SHADOW, Hunter Lee Soik and Jason Carvalho

Hunter Lee Soik is no stranger to the creative process. He's worked as a creative consultant on Jay-Z & Kanye West's Watch The Throne tour and is now taking on the app space. Soik and co-founder Jason Carvalho created SHADOW, an app that helps users record and track their dreams through a process of waking them at the perfect time so they can remember and record descriptions on their phones. (You know, those enlightening few moments when you can barely remember what was going on in your head overnight.) The goal: To create a community of dreamers with accessible data on dream patterns from users around the world.

The Kickstarter campaign launched this morning and has already raised $8,400 of its $50,000 goal. We took a few minutes to chat with Soik on his favorite parts of the app and where he sees the "dream community" in five years.

Core77: What was the process of creating SHADOW like and how did you test the app?

Hunter Lee Soik: We're focused on two things: Assembling a great team and building a great product. We've shared alpha versions of the app with the team and advisors, and their feedback has really influenced the product we're building. We're a small team, but we're all over the world. I'm in New York, my co-founder Jay is in Vancouver, our design and engineering are in Berlin. So geographically and culturally we have a lot of diversity, but we also have this dream in common. This variety of input has been invaluable, so we decided to open that feedback loop up even more and ask our Kickstarter backers to help steer the development by telling us which device they want the app on first.

wants a Jr. Product Line Manager
in San Clemente, California

Since 1996, Flow Sports, Inc. has been making it possible for action sports enthusiasts to shred up the mountain tops and cut through some serious freshies with style and ease. They're looking for a Junior Product Line Manager to take on the entire product lifecycle of their Flow Bindings category so this is your chance to jump on a seriously cool opportunity.

You're going to need experience in 3D-CAD software (SolidWorks), Adobe CS5, MS Excel and Powerpoint, plus an easy going attitude in a fast-paced, multi-tasking, multi-cultural environment, but for the right person, that's a piece of cake.

Apply Now

This is the eighth post in our interview series with ten influential I.D. curators, retailers and creative directors. Yesterday, we talked to Herman Miller's Gary Smith.

David Alhadeff opened The Future Perfect ten years ago on a quiet corner in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with the intention of providing a platform for local designers to show and sell their work. Channeling his love of architecture, interiors, art history, industrial design and graphic design, Alhadeff's storefront and his tightly edited selection of furniture and housewares put Brooklyn design on the map. The Future Perfect has since expanded beyond its modest roots, with locations in Manhattan and San Francisco and designs from all parts of the world, yet Alhadeff continues to champion emerging designers and maintain TFP's integral sense of community.

How do you find about new designers?

I travel and visit trade fairs, and I do some amount of scouring in magazines and on the Internet. I sometimes find that to be a little disheartening. In terms of editing and curating a retail environment, I have to think about stuff being in the store for a very long time. With a magazine or Internet article, I can get swept up in the story, and sometimes I'm getting swept up for the wrong reasons. So it can be the wrong place for me to learn about something new. But I like The World of Interiors and Elle Decoration UK, and I've started looking at Elle Decor US as well. Online, I look at Dwell, Core77, Designboom, Highsnobiety, NOTCOT.

I also find out about a lot of designers through referrals. Friends, clients that we work with, interior designers, and photographers—they come into contact with the product in a very different way than we do, and oftentimes have an opportunity to see things that just aren't going to be in stores. The photographers and the stylists are an interesting group of people that I listen to very closely. They're curating in their own way, so they get it.

I always go to Milan to the Salone, and I started visiting the London Design Festival on a yearly basis as well. I make trips to international and domestic partners that we work with, and I try to do a trip every year someplace I haven't visited to get into a local community and do studio visits. This year I'm going to Tokyo.

The last way would be through people who submit their work. We don't have time to respond to every submission, but we look at every one. We do find diamonds in the rough.

Inside The Future Perfect's Manhattan store

What kinds of design are you looking for at the moment?

I'm looking more at designer talent. It isn't necessarily collections to purchase; it's people to collaborate with. We launched our in-house collection last May and we're continuing to expand that. So for me it's more about looking at broader talent bases. I've always considered The Future Perfect to be about the relationships I have with the people, and the makers I work with. That defines what we do here.

