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Althea Crome's Sweaters Won't Fit You, But We Don't Care

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No biggie.

For those of you seeking a bespoke sweater the size of a thumb drive, look no further than the work of Althea Crome. Althea was a contributing artist for sweet knitwear in the stop-motion flick Coraline, which featured a couple of her glamorous and well-fitting sweaters. One glance through her adorable but incomprehensibly tiny line of work and it's clear why she was picked to be a high-profile puppet clothier. Her work with miniatures requires the already taxing skillset of a talented knitter and ramps up the difficulty to the point that she sometimes needs knitting needles near the width of a human hair.

And these aren't your standard squint-and-they-look-believable-I-guess Barbie style doll clothes. Her knitting is on par with more conceptual sweater designs at full scale, to say nothing of the competition at 1:12 scale (because there isn't any). Despite the glaring oddness of knitting with homemade needles the size of pins, much of her work features ornate patterning, intricate designs, and fine materials like Japanese silk or cashmere thread. Oh, and let's up the artsy ante by throwing in some fine art reproductions and face cards.

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Solving the Body's Problems Through Eyewear, One Goofy Design at a Time

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Google's new diabetes-regulating contact lens has been making the rounds online, but somehow we're not surprised—its futuristic functionality is a hallmark of the Google X team. While the technology itself is intriguing and ground-breaking—let's face it, anything has got to be better than stabbing yourself with a needle multiples time a day—we'd like to take the opportunity to trace a brief (and by no means comprehensive) history of 'overlooked' eyewear options for addressing medical issues.

Let's hope that Google contact lenses may be the future for diabetes, but let's take a look at all of the other slightly sci-fi eyewear evolutions out there that get the job done:

GoogleContact-EskimoGlasses.jpgKeeping eyes dry and tan lines awkward since the ice age

Eskimo Sunglasses

These Star Trek-esque frames were—and still are—worn by the Inuit people to prevent snow blindness (which is pretty much major sunburn to the cornea) in dangerous conditions. Traditionally, the eyewear was made from a piece of bone or ivory with slits for a small field of vision; modern versions are made of wood. While it's a little extreme for anywhere that isn't the Arctic, those of you in the Polar Vortexed Midwest—or soon-to-be whitewashed Eastern Seaboard—might've benefitted from the design a couple weeks back. Hey, instead of complaining, they should've just checked Etsy.

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Casey Neistat Hacks a Canon S120 to Correct an Ergonomic Injustice

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Is there anything more frustrating than when product designers get something right, only to screw it up in successive iterations of their design? Think of anything you've owned two versions of where the power switch has now been moved to an inconvenient location, or the metal construction of a crucial part has been swapped out for plastic, or positive-click buttons have now been made spongy.

NYC-based filmmaker Casey Neistat encountered one such generational design flaw with "The Almost Perfect Camera," Canon's S120. Previous iterations of the camera--Neistat's favorite--had the microphone aimed towards the subject; the new model has it pointed towards the sky, which creates ergonomic interference. Unsurprisingly, Neistat went at it with boxcutter, epoxy and ice cream stick to fix the problem:

We'd like it if more folks made videos like these, exposing what the end user deals with when bad design decisions are made; and what we'd really love to happen is for the original industrial design teams—or whomever constrained their budgets—being forced to watch the videos.

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Turning Dead People Into Materials

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Once upon a time, human beings were biodegradable. But with modern-day corpses shot full of embalming chemicals before being sealed inside metal coffins, it will be a long time, if ever, before those bodies go back into the earth.

The alternate method of cremation, of course, turns human bodies into ash; and now Swiss company Algordanza has taken it a step further, by figuring out how to compress that ash into diamonds. For US $5,000 to $22,000, your remains, or those of a loved one, can be turned into as many as nine diamonds, presumably depending on the volume of ash. And what's fascinating is that there is some color variation:

Most of the stones come out blue, [Algordanza CEO Rinaldo] Willy says, because contains trace amounts of boron, an element that bone formation. Occasionally, though, a diamond pops out white, yellow or close to black - Willy's not sure why. Regardless, he says, "every diamond from each person is slightly different. It's always a unique diamond."
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DePuy Mitek Sports Medicine, a Johnson & Johnson Company, is Hiring Industrial Design Co-ops

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Work for Johnson&Johnson!

DePuy Synthes Companies of Johnson & Johnson is the largest, most innovative and comprehensive orthopaedic and neurological business in the world. DePuy Synthes Companies offer an unparalleled breadth and depth of products, services and programs in the areas of joint reconstruction, trauma, spine, sports medicine, neurological, craniomaxillofacial, power tools and biomaterials.

