One of last year's entries to make the 2013 roundup was this piano that was converted into a workbench. Any time you've got 300-plus pounds of antique quarter-sawn oak sitting around, it is of course better to recycle it into something useful, even if the music-generating parts no longer work; and the cast-iron parts can be hauled down to a salvage yard for some extra dough.

It looks like a lot of folks are onto this. Vicky Neuman converted an old upright into a bookcase/desk, and exhaustively documented the process, with many photos, here.

Core77 2013 Year in Review: Top Ten Posts· Furniture, Pt. 1· Furniture, Pt. 2
Digital Fabrication, Pt. 1· Digital Fabrication, Pt. 2· Digital Fabrication, Pt. 3· Digital Fabrication, Pt. 4
Insights from the Core77 Questionnaire· Maker Culture: The Good, the Bad and the Future· Food & Drink
Materials, Pt. 1: Wood· Materials, Pt. 2: Creative Repurposing· Materials, Pt. 3: The New Stuff
True I.D. Stories· High-Tech Headlines· The Year in Photos

In 2013, the Core77 team visited design festivals, exhibitions, conferences, design studios and manufacturers around the globe bringing you a firsthand look at stuff that made us look twice. This collection of images is not so much a narrative in itself as it is a broad survey of design happenings and projects that we documented over the past year. All of our international photo correspondents are practicing designers, and we are always excited to see how they capture these events with a designer's lens (both figuratively and physically).

Going into 2014, we are looking forward to having lenses and tripods on the ground in more cities—if you're interested in contributing, have a decent camera and a sharp eye for design that counts, send me a short bio with a link to your photos: glen [at] core77 [dot] com.

Happy New Year!

Click on each image to see the full galleries / photo essays!

SVA Products of Design's ALSO! project, WantedDesign, New York Design Week. Photo by Kathryn McElroy

Props by Frederick McSwain, Off the Grid at Gallery R'Pure, New York Design Week. Photo by Glen Jackson Taylor

UMJ-1 Custom Keyboard Stand by UM Project for Mikael Jorgensen of Wilco. Photo by Glen Jackson Taylor

I'm loving the design of the Mastro Table, created for Italian manufacturer DeCastelli by Viareggio-based Gumdesign. It's not just the clean look—it's the perfect, elegant simplicity of proper materials exploitation.

Take a sheet of iron and it's pretty strong. Bend the edges twice and it's even stronger, gaining I-beam-like rigidity. And now that you've bent those edges, a channel is created--the perfect place to slot a crossbeam for trestle legs.

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For all you energetic, organised and ambitious Product Designers and Engineers our there, D30 is eager to bring you on board so you can strut your stuff and make their portfolio even better. This is the perfect opportunity for someone with 3 - 5 years experience in a related industry, knowledge of various types of manufacturing equipment and their limitations, plus a knack for building relationships with customers and the sales team. Apply Now.

Johnson Tsang takes the common bowl or cup to the next level. His ceramic housewares constantly bring deeper meaning to dining receptacles, far past simply housing your tea and soup. He's even managed to make a spitting face look surprisingly appetizing.

Tsang—who lives and creates in Hong Kong—has a whole portfolio full of captivating faces and figures. His website serves as an ongoing chronicle of works-in-progress, a sequence of shots from first coils to finished products like these:

Moving sheet goods is a huge pain in the neck, particularly for shorter guys like me with a wingspan that leaves something to be desired. But even for you bigger folk, there's nothing ergonomic about toting a 4x8 sheet around your shop or the jobsite.

The Gorilla Gripper is a cleverly-designed handle that allows you to lift and carry sheet goods using your back and legs, while preserving your fingers and toes. There are tons of YouTube videos showing the thing, but I like the following low-res one the best because it shows the actual applications in the field:

I don't think I'd have the balls to try hoisting it up a ladder, like the guy did in the video, but I'd try everything else they showed.

Of the power tools I own, this diminutive Makita impact driver is one of my favorites. I recently had to install a Murphy Bed and this thing drove lag screws into the subfloor like I was hammering brad nails. As someone who cut his teeth with bulky, cordless, keyed-chuck power drills with no hammering action, that something this small could pack so much punch has always amazed me.

