The BMW i3 [Ed. Note: We spoke to Head of Design Adrian van Hooydonk on the occasion of the launch]

It was just a few short years ago that Audi showed up to CES with a small booth highlighting their infotainment HMI advances. This year, it seemed like the auto industry defended en masse on CES from BMW i3s lapping the area to Audi's massive booth. In addition, Qualcomm and GoPro had multiple cars in their booths. The focus was on four main themes: autonomous driving, alternative fuels, connectivity and lighting.

Both Audi and BMW were giving rides in their autonomous A7 and 2 Series respectively. BMW programmed their system to drift the car to show how precisely it can be controlled.

In the alternative fuel category, BMW was allowing people to get rides in their new i3, Ford showed off a C-Max with a solar roof, Qualcomm showed off their sponsorship of Formula E electric racing which has been recruiting Formula 1 drivers away from petrol racing, and Toyota brought the FCV hydrogen powered car it says will go on sale in California next year.

This is our first non-anonymous True I.D. Story.

As a musician and sound engineer, Stephen Ambrose spent the '70s touring the world with hard rock acts. This led him to invent the world's first in-ear monitor, essentially the progenitor to the modern-day earbud. In this True I.D. Story, Ambrose—who went on to commercialize his invention by founding Asius Technologies—reveals why Spinal Tap's "11" is, in real life, more like a 3.5.

Editor's Note: This story is primarily paraphrased from a conversation with Stephen Ambrose, and is not comprised of direct quotes. If there are any factual and technical errors here, they are mine, and not Ambrose's.

As a sound engineer in the 1970s, roadies used to hate me because I'd show up for the tour with 23 flight cases and they all had to be hauled; musicians, especially the hard rock guys I was working with, need to hear themselves on stage, and they like to hear themselves LOUD, the thinking went. So there was a lot of gear.

Aside from the roadies, I had a financial incentive to develop an in-ear monitor; if I could make something that fit into your ear and gave you that crucial feedback, then you wouldn't have to ship 10,000 pounds of speakers all around the world. The air freight on those speakers was pretty expensive.

A lot of [these rockers] had actually developed hearing damage from years of being up on stage, though they'd never admit it. Image, you know. So one challenge in designing my in-ear monitor was that it couldn't look like a hearing aid, because no rocker wants to look like he's wearing a hearing aid—even if he really needs one! So I made them out of gold so that they looked like jewelry.

Hyper-metallic cases and gaudy lighters are taking over smoking accessories. What were once carefully created pieces of functional art are now truck stop novelties and pass-me-downs. Not that we're looking to promote the act, but I recently stumbled upon a cigarette case with a noteworthy design. Even more, you can download the pattern and make it yourself.

A classic knoll shot because you know how much we like those.

Lance Green, a designer based in New York City, was looking to create a case using a single coin cell battery, one LED and miniature and simple, handmade mechanisms. SmokeBox features a interior mechanism that connects with an exterior screw for easy access to one cigarette at a time. When you're down to your last cigarette, a red LED light will fire up.

Green shares a look at the wooden case in action:

After reading our entry on multi-bladed jigsaws, Art Director and Coroflotter Juan Cano tipped us off to a similar machine, this one used to cut stone. By swapping out jigsaw blades for diamond-crusted wires, and switching the axis of cut from vertical to horizontal, the massive GoldBreton 2000 Multi-Wire Machine can cut massive chunks of granite into neat slabs.

If you think these guys are scary, just imagine
if they all knew how to sew French cuffs

In 1829, a French tailor named Barthelemy Thimonnier invented the first French sewing machine. It was primitive, looking more like a big wooden drill press than anything, but it worked, and together with an engineer buddy he cranked out several dozen of them. They then set up the world's first clothing mass-manufacturing facility and won a contract to produce military uniforms.

Business ended quickly—and badly. In 1831 a gang of unemployed French tailors (arguably not the most frightening demographic by modern standards) stormed Thimonnier's factory, destroyed all the machines and burned the place to the ground.

The pissed-off French seamsters weren't unique in this, of course. Five decades earlier, over in England, a tradesman named Ned Ludd had reportedly smashed up a couple of primitive knitting machines that he felt were putting him out of work. Ludd's name gave rise to the term "Luddites," which was then synonymous with machine destroyers and nowadays means people who hate technology.

HP is looking for an ENTHUSIASTIC individual to join their commercial notebook and tablet design studio. This candidate must demonstrate portfolio examples showing an understanding of design process, problem solving and a keen eye for form development.

As an HP Industrial Design Intern you will gain experience working closely with Industrial Design leads, Human Factor specialists, Marketing and Product Engineering to develop award winning products that invoke Hewlett-Packard's spirit to "Invent." You will be taken through all aspects of product design including; research, brainstorming, presentation creation/delivery and CAD development. If you're pursuing a degree in Industrial Design, Apply Now.

