Like a lot of designers, I have struggled with the term industrial design over the years. The term seems a little vague. Sometimes people ask us if we design factories. A look at conversations over in the Core77 discussions forums shows I'm not alone. Check out this 80 reply thread on the forum that was started back in 2007. The term doesn't seem have the weight of history that Architecture has. It doesn't have the contemporary feel of the term Interaction Design. It does't have the specificity that some of our sub disciplines have like furniture design and footwear design, and it doesn't have the sexiness of transportation design or entertainment concept design.

In reaction we have flirted with other terms like product design, which has it's own set of issues. It seems a bit clinical to me and doesn't touch on the breadth of what we do beyond the product. Adding to the confusion, the term product design has been co-opted in some cases by mechanical engineers and app designers.

Over the last 15 years, as I've grown from a staff designer to a design director, creative director, and now chief design officer at Sound United, I've now started to come full circle. What I do now as a CDO of course involves identifying user segments, defining brand parameters, conceptualizing product opportunities, designing physical and digital products, packaging, web-experiences, physical retail and event spaces. It also involves designing interdisciplinary work flows, concept development processes, and organizational structures. Suddenly the term Industrial design seems to fit. Our education in user-centered design, problem identification, creative solution finding, implementation strategy mixed with our desire to often find the most aesthetic and clean solution makes us just as suited to designing the perfect ergonomic task chair as it does designing the company that makes the chair.

Industrial designers can in fact be designers of industry. So after 15 years of trying to dodge the term, I've actually come to embrace it. I am an industrial designer.

It's the dawn of a new year, a time that we often think about the future. For Cameron Smith, a professor of Anthropology at Portland State University, that future looks like something from a 1950s B-movie: He's building his own space suit by hand. When I say by hand, I mean by hand—he doesn't even own a sewing machine. Recently featured on the podcasts Destination DIY and 99% Invisible, Cameron's work is an impressive example of the weird world of DIY aeronautics. Motivated by the challenge of engineering his own answers to the technical difficulties of keeping a human body alive in the extreme pressures of space (officially bounded by the Karman line, for those interested), rather than design prize money or grants from an entity like NASA, he is definitely on the outer reaches of space engineering and DIY in general. To date, the only key component he hasn't fabricated himself is a Soviet space helmet. When stumped he often turns to Soviet designs, because their smaller space budget forced them to use more creative problem-solving.

Though it's still a work in process (the wearer can currently breathe in but not out—"It's a minor problem, we will fix it"), the pressurized suit is already stable and airtight enough to function at length underwater. Once the design is trustworthy, he intends to take the suit up to space-like conditions at 50,000 feet in a balloon-supported gondola - also made by hand. In the meantime, Cameron has teamed up with Copenhagen Suborbitals, a non-profit rocket building project operated out of an abandoned shipyard in Denmark. It may sound sketchy, but they are prolific and dedicated and making headway towards manned space flight.

Willenz and his Profile chair

This is the latest installment of our Core77 Questionnaire. Previously, we talked to the lighting designer Bec Brittain.

Name:Sylvain Willenz

Occupation: Industrial designer

Location: Brussels

Current projects: At the moment we are working on a variety of things. It's mainly chairs and lighting, which are products that I have a strong interest in. And then there are some complementary accessories as well, such as tables and mirrors, for example. We are also working on a number of textile-based projects using several techniques; this is an area that we are developing and in which I enjoy working.

Mission: To design useful things that people will enjoy using. But also to contribute to the company that is making these things. So I'm not just concerned about the end user; I'm also concerned about the context of the product and it being something interesting and viable for whoever's producing it.

Drop is a simple, affordable, injection-molded-plastic bucket designed by Willenz for the Belgian housewares company Xala.

The legs of Willenz's Candy tables are steel rebar like that normally found on construction sites.

When did you decide that you wanted to be a designer? I guess when I was around 18 and I discovered that this profession existed. At first I wanted to be an illustrator, doing comics. Then when I discovered that you could actually design things and objects, I got really interested in that. But I believe that I have kept my interest in comics and sort of translated it into objects. Because I've always had a really strong interest in drawings—in drawing myself, in other people's drawings, in comics, in how you can simplify reality into a drawing. And I liked the idea of doing that with products, of making sort of three-dimensional sketches that are resolved in really functional and useful objects.