I always pictured a powerful little leprechaun inside making the magic happen; but as it turns out, the impact mechanism's a bit more prosaic. Nick Moore, whose YouTube channel is dedicated to sharing "Science on a budget, [to] take a closer look at the world we live in," cut the housing away on an impact driver extension to show you how it works. Pretty cool:

I'm a big fan of the "campsite rule" in most realms of life. You should be too. You're going to tinker with something for fun or profit? Make sure you're contributing positively in both the long and short terms, and above all, do no harm. Seems pretty straightforward, right? So when I stumbled across a series of "then vs. now" photos of dog breed development through the ages my Aghast Button got a good poke. My conclusion was this:

Many purebred dogs are the product of idiotic aestheticized design sense, and engineered to fail.

This might provoke some internal knee-jerks. Whether you're thinking "Well, MY [favored breed] is happy, healthy and recently rescued a bus full of children from a fire," or "Sure, all breeders are immoral and should be shot," I'm not here to argue the meta point on animal husbandry. In fact, I'll cop to being both a shelter-only wonk and a big Viszla fan. Rather, I'd encourage you to consider the purebred dog as a heritage brand product that has lost hold of the function side of the scales and any vision of the object as a whole. (Think PT Cruiser.)

No denying it, some beloved purebred dogs are terribly configured, and it's hardly surprising. When you allow aesthetics or a single praised trait to dictate form, you run the risk of compromising overall quality, usability and durability. If there's one thing pedigreed breeding is all about, it's single-minded dedication to very specific traits, and when you multiply that dedication over the course of generations... the results can be bizarrely out of touch. Here are a couple of examples.

Bloodhounds: Bred as a practical purpose-built dog for game chasing and savvy sniffing as far back as medieval France, the bloodhound dipped deeply in popularity around the early 1900s (as pictured above) and may have disappeared if competitive dog shows hadn't taken off around that time. Subsequently, their prized scenting skills have been "improved" on with increasingly unreasonable physical characteristics: a tall peaked skull, ears like grandma's caftans, sunken eyes, and lots and lots of wrinkly skin. The jowelled face on these guys could belong to an aging president. While handsome to a bloodhound fancier, some of these bred-in traits are in direct conflict with the dog's hunting nature. What's worse, they now commonly suffer from eye, nose and ear problems, cancer, and high instances of bloat. Some surveys report an average lifespan as short as 6 or 7 years. Planned obsolescence? Pretty sure that's unethical.

There are only so many ways to make a plant look right at home indoors. You can buy the biggest, most functional planter and they're still going to look a little out of place—not to mention your vegetation will eventually run out of room. Without the freedom of the great outdoors, plants just don't look right indoors. Italian designer Andrea Rekalidis is looking to switch that mentality up with a design that helps plants let it all hang out (literally) indoors and out.

Piantala is a metal rod partition that gives off the form of a traditional white picket fence. The design acts as a support system for vine-growing plants indoors and outdoors—the circular "feet" can be planted directly into the ground outside or into a planter or pot inside.

As a world leader in designing, manufacturing and marketing cleaning solutions that help to create a cleaner, safer world, Tennant Company is making a positive impact on the environments where their products and solutions are used. They are also increasing their commitment to creating great customer user experiences by expanding their internal, award winning industrial design group.

Want to join their team? It takes a bachelor's degree in industrial design, and since this is an entry level position, anywhere between 0 and 3 years of experience will do. You should also have exceptional sketching and rendering ability, proficiency in 3D CAD; preferably SolidWorks, and an intense desire to improve on the status quo while maintaining a coachable spirit. Apply Now.

Photos by Talia Herman

If you're an industrial designer looking to work in the tech sector, Google is probably pretty low on your list of prospective employers—if it's on there at all. The company employs plenty of UX designers, interaction designers, motion designers, and others who shape how Google users interface with its many digital tools. But Google doesn't really make stuff, and ambitious designer-makers are much more likely to set their sights on Apple, IDEO, frog, or any number of other high-profile companies that do.

That may be about to change. Recently, Google invited Core77 to visit its Mountain View, California, campus and meet some of the design talent behind Google X, the semi-secret "moonshot factory" that has in recent years been designing quite a bit of actual stuff, some of which you've no doubt heard about by now. X was founded in January 2010 to continue work on Google's self-driving car initiative, and to start developing other similarly futuristic projects. The next to be unveiled was Google Glass, the much-publicized wearable computer that is expected to reach consumers sometime this year. After that, X launched (quite literally) Project Loon, an attempt to provide Internet service to rural and remote areas via balloons floating in the stratosphere; it conducted a pilot test in New Zealand last June. X also recently acquired Makani Power, which develops airborne wind turbines that could be used to harvest high-altitude wind energy, bringing its total number of public projects to four.