As an intern at Mitek Sports Medicine, you will have the opportunity to infuse design into all stages of the product life cycle for our next generation products focused on improving patient quality of life. The right person for this internship will assist in the identification of unmet needs, field research, and implementing design principles through conceptualizing, defining, developing & creating new products or upgrades to current products. Apply Now.

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Behold, the Badass Beauty of Boro

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Since the dawn of time, high fashion has recycled low... and congratulated itself for doing so. Antique Japanese boro fabric, increasingly popular among the edgy styluminati, is simultaneously co-branded couture, lowbrow folk tradition, and literally recycled. Boro traces its lineage to the traditional cloths used and reused and re-reused by rural farmers, artisans, craftspeople and laborers between the 18th and 20th centuries. Before cotton was widely available in Japan, the most commonly used fibers came from tough and abundant sources like jute, wisteria and bast. Rough stuff for sure, but resistant to wear and tear. As cotton production increased and cotton products began to spread, used cotton kimonos and other textiles became available at more affordable prices.

kimonofabric.jpgExploded diagram of a kimono, Boro fabric exploding at the seams

Boro_The_Fabric_of_Life_880.jpgTasteful French gallery show of other people's old workwear

To get the most out of these valuable softer fabrics, they were patched over and over, sometimes being torn into strips and rewoven, integrating the tougher materials for reinforcement. Dyed textiles would often be taken apart, redyed and rewoven in multiple iterations, creating a deeply textured and mottled appearance over time. Sometimes you can find signs of a fabric's earlier life, like the darker strip on a blanket where a kimono collar used to be. The most recognizable boro fabrics feature an array of indigo hues, carefully patchworked with strong quilting or darning stitches. (For a good time, look up "sashiko" stitching, which literally translates as "little stabs." Quilting is pretty metal.) The patches on most boro fabric, while varied in color and size, are usually square or rectangular. Coincidence? Nope, nor a cultural obsession with rigid angles. It's another sign of efficiency and good design.

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Getting Hired: To Work at Ziba, Be Honest, Show Process and Sweat the Details

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GettingHired-Ziba-1-recrop.jpgIn 2011, Ziba redesigned the Heinz ketchup packaging.

Editor's note: We interviewed Paul Backett late last year, and since then he has moved on from Ziba. We decided to still include his thoughts in this Getting Hired series, as they reflect more than eight years of working at Ziba, and are generally applicable to interviewing at any design firm.

Ziba, which means "beautiful" in Farsi, was founded 29 years ago by the Iranian Sohrab Vossoughi as an industrial design firm. One of the first consultancies to create an in-house consumer insights and trends group, Ziba prides itself on understanding people first and foremost. Headquartered in Portland, Oregon, the company has evolved to offer product, communication, environment and packaging design, plus brand strategy and consumer research. Paul Backett, who until recently led Ziba's industrial design team, was responsible for assembling, leading and driving the I.D. team to create. Though Backett is no longer at Ziba, his opinions reflect working at the company for over eight years.

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

This is probably pretty common, but we get a lot of applications. What we like to do is split our applications across teams. The principal industrial designer and I will look at all the senior portfolios that come in. Then a few of our senior designers look at all of the junior and intern applications. Every few weeks we get together and ask if there's anything interesting that's come though. If there's something that's really wonderful, we forward it on to each other and have a look pretty quickly. It really is a team effort. If we see someone that we like, even if we don't have an opening, we like to talk to that person. One of the important things about finding talent is building relationships. It's getting to know people and starting a conversation for when the right working opportunity comes along.

We like to talk to candidates over Skype (unless they're local), because so much of what we do is about having a personality, caring about what you do and being able to talk passionately about your work. And if there are people we are considering for a position, then we absolutely bring them to our "house." It's important for us to get to know them, but also for them to get to know us in a lot more detail.

At that point, we also make sure that the whole team meets the person who's applying for the position. It's a bit of a rite of passage. Everyone that has a job here has come to visit Ziba for a day-long interview. It can be quite daunting, but I think it's a great thing to do. A little bit of pressure is sometimes good. It's very important the whole team meets the candidate. That's everyone that we have from juniors through seniors, principals, and myself.

What makes good candidates stand out?