Early in my career I was introduced to the phrase "real designers ship," which I took to mean "until you get something in production, you don't know nothing kid." To a point, it is correct. The actual up-front design process of research, insight identification, concept generation, iteration and refinement is relatively small compared to the full journey of product development. Until you go on that journey several times, it is difficult to understand how many opportunities there are for the original intent to get watered down or lost all together. Conversely, those moments are also opportunities to reevaluate and make the design better. Design doesn't stop until the product is on its way to retail. Which is why real designers ship.

To honor that journey and those who have shepherded their products through to production, there is an awesome topic over in the Core77 discussion forums called simply "Newly Released Work," where designers have been posting their latest production pieces. Check it out, and give your comrades a pat on the back or two. If you have gone through it, you know it isn't easy.

Products clockwise from top left: Skora Running Shoes by Richard Kuchinsky, Thule iPhone case by Ryan Mather, Motorola DS4800 Series 2D Scanner by Mike Kaminsky, Roku 3 by Anson Cheung, Turnstone Buoy by Ricky Biddle, and Shur-line Deck Pad by Jim Kershaw

Philips's Ambient Experience electrophysiology lab helps patients relax and staff work more efficiently.

This is the third post in our Getting Hired interview series. Yesterday, we talked to the global head of talent at IDEO.

A 100-year-old multinational company, Philips began quite modestly as a Netherlands-based producer of light bulbs. Now based in 126 countries around the world, the firm continues to make products that improve lives but with a much broader scope: shavers, kettles and coffeemakers in its consumer lifestyle division; ultrasound machines, X-ray equipment, patient monitoring devices and defibrillators for the healthcare industry; and everything from household bulbs to office illumination and street lights in the lighting division. Sean Hughes runs the global healthcare team, overseeing 100 designers across seven studios.

Can you walk us through your process for hiring a new designer?

It starts with a business need. We may see that there's increased effort needed in R&D, or that new business has come along and design support is needed. Then we'll start the recruiting process. We usually start locally, so it's either the direct manager or the hiring manager (one of my designers) who is responsible for posting the vacancy. They would post it on a number of websites, including Philips.com. We also use our internal network to review any other candidates in the pipeline: candidates we saw in previous interviews, or candidates who sent us work we found interesting. We often get people who are sending us their CVs and portfolios speculatively, and we do look through those.

We have to see a portfolio. For me, the easier it is to digest, the better. Ideally, it's five or six sheets of paper, not a CD-ROM or a website, but something we can pass around and archive easily. Then we'll make a shortlist based on the portfolio and CV.

Depending on where the candidate is located, we might start a first interview on the telephone or via Skype. If we're still interested, we'll fly people to the location to meet the local team and have a face-to-face. They'll meet with the hiring manager, one or two colleagues and some people from the business. By the time we've arrived at that stage, we're pretty interested in the candidate. We've already established the capabilities of the designer, and it's more about professional fit. Do they share the same approach that we have? Are they a good fit as a human being for our organization and culture?

What makes good candidates stand out?

Fundamentally, we like to see designers have the ability to draw, communicate and edit information. We love to see nice sketches and hand drawings, as well as designers who can tell a compelling story about how their product or communication came into being. We like to see the process—so, how did you arrive at the end result? If you're making an MR machine, we like to see the directions that you explored, things you researched, a process of design development. Why it made sense from a business as well as a design perspective.

At the end of the day, I'm running a design team that's part of a business and we want to make great design, but we want to make great business as well. So we need people who have an understanding of how design can work to make the business more successful. Communication is crucial. You have to be able to hold an audience, tell a story verbally and visually, and communicate what is vitally important in a corporate environment.

Sean Hughes, Philips's chief design officer for healthcare. Right: the Simply Go portable oxygen system

Image via Apple

This past weekend saw the debut of Apple's latest TV ad, "Your Verse Anthem," a kind of creative use-case montage set to a Robin Williams voiceover from Dead Poets Society. Specifically, it's his measured delivery of an abridged version of Walt Whitman's "O Me! O Life!":

The number of things that can be 3D printed is overwhelming—from casts, interactive toys and auto shift knobs, the options are mostly useful and sometimes just plain fun. Meanwhile, researchers continue to develop and experiment with new materials, from flexible plastics to meat to titanium. Now, a group of students at the University of Maribor in Slovenia have created printGREEN, a 3D garden printer.

The apparatus prints objects out of a mud-like grass mixture; anything from artwork to pots. Created from a modified CNC machine, the process features an instrument that's much like a cake decorating tool that helps produce clean lines and shapes. The magical grass producing mixture is pretty expected: soil, water and seeds.

See the machine at work in this logo-inspired test run:

In the '90s, David Munson was working as a volunteer English teacher in Mexico when he caught the bag bug. While searching for the perfect leather bag, he realized it didn't exist, and set out to design his own. Long story short, here in 2014 he runs Saddleback Leather, which manufactures a high-quality line of leather bags, backpacks, briefcases, wallets, luggage, accessories and more. Each product is designed to be so durable and "over-engineered" that your heirs will "fight over it when you're dead," as the company motto goes.

Munson, by the way, is pissed off. After spending years learning the trade and building out his company piece by piece, he now has to deal with unscrupulous folks knocking off his products. He came up with a rather brilliant way to address this problem head-on: He made a video to his competitors showing them how to knock his bags off, incidentally educating the consumer on where the quality and design of his products, versus the competition's, starts to diverge.

Via Kottke

Bet you would've loved these over the holidays. Much better than paper dishes and yet with the same convenience: No washing! That's right, self-cleaning tableware.

The prototype is the work of the Swedish design studio Tomorrow Machine, where they apparently "look at science from a creative point of view." And a useful one! The plate and cup are made of cellulose, and are coated with what they call a superhydrophobic coating, and it's this coating that resists dirt and water.

The coating was originally developed by KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. They took the inspiration from the waxy coating of the lotus leaf.

A bandsaw is the go-to shop fixture if you're cutting an intricate shape out of wood. But there's a size limit as to what you can get up onto the bed and maneuver with your hands, in a manner that's safe for both you and the machine. Imagine if you had to cut a 16-foot beam or a log for a log cabin, for instance.

To get around this, Italian production-tool manufacturer MD Dario has come up with an ingenious solution: Mount an entire bandsaw on a two-section arm with ball-bearing joints at all three connection points.

By taking this moutain-comes-to-Mohammed approach, a single operator can quickly and accurately move the saw around while the workpiece remains mobile. In the video below, fast-forward to 1:07 to get to the good part:

Matter is a product innovation consultancy that specializes in thoughtful and well informed creative design. They use research, consumer insights, business understanding and instinct to beautifully craft category changing product experiences. Their process is called informed innovation - a straight forward hands on approach that continues to deliver successful products and experiences for some of the best loved brands in the world.

Lucky for you, they are searching for a junior level Product/Structural Packaging Designer to join their team! Successful candidates for this junior role will be creative energetic individuals with a real passion for design and a natural eye for detail. You will require a resourceful practical 'hands on' approach and a first class ability to talk about and visualize your design thinking. A good understanding of 2D and 3D CAD tools will be an advantage. Apply Now.

Hear that dull whine in the background, the noise that sounds something like your neighbor using an impact driver down the hall? Close—its actually the reaction to the new logo for Black & Decker Black+Decker. Designed by Lippincott, the consultancy behind last year's well-received Stanley refresh, the verdict on the new look is rather less auspicious—over on Brand New (where Armin Vit took my first choice for a title), commenters have found it underwhelming. Some have noted the potential for a Tropicana trap, and indeed, the 'more personable' typography vaguely echoes that of Home Depot's 'house label' (har) HDX.

My own gut instinct was that the new identity falls somewhere between housewares genericism and maybe mid-market tech peripherals; too airy to compete with the likes of DeWalt, Bosch, Milwaukee, etc. (the former is a subsidiary of Stanley Black & Decker, which has not yet updated the logos on their website). Meanwhile, I felt that axing the ampersand in favor of a Phillips-head plus evoked not an architecture firm, as some have suggested, but housewares brand Black+Blum... whose oblique/lightweight logo would actually look pretty good in the latest Lippincott treatment.

Where the bold condensed letterforms of the old logo convey a certain no-nonsense utilitarianism, the orange-on-black aesthetic feels distinctly masculine in a way that feels radically different in white, as it appears on the vacuum cleaner.

Is it just me, or does the base look like an external hard drive?

Designworks USA provided engineering and design expertise for the 2014 U.S. Olympic bobsled

This is the fourth post in our Getting Hired series. Yesterday, we talked to the chief design officer for Philips's healthcare division.

Built by Charles W. Pelly and Ray Carter in the early 1970s, DesignworksUSA has been a creative consultancy for over 40 years. The firm was acquired by BMW Group in 1995, but its portfolio extends far beyond the automotive industry with projects in consumer electronics, medical equipment and transit—including planes, trains and yachts. Lisa Olivia is responsible for global talent management for the firm's three studios, in Los Angeles, Munich and Shanghai, which together employ about 130 people. Before joining DesignworksUSA, Olivia was the director of global design recruitment at Nike for 12 years.

Can you walk us through your process for hiring a new industrial designer?

Generically, we identify a designer we're interested in either through an advertisement or through networking. Then we would request a resume and a portfolio. The portfolio is obviously very important in the review process because there needs to be a certain talent and skill level evidenced through the work, the sketching and the rendering. And the designer's previous experience needs to be relative and applicable to our current opening. Sometimes it's hard to articulate—you see a strong portfolio and you just know.