But what's interesting for the design community is not just that Google X is doing some traditional industrial design in the service of realizing outrageously big ideas, but that it's integrating I.D. with a variety of other disciplines in a particularly rigorous fashion, creating an ideal-sounding nexus of design thinking, user research and fabrication. And it is actively seeking new talent who can help flesh out its multidisciplinary approach.

"We're looking for unicorns," says Mitchell Heinrich, one of the four X-ers I met in Mountain View about a month ago. Heinrich founded and runs his own group within X called the Design Kitchen, which acts as X's in-house fabrication department but is also deeply involved in generating (and killing) new ideas. And what he means by "unicorns" is designers who have the rare ability to excel in both of those roles—as he puts it, "people who have the ability to have the inspiration, the thought, the design, and then are able to carry that out to something that actually works and looks like what they want it to look like."

That may not sound like such a fantastically rare combination of skills, but Heinrich insists that finding people who can do this kind of soup-to-nuts design—come up with brilliant ideas and then actually make them, while also working extremely fast—has been difficult. In other words, the Kitchen has high standards. "I like to think of it as more like a Chez Panisse than an Applebee's," he says.

The Googleplex in early December

At this point even laypeople, not just us industrial designers, have heard of injection molding; it's how a lot of the plastic stuff we own is made. But few layfolk have heard of metal injection molding, and it's only a minority of ID'ers who will get to work with the process because it's so darn expensive.

Expensive, and cool. Metal injection molding can be used to create small, complex metal parts that would be too difficult to machine, and it affords higher tolerances than casting. It's accurate enough to mold tiny threads, as you can see on the shaft of the arrowhead below:

Happy New Year, designers! We can't wait to see what this year will bring for the Core77 Design Awards. The deadline to receive one of our limited edition silk-printed posters may have come and gone, but the earlybird deadline (with a 20% discounted registration fee) is still up for grabs if you submit your entry before January 30.

We've got a little motivation for you. We can give you a little insight into the fabulous jury captains who will be leading this year's judging teams. Read on to get to know the people you're out to impress:

One of the biggest barrier for designers getting their work to the public is the current state of large scale physical retail, which can inhibit risk taking and reward products that are overly conservative. The goal is often to bring products to retail that are already proven. By definition this is going to limit designs that are more niche and interesting, and make designs that are disruptive almost impossible to bring to market.

Perhaps this is why so many people are slightly infatuated with crowdfunding, where a person can have a dream, put some effort in, and directly reach the end user. This process of direct communication with end users eliminates the opinions of dozens of retailers and can appeal to very specific and niche audiences. I don't back a ton of campaigns, but I love surfing through them. A few of our discussion group members even have a slight addiction problem. After all, it does feel a bit like your own personal version of Shark Tank.

In this series, Matthew Sullivan (AQQ Design) highlights some designers that you should know, but might not. Previously, he looked at the work of Martino Gamper.

Ugo La Pietra: Born in Bussi sul Tirino, Italy, 1938

"Art furniture" is a fairly detestable moniker. It carries with it a sense that said pieces are not quite art and not really furniture—either art is slumming or furniture is longing. Clearly, and it may seem overly reductive (but I can't see much actual distortion), for all human endeavors, some creations are simply good and some not so much. All things have value but not all are superlative, whether art or decorative art, sculpture or industrial design, painting or graphics, drawing or illustration, essay writing or whatever. To separate the functional arts from the fine arts is like trying to differentiate between the acceleration rate of a falling pound of goose feathers and a falling pound of duck feathers. Art and design are not dualistic—and our subject, Ugo La Pietra, is really the most instructive on these matters. He considers his life's output (50-plus years, spanning a wide range of disciplines) to be, plainly, research.

La Pietra came of creative age during the ambitious days of radical 1960s culture. Working with and alongside such provocateurs as Hans Hollein, the Haus-Rucker-Co, Ettore Sottsass, the Situationist International, Coop Himmelblau, Archizoom and Superstudio, he developed his own critical method of making. In his own words, he pushed for the "decoding and rereading of what has been forgotten, or ill used, or is somehow, for more or less legitimate historical reasons, petrified" (Ugo La Pietra, "1960-1990: Thirty Years of Experimental Research").