I also teach at the University of Oregon, and I'm always giving my students advice on how to get into good design firms. My number one thing is, it's all about your body of work. I don't, in a way, care where you're from, where you studied, or what grades you got. Your work really speaks for you. Having great ideas is just a base; everyone can come up with great ideas. What we love to see in a portfolio is really that you can showcase your skills. We're a very visually based company and we're immersed in making as much as possible. So we love to see great sketching and modeling skills. We're less excited by glossy renderings and CAD work. It's old-fashioned in a sense, but I love to see the core skills of an industrial designer.

In a portfolio, it's really important to think about pace. This goes for anyone, not just recent graduates. Don't take a cookie-cutter approach to sharing your work, like "Here's my research, here's my inspiration, here's my refinement, here's my solution." Use different projects to showcase different skills. Some projects might be focused on killer sketching; some might be more about visualization. Process is really important at Ziba. It's not about the final solution, but how you got there. We love to hear about the challenges that people come across as part of that story. Failures even. Things that pushed you to the next level are key. That's really what we do here. We're approaching difficult problems, and we don't always get it right the first time. We have to go down lots of paths and make difficult decisions along the way.

GettingHired-Ziba-2.jpgZiba did the design and engineering of Wacom's Cintiq 24HD graphics tablet.

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Core77 Photo Gallery: North American International Auto Show 2014

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NAIAS-2014-Photo-Gallery.jpgPhotography by Glen Jackson Taylor for Core77

Detroit may not be the most desirable travel destination in mid-January, but for the automotive industry it's the only place to be. This year's North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) didn't disappoint, with a solid lineup of production cars including the Ford Mustang, Ford F-150 pick up, Lexus RC, Cadillac ATS Coupe, BMW M4 Coupe, Corvette Z06 and Audi RS7. As the car reveals get more and more sensational sophisticated with massive choreographed video projections, music and live stage antics, it's fair to say Ford won most ambitious booth design with nearly 38-ton section of assembly line on their stand to demonstrate the robotic production process of the F-150.

One of the biggest trends was the resurgence in performance cars, possibly to attract the Millennial market who's lack of interest in car ownership has been widely reported. Or more simply, the industry has grown stagnant and senses it's time to inject some new excitement to appease the car enthusiasts like Toyota's FT-1 and Kia's GT4 Stinger concept cars.

» View Gallery

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3D-Printed Brain Surgery

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We've explored 3D printing from lasercused bike porn to the new domain of litigators to the surge in cheap consumer-level printers. But here's an area about to be changed by 3D printing that you might not have considered: Brain surgery.

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Scientists from the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur recently created a realistic 3D-printed skull that matches the dense grey matter texture of our brain, including the layers of connective tissue. So maybe no more cutting into cadavers, med students can practice on 3D models, that are more realistic than anything previously produced (see photo at top for a sample of a previous model.)

You can watch a student cutting into the more realistic model in this video, but be forewarned, it's quite realistic:

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Mo' Pencils, Mo' Problems

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Whether you're an ID student working wood or an architecture student making foamcore models, you need a pencil to mark dimensions on the material prior to cutting it. And you quickly learn that on high-tolerance projects, a regular and unsharpened pencil can have you off by as much as 1/16th, or worse if you're a sloppy cutter; the things need to be kept sharp.

So next you figure mechanical pencils are the way to go for accuracy. But mechanical pencil leads always seem to break off when they're jostling around in your ArtBin or toolbox, and those little plastic tubes that hold the replacement leads like to disappear when you're pulling an all-nighter. Plus a mechanical pencil lead has the same problem as conventional pencils—they're worthless for marking on black foamcore or darker woods like walnut.

One potential solution is the Accutrax Pencil Blade, a piece of graphite shaped like a utility knife blade.

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Must-See Video: Surfing, as Seen from Overhead, Looks More Amazing Than Usual

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We've seen plenty of GoPro footage of surfers from POV and "selfie" angles, as well as cool GoPro quadrotor footage before. But it's not 'til now that we've seen these things combined. Hawai'i-based shooter Eric Sterman runs Sterman Aerial Photography and has captured some stunning overhead footage of surfers on Oahu's North Shore.

Sterman's footage not only captures the breathtaking perspective of seeing waves swell and break from overhead, but it also offers a context you rarely see in surf videos: For every guy on a board catching a wave just right, you see dozens of hopefuls paddling out and waiting their turn, bobbing and flailing until their opportunity to synchronize with nature arrives.