Education: I studied in the UK. I did a B.A. in three-dimensional design, and then I did a two-year masters course at the Royal College of Art in London, in what they called Design Products, rather than product design. That was something that Ron Arad had put into place when he started as the director of the course. I believe he thought it was more interesting to turn things around and call it Design Products, because it opened the possibilities of what you could design.

First design job: The Brackets Included shelf, which was my graduation project and which went into production a year later, in 2004, with a company that no longer exists—and which now, ten years later, has been put back into production by Wrong For Hay in a revised design. The design concept is still the same, but we refined it and tuned a few details. It's much nicer now.

Who is your design hero? There are many designers I admire for obvious reasons. Philippe Starck would be a major one, because I think he's a fascinating mind. Not that I necessarily like what he does in terms of his work and style and products; not that I necessarily agree with everything or understand everything that he does—but I do think he is a profoundly interesting mind.

The Profile chair and table

We're no stranger to innovativeclotheshangerdesigns. This time, we've been turned on to a design that consists a lot more than what meets the eye. UK-based homeware brand Gazel has introduced a sleek hanger that won't damage your clothes with some avant garde functionality.

The Gazel clotheshanger will look good in your closet and it actually looks like one of those products that holds true on the term "user-friendly." Read on to find out how this design might have the power to make you want to hang up your clothes.

A globetrotting Japanese expat once told me he believed there was a Japanese expat pecking order. "The coolest kids move to London," he explained, "the second coolest, to New York. The third coolest move to L.A." (This last one delivered with an undertone of scorn.)

If his theorem can also be applied to Japanese automobiles, then Nissan is in pretty good shape. Their boxy NV200 won NYC's "Taxi of Tomorrow" competition (albeit amidst resistance) last year; now it's just won the "Taxi for London" title, and will begin rolling out there later this year.

Petrol version

Electric version

Many American cities have this problem, but it's most obvious in sprawling Los Angeles: When you're trapped in bumper-to-bumper on the 405, you look around and observe the brutal 1:1 ratio of cars to drivers, as far as the eye can see. The absurdity of lone humans each ensconced in their own two-ton rectangle of steel, and the space each person's vehicle consumes relative to the drivers' size, is difficult to find unremarkable. Four wheels, one driver, and from one to five empty seats.

That's how it's turned out, but in the 1950s German engineer Carl Jurisch had a different vision. According to the Bruce Weiner Microcar Museum, Jurisch "became convinced that the future of transportation lay in a personal single-seat vehicle" and so, using a motorcycle sidecar as his starting point, he designed his single-occupancy Motoplan.

Want!

There are certain items that don't lend themselves to being hung on hooks, like towels, scarves and winter hats; mine like to stay on the hook for the first 30 seconds, but later I'll return to find them on the floor--which led to my dogs destroying my favorite rabbit-fur head-heater, which I purchased in Sweden. Sigh.

Ironically, the solution to this also comes from Sweden. Homeware manufacturer Linden Sweden sells the Clever Hook you see pictured above. It's tough to understand how it works by looking at a still photo, so watch this short vid:

Sephora is a visionary beauty-retail concept founded in France by Dominique Mandonnaud in 1970. Their unique, open-sell environment features an ever-increasing amount of classic and emerging brands across a broad range of product categories. Freedom, energy, edge, and boldness describe what it's like to work at Sephora and there's a wonderful opportunity in their San Francisco office for an exceptional Packaging Development Manager.

In this role, you'll be be responsible for the development of quality, innovative new products across multiple seasons in multiple brands. This includes overseeing new product launches with a focus on packaging and improving and optimizing the quality and performance of existing core products. Put your passion for packaging and makeup to good work by Applying Now.

One of the designs on display at the exhibit opening and auction

It's easy to feel weirdly disconnected from your favorite designers. They're always finding inspiration from this and that, but you don't know much about how they view themselves. Consider this exhibit as close to a personal introduction as you might ever get. In a collaboration with Alessandro Mendini for TAM TAM (a free and unrestricted non-school in Milan), 50 designers decided to take on an assignment: decorate a white vessel (designed by Mendini) with a self-portrait. The pay-off? A motley mix of slightly psychological designs titled "Immagini d'Io," on view through January 19 at the Triennale di Milano museum.