I will say, there's a certain type of design that's happening now. There's a return to craft along with the accessibility of new types of machinery and technology. It's pushing design in two different directions, but they are merging and converging. For example, people are having parts machine-made but then using them in forms that are super organic and beautiful. This is something that's new and fresh. What I'm seeing in our community—or with the designers we work with, at least—is a use of the two in combination. A lot of it is just about accessibility. These machines have been around for a while but young, emerging designers just starting out haven't had access to them. On the flip side, there are things that are just entirely crafted. Piet Hein Eek's work, for example.

The Future Perfect will begin carrying Justine Ashbee's Native Line weavings this fall.

Over the next few weeks we will be highlighting award-winning projects and ideas from this year's Core77 Design Awards 2013. We will be featuring these projects by category, so stay tuned for your favorite categories of design! For full details on the project, jury commenting and more information about the awards program, go to Core77DesignAwards.com.

• Project Name: Clean Team
• Designers: IDEO.org + Unilever and Water & Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP)

Clean Team is an affordable in-home sanitation system in Ghana that offers residents an alternative to unsanitary public latrines. Essentially, a portable toilet is delivered to customer homes and serviced three times a week. Families pay on an incremental basis.

- How did you learn that you had been recognized by the jury?

Clean Team was notified that we had been recognized for the Core77 Design Awards from IDEO.org's marketing and communications team.

- What's the latest news or development with your project?

Clean Team is rapidly scaling in Kumasi since the end of the pilot, with another 120 new Clean Team toilets installed just in the past month of July. The business has recently received a shipment of 1,000 new toilets and plans to have at least 1,000 total installed in homes by the end of the year, reaching out and providing improved sanitation solutions to over 7,000 Ghanaians. With scale, Clean Team is proud to maintain a positive customer experience. In the words of one of our clients: "Clean Team is hygienic, ensures privacy, safe and has provided me something to be boastful about as these days it is the only predictable and dependable service I get."

- What is one quick anecdote about your project?

When it came for prototyping, the IDEO.org design team arrived in Kumasi to test four toilet prototypes. Industrial designer, Danny Alexander, explains that "one of our concepts going into prototyping was a water flush toilet, similar to a high-end camping toilet. It had been the clear favorite in the drawings we shared earlier in the process. When we brought prototypes to the field, though, we realized very quickly that water flush toilets would do more harm than good."

After leaving water-flush and non-flush toilet prototypes in user's homes for a few nights, the team returned to check on the toilets. "All the water-flush toilets had overflowed--what a disaster!" Between that, the complexity of use, the lower capacity of the tank, and the need to use expensive water to flush their waste, users of water-flush toilets unanimously rejected them. Everyone wanted the simplicity of non-flush toilets. Had we not physically tested the toilet prototypes with users, though, we would have thought water-flush toilets were the answer!

- What was an "a-ha" moment from this project?

During the design process, WSUP, Unilever, and IDEO.org were driven by the fundamental belief that every family deserves a toilet. This project was as much about providing dignity as it was about providing clean sanitation for our clients. So one of our biggest a-ha moments came when thinking about our branding and business design strategy. Seeing as our product provided dignity for families, our brand had to follow suit. For this reason, Clean Team's business design was heavily structured around the strength of its service—following through with promises in a professional manner and making people the cornerstone of the design. To achieve this, we found that an important part of business development would entail Clean Team making an often stigmatized and undesirable job into an esteemed profession.

View the full project here.

Over the next few weeks we will be highlighting award-winning projects and ideas from this year's Core77 Design Awards 2013. We will be featuring these projects by category, so stay tuned for your favorite categories of design! For full details on the project, jury commenting and more information about the awards program, go to Core77DesignAwards.com.

• Project Name: Clean Team
• Designers: IDEO.org + Unilever and Water & Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP)

Clean Team is an affordable in-home sanitation system in Ghana that offers residents an alternative to unsanitary public latrines. Essentially, a portable toilet is delivered to customer homes and serviced three times a week. Families pay on an incremental basis.

- How did you learn that you had been recognized by the jury?

Clean Team was notified that we had been recognized for the Core77 Design Awards from IDEO.org's marketing and communications team.

- What's the latest news or development with your project?

Clean Team is rapidly scaling in Kumasi since the end of the pilot, with another 120 new Clean Team toilets installed just in the past month of July. The business has recently received a shipment of 1,000 new toilets and plans to have at least 1,000 total installed in homes by the end of the year, reaching out and providing improved sanitation solutions to over 7,000 Ghanaians. With scale, Clean Team is proud to maintain a positive customer experience. In the words of one of our clients: "Clean Team is hygienic, ensures privacy, safe and has provided me something to be boastful about as these days it is the only predictable and dependable service I get."