Above: the 1966 Globo Tissurato lamp (left) and a ceramic piece from 1991. Top: the Libreria shelving unit (left) and La Pietra with his Globo Tissurato.

There's no denying that levitation of any sort is pretty awesome—whether you've only seen it in movies or our previous coverage of magnetic levitation, levitating table lamps or this hovering LED. There's something about seeing something move with no visual force that's so intriguing. You may have seen this shape-shifting water video from science and illusion videographer Brusspup as it hit the Internet early in 2013:

Hosted by Don Lehman, Core77's podcast series is designed for all those times you're sketching, working in the shop, or just looking for inspiration from inspiring people. We'll have conversations with interesting creatives and regular guests. The viewpoint of Afterschool will come from industrial design, but the focus will be on all types of creativity: graphic design, storytelling, architecture, cooking, illustration, branding, materials, business, research... anything that could enrich your thought process, we'll talk about.

When I was in high school and just starting to think about college, I knew I wanted to get into design, but wasn't sure what that meant exactly. I liked making things and loved all of my art classes, but design wasn't talked about much back then, which made it hard to learn about. And then, the iMac came out.

In the shadow of the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, it's hard to remember what a big deal the iMac was, but it was a really big deal. Pretty much every computer at that point was a beige box, and then out comes Apple with this translucent, Bondi blue, space orb. The aesthetic was head turning, but it was the design of how people would use it that captured my 16-year-old attention. Plug in the keyboard and mouse, plug it into the wall, and start surfing the internet. An all-in-one, fully considered, user experience. The iMac saved Apple from bankruptcy and helped put design on the map in the late 90s. Its designers were actually featured in interviews. And those interviews ended up being my first encounter with both the term industrial design and the leader behind the iMac's design, Jonathan Ive. From then on, I knew I was going to be an industrial designer.

I think it's safe to say that over the last fifteen years, no design team has had more impact than Apple's. Even once you get past the success of their products, they've reshaped not only how the world views design, but how the design industry views itself. For all that notoriety and impact, we actually know very little about Apple's design team. Today we talk about Jony Ive and Apple's Industrial Design Group with author Leander Kahney. Leander is the editor and publisher of cultofmac.com and has written three books about Apple: Cult of Mac, Cult of iPod, and Inside Steve's Brain. His latest is called Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products.

Get the Afterschool Podcast, Episode #15 - Author Leander Kahney: Available at the iTunes store or direct download via Soundcloud below.

Remember our Car Studio Photography Set-Ups entry? That gave you a pretty good look at the insane amount of equipment required to shoot automobiles. But of course it didn't cover every possible situation; most of the earlier set-ups we saw were all about diffusing the overhead light, like this:

Australia-based Easton Chang, on the other hand, used unfiltered tungsten lighting while capturing a Holden VF Commodore, resulting in one of the "hotter" shoots of his career:

"All the lights were (boiling!) hot tungsten lights," Chang writes. "There were a total of 84 lights, including the ones lighting the front of the car which you can't see in the shot.

"The results? Absolutely boiling hot conditions, the paint (which was one off and uber expensive) started to bubble and the metal on my tripod was too hot to touch with your bare hands."

Chang, by the way, may just have one of the coolest jobs in the world: He travels the globe photographing exotic cars, capturing shots like these:

Giant floating bubbles filled with orange-scented smoke make their way to the noses of onlookers.

We hope you had a great New Year's Eve filled with friends, kitschy noisemakers and too many drinks. But the truth of the matter is this—you probably didn't catch fireworks as cool as the thousands of people who got to taste their light show in London. Food scientists Bompas & Parr (the partners behind the jelly project that blew our minds) teamed up with Vodafone and the mayor of London to create an edible experience for the area's annual New Year's Eve fireworks show on the Thames River.

Early sketches of the firework experience

Viewers stood clad with light-up armbands that flashed in beat to the show they were watching. The different colored fireworks corresponded to different scents and tastes that were projected into the audience through peach snow, edible banana confetti, strawberry smoke and floating bubbles filled with Seville orange scented smoke. Check out a video from the event:

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To qualify for this internship, you must be enrolled in BS/BA degree program in Graphic Design, have solid knowledge of Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign and Adobe Acrobat on a Mac platform, creativity and ability to think out of the box.

Spruce up your resume and portfolio today and Apply Now.