From left to right: Franz Preis, Lorenzo Palmeri and FormaFantasma

L: Karim Rashid; R: Alessandro Mendini

Everyone loves to back a winner. Eone Time brought the Bradley Timepiece to Kickstarter and the people of Kickstarter backed it to the moon and, uh, back. This slick watch was developed by Hyungsoo Kim, inspired by the surprisingly limited watch options for people with impaired vision and aided by simple design sense.

The Bradley Timepiece is made from machined titanium and powered by a Swiss crystal mechanism, but the brilliant point is the face. Two slightly exposed ball bearings representing the minute and hour hands are pulled around tracks by strong internal magnets which keep them in time and secure. Numerical positions are marked in relief, 12 is a bold triangle and quarter hours are textured to distinguish them from minor increments. As a result, you can tell time with a brief brush of the fingers.

Is this 2014's first Photoshop hoax? That was the sentiment as the photo above was brought to the blogosphere's attention earlier this week. "What's the largest item you can have shipped from Amazon?" queried Reddit user listrophy. "Because I think my neighbor just got it."

More photographs of the mysterious box popped up on Twitter...

The finished farmer's market at dusk

As every designer and design educator knows, the hands-on experience of bringing an idea from paper to product goes far beyond a letter grade. Yet primary and secondary school curriculums rarely inspire the depth of dedication required to these kinds of potentially transformative workshops. Designer/activists Emily Pilloton and Matthew Miller are among the exceptions: following their "design revolution roadshow," they've since brought design thinking to underprivileged areas like Bertie County, North Carolina—the poorest in the state—through Studio H, the education arm of their larger Project H initiative. Even more, they did it with a mid-project salary cut, forcing them to depend on grant money and credit.

Studio H students Kerron Hayes (left) and Cameron Perry (right)

Directed by Patrick Creadon (the man behind Wordplay, a documentary about New York Times puzzle editor Will Shortz), If You Build It is a documentary about their experience teaching ten students the power of design and what a community-focused effort can do to the moral of the area. Over the course of the year-long curriculum, Pilloton, Miller and a few volunteers worked with the students created a farmer's market pavilion from the ground up. The class turned out to be much more than a mere —check out the trailer:

Trying to find some sort of beauty in the noisy traffic of a busy city street probably isn't your first thought as you're walking down an overstimulating sidewalk. In fact, if you're anything like me, you'll do anything you can to mentally take yourself away from the bustling environment—starting with plugging in to your headphones and creating some high-decibel eardrum damage. Urban Matter, Inc. is taking a different approach that present itself as such a blow to your hearing.

You can find your own personal moment of tranquility underneath the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE) in the most populous borough thanks to the Brooklyn-based design studio. Like many places in New York City, the traffic noise never stops and it gets quite dark, so the team took on the challenge of turning the noise into an interactive light exhibit. Enter "Silent Lights," a series of gates housing 1,400 LEDs located in a Brooklyn hotspot.

At the intersection of Park Avenue and Navy St., you'll find a series of square arches that slowly transition through a rainbow of colors according to the level of traffic noise in the area. Check out this behind-the-scenes video on what it took to create the installation:

"These were little plates of ice, very flat, very polished, very transparent, about the thickness of a sheet of rather thick paper... but so perfectly formed in hexagons, and of which the six sides were so straight, and the six angles so equal, that it is impossible for men to make anything so exact."

The philosopher Rene Descartes made that observation when he attempted to catalogue snowflakes back in 1635, and wound up with a fairly thorough description of snowflake shapes, especially since all he had was the naked eye. See drawings above.

And we've experienced the same astonishment as Descartes when we wrote about platinum crystals. There is something about crystals that just looks too unreal.

It needs to be around freezing for water vapor in clouds to form ice crystals and this is when they skip the raindrop phase altogether (although the warmest snow is pretty wet and is the best kind for snowballs.) When the temperature drops below freezing snowflakes become smaller and lighter, and feel more like powder.

But the key to a snowflake's amazing shape is hexagonal symmetry. Ice crystallizes in a form that is scientifically known as Ice 1h, this means that its base shape is a hexagon, but the interesting part is that if you turn the crystal 60 degrees it maintains a hexagonal shape.