- What is one quick anecdote about your project?

When it came for prototyping, the IDEO.org design team arrived in Kumasi to test four toilet prototypes. Industrial designer, Danny Alexander, explains that "one of our concepts going into prototyping was a water flush toilet, similar to a high-end camping toilet. It had been the clear favorite in the drawings we shared earlier in the process. When we brought prototypes to the field, though, we realized very quickly that water flush toilets would do more harm than good."

After leaving water-flush and non-flush toilet prototypes in user's homes for a few nights, the team returned to check on the toilets. "All the water-flush toilets had overflowed--what a disaster!" Between that, the complexity of use, the lower capacity of the tank, and the need to use expensive water to flush their waste, users of water-flush toilets unanimously rejected them. Everyone wanted the simplicity of non-flush toilets. Had we not physically tested the toilet prototypes with users, though, we would have thought water-flush toilets were the answer!

- What was an "a-ha" moment from this project?

During the design process, WSUP, Unilever, and IDEO.org were driven by the fundamental belief that every family deserves a toilet. This project was as much about providing dignity as it was about providing clean sanitation for our clients. So one of our biggest a-ha moments came when thinking about our branding and business design strategy. Seeing as our product provided dignity for families, our brand had to follow suit. For this reason, Clean Team's business design was heavily structured around the strength of its service—following through with promises in a professional manner and making people the cornerstone of the design. To achieve this, we found that an important part of business development would entail Clean Team making an often stigmatized and undesirable job into an esteemed profession.

View the full project here.

We've seen our healthy share of design conferences over the years, but a Better World by Design in Providence, Rhode Island, takes the cake for top-notch interdisciplinary social innovation. Begun just six short years ago as a collaboration between students of the Industrial Design department at the Rhode Island School of Design and engineering at Brown University, the conference has since grown into a three-day event boasting some serious firepower in their recently announced line-up for 2013 covering a multitude of disciplines.

This year's conference will take place from September 27–29 at locations on the campuses of both the Brown University and RISD, who will host some of the major movers and shakers in design, engineering, education and more to share their ideas, stories and plans for action under the event's theme of "Pause + Effect."

The theme for this year's conference is Pause + Effect. It is a decision to make reflection a part of your creative process. Not stagnation, but rather, a state of dynamic equilibrium. Our conference is an opportunity for attendees to pause—reflect, revise and redirect their perspectives—and effect change wherever they go from here.

We asked the a Better World content team to give us a sneak peak. Here are a few of our most anticipated speakers and workshops.

Speakers Former AIGA President Doug Powell and Lead Breaker Juliette LaMontagne

Speaker Spotlight on Juliette LaMontagne: Breaking New Ground

The Breaker model of teaching and learning takes its lead from designers and entrepreneurs because these methods and mindsets help young people create value for themselves, for organizations, and for the world. Each short-term project answers a different challenge, convenes a unique set of collaborators and industry professionals, and results in viable business solutions. LaMontagne will discuss Breaker's most recent challenge, The Future of Stuff - a collaboration with the d.school at Stanford that tested a hybrid (online/offline) version of Breaker's design-driven model.

Speaker Spotlight on Doug Powell: Social Design - Where Do We Go From Here?

How does a designer who has been self employed for his entire career enter a new chapter, with a new employer, in a new city? Moreover, where does his passion for design-driven social change fit into this new experience? Doug Powell will tell the story of his life and career transition and connect this all to the emerging practice of design-driven social change.

Image by deviantartist Ham549

Last week we revealed the first half of the top ten greatest moments in materials' science history, according to The Minerals, Metals and Materials Society. This week we've got the remaining top five:

5.) Optical microscopy. OK this one is definitely big. Microscopes changed everything. Suddenly we were able to see a world 200+ times smaller than what we can see with our natural eyes. It was developed by Anton van Leeuwenhoek around 1668, and the design of the optical microscope has pretty much remained the same since. Even though Leeuwenhoek may not have "invented" the microscope, he is officially credited with popularizing it (and as we know from Apple, popularizing something is as important as inventing). The oldest drawing known to have been made with a microscope is the one on bees, up above.

