New Balance has a history of 100 years of enduring performance and is still running strong today. They seek to hire associates who are always on the move, who push themselves forward and are motivated to move New Balance forward. Do you fit this description?

As the Color, Material and Trend Designer in their Lawrence, MA office, you will work cross-functionally to execute new and original color combinations, materials, & print/graphic applications for footwear. You'll need knowledge of footwear materials, construction, colors and design processes, as well as a creative and motivated personality. What are you waiting for? Apply Now.

Calvin Chu pitches Palette at the HAXLR8R Demo Day in San Francisco. All event images by the author for Core77.

If you were to take apart the hardware on your computer, you'd see a microcosm of the world. A simple look at a laptop computer on SourceMap, the popular software for sourcing the materials and components of just about any object and where those pieces come form, reveals an incredibly complex trade route: Unlike software, which can be hacked together regardless of location, hardware requires a lot of moving parts, from raw materials to manufacturing to assembly. It's a process that criss-crosses the globe until the final product arrives in our hands, ready to use.

Shenzhen is a key focus of HAXLR8R, which bills itself as "a new kind of accelerator program." Accepting applications twice a year from hardware startups around the world, it provides seed funding of $25,000 (with opportunities to increase that amount through additional funding paths), office space and regular mentorship on a variety of topics, from building products to pitching them. Most importantly, it offers an opportunity to live and work in Shenzhen, interacting directly with manufacturers who have the ability to take the product to scale.

"JDFI also applies to us," notes the accelerator program's website, as they list out the services and equipment they provide, including a laser cutter, 3D printer, CNC machine and in-house services like product design and small batch assembly and testing, not to mention the basic tools of business. HAXLR8R is very much a project about doing and making at the highest levels.  And as I explored in my recent column, this intermixing of disciplines and processes undoubtedly makes for better designs.

You might know Jessica Walsh for her graphic design work, but it's more likely that you religiously (and tearfully, at times) followed her viral side project "40 Days of Dating" with fellow designer friend (even post-breakup) Timothy Goodman. The latter project has blasted her name around the Internet and in conversations worldwide—Warner Bros even recently bought the film rights to the project. But her graphic design starts a conversation on its own. The attention to surreal detail in her ad campaigns, subway posters and branding projects puts her on the "designers to follow" radar.

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

Editor: After a nasty paycheck surprise, suddenly underpaid "Family Man" has to figure out where he went wrong with his new employment contract. Has he screwed himself and his family, or are they getting screwed by the company?

It was well after closing when I got to the office, so everyone else was long gone. I flipped the lights on, headed over to my desk and ripped the drawer open. There was the contract. I pulled it out, slammed it down on my desk and started reading through it, to see where I'd screwed up. To be told you were going to be paid an annual salary only to have some clause slipped under your nose in the contract stipulating you'd instead be paid hourly wages—this made me angry, and I had to figure out where I'd make the mistake so that I'd never make it again.

I spent fifteen minutes going through the contract from top to bottom, and could find no such clause. So I read through it again. And again. Then, a fourth time.

There was nothing in the contract like that, no clause, no loopholes. It was totally straightforward. I was supposed to be paid $85,000 a year in biweekly installments, no ifs, ands or buts. So I had read the thing correctly the first time. That made me breathe a sigh of relief since it meant the error wasn't mine, but my anger shortly returned. The boss was shortchanging me.

I went home that night angry, and when my wife asked me what was wrong I lied and said I had to learn some new software for work that was giving me a headache. I couldn't bring myself to tell her how much less money we were going to have, not until I talked to the boss and figured out what the hell was going on.

On 7th Street in Manhattan's East Village stands McSorley's Old Ale House, one of NYC's older Irish pubs, dating back to the mid-1800s. Since its inception the bar had a no-women-allowed policy—an anachronism they held onto until 1970 (!) when the Civil Rights Bill was passed. The first woman invited inside was Barbara Shaum.

If being invited inside a bar doesn't sound like an accomplishment, what Shaum was achieving just two doors down the block was. As a 21-one-year-old woman living in 1950s NYC, she had begun learning leathersmithing. By 1970 she'd had nearly 20 years of experience, and had her own leathergoods shop—in both senses of the word—next-next-door to McSorley's. (And she'd actually had beers inside the bar before the ballyhoo, as local shopkeepers were once a lot friendlier with each other.)

Barbara Shaum is the leathersmith whom Kika Vliegenthart apprenticed under. And now, at age 83, she's 62 years into the business and still running her shop. Rising rents have forced her off of 7th Street, but she's still keeping it East Village real enough, now relocated to 4th.

Shaum refers to the leather sandals she makes as "like wearing a T-shirt on your feet." It's not uncommon for them to last for decades, as her business has. Over the course of her six-decade career she's made bags, briefcases, sandals, belts, and a variety of custom work (her strangest "client" was a llama). Here's her story:

The season of sparkling snow, stress and singing Santa figurines is here! In between the food and the familial feuding, we hope you'll find time to show your loved ones you support their creative aims. At Hand-Eye Supply we think a good gift sparks excitement about the object and the way you'll use it. We've gathered some especially inspiring objects for the shop, the studio, the campsite and the home. Who they're gifted to (or hoarded by) is up to you, but we guarantee they're all nicely made, satisfying to hold and ready to fit a creative lifestyle.

Check out the Hand-Eye Gift Collection Here!

Check out some of the collection stand outs after the jump.

Update: Commenter Max Shelley has not only dug up the original video but juxtaposed them, YouTube Doubler-style, in an absolutely uncanny comparison video, embedded below, and it's holy-crap-I-sh*t-you-not dead on. Good work, Max!

Seeing as toilet humor never gets old, we were very interested to stumble upon a company called Remade Co., which gives a veritable swirlie to a certain New York City-based design company. We've seen similar variations on the theme of painting a handle before, but Remade is a parody par excellence: The website is dead ringer (or should we say plunger) of its target, and the product lineup is at once entirely on-brand and completely off-the-mark.

In the profile video (below), which I assume is a shot-for-shot remake (get it?) of an original that I was unable to dig up as of press time, an unidentified jester goes by a hyphenated surname that is the inversion of that of his mark. Reader Max Shelley has put them side-by-side, revealing a profound attention to detail on the part of Mr. Smith-Buchanan—the, um, original Remade vid is here—and frankly it's hard not to be impressed by the whole thing.

Spanish artist/designer Javier Lloret has created what is possibly the nerdiest (and coolest, in our books) interactive façade ever. Puzzle Façade, a 3D-printed interface cube that's connected to a digital wall by Bluetooth, lets passersby try their hand at solving a larger-than-life Rubik's Cube.

The tools and pieces behind the interface cube

The handheld cube is made up of 3D-printed exterior pieces (the twistable cubes we've all grown to love and hate) and a digital core that connected wirelessly to a laptop that controls the projection on the façade. As the challenger twists and turns the physical cube, the LED lights transform accordingly. The actual cube is a pristine white, making it harder for those who have memorized their puzzle-breaking pattern. Check out the video to see it in action:

The legendary Boston Whaler brand began in 1958 when founder, Richard Fisher, crafted the first unsinkable 13 foot Whaler and they've been manufacturing quality unsinkable boats from 11 to 37 feet ever since. They'd like you to join the team and build upon existing Brunswick Boat Group products as well as innovative new offerings.

As part of the design team you will have the opportunity to generate and develop concepts and designs for Brunswick Boat Group products and maintain a wide range of responsibilities. If you are currently pursuing your degree or are within a semester of receiving your degree, Apply Now.

When it comes down to it, good design is often more a matter of execution as opposed to the idea itself: Speculate as we might, a product must actually be in production in order for the world to appreciate its merits. And while few among us have the luxury of not having to compromise (Apple, for one, if Leander Kahney's biography of Jony Ive is any indication), these are precisely the instances in which the vision must remain coherent if the concept is to be realized in full.

Count Moroso among the vanguard of design-led brands. The Udine-based furniture company celebrated its 60th Anniversary last year, but as Creative Director Patrizia Moroso notes, they took the opportunity not to look back but to look forward. She personally toured their factories, "looking for the prototypes an the pieces that never went into production," for an exhibition in Milan last year. "All the things that go before the 'birth' [of a project]"—samples, prototypes, early experiments (some of which were aborted)—"it was very emotional, because I remember when the designer came and changed this detail, maybe he [or she] changed a lot..."

But she doesn't dwell on that which could have been: When we caught up with her at Moroso's New York showroom in October, Patrizia was in a buoyant mood (thanks, perhaps, to a few espressos following a flight from Italy), as was Marc Thorpe, whose recent collection for the brand is currently on view at the space at 146 Greene St. Indeed, she was in town on the occasion of the opening of "Blurred Limits," featuring the young New York-based designer's "Blur" collection, along with the one-off "Ratio" table and a first look at "Morning Glory," which will officially debut at the Salone in 2014. We had the chance to speak to the two of them about their ongoing collaboration, which dates back to the "Mark" table from 2010.

"I actually met Patrizia and in Italy in 2009, in the Fiera, but it was very brief," relates Marc, when asked about how they first met. "And then a year or so later, we were here [in New York] at an event, so I asked very humbly if I could show some of my work to her, and she said, 'Oh yeah, come have lunch...'" He recalls showing her a handful of renderings and prototypes, but one piece stood out: "That was the 'Mark' table, which was produced for a bar/lounge called the Mark." ("Easy to remember," Moroso notes.) "So she took everything to Italy and that's where it sort of began.

"A year or two later, we had the first conversations about the 'Blur' collection."

So you've designed your product, run simulations on the model, figured out the PLM and rendered countless iterations. Now it's time to actually machine the thing. Autodesk is now addressing this final step, taking advantage of Autodesk University's packed attendance (10,000-plus people this year!) to announce their new CAM 360 software, which they're billing as the world's first cloud-based CAM solution.

CAM 360 is seen as the final puzzle piece in their cloud-based digital manufacturing software suite, following on the heels of PLM 360 (product lifecycle management), Sim 360 (simulation software) and Fusion 360 (design). By finally integrating the thing that actually generates the toolpaths for CNC, the company reckons manufacturers will enjoy a huge time savings. And the cloud-based approach confers three distinct benefits: 1) Customers no longer need worry which version of the software they and their collaborators are on; 2) Files can be accessed anywhere, anytime; and 3) they've got virtually limitless cloud-based computing power available to quickly crunch those monster files.

The CAM 360 release date is pegged for next year.

Photos by Tom Oxley Photography

Duffy London is really good at giving everyday furniture essentials fun, design-savvy flair. Most recently, we saw their swinging table at this year's London Design Festival. The brand's versatility fits any home—if you're looking for a contemporary simple statement piece, you're covered. Bend a few joints, twist a few knobs or fold over a table leaf and you've got a totally different (and more complex) piece of furniture.

Believe it or not, this is the same table.

This is the case with their new series of folding tables. What may come off as an angular space-saving coffee table is actually also an expansive dining room table. In two simple movements, the hidden legs and leaves that make up the coffee table pull out to become a 4.5' x 2.5' dining area. The MK1 Mini Transforming Table may come in at a steep price (about $1,080), but really it's like buying two tables in one, so you can't feel that guilty about it. For small spaces, this may be the table we've all been wishing for.

littleBits Electronics is looking for an excellent Mechanical Engineer / Product Developer to join the core team. What's littleBits, you ask? It's an open source library of electronic modules that snap together with tiny magnets for prototyping, learning, and fun so you can light it, push it, turn it, twist it, bend it, buzz it, blink it, shake it...

To land this wonderfully creative opportunity, you must have great technical expertise in mechanical engineering and production processes, a track record of creating and manufacturing products and an understanding of Design for Manufacture. Apply Now for this fun, full time position in their Greenwich Village office.

Anyone who has ever visited the Taj Mahal in Agra, India, would probably agree that it is one of the most fascinating buildings that he or she has ever been in the presence of. Even in pictures, one can sense the almost magical aura of this massive marble memorial, which appears as though it is floating. If it has a breathtaking effect from afar, it becomes truly mind-blowing when having a closer look—when one can see that all the delicate patterns that cover the huge marble blocks are actually stone inlays.

On a recent trip to India, I had the chance to learn how these stone inlays are made. They are in fact still done in exactly the same way that they used to be done in 1633, when the 17 year construction Taj Mahal began—except that the craft is applied to souvenirs rather than mausoleums these days.

The Taj Mahal was built by the great Mughul emperor Shajahan, in memory of his wife Mumtaz, who died giving birth to her 14th child. To create it, the most skilled architects, inlay craftsmen, calligraphers, stone-carvers and masons were called from all across India and lands as distant as Persia and Turkey. It is said that the most skilled individuals who had worked on the Taj Mahal had one hand cut off after it was finished so they could never duplicate this work again.

Fortunately, the artisans were still able to pass on their skills to future generations (although only to the men and only within the family), and, 14 generations down the line, I had the pleasure to meet some of their descendants, who demonstrated how these stone inlays—pietra dura or parchin kari—are made. The artisans work together as a cooperative, meaning each of them remains an individual artist with complete creative freedom, but all profits are shared equally.

The starting point are thin sheets of various (semiprecious) stone, from which the artisan creates delicate shapes, some only a few millimetres in size, like the little dot in the picture above. Only a (human-powered) grindstone is used, and the craftman will inevitably also abrade the skin on his fingers during this process.

Each shape is ground individually and must fit precisely without any gaps. Once a perfect fit has been achieved, the marble plate, into which the ornamental pattern will be integrated, is covered with a layer of henna paint.

The single pieces that make the inlay pattern are laid out on the marble plate and their outlines scratched into the surface. The orange color serves as an orientation when carving out the individual grooves, into which the semiprecious stone pieces will be glued.

