This is a true story. Descriptions of companies, clients, schools, projects and designers may be altered and anonymized to protect the innocent.

Editor: Where we last left off, Design Ninja had practically killed himself to generate 100 concept drawings, in an effort to impress the design consultancy where he'd been hired. Now it's time for the client presentation. Will they be wowed?

Cabinet, formerly two doors from a Mazda Lantis

We obviously love seeing old things being given new life and functionality, so we were glad to see that Israel-based designer Ronen Tinman has found an alternative use for luxury car parts. In a world where car enthusiast decor is friends with the classy look of design-attentive home furnishings, Tinman is king. Can't afford a Lexus? That's ok—opt for the coffee table made from its doors. Like the curves of a Lancia, but can't get your hands on one? Tinman's got the perfect hood/backseat sofa for you.

The auto parts are recreated into tables, light fixtures, shelves, chests and sofas. Classified as "functional art pieces" by the designer's website, these conversation starters may seem like they're destined for the man cave in your life. But Tinman has found a happy medium between car enthusiast and classy. Some of my personal favorites:

Sofa, formerly the back seat from a Lexus Luxury

Part of the appeal of a career in industrial design is that the field is so broad, a talented designer can work on a huge range of items, as with Raymond Loewy or the Vignellis. But it's also neat to see designers who have focused on one particular area, and how they can still demonstrate a healthy range of variety within those constraints. One of the more interesting such careers we've seen lately is that of Eiji Mitooka, the Japanese industrial designer who founded Don Design Associates. DDA's focus: Designing passenger trains.

Mitooka's designs for Japan's JR Kyushu train company range from the 787 and 883 series, which have an almost Teutonic or Scandinavian look to them:

In contrast, his 885 and 800 Shinkansen (bullet trains) are pure space-age:

Most interestingly, in the past few years they've branched out into what we can only call pleasure trains, short two-car units that cruise around providing sightseeing tours and serving charter groups. Mitooka's design for the Umisachi-Yamasachi line goes heavy on the wood, both inside and out:

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We humans have put a lot of gross-sounding mixtures in our mouths through the years to get our teeth clean. The latest incarnation of this storied tale is one of the coolest products I've stumbled upon recently, called Blizzident. It gets the job done in six seconds. By taking scans and impressions of the brusher's mouth and targeting bristles in hard-to-clean areas, the Invisalign-like tool achieves a 100% cleaning ratio while electronic toothbrushes typically come in around 70% at best. The toothbrush comes fully equipped with over 600 bacteria busting (soft/ultrafine) bristles and slits/holes to attach floss.

Blizzident got me thinking. What did people do before we had amazing tools like that? We've come a long way from the burnt eggshell toothpaste and swine bristle toothbrushes (seriously). Let's take a step back in time:

There's just one week left to submit your entries for a chance to compete in the first ever Hatch Live, an exciting new competition format in which designers battle head-to-head with their CAD skills. But there's still a week to submit your entries for a chance to compete at the head-to-head competition in SoHo on October 19th. In our last announcement, we broke down the rules and prizes. This time, we're digging a little deeper into the organization behind the competition. Founder Matthew Sargeant told us a bit more about Hatch Hub and how you can involved:

Core77: What is the background to Hatch Hub?

Hatch Hub: I think the design process today is outdated and ready for a refresh. It's time to shake things up and right now we are seeing a lot of companies heading in that direction. With modern production methods and new design tools I think the way design is discovered, made, and sold needs to change. We're hoping to become a part of that movement and HatchHub.com, launching this Fall, aims to be a design meritocracy, where the best designs are made and promoted.

What inspired you to start Hatch Hub?

The concept behind Hatch Hub came to me after shopping for my sister's wedding present. I realized then that more often than not, the designs that were being brought to the market were out of touch and impersonal, usually mass-produced and lacking consumer involvement and engagement. At the same time, we are seeing up-and-coming designers attempting to break this cycle with intelligent and engaging work, but lacking the means and production ability to bring their product to life on a larger scale. I wanted to create something that not only showcases these designers, but also brings them closer to a community of design enthusiasts that can both influence and purchase their work.