After reviewing resumes and portfolios, we invite viable candidates in for an interview if they're local. If they're not local, we might start with a phone interview or a WebEx conference. If they pass that first test, then they'd come in for interviews with our design directors and some other team members who can meet with them, ask questions and make an assessment of their talent and skills. When designers come on-site here with their portfolios, part of the process is walking us verbally through the portfolio to articulate their design process and their design thinking, and how they came up with solutions to different projects. Then, depending on the situation, they could come back a second or even a third time before we make a selection and extend an offer to the best candidate.

What makes good candidates stand out?

The portfolio is the critical piece in the process. We're looking for designers who can articulate their process well in their portfolio. It also depends on what kind of designer we're looking for—we have visual interaction designers, graphic designers, industrial designers, transportation designers, et cetera. In the case of industrial designers, we're looking for strong sketching and rendering skills, fresh thinking—and it can be a plus if someone can also demonstrate strong 3D skills. Ideally, a portfolio demonstrates a lot of different solutions, so we can see that you can think of different ways of solving a problem.

Because designers don't always have the chance to walk us through their portfolios, they really need to make sure that their work can speak for itself. They need to think of someone paging through or clicking through on their own. Can someone else follow it? Does it make sense? Is their thought process well articulated?

Lisa Olivia, DesignworksUSA's global director of collaboration and knowledge management. Right: packaging design for hello, a "seriously friendly" oral care brand

In proper book review fashion, Designers & Books have given us enough 2013 design copy to last us years in their end of the year round-up. According to the site, their list consists of 47 architecture/urban design books, 23 graphic design books, titles in fashion, interior, product/industrial design, general design inspiration and a standout fiction novel featuring the past of future of automotive design as told by Paula Champa.

The list includes a total of 99 titles from last year, a couple of which we featured here on Core—Steve Portigal's Interviewing Users and the Kelley Bros' Creative Confidence—as well as dozens of others that caught our eye. Categorized by month, each group covers topics ranging from traditional (opera house design) to the downright niche (ancient hanging garden design).

A new venue has earned a place on the map of Passagen 2014, Cologne's annual Interior Design Week that runs concurrently with imm cologne with close to 200 exhibitions throughout the city. Set in a converted office tower, the t.a.t. new talents hosts two shows exhibiting works by the young and the restless: Designers Tower and Sensing The City/ Capturing Cologne. Designers Tower offers a platform for 15 selected studios and independent designers to show off their latest works. One of them is Markus Krauss with his rocking chair Sway (above), offering plenty of room for two people to lounge in sync, and featuring a patented telescopic mechanism that allows the chair to take on a number of positions.

We loved the graphic simplicity and purity of material of Prolog, by Daniel Rauch and Niklas Markloff. The two industrial design students of Folkwang University Essen developed the structure cast from pure tinted UHPC (ultra-high performance concrete) with their colleagues from the material sciences lab. It's one of the first applications of this material ever and elegantly shows off its amazing compressive strength.

Koelnmade is a label that takes pride in making products that are designed and produced in and around Cologne. Surfin Bird can be both a place for safely feeding your feathered friends in the winter, or a full-fledged birdhouse to provide a space for nesting and extending the family.

If you've got the bucks, an HD projector is a cool alternative to a television. It's about as unobtrusive as it gets, turning any white wall into a screen larger than the biggest LED or plasma screen you can buy. But installing a projector is a pain—I helped a buddy hook one up, and mounting it to the ceiling required us making a custom plate for it, then dragging the ladder back and forth to find the perfect spot for it, not to mention drilling into a stamped-tin ceiling. Then came the PITA of getting cables to the thing and having to drill supports for the cables along their length. And once it's up and running, if you find you need to make physical adjustments to the thing or de-dust it after a period of months, well, time to break out the ladder again.

Sony's brilliant design solution to projector hassles is their 4K Ultra Short Throw Projector.

Thanks to this little guy, scientists are finding more efficient ways to stitch people up

Design's role in medical discoveries is always an exciting topic of conversation, from design experiments like Jake Evill's 3D-printed cast to DIY solutions like the $15 iPhone hack with the potential to improve 600 million lives. Like the latter, this story begins with the efforts of a group of medical scientists. Through researching various animals that have evolved and mastered the art of staying upright in sticky surfaces (think slugs and flies), they were looking for a more effective medical adhesive that wouldn't have the same destructive qualities as traditional sutures.

Of course, we're used to seeing sutures (stitches, in non-technical parlance) in a more traditional, semi-gory Hollywood context—ripping in and out of skin with cringe-worthy zeal—but when you think about it, that can't be the best option for more delicate fix-ups involving, say, any of our internal organs. Now, a group of scientists have come up with a medical-grade adhesive design straight from nature, inspired by the vicious secretion from the Sandcastle Worm.