minute showdown to see who can eat the most food in the correct order."

A digital interface built into a custom dining table shows players which foods to eat and when, while the game detects whether they've eaten the correct food by measuring the food's resistance on the fork. Potential applications for Pixelate include encouraging children to eat more healthy foods, helping to manage portions, and educating children and adults about nutrition. Built using Arduino and openFrameworks, Pixelate gameifies the act of eating, challenging players to consider whether they think before they eat, or eat before they think.

Kumar has happy to share the behind-the-scenes story behind "Pixelate."

During the prototyping process, we made a chart to document the resistance of different foods. We were determined to use resistance as the variable for determining what food is on the fork, so we picked foods for the game that were electronically distinct enough for the program to differentiate between them. There's also a lot of variability in the resistance based on the amount of food tested, whether it's been cooked, where it's been sliced, and how long it's been left out for a while. Strawberries, kiwis, and figs made it to the final menu.

We also noted a trend in the resistance of "healthy" versus "unhealthy" foods based on the water content/density of the food. The more artificial, dense, or processed the food, the less it conducted. Fruits and vegetables, which have a higher water content, were much better conductors. So the harder it is to pass electricity through a food, it seems, the unhealthier it is (not a rule, but definitely a trend).

wants a CAD sculptor/Digital 3D Modeler
in Cupertino, California

Your resume and portfolio might be pretty sweet right now, but imagine how super charged they'll be after you work on the Apple Industrial Design team. If you posses any level of experience with 3D Modeling and CAD Sculpting, working for Apple could be a reality for you.

They're searching for modelers with experience in industrial design, product design and computational geometry who are deadline driven, and possess excellent problem solving, organization, and interpersonal skills.

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