Talk about schadenfreude. Seemingly every car blog in the world, and every local paper in NYC, has picked up the story of a Lamborghini crash last weekend in Brooklyn. The notable part of the crash: The $400,000 Aventador hits a tree and splits in half.

Luckily there were no fatalities in the crash, which occurred Saturday in the Mill Basin neighborhood of Brooklyn. But the part that we can't get over is that every single news organization is reporting, with no attribution whatsoever, that the Lamborghini is specifically designed to split in half in the event of a crash. Uh...what?

"Hey, what happens if I press this button with the skull and crossbones on it?"

From an interface design standpoint, it's completely bewildering: Switches, levers, dials, buttons, toggles, and every type of physical interface known to man are crammed into the cockpit of a Boeing 737—not to mention all the gauges and screens. While you're back there in the cabin trying to find space in the overhead, the pilot and co-pilot are up front working this insanely complex console to complete their pre-flight setup and get the engine running.

Check out this clip, shot aboard a new Boeing 737, of actual "pre-flight setup and engine startup procedures." You won't mistake the five-minute video for a Michael Bay production, but it does give you a good look at the overall console:

Arial or Helvetica?

Typography is one of those underappreciated art forms outside of the design world. While a movie like Helvetica brought attention to the craft of type, and the regular selection of fonts on Word processors has made everyone aware of the subtle differences of type styles, few can articulate what makes Times New Roman different from, say, Times.

I came across a site recently that's so simple it's brilliant. Produced by New York design firm OKFocus, Arial VS. Helvetica* is just what it sounds like, a comparison of perhaps the two most popular sans serif Roman fonts in the world. It takes an animated GIF approach: in one moment it shows Arial, in the other moment it shows Helvetica. We're not told which is which, but that's not the point: what matters more is that we can see just how subtle the difference is, and where the most critical distinctions lie (hint: Q, G and R are the best giveaways).

It reminds me of those crazy animated GIFs of people showing the same face in different photos. Now all we need is a site that can do this for all kinds of fonts. Every. Single. One. Hear that, OKFocus? My typography professor will thank you.

*Note: As of press time, the site wasn't working properly in Firefox. Try Arial VS. Helvetica in Chrome or Safari and you're good to go.

In a tribute to International Peace Day (September 21st), British artists Jamie Wardley and Andy Moss of Sand in Your Eye took a team of 60 volunteers to Normandy beach over the weekend to sketch the outlines of 9,000 soldiers figures into the sand. The installation was created to commemorate the people who lost their lives on June 6th, 1944 and is appropriately titled "The Fallen 9,000."

According to design website Colossal, what started with the artists and 60 volunteers grew to an effort including 500 local residents who jumped in to help after seeing what was going on.

The end result was fleeting and was washed away by the tide after a couple of hours. But these photos most definitely do the project justice:

*Hat tip: Colossal and Lustik

I was sitting in front of Dyson Air Multiplier the other day and even though I've seen and felt these "fans" many times since they hit the market in 2009, I was struck that I'd taken something so unusual for granted. It's got no blades. So how does it blow air?

It's a circular structure mounted on a cylindrical stand. The circular tube, or ring, is only a few inches deep, and the larger models have a 12-inch diameter. If one were to just look at it—even fairly closely—there is no obvious clue to how it manages to push air as a fan would.

There might be no obvious clue, but the fact is that there are blades... you just can't see them. The blades—or fins, as Dyson calls them—are inside the pedestal, and they pull the air in, at a rate of more than five gallons per second. (The most recent implementation of the Air Multiplier moves more than six gallons per second.)

Basically it works like this: Air comes in through the pedestal and moves up through the circular tube that functions like a ramp, forcing the air forward.

So that maps out the direction of air movement. But what gives the fan its oomph? What makes it feel like a fan?