4.) Glass. After ceramics, glass is the greatest non-metallic engineering material, according to The Minerals, Metals and Materials Society. Of course volcanic glass has been naturally found and used since the Stone Age, to make sharp cutting tools. But the first man-made form is thought to come from Northern Syria but glassmaking was practiced more formally in Iran. Apparently the elements of early glass included lime, soda and silica (beach sand). It wasn't until the 19th Century that glass became more of an aesthetic art form, including jewelry and sculpture. To be sure, that in scientific terms the word 'glass' actually refers to a wide range of materials. Basically every solid that has a non-crystalline structure, which means its atoms are not arranged in a lattice form, and can move from a brittle to a molten-like state is called a glass.

As industrial designers inspecting existing products, we can tell the difference between stainless steel and aluminum; we can see that a piece of furniture a non-designer friend thinks is oak is actually veneer-covered particle board; squeezing a bottle, we can distinguish between PET and polycarbonate; and with columns like Rob Wilkey's series on wood, even a noob can learn to identify various species by grain. Being able to quickly identify materials we've worked with becomes second nature.

What is the equivalent in graphic or interior design? We suppose it would be the ability to identify precise color tones like, say, by looking at the seats on the F-train and nailing the Pantone number of that particular orange. Well, with a hopefully forthcoming device called the Nix Color Sensor, that may soon be possible for all of us.

The small, handheld device is basically a real-world scanner that you place against an object, and the Nix then transmits the exact RGB values to your smartphone. There are existing smartphone apps that do this via the phone's camera, but the Nix is calibrated to be precisely accurate. This stems from one of the product's motivating influences: A friend of the developers' creates custom concealing makeup for burn victims, and needed an accurate, inexpensive way to scan the undamabed portions of her customers' skin.

After securing a grant that enabled them to complete the necessary scientific research, the Nix team is now seeking Kickstarter funding for the second half of development: Paying for the molds, sourcing the components and finishing the app.

We dig that the developers really thought the app through, particularly for interior designers: After you scan a color, the app helps you find a matching paint manufacturer and directs you via map to where you can actually buy the stuff. Check it out:

At press time the Nix had CND $19,000 pledged towards a $35,000 target with 28 days left.

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.

Well folks, we've arrived at the final installment of this series on commonly imported wood species. This week's featured species:

Like many other popular imports, teak has several impostors. Its name is used to sell a number of other species such as 'Brazilian Teak' (Cumaru) and 'African Teak' (Afrormosia). Genuine teak, also called Burma Teak, consists of only one species: Tectona grandis. This wood grows naturally in the tropical regions north of the Indian Ocean, but is now cultivated on plantations in Asia, Africa and South America. In fact, naturally-occurring or 'old-growth' teak is very difficult to find nowadays as plantation teak has dominated the marketplace. While plantation-grown teak has the same working properties as natural teak, it tends to lack the deep coloration and beautiful grain patterns found on old-growth teak. One property that all kinds of teak possess, however, is an extremely high resistance to rot and decay, making it the lumber of choice where water exposure is an issue. Wooden boat decks are almost always constructed using teak planks.

Teak is easy to work, relatively lightweight, and suffers from minimal seasonal movement. With a Janka rating of 1000lbf, the wood is just hard enough to resist dents and scratches while still being easy to cut and shape. Teak is diffuse-porous with medium pores, and is usually straight-grained. All of these factors make the wood ideal for most woodworking processes, however it will not sand to a smooth surface due to the numerous open pores. Teak's incredible decay resistance is mostly attributable to the wood's high oil content which, oddly, has little negative effect on gluing the wood. While other woods share teak's high decay resistance, few are as abundant, workable, and lightweight as teak. The low weight of teak is especially important for its use on outdoor furniture. The weight difference between teak and other weatherproof woods, such as ipe, can mean a difference of several pounds on something as small as a dining chair.

In Kentucky, a revolution is brewing—literally. "Craft beer is encroaching on bourbon territory," says Louisville local news station WDRB, "and a two-week festival in Louisville is out to prove it." This week Craft Beer Week kicks off in Kentucky's largest city, which produces one third of the world's bourbon supply. But until the festival runs its course, the American whiskey variant will be taking a back seat to beer, as 70 different events are attended by dozens of local craft breweries—and at least one talented glassware designer.

Louisville-based Matthew Cummings runs The Pretentious Beer Glass Company, and his handcrafted creations are as different from steins, tumblers and growlers as it gets. Cummings' Dual Beer Glass is the one that most caught our eye, designed for you Half and Half or Black and Tan drinkers.

It is a cylindrical beer glass with two separate chambers inside that combine into one towards the lip. I first began working on this design after having a bartender incorrectly pour a Half and Half, blending the two beers together. This glass is not just the solution to the problem of using a jig to properly pour those types of beers, but it allows you to mix any two beers, even ones that have similar viscosities. A wonderful secondary benefit to this glass is that you can smell the bouquet of both beers simultaneously, where normally you only smell the beer that settles on top. Dimensions vary more on this glass than the others due to production techniques, and are approximately 5-6" tall and 3" wide, holding 10-12 oz.

Check out the rest of TPBGC's creations here.

wants a Bag and Case Designer
in Portland, Oregon

LOOPTWORKS is an innovative, disruptive, passionate Upcycling company that creates its products for the urban/outdoor lifestyle. Their ethos is framed by one simple concept; Use only what already exists. It is the most environmentally responsible way to create best in class products that are visually stunning, functionally superior and conserve water and fresh air.

They're looking for a an extraordinary designer that not only has an excellent sense of style, construction, form and function, but also has the ability to blend a variety of materials to create an amazing confluence of design that others simply did not see.

Check out the Mad Skills they're searching for on the next page and Apply Now.

Photo by Michelle Qureshi

This is the ninth post in our interview series with ten influential I.D. curators, retailers and creative directors. Yesterday, we talked to The Future Perfect's owner, David Alhadeff.

An accomplished writer, critic, educator and graphic designer, Ellen Lupton has been a curator of contemporary design at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, since 1992. With an interest in design across media, and a diverse, public-minded approach to her work, Lupton is busy curating an upcoming exhibition of product design slated to open in fall 2014, after the museum completes its three-year renovation and expansion. She also directs the graphic design M.F.A. program at Maryland Institute College of Art.

How do you find out about new designers?

From magazines. I'm a big fan of Metropolis. The New York Times, of course. Eye for graphic design is very good. Print. Wired. And then websites like Designboom, Core77, Design Observer, manystuff, and Fast Company. I look at [Adobe's] Behance—I like that you can see lots of people in an almost democratic way, and it's very nice for looking at work by younger people. Pinterest is very important to me; I look at that a lot and post a lot to it. Also, press releases from designers—those are actually very useful.

From going to museums and shops. From word of mouth and talking to colleagues and students. I'm a teacher so I'm around young people and I hear what they're talking about; that's really important. From conferences. That's a place where you hear somebody talk that you wouldn't have encountered otherwise. That's really valuable. People should get out there and present and participate. It's another way to show your work and share your work.

Another source for me is competitions. I really encourage people to participate in competitions; they're an important source for curators.

And, finally, books. They still provide a depth of analysis and visual richness that you don't find on the web. A few that I purchased in the last year to learn about new developments in design are Lidewji Edelkoort's The Pop-Up Generation: Design Between Dimensions; the graduation book of the Design Academy Eindhoven; Michael Haverkamp's Synesthetic Design; and a fascinating book about poster design called Poster No. 524: The Deconstruction of the Contemporary Poster.

Over the next few weeks we will be highlighting award-winning projects and ideas from this year's Core77 Design Awards 2013. We will be featuring these projects by category, so stay tuned for your favorite categories of design! For full details on the project, jury commenting and more information about the awards program, go to Core77DesignAwards.com.

• Project Name: CrossTrainer
• Designer: Andrew Lowe
• Carleton University School of Industrial Design

The CrossTrainer Wheelchair is designed to introduce disabled youth to adaptive sports. Its' innovative design qualifies it for government funding grants for daily use wheelchairs, but packs all the features of a sports wheelchair. The unique camber adjustment allows changes to the angle and position of the wheels, exponentially increasing functionality. A range of sports can be played with interchangeable front ends. Sound mass production principles lower the cost of the chair versus existing wheelchairs. These factors combine to create a wheelchair that greatly increases the accessibility of disabled sport to youth.

- How did you learn that you had been recognized by the jury?

Constantly Ctrl-R-ing the awards page waiting for the winners to be announced.

- What's the latest news or development with your project?

I've continued to optimize the design in my own time: trying to reduce material usage, simplifying the potential tooling, reducing weight and lowering cost of the wheelchair.

- What is one quick anecdote about your project?

After a strenuous day in the university shop machining components for the wheelchair, I realized I had previously set up a date with a lady-friend. With no time to go home and change, I showed up covered in aluminum chippings from the milling machine and smelling strongly of cutting oil. I was told that the sparkly bits of aluminum "suited me" and that cutting oil made quite the cologne.

- What was an "a-ha" moment from this project?

There were two huge "a-ha" moments during this project. The first was the basic concept for the CrossTrainer Wheelchair; if most sports wheelchairs share common parts, why not combine them into one wheelchair with interchangeable components? The second happened in the reception area of a swanky company while sitting in an Eames Aluminum Group chair. I thought to myself, "If Eames can die cast a chair, why can't I die cast a wheelchair?"

CrossTrainer also received a Runner-Up mention in the Student Consumer Products category, as well as a Notable mention in the Student Equipment category. View the full project here.

If you're checking out grad schools for next September, be sure to take a look at the MFA in Products of Design program at SVA in New York City. Chaired by Core77's Allan Chochinov, the department will welcome guests to its Information Session/Open House on Saturday, November 9th, from 11am to 1pm. Meet faculty and students, tour the department and Visible Futures Lab, and preview projects and the curriculum. Here's a bit more:

"Please join us for our Open House and Information Session. The MFA in Products of Design is an immersive, two-year graduate program that creates exceptional practitioners for leadership in the shifting terrain of design. We educate heads, hearts and hands to reinvent systems and catalyze positive change.

Students gain fluency in the three fields crucial to the future of design: Making, from the handmade to digital fabrication; Structures: business, research, systems, strategy, user experience and interaction; and Narratives: video storytelling, history and point of view. Through work that engages emerging science and materials, social cooperation and public life, students develop the skills to address contemporary problems in contemporary ways.

Graduates emerge with confidence, methods, experience and strong professional networks. They gain the skills necessary to excel in senior positions at top design firms and progressive organizations, create ingenious enterprises of their own, and become lifelong advocates for the power of design."

Check out all the goings on at the department goings on at the site and on their blog.
RSVP for the Open House/Information Session event here.

An electric bicycle parked in Shanghai. Image CC BY-SA Lars Plougmann.

Here at Core77, we've featured a number of electric bicycles. In our 2012 Year in Review, we noted that vehicles are increasingly going electric, from motorcycles to cars to bicycles. And earlier this year we took a look at the nCycle, a notable electric bike concept that's sleek and modern like an Apple device. From folding e-bikes to retrofittable motors, electric assistance remains a holy grail for commuters who want the convenience of bicycles without the sweat equity demanded by having to pedal to work.

A recent piece in Atlantic Cities pointed out this emergent trend: "The electric bicycle has so far remained a novelty item in the United States, but manufacturers, retailers, and analysts say that will soon change. Fueled by soaring numbers of bike commuters and rapidly evolving battery technology, the electric bicycle is poised for a breakthrough, if it can only roll over legal obstacles and cultural prejudices." The article goes on to explore some of the bigger challenges, like legal restrictions. These barriers have prevented wide adoption in a city like New York, which is dense and flat enough to encourage electric bike usage.

It's easy to see these electric bicycle hype stories as just that: hype. But it's impossible to deny just how popular they are in other contexts. As the article points out, electric bikes are very popular in Denmark and Germany, both countries that have historically been friendly to cyclists. (Of course, this recent column in the Copenhagen Post suggests Danes are still adjusting to the idea of electric bikes.)

Denmark may have the lockdown on Lego, but a neighboring country is also producing something children can use to build things: Sand. No ordinary sand, of course. A company called Delta of Sweden, which manufactures modeling compounds for use in the educational, medical, therapeutic and arts & crafts markets, has an invention called Deltasand. The stuff has been licensed by several toymakers, most notably Colorado-based WABA Fun, who have produced this video demonstrating the product (rebranded "Kinetic Sand"):

What ingredient could the manufacturers have possibly added to make the sand behave that way? You probably noticed the video mentions the product is 98% sand, but neglects to tell you what the rest of it is—leading one cynical YouTube commenter to respond with "98% pure sand, 2% deadly chemical compounds."

This time last year, designjunction established itself firmly as the design show of London Design Festival, with a hearty mix of contemporary manufacturers and emerging design talent showing their wares under some expert curation.

Returning to the industrial surroundings of the old postal sorting house in central London, the show opened its doors to an expectant public as the sun set on the fifth day of LDF.

We were delighted to see Paul Cocksedge's Vamp drawing some attention with a huge installation recycled hi-fi speakers.

wants a Sr. Manager, Lifestyle Research Lab
in San Francisco, California

Samsung's newly-formed Lifestyle Research Lab is looking for a Senior Manager to build their research practice for the TV product category. Lifestyle trends fall outside of Samsung's typical product-oriented research domain, looking to the future to understand the new ways of living that may influence consumer needs and expectations. Areas of coverage include: family, housing, health & wellness, transportation, society, media, culture, education, entertainment, leisure, environment, etc.

If you have a strong innovation/concept development track record, a minimum of 10 years experience in areas such as trend research, design research, and product development, plus a willingness to work in small, agile team within a large corporate setting, this is your job.

Apply Now

This is the tenth and final post in our interview series with influential I.D. curators, retailers and creative directors. Yesterday, we talked to the Cooper-Hewitt's design curator, Ellen Lupton.

Jamie Gray can't pinpoint the moment he fell in love with design. His interests quickly shifted from collecting midcentury pieces to following the new ideas and materials being explored by contemporary designers. Matter, the design shop he founded in 2003 to showcase that work, is now a fixture of New York's design scene, and Gray is widely known for his discerning eye. MatterMade, the shop's in-house line, was developed expressly to champion American designers, and to prove that small-scale production—and real design for living—could succeed. With this year's collection, MatterMade focused on a single designer for the first time, releasing a line of furniture and lighting by Roman & Williams.

How do you find out about new designers?

New designers come to Matter in every imaginable way. I'm immersed in the design community locally, nationally and internationally, so people come to me through other designers, introductions and recommendations. I follow the industry via blogs, magazines and periodicals. I'm always intrigued by what's happening, what's current.

Elle Decoration UK is probably my favorite magazine, because they feature the type of work Matter looks for, but there are so many others: Surface, Dwell, Wallpaper, World of Interiors. Online I'm all over the map. I'm always checking Sight Unseen because I think Jill [Singer] and Monica [Khemsurov] are constantly curating and finding interesting new work and talented young designers and creators. David John, who runs You Have Been Here Sometime, puts together a really beautiful blog. There's also Architizer, Yatzer and, of course, Core77. And the list goes on.

I also receive cold calls, or more specifically, cold e-mails. We receive a lot of work via e-mail, all of which I look through with excitement and enthusiasm. Maybe one in a hundred I will respond or relate to. It's not even that all the work is good or bad; it's that the process of curating, or the process of beginning a new project, is such a personal endeavor. Occasionally I'll open an e-mail and really respond to somebody's work and I'll introduce myself.

The Matter store in New York

Although it launched nearly a year ago, I'm surprised that an app called How.Do didn't turn up on our radar—after all, an app for making quick'n'dirty how-to tutorials is right up our alley. Thankfully, co-founder Emma Rose Metcalfe reached out to us on the occasion of the launch of How.Do Two.Oh (Version 2.0, that is), which was released yesterday on the occasion of iOS7 and the World Maker Faire this weekend. (Supported by venture capital, her fellow co-founders Nils Westerlund and Edward Jewson round out the Berlin-based team.)

Viewable both through the free app and online, the Micro Guides are concise user-generated slideshows with audio, an ideal format for step-by-step tutorials and on-the-go reference guides. Insofar as the app hits a sweet spot in the maker/fixer/lifehacking movement, the How.Do team will be reporting from World Maker Faire tomorrow and Sunday, offering a unique window into the festivities at the New York Hall of Science—follow them on Twitter @HowDo_ to get the scoop!

As busy as they are this weekend, Metcalfe took a few moments to share her thoughts at this exciting time for the growing company.

Core77: What inspired you to create How.Do in the first place?

Emma Rose Metcalfe: How.Do is the intersection of my MFA research in sharing and distributing meaningful experiences and Nils' interest in the challenges of scaling projects for large communities. He had left SoundCloud to finish his studies at Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship where the two of us met. Long story short, we came home from a design bootcamp in India wanting work on something together. We shared the belief that knowledge is deeply personal. The space created between the emotional power of sound and the fantasy of image is incredibly profound—we wanted to harness that to make sharing and learning feel good.