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The Quest for the Perfect Design: Merel Bekking Turns to Neuroscience in 'Brain_Manufacturing'

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Yesterday, we took a look at a potentially revolutionary breakthrough in brain surgery, which is great for neuroscientists (and their patients)—but the rest of us, not so much. After all, Steve Jobs channeled Henry Ford's dictum about a faster horse when he asserted that "people don't know what they want until you show it to them," prefiguring an interdisciplinary approach to 'neuromarketing.' In order to uncover what consumers really want—as opposed to their conscious desires—researchers such as Dr. Steven Scholte measure subjects' brain activity as they are exposed to various stimuli.

Now, designer Merel Bekking is looking to apply neuroscience to product design. In her quest to "create the perfect design," Bekking realized that the main obstacle is the fact that "perfection is subject to taste and aesthetics." The solution, then, is a systematic approach to determine what 'perfection' might be. "In 'Brain_manufacturing,' Bekking excludes personal preferences and tastes and creates designs purely based on scientific research results obtained with MRI scanners."

In every design process, the designer makes choices, such as which shapes, colours and materials to use. "If you let a group of non-designers make these choices, will you end up with the perfect design?" Merel Bekking says. "And if you ask people directly versus letting their brains give the answer, will there be a difference?"

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Working with Dr. Scholte and the Spinoza Centre for Neuroimaging in Amsterdam, Bekking had 20 subjects—half male, half female—undergo an MRI while presented with various images that represented the shape, material and color of what would be an ideal object. Here's an informative (albeit a bit dry) video of Bekking describing her process:

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Experience the Magic of 3D Printing (and Create Your Own Designs) with Carla Diana's 'LEO the Maker Prince'

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LEO the Maker Prince is a children's book by NYC native and designer Carla Diana that could well enlighten anyone, young or old, about the growing 3D printing community around us. Not only does it humanize the mechanical process of 3D printing but it breaks down the different subcategories of 3D technology and the types of materials that are out there. I bet some of you didn't even know there was more than one way to get the job done (no shame).

Although utterly fictional—as most children's books are—this story is oddly relatable, especially for New Yorkers. "I wanted to pay homage to the blossoming creative technology scene in New York City, Diana says. "In particular, I wanted to highlight Brooklyn as the birthplace of a lot of the first DIY 3D printing kits like the MakerBot." Set on the stormy night of October 29, 2012, the main character finds herself in trouble on the her way back to Manhattan, when she's looking to beat Hurricane Sandy home and her bicycle chain breaks. I won't spoil the plot, but a tiny, personable MakerBot named LEO shows up, asks Carla to draw a sheep while guiding her through the various methods of 3D printing. Trust me, it makes sense in the most adorable of ways.

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Getting Hired: For a Job at Teague, Focus on Problem-Solving, Expect Curveballs and Don't Forget to Make Eye Contact!

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GettingHired-Teague-1.jpgTeague Labs' 13:30 printable headphones

This is the ninth and final interview in our Getting Hired series. Previously, we talked to LUNAR, IDEO, Philips, BMW Group Designworks USA, Smart Design, frog, Google X and Ziba. Tomorrow, we'll conclude the series with our list of key strategies for the I.D. job-seeker.

Started by the industrial design pioneer Walter Dorwin Teague in 1926, Teague is not exaggerating when it calls itself "the original design consultancy." And it continues to innovate today, with offices in Munich and Seattle, a staff of 200 designers and clients like Kodak, Boeing and Microsoft. Alysha Naples, Teague's interaction design manager, describes the firm's work as looking five to ten years into the future of technology. For Teague's designers, it's not enough to ask what hovercrafts will look like in seven years, but also to anticipate the kinds of problems such technology might create. Naples is in charge of hiring, team-building and staffing projects for her team; when working for clients, she also acts as creative director.

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

There are two ways that we do new hires. One is through business planning. At the end of the year, we plan ahead in terms of what we're going to need to keep doing the kind of work that we want to do. We ask ourselves, "Given the work we did last year, were we regularly short in a particular area?" During that process, we also decide if we want to grow a particular area or introduce a new one. And then the other way we hire is when people leave the company or get promoted into another role, and there is an opening that needs to be filled.

Once we decide we're going to hire for a new job, we write the job description and turn it over to the recruiting department. Then the job is posted on our website and on all of the usual design places, like Core77. Then I review each application myself and will either reject candidates if they're not qualified, or put them in a pile of people I'm interested in. From there, I do phone interviews, starting with the applicants who are the best fit or the most interesting. Before I do a phone interview, I ask our recruiters to do a phone screen. They'll screen for things like your ability to work in U.S. We get a lot of really wonderful and qualified candidates from outside the United States, but we've had a hard time with visas; often, if it's a position we need to fill right away, we can't move forward if the candidate doesn't have U.S. work clearance.