Junior isn't just a task light. Like Bob de Graaf's "Species of Illumination," Junior is a whimsical living lamp that depends on your breath to keep his energy up. By breathing toward the lamp, Junior lights up—literally and figuratively—into the perfect playful midday distraction. This all being said, it's probably not the work lamp for you if you've got one of those stressful, white-knuckle jobs that keeps you way past daylight. (Or maybe you need Junior more than the rest of us.)

You can't help but pull images of Disney's Wall-E to memory with this design.

The lamp's main goal is to remind users to take moments throughout their busy days to breathe and interact with an object in a more natural and intuitive way. Junior detects the warmth in your breath and pulls energy from it to interact with your movements. Take a look:

If you have the desire to invest yourself in a team environment that is all about building a great, desirable brand, the Belkin team in Los Angeles, CA wants to talk to you! Their Linksys networking division needs a strong designer who can handle multiple ongoing programs and carry them through from inception through production.

Working side-by-side with other industrial designers, engineers and product managers, you will be challenged to bring your experience with form, materials and manufacturing to the table. You will be asked to own your products' design and development process, from initial research to packaging, ensuring that Belkin's products continue to be recognized for quality, performance, and innovation around the globe.If you're up for it, this outstanding role can be yours. Apply Now.

The Canadiano is freaking awesome. It's a single-serving coffee brewing device, for those of us who live alone, or those of you who live with other people but enjoy being selfish, and it's made out of wood.

Or one of three woods, specifically. You can order the Canadiano in Cherry, Walnut or Maple, and while we're not sure if this part is true or just hooey, the manufacturer claims that "the wooden piece will remember each cup of coffee you make."

Overtime the coffee oils of your specific beans and roast will be absorbed into the wood and be a part of your morning coffee experience... Each type of wood is matched with different beans and roasts from around the world. We encourage brewing single origin beans in the Canadianos. The Walnut edition is crafted and designed for use with darker roasts and earthier flavors such as beans from South East Asia. Maple and Cherry is designed for beans with slight citrus hints and nutty taste.

If there's anything that'll defer you from teaching design, it'll be the classroom composition.

As in many creative disciplines, the first few years of a designer's career are an ongoing learning experience—with each new project comes new challenges to overcome. But what happens when those projects slow down? Workflow plateau's and something's gotta change.

Meanwhile, design education is a competitive field with opportunities all over the world. It's tempting to take a break from the design industry and step back into the classroom. This is the point that discussion board member experiMental is getting at in his inquiry into the intricacies of design work. Is it more fiscally responsible to pick up that red pen and enter the world of grading design projects?

We were there for the launch of the instantly iconic torqued helix of the Plumen 001, the radical compact fluorescent lamp that elevated the lowly light bulb to eco-conscious design object status. Since its debut in 2010, the helical CFL has become an award-winning, museum-worthy icon, even as the Edison bulb has asserted itself into nouveau-rustic interiors over the past few years. I personally find the bright 2700K luminaire to be well-suited to most settings, but, as they note on their Kickstarter page, "it works for areas that need to be bright, but isn't always perfect for dimly lit ambient spaces, like bars, coffee shops or your living room. Places where warmer tones define a texture and softness in the atmosphere—that's where the 002 comes in."

As Roope noted regarding Plumen's recent collaboration with Middlesex University, they've been working with the 001 for some four years now, and the second product offers a noticeably different aesthetic, both in form factor and usage: If the Edison bulb is shorthand for steampunk-y vintage, the Plumen 002 vaguely evokes Art Deco, offering the brightness equivalence of a 30W incandescent "for the coziest of contexts." Viewed on-end, the hemispherical shape suggests a filament bulb, which belies both the axe-like profile and slim, bisected teardrop shape of the frontal view. It's both more and less like a traditional light bulb than the coils of the Plumen 001, referencing its silhouette but literally paring it down to a more modern form.

You may remember Oobleck from your elementary school days when you were learning the difference between liquids and solids—it's an easy-to-make rebellious mixture that insists on being both. It's a non-Newtonian fluid, which means its ability to resist infiltration is based on the speed of an object hitting its the surface; toothpaste, blood, shampoo and (notably) ketchup are common examples. And, as demonstrated in a video by The Discovery Slow Down, it's not just a for kids. If only we had known the possibilities as we sat in our 9-year-old bodies carefully eying up the mystery mix, we probably would've had a much better day at school.

Check out this video showing all that Oobleck has to offer: