No one really likes commuting (except maybe those who have readily accepted "Tube Games" into their daily routine). We might temporarily curb our discontent with a few minutes buried in a good book, slowly head-bobbing to music or eyeing the cute straphanger across the train. It doesn't push past the fact that no one likes being crammed into a sweaty sardine can with a crowd of groggy people on their way to work.

If anyone has come even remotely close to making that scenario the least bit enjoyable, it's industrial designer Siew Ming Cheng. She's put together a commuter get-up that'll keep even the bravest of morning riders at bay. Just make sure you aren't on the receiving end.

When thrill seekers, athletes and video enthusiasts of all backgrounds want to capture the most immersive and engaging life experiences, they turn to GoPro. These versatile cameras are sold in over 100 countries across and GoPro wants your industrial design expertise on staff to help them continue their successes.

This role blends the best of Industrial Design with product usability. You'll design new cameras and other products as a lead member of our Industrial Design team. You'll also maintain and evolve the GoPro product design language by designing new products and concepts to expand the GoPro portfolio. The ideal candidate is passionate about the brand and about creating the best user experience possible. Apply Now.

For 34 years running, the Industrial Designers Society of America sets out to find designers and designs that epitomize quality across design mediums and platforms. Are you ready to be discovered and recognized?

The International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) are given to only the brightest and best executed designs in products, sustainability, interaction design, packaging, strategy, research and concepts. Winners of this award enjoy immediate benefits including pride, self-satisfaction and bragging rights, as well as some longer-term perks, like a stronger professional reputation and increased career opportunities.

All the information you need about the awards, how to enter, the jury and much more is available here. The call for entries ends February 14th, 2014, which we all know seems like an eternity from now, but we recommend you get your entry in sooner than later. Good luck!

Hello Wood has gotten into the holiday swing of things with a Ai Weiwei-esque installation. With 365 sleighs, some colored lights and lots of helpful hands, the Hungary-based art program put together a Christmas tree made entirely of the multitude of sleighs. The entire installment—which is on display at the Palace of Arts in Budapest—gives off the same glow and textures that we see in Weiwei's bike installations.

Lucky for us, the organization has created an online panoramic view just in case you can't make it to Hungary this holiday season. You can take a look at the entire structure from two vantage points: a passerby's view and an inside look at the core of the installation (which you can also experience on-site.

"Good artists borrow. Great artists steal."

These words have been attributed multiple times to Pablo Piccaso, though the source itself is dubious. But as with every myth, there's a kernel of truth: we learn best by learning from the best. That's the theory behind the age-old practice of going to museums to sketch and draw.

Mobile designers have their own version of a museum through a large and extensive collection of apps for both iOS and Android.  But how do we sift through everything? How can we contextualize the workflow? UX Archive, which I learned about recently, is one such museum. A collection of UIs and workflows from popular mobile apps for iOS, documented by actions and tasks like "Getting directions" and "Onboarding."

"UX Archive aims at helping designers in this process," notes the site's About page." We lay out the most interesting user flows so you can compare them, build your point of view and be inspired." Right now, it's very iOS heavy, focusing on the iPhone 4S and the iPhone 5, though they point to other popular workflow sites like pttrns (including Android Patterns) and the always popular UI Parade. Each app contains detailed imagery, and it's easy to sift and click through. There's even a section that compares iOS 6 and 7, so you can school yourself on the differences.

UX Archive documents and displays the differences between iOS 6 and 7 for different actions.

Not that this is a substitute for good, solid interaction design research. "Before comparing any user flow," the site's founders note, "start by trying them out! Once you have been through them on the actual apps, use UX Archive to compare them!" Good advice indeed.

Once again, our friends at Cuppow are pleased to present an enlightening (see the 2012 numbers here. We've been following their story since day one and it's always good to hear from Aaron Panone, who has diligently kept us abreast of new developments from Cuppow HQ in Boston. Here's the latest from Fringe Union:

2013 has been a great year for Cuppow! We started the year by transitioning all of our products to a 100% recycled and domestic plastic supply, we hired our first (and only) employee, released a new product (BNTO lunchbox by Cuppow), refined our wide mouth drinking lid to more readily accept straws, and continued to develop our network of charitable organizations (adding Living Beyond Breast Cancer and Cradles to Crayons), through which also releasing two new product colors! With the support of our fantastic customers and retailers, we've stayed true to our commitment to be as responsible as possible and make the most minimal impact on the environment that we can—all while growing a business committed to American-made products and working with other great American companies.

This year's installment of our annual infographic project is a single year snapshot showcasing the impact that Cuppow—through utilizing a local supply chain and totally recycled material sources—has on the environment. We used our actual manufacturing and performance data collected over the last year to calculate freight emissions and the amount of recycled material that we were able to reprocess and reuse to make our products. We consulted with shipping experts and studied up on EPA emissions factors to provide a comparison between our supply chain and a hypothetical supply chain originating from Shenzhen, China. (Although we are not sure exactly what percentage of imported consumer products originate from Shenzhen, it is noted as one of the largest manufacturing cities in the world, so it serves as a good comparison for our study.)

We hope that you enjoy our infographic below, it is a collaboration with our long-time colleague and designer Natalya Zahn. If you like it, share it with your friends! And please let us know any feedback that you might have for us—we're always happy to hear from you!

Dear designers, design aficionados and assorted creative types of the greater Portland, Oregon area,

Tonight's the Night for design and celebration. We strongly encourage you to drop by the design event of the season for some:
- Complimentary Social Lubrication (DJ Music & Cocktails!)
- Free perusal of the Bridge City Tool Works exhibit!
- Raffled-off gift certificates worth $500 at Core77's Hand-Eye Supply!
- Elbow rubbing with some of the creative luminaries from this year's Curiosity Club speaker series.

The Core77 & Hand-Eye Supply Holiday Shindig at
Museum of Contemporary Craft
in partnership with Pacific Northwest College of Art
724 Northwest Davis Street
Portland, Oregon 97209
Further information here.

The Core77 Ultimate Gift Guide is one of the more popular pieces of content that we put together every year, both for our readers and those of us who have the privilege—and eye—for making the selections. In the interest of capturing the communal spirit of this year's Gift Guide, the contributors will be selecting a few of their favorite picks from their cohorts' lists alongside one of their own.

In other words, hint, hint.

Most stuff is junk, it just is. So when it comes to buying gifts, do the planet and your giftee a favor and get them something they'll actually use, rather than throw out or toss in a corner.

For this year's Gift Guide, I looked around my place for some of the most useful things I own, with a particular focus on objects that can not be replaced by other objects; meaning, almost everything on this list has a unique function or performs its task in a far better way than you could do it before that object existed.

None of the items on my list are sexy, so if you're looking for wow-factor during the unboxing, you've got the wrong list. But assuming your giftee actually does the things these objects were designed for, they will find themselves using them time and time again, and you'll get the credit for being one of those people that buys useful, kick-ass gifts.

To keep the Core77 Gift Guide going, we staffers were asked by the Core77 brass to pick some items out from other staffers' lists. I take this to mean that after picking these items, we'll then have them purchased for us on the company dime. Right? Boss? ...Hello?

From Glen Jackson Taylor's list, I'll pick the Sheffield Kevlar Shears. (Note that Glen has three names, like some kind of famous political assassin, and his gifts are also three-worded. Something is going on there.) Why shears that can cut through Kevlar? Because you never know when friends are going to come knocking on your door at 2am because one of them was shot and they can't go to the cops, and because you took a veterinary course in college you then have to put on a white lab coat and look nervously reluctant while you fish the bullet out with a pair of tweezers and drop it into a silver kidney-shaped bowl with an audible "clink." And you might need the shears to cut through their clothes. Of course if they were wearing Kevlar there'd probably be no bullet for you to remove, so, fine, maybe I didn't think this pick through... $76 at Best Made Co.

From Mason Currey's list, I'll select the 2014 Cat Calendar. I'm a dog guy and I don't like cats, but my dogs like eating paper, and I'm hoping they go for the cat calendar before they hit my copy of the Woodcraft catalogue. $50 from United Bamboo

From Fosta's list, I'll pick the Magnetron Carabiner. Why? You know why. Don't play dumb with me. $30 from Black Diamond

Early this year, on a surf-and-ski trip gone awry, the San Franciso–based designers Wylie Robinson and Nick Polinko found themselves stranded in their car overnight in sub-zero temperatures. Luckily, they had sleeping bags, which not only kept them warm until they could get their car towed but gave them an idea for a new product—a high-performance blanket for the home that they dubbed the Rumpl and launched on Kickstarter this month.

"We felt that the soft, warm, durable materials used in our bags had the potential for many uses other than camping or super-technical apparel," Polinko says. "We realized the everyday blanket was severely lacking a modern update, and the boring style options at local home supply mega-stores were dull and repetitive." Looking at the options available, they noticed that everything seemed to be made for either college students or Martha Stewart. With a shared spite for dealing with clumsy duvet covers and an affinity for the feel of technical materials, the two knew they could develop something better. "We set out to solve a problem that we had, and found out that lots of other people felt the same way," Robinson says.

But realizing their vision was hardly a straightforward task. Robinson and Polinko knew exactly what kind of material they wanted—a durable, water-resistant coated nylon like the kind found in high-end jackets and sleeping bags. Their first step was to source the material in bulk, a surprisingly challenging task. With backgrounds in product design and graphic/environmental design, respectively, Polinko and Robinson had a lot of experience building new products from scratch, but never in the soft-goods department. To fill that gap, they brought in an apparel designer.

Bring a little fire-god into your drinking routine. The Hand Forge bottle opener offers that je ne sais quoi that comes from being heated to 2,000 degrees and smashed into shape. Rough-hewn but carefully made, each bottle opener is forged individually on the anvil, then finished by hand and inspected for proper fit. This piece of badass static machinery never fails to grab attention (or bottle caps). Put the power back in your power-drinking.

The Hand Forge Bottle Opener - $36
Available now at Core77's Hand-Eye Supply

Order now for guaranteed holiday delivery!

One more for today, via new Gizmodo-spinoff Sploid: We took note of filmmaker Kirby Ferguson's "Everything is a Remix" project when it launched in 2011; given his thesis—that art and innovation increasingly consists of merely recombining existing ideas in novel ways—it will only become more true as time marches on. Ferguson has just revisited the project with a one-off case study on the iPhone, and while it's definitely worth watching, it does feel a bit like armchair analysis—dissecting these specimens (see also: the viral "Was iOS7 created in Microsoft Word?" vid) or, say, identifying all of the samples in a Girl Talk album is, as the clich&ecute; goes, to miss the forest for the trees, and overlook the seamlessness of the the system as a whole (which, as we all know, was Jobs' genius in the first place).

That said, it's nice to see all of the reference points in one place, and unlike the latter example, in which the DJ's All Dayactually boosted sales of its source material, hardware is a zero-sum game. As an immaterial good, we hear or listen to dozens, if not hundreds, of songs every day; most of us only own a single phone.

A few from the archive:
- Skeuomorphism aside, it's also interesting to revisit "Five Reasons Why the [Original] iPhone Is Older Than You Think," by Robert Fabricant... from September 2007.
- Every iPhone [except for the original] Side by Side in Action
- The New iPhone [5C/5S] Elements That Catch Our Eye.

The Leveraged Freedom Chair, a wheelchair optimized for rural terrain. All images courtesy Icsid.

As the field of design for social impact grows, so does the discourse around it. Here at Core77, we recognize Social Impact as its own category in our own Design awards [Ed. Note: Which are now open for entries], and sites like Change Observer and the Design Altruism Project regularly highlight design and its role in social change. The World Design Impact Prize, started last year by the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (Icsid), is one such prize, a new development in recognizing and rewarding innovations in the field.

"The goal of the World Design Impact Prize is to recognise and elevate industrial design driven solutions to societal challenges," noted Icsid Project Development Officer Mariam Masud. "By sharing these solutions, and the challenges they address the prize hopes to raise awareness of perhaps unknown obstacles and encourage a global exchange of ideas."

Food design for social change: a repurposing of the popular Indian snack called a "laddoo", with rich nutrients to fight malnutrition.

The shortlist of projects met the standards of basic selection criteria that extend past basic questions of design aesthetics and functionality that an industrial design competition might be focused on. Rather, jurors are asked to consider questions around Impact, Innovation, Context and Ease of Use. "Are there elements of the project (best practices) that can be universally shared?" "How well does the project compliment or build on the existing infrastructure (physical, political, cultural etc.)?" "Is the project easy to maintain and are replacement parts easily available?"

10jours10designers ("10 Days, 10 Designers") is the name of a recent design competition held by French furniture design house Minimalist Editions. The challenge was pretty simple: Each designer gets an oak slab, 400mm × 250mm × 28mm—that's roughly 16” × 10” × 1” to us Yanks—access to a CNC workshop and an ebeniste, and has ten days to come up with an oddments tray, or whatever you call that little key-holding dish by the front door of your house.

While the end products are pretty refined, they remind me a lot of those design school projects, where groups of students are given identical materials and yet yield a surprising variety of designs. Check out Lionel Dinis Salazar's artfully-kerfed "PAVO":

Pierre Dubourg's pretty bi-level number leaves no doubt as to what the form was inspired by—it's called "Super Tanker":

Are you driven by potential? Lowe's is too. They are propelled by the pioneering spirits who find opportunity in change. As a FORTUNE 100 company, Lowe's committed to rewarding the hard work and dedication of the employees who have helped them get to where they are today.

For the right Manager of Product Design, this is an opportunity to serve as the trusted resource for Lowe's design direction in kitchen and bath. You'll lead the kitchen and bath designers in the design and development of private brand kitchen and bath product solutions that are aligned with Lowe's customer experience strategy, and style and trend direction. Sound like your kind of gig? Apply Now.

Hilversum, the Netherlands, where interaction14 will take place

Arguably for any discipline to advance in its practice it needs to have a solid means for educating its future practitioners. This is doubly true when the demand for that discipline is at a pace that is far exceedingly the rate at which practitioners can be "created" otherwise. In 2009, Jared Spool saw this reality coming. He led an amazing panel at the Interaction Design Association's (IxDA) annual conference, Interaction09, in Vancouver, British Columbia. The panel was called "Hiring the Next Generation of Designers," in which Jared asked, "Where are the next 10,000 interaction designers going to come from?" While in most academic terms four and a half years is not very long, in the digital design world it is a very long time ago.

For me, the Interaction09 conference was on the heels of a major moment in my own life. I moved away from practice and into Education because, like Jared, I felt the pressure that was and continues to be on interaction design education. And for over four years, I led the interaction design program at a prestigious Art & Design college, the Savannah College of Art and Design. During that time, I felt the pressures on interaction design education. I was trying my best to make students that were better than what industry needed and at every turn my successes felt limited to only a small selection of outstanding students. Students who brought the soft skills they needed to me and whom I just curated a collection of knowledge and tools to make them better prepared and those that came ready left ready getting hired into positions directly out of school at organizations like frog, Adaptive Path, Philips, Siemens, Smart Design and IBM.

But through all this success, it was still clear to me that there was a growing disparity between what I was offering and a what a large number of employers were looking for in their Junior employees. We have entered an industry that is increasingly unforgiving compared to design careers in the past. I felt at odds with much of my peers who were still 100% in industry. I started to look for ways to engage industry through my connection with the IxDA. Right after the 2009 conference, I started a conversation with people both in education and in industry interested in helping me start a competition geared towards highlighting how awesome both students and design education institutions were. We called it the International Interaction Design Student Competition. We had about 15 judges, of whom eight made it to the main conference and of whom five were part of a panel of "mentors" for the finalists, who were all given a free trip to Savannah, GA, for Interaction10. They were given a challenge to design something in a short time and find ways to present their skills and mindset to the community of attendees as a whole. The event was a success in so far as it got a new conversation happening among industry and design educators.

With the holidays upon us once again, once again we collectively face retail propositions—thinly veiled as holiday spirit, if at all—at every turn as consumerism surges towards its perennial peak in one week. So too are flesh-and-bone shoppers invariably subject to a brick-and-mortar experience that predates the web-enabled phenomenon of 'showrooming' (which has now met its match with neologisms such as 'webrooming,' 'e-rooming,' and 'RoBo'; look 'em up if you're curious): the ineluctable IRL soundtrack to the season, piping through the internal airwaves of stores as though preordained—paeans to Santa, Rudolph, Frosty, et al part and parcel to unflattering fluorescent lights and cranked-up HVAC. Hackneyed holiday classics and the ever-lengthening tail of covers, remixes, etc. alike serve as foregone background music that falls like light flurries on one's ears; sure, it melts instantly, but it also has a weird way of seeping into your cerebellum. Tis the season indeed.

Here's one that you won't be hearing at your local Best Buy or [insert big box electronics store here]: James Houston's take on "Carol of the Bells." The director / animator / graphic designer tuned his obsolete-device orchestra—which include an iMac, a Commodore 64 and a SEGA Mega Drive, among others—to the telltale motif of the Ukrainian folk chant. Check out "Season's Greetings from The Glasgow School of Art" (Houston's Alma Mater):

Photos by Priscilla de Castro

For the last round of the Hatch Live competition, the contestants were kept in the dark in terms of what they would be designing until four hours before the competition. "We wanted to keep it exciting," says Matthew Sargeant, founder and CEO of Hatch Hub. "We wanted to see how each designer works under pressure. It was great to feel the adrenaline in the room at the final." The morning of the final round, they were told they'd be creating table lamps. As the event began, it was pretty clear that judges Dan Rubinstein (former editor-in-chief of Surface magazine) and industrial designer Simon Enever had a tough choice ahead of them. Check out the behind-the-scenes video of the final battle for the grand prize:

The Core77 Ultimate Gift Guide is one of the more popular pieces of content that we put together every year, both for our readers and those of us who have the privilege—and eye—for making the selections. In the interest of capturing the communal spirit of this year's Gift Guide, the contributors will be selecting a few of their favorite picks from their cohorts' lists alongside one of their own.

In other words, hint, hint.

Gifts are silly, and designers are even sillier. Most people really want money, but as humans we love to obsess over gifts so we can show how well we know someone. We want to pick that perfect item that so personifies our friend, or hits on that untapped need that even they didn't know they had. Perhaps we just want to show we care. What can be more fulfilling of human needs than that, to make a connection with peer and show you understand?

In selecting my list, I tried to pick a variety of things for all different kinds of designers. For that severe utilitarian type who is a closeted brand freak, the Herman Miller desktop power outlet says "I understand your woes my brother." For that person who can't just get a drink quietly, they have to make an entire production of it flaunting every tool in their 30 step process, the Stelton Sommelier Foil Cutter says "hurry up already, I just can't wait for that next glass of Gewürztraminer." For that designer couple you know who are about to have a designer kid, the LAX minimalist poster says "I care that your child grows up to be an aesthete just like his mama and papa." For the whimsical iconoclast, the BOOM Swimmer says "I know you are going to do something wrong with this, go for it." And for the billionaire designer who has a billionaire designer friend, the Icon Thriftmaster is the must-have of the season.

So no matter what type of designer you have on your gift list, I think I selected something that might be enjoyed. Some of these might even work for non-designer types... if you know any of those.

Slyphone - For me researching isn't a phase of work, it is everyday all day. I'm always trying my hardest to covertly snap photos of things in stores, people on trains and around town, and of things I'm not supposed to in museums and art galleries. This thing is going to make my life so much easier. $19 at Minor Asset

The Magic Charger - I have three Magic Mice. One on my desk in the studio, one in my home office, and one I keep in my bag... they designed this thing for me. $50 from Mobee Technology

See the full 2013 Gift Guide for more ideas →

This nautically named knife is sharp and straightforward, but (when used properly) will not force you to swim or sail. The Montpellier comes to us from MC Cognet, makers of the odd and lovely Douk-Douk for over 80 years.

Practical and pretty, it sports a beautifully faceted and patterned cocobolo wood handle (which smacks lightly of futurist architecture) and a wide carbon steel blade. Aside from the lanyard hole, it's got no unnecessary bells or whistles to bog it down. It's just you and the blade, man. This stylish knife comes in a foam gift box that would appear to have spring snakes or a really cool pen inside. In reality it just cradles a simple, finely made French pocket knife in slightly questionable style.

Fresh in at Hand-Eye Supply– $60.
Order now and get a free upgrade to Priority Shipping for Xmas delivery within the US!

When USB flash drives first came out, they were useful, expensive and valued things. Nowadays they're still useful, but I've got a drawer full of them, as every press conference I attend passes them out like candy. Most are made of plastic, some of metal. As they continue to proliferate, oughtn't we make them out of recycled/recycleable materials?

BOLTgroup thinks so. The North-Carolina-based design firm is trying to Kickstart Gigs 2 Go, their project to release flash drives with bodies made from recycled paper pulp. The idea is that users buy them in credit-card-sized four-packs, and tear them off as needed for file sharing. Have a look:

The reason why I've got this in the "Yea or Nay" section is, do you think these will see uptake, given their cost? When it comes to bang for buck, careful shoppers can scoop up flash drives for roughly 50-cents-to-a-dollar per gigabyte; The Gigs 2 Go drives still available ring in at roughly two bucks per gig, with an early batch of $1/gig long gone. Do you think their uptake will be dependent on cost, or would you be willing to pay slightly more for a thumb drive you could recycle?