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Electrolux Design Lab, the annual design competition that asks design students to envision the future of product design, is coming into the home stretch for this year. Some 1700 entrants from around the world have been winnowed down into just eight finalists, through three rounds of judging, with the winner to be announced on October 16th.

This year's EDL was a little different in that the categories were opened up a bit, expanding beyond appliances into accessories, consumables or services. Still, two out of our three finalist faves still fall into the appliance category.

First up is the ballet-dancer-inspired 3F (for "Form Follows Function"), a shape-shifting vacuum cleaner by Germain Verbrackel, an ID student at France's Ecole de Design Nantes Atlantique:

Writes Verbrackel:

It is designed to economise space in compact and urban apartments; thanks to its autonomous mobility and capacity for physical metamorphosis, -3F- is a living product, responsive to its consumer's needs.

Core77's Hand-Eye Supply store puts this deal together once a year so come grab the workshop necessities while saving the big bucks. This pair of items typically goes for $40 but is over half off until the end of the month—that's in 5 days!

Hand-Eye Supply Black Denim Apron
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Reporting by Kat Bauman

This season, Germany is for car lovers. Last week's Frankfurt Auto Show saw the debut of a slew of new cars—some slated for production, some beautiful, high-functioning pipe dreams. Audi, a fatherland favorite, unveiled several new models, including an A3 E-tron plug-in hybrid, coming soon to an America near you, and a sick 700hp Sport Quattro Concept (above), coming someday to... something, maybe.

A few days later, Audi pulled the curtain off another new but utterly functionless car. As people milled about the vehicle-stacked white spaces of Munich's Die Neue Sammlung International Design Museum, I squinted at a shining wall studded with 1,800 miniature aluminum rally cars and begrudgingly considered the intersection of cars and art.
Another unambiguously car-shaped object, full-sized and covered by a dramatic white dropcloth, hovered high on the wall. The shrouded figure was the focal point of the evening and of the museum's new permanent exhibit on vehicle design, the spooky centerpiece of the new "Audi Design Wall." Its unveiling marked a re-opening of the museum, now a century old and home to seven collections of rare and groundbreaking objects in design. And so, between fiddling with the headphones for real-time English or Chinese translation (hey, growing markets, how ya doin'?) and eating small geometric foods off small geometric plates, we were treated to a little piece of engineered engineering history.

Dedications were made by Audi lead designer Wolfgang Egger, Dr. Ulrich Hackenberg, a technical development board member at Audi, and Dr. Florian Hufnagl, director of The Pinakothek Der Moderne (the design museum's parent institution). Each mentioned the company's design-minded history, the link between history and future. The spectacle was consummated as all three pressed an Audi-logoed white button, dropping the veil to reveal the star of the Audi Design Wall: a totally unexpected white dummy version of the new Sport Quattro Concept. Shocking? No. Thrilling. Slightly. Art? Maybe it was something in the geometric food, but I was potentially open to that interpretation.

Something new, something old. Something silver, something matte white to symbolize open-ended future creative development.

This institutional partnership particularly makes sense if you're familiar with Audi's history. As the story goes, the spark for Audi began in 1899, founded by August Horch, an engineer who quit working for Karl Benz (yes, that Benz), and then his own eponymous company, to pursue greater creative freedom and technical advancement. As in most German industries, war and a fluctuating market wreaked havoc with both the innovation and the ownership of the company, but Audi was one that survived. By the early 1930s, it was one of four companies sublimated into the massive Auto Union brand, along with Wanderer, DKW and Horsh.

A couple weeks ago, we took a look at SIMPLE Mobile, a great new way to approach phones that's picking up steam here in the United States after seeing success around the world. If you have an unlocked phone that has a spot for a SIM card, SIMPLE Mobile makes it easy to use one of their SIMs and get yourself set up with low-cost, flexible phone, text and data plans.

As part of their promotion, SIMPLE Mobile has been hosting Change Your Game, a series of web videos and user submissions that show how young people are changing the game within their creative fields. In their first two episodes, they looked at the legendary street art and skater scenes of Los Angeles, and in the latest, they've moved east to Houston's world of rap.

Ron Paulk has already got his own following, independent of Core77; while we don't have the demographic breakdown, we assume they're mostly DIY'ers, builders, and fellow contractors. These video extras from our chat with Ron will be of interest to Ron's following, as we get into some topics that Ron hasn't covered on his own YouTube channel: The surprising story of how he decided to become a contractor in the first place, what it was that made him expand into design, and why YouTube is an invaluable learning tool.

The summer job that changed Ron's life, and made him realize that building stuff was better than grad school:

Why (and how) Ron expanded into design and doing his own CAD work:

Some of our recent design education has come from instructors who have offered us exclusive inside looks at summer intensives: Francis Bitonti's "New Skins: Computational Design for Fashion" Workshop at Pratt DAHRC and the Brian Anderson's "Immediate Objects: Explorations in 3D Printing" at the SAIC. This time around, we have a guest post by a student, Vivian Chan of Simon Fraser University's School of Interactive Arts + Technology. Under the tutelage of instructor Russell Taylor, she and a dozen of her classmates spent six weeks in Europe this summer, traveling halfway around the world from Vancouver to the Netherlands to film and research designers in a unique and unforgettable Field School program.

By Vivian Chan

As part of the bi-annual SIAT Dutch Design field school, we travelled to the Netherlands in order to interview and document Dutch designers, their work, their process and design culture. The field school is a part of SFU's study abroad program consisting of three courses: IAT 395 in the semester beforehand to prepare and research, IAT 396 the in-field course, and IAT 397 upon return to synthesize our research and experience into the videos and website.

During our time in the Netherlands, we spoke with 20 prominent Dutch designers such as Piet Hein Eek, Phillips Design (above) and Ineke Hans, as well as some up and coming designers like Formafantasma and Scholten & Baijings. We have officially launched our website, and all of our work and research has been documented and is now ready to be viewed in the form of short interviews and cultural films.

We all had a part in the video editing process. For the interviews, we paired up and each pair had 3–4 interviews that they would conduct on our own. The pairings matched up a student that was more proficient with video editing and another that could help in less technical ways such as gathering the video content and helping determine the structure and story behind the videos. We studied the designers' past works and design approach, then developed questions that would establish credibility, as well as get them to open up and discuss the ideas, the methodology, the challenges and the thought processes behind their work.

Zippers can be many things, but I bet you wouldn't normally describe them as "whimsy." But that's exactly what they are, thanks to Japanese street artist Jun Kitagawa. He has created a standout public installation in cities around Japan that gives passersby more than just something pretty to stop and take in.

Kitagawa is no stranger to offbeat public displays of art. His inaugural installment came to be after finding himself with a bunch of unwanted T-shirts and living in a town with numerous nude statues. Obviously the best (and only, in my opinion) use for those T-shirts were for covering the statues. And in an act that rides a perfectly crooked (and humorous) line between vandalism and public service, a street artist was born.

His zippers are found painted on walls and sculpted to interact with natural resources. The zippers' intent? To give viewers a more intimate look into the world we interact with every day through a familiar object.

*Hat tip: Spoon & Tamago

Zippers can be many things, but I bet you wouldn't normally describe them as "whimsy." But that's exactly what they are, thanks to Japanese street artist Jun Kitagawa. He has created a standout public installation in cities around Japan that gives passersby more than just something pretty to stop and take in.

Kitagawa is no stranger to offbeat public displays of art. His inaugural installment came to be after finding himself with a bunch of unwanted T-shirts and living in a town with numerous nude statues. Obviously the best (and only, in my opinion) use for those T-shirts were for covering the statues. And in an act that rides a perfectly crooked (and humorous) line between vandalism and public service, a street artist was born.

His zippers are found painted on walls and sculpted to interact with natural resources. The zippers' intent? To give viewers a more intimate look into the world we interact with every day through a familiar object.