Earlier this week, we were wowed by an elaborate parody of a certain purveyor of anachronistic Americana: Remade Co. cleaved its supposedly superlative subject like an axe splitting a cord of firewood. Today, we'd like to share another brilliantly conceived and produced multimedia project from NPR, one that expresses the opposite sentiment, supplanting the thickly-laid irony with earnest, beautiful reporting from Mississippi, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Colombia. Planet Money Makes a T-Shirt was originally Kickstarted six months ago, bringing in over ten times its $50,000 goal, and the meta-level T-shirt reward tier (the only one available) was both the means to support and the premise of the investigative journalism project.

That $590K most certainly paid off: A custom web experience drives the compelling narrative, which presents an incredible amount of quantitative and qualitative information in an easily digestible format: tightly-edited video complemented by just the right amount of text, stills and archival photography.

NPR has been supporting the self-contained website with additional content & broadcasts this week; here's a brief synopsis (spoiler alert?) and the introduction below, but you should really just check it out for yourself...

Another piece of software we got a good look at at this year's Autodesk University is Autodesk 360. The company has created a Facebook-like interface for projects and design teams; collaborators log on to a cleanly-designed dashboard page containing "all of the data, projects, people, tasks, discussions, activities, issues and alerts that are associated with design or architecture projects that they are working on."

Clicking on a project, for instance, is like clicking on someone's Facebook wall; you get a linear view of all developments concerning that project, with your fellow collaborators' updates taking the place of comments. People can upload relevant files as updates, and anyone with access can view any file, regardless of whether it's an Autodesk format or not. (This includes non-design data, like spreadsheets and such.) And yes, Autodesk 360 can also be used from your phone or tablet, just as with Facebook.

While we were treated to an on-stage, well-explained visual presentation of how it all works, we realize text is not the best way to drive home how this software would impact your workflow. Thankfully, Autodesk has made available the videos they used for their presentation. These are hot off the presses so they haven't added the voiceover yet, but we'll provide the relevant text:

Projects at the Center

In Autodesk 360 users can see all the projects they are working on in one place. Because customers work on lots of projects, they can pin or unpin them, to indicate which ones are most important.

We're a fan of fire, especially when it comes to DIY projects like a sun-powered grill, an incendiary bicycle, or what is still probably the best IKEA hack ever. But besides its culinary or propulsive properties, fire is really just a source of light, and we also love it when designers come up with new ways to provide this basic necessity.

San Francisco-based designer Hoang M Nguyen has created a lamp design that certainly holds a flame to other lighting designs we've featured. The fixture, LampFire, is a fun play off of a traditional camping silhouette. The design, which is inspired by the act of gathering around a fire to bond with friends, features a bare hanging bulb staged to set the scene of a single source campfire.

Sipho Mabona does beautiful things with paper. Not only does he have an awesome job title—Professional Origami Artist—he also has big plans for his hobby-turned-profession. Using a 2,500 sq. ft. sheet of paper, Mabona is looking to create a life-size origami pachyderm, cleverly known as the "White Elephant."

And he'll even record himself doing it, for those of you video-or-it-didn't-happen skeptics—two cameras will be streaming a live feed of the project in progress. The entire project will be completed in a room at the Art Museum in Beromünster, Switzerland with help from three assistants. The team will take on treacherous creases and potential for some major paper cuts to craft an elephant that stands over ten feet tall (with the help of a support structure and white acrylic sealant). Mabona explains:

We're always interested to see how technology increasingly enables new combinations of mediums for artwork, such as a recent work of performance art that stars a carefully choreographed set of 60 lamps—exposed tungsten bulbs on an arcing wood frame—along with the performers themselves, all set to an electronic score. "A Man Named Zero" is as much a work of performance art as an example of lighting design at its best. London-based lighting experts Nocte created the concept behind this performance piece—a show put on at the London Total Refreshment Centre that's meant to "tell the story of one man's rite of passage as he breaks out of his mental and physical hibernation into discovering himself and his own mind," according to the brand's website.

Performance art definitely isn't for everyone—the slightest detail can spoil the suspension of disbelief that is a prerequisite for an aesthetic experience. But if the photos and video (below) are any indication, "A Man Named Zero" was quite the spectacle.

Design + Industry is growing and they're looking for passionate, enthusiastic industrial designers to join their creative team. Design + Industry is a leading product design and engineering consultancy that has been at the forefront of design and innovation for over 25 years.

As part of their team, you will apply your design thinking skills on a diverse range of medical, business and consumer products for world markets. Their approach to design will see you involved in the early stages of research and strategy through to concept generation. You must have a minimum of 6 years' experience in product design, as well as experience in project and client management to excel in this role.

Apply Now.