Phone interviews are a one-on-one between the candidate and myself. We talk a little bit about Teague, what it's like to work here, who we are and what we do. Then I ask candidates about their interests and why they're interested in working here, and I ask them to walk me through a project in their portfolio that they're most proud of, or that came out closest to how they intended. After that I ask them to tell me about a project—often these aren't in their portfolio—that did not go how they intended.

If I'm excited about the candidate at this point, the recruiting team will set up a group interview in person, and we'll fly them out to Seattle if needed. They'll interview with the entire team, plus a couple other members of the studio that I will pick specifically based on the position. I like to get a balanced set of feedback. Each of the different disciplines in the studio really brings its own lens, so it's really nice to see someone through all of those.

GettingHired-Teague-2.jpgAlysha Naples, Teague's interaction design manager

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Bad News for Small Cars: The Crash Test Results are Horrifying

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When I was still a motorist, I always owned small cars, and if I were to return to that mode of transportation, I probably will again. Maneuverability in NYC traffic and the all-important parallel-parkability are important to me, as is the fuel economy. But the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety is revealing some ugly facts that I don't want to confront.

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I suppose it's common sense that a smaller car has less mass and oughtn't do as well as a larger car in a crash test, but seeing the actual footage is freaking terrifying. In the overlap crash test, where the barrier is offest and allows force to be concentrated on one corner of the car rather than distributed across the entirety of the front structure, the results look pretty grim:

If you've got a small car and want to see how your specific model did, the IIHS has posted their analysis and safety chart here, and they've broken the videos out individually here. Just be warned that you may not want to watch the latter.

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Flight Plans: A RISD Professor Takes Birdwatching to a New Level

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No, you're not on drugs (or at least we should hope not, on a schoolnight)—you're just seeing the flight pattern of a traveling group of starlings. Recently, we've seen a lot of ways that nature is making a power-play in the design world—whether it's worm secretion making a debut in the medical industry or the hidden design in sand crystals, there's always something surprising about the make-up of the natural world around us.

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Dennis Hlynsky has been bringing us footage of animals' transit paths since 2005, but the Internet has recently caught on to just how cool they are. What started with a Flip video recorder and an interest in the flight patterns of birds, has become beautiful compiled footage following the habits of avians aloft. Dennis Hlynsky has since upgraded to a much more detail-oriented camera and mastered his hand at editing with programs like After Effects to create his timelapse-esque films. The end result is not unlike this time-lapse video of 4.5 hours worth of airplanes flying into San Diego International. Check out a few of his films:

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How Much Ink is in a Sharpie, How Much Aluminum is in a Soda Can, What Does a Million Bucks Weigh, and Other Materials Mysteries

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Just how Bad did Walter White Break?

Have you ever wondered exactly how much aluminum a soda can contains? Or exactly how many CDs you could label with a Sharpie? Or whether 360-thread-count sheets actually have 360 threads per inch?

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Wonder no more. Since 1998, California-based Rob Cockerham has been periodically updating his "How Much is Inside?" website by conducting (admittedly unscientific) experiments to get at the answers above. Said experiments range from straightforward—magnifying and painstakingly counting the threads in a sheet—to sideways approaches, like weighing a soda can and comparing it to the equivalent weight of sheets of aluminum foil to calculate how many cans one could make out of a roll.

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Yea or Nay? Tsunami-Resistant House Design Features Breakaway Glass Walls

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Everyone from dog trainers to engineers of hydroelectric dams will tell you to work with nature, not against it. So in his bid to design a tsunami-resistant house, Dan Nelson and his team at Designs Northwest Architects figured if they couldn't build a house to withstand tsunami waves, they'd come up with one that let the waves pass through it. Their 30-foot Tsunami House, situated on the waterfront of Puget Sound, is designed to remain structurally intact even when hit by eight-foot waves.

How they did this was to raise the house nine feet on concrete-encased, steel-frame-reinforced pillars. But the ground floor is still livable, to a degree: Every fixture and piece of furniture on the first level is waterproof, and there are no electrical outlets down here, just ceiling-mounted lights. The outer walls consist of large, garage-door-style glass walls that are designed to break away under the force of a wave, rather than provide resistance that could be transmitted to the structure.

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No Room for a Home Workshop? Think Smaller

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Maybe it's just that time of year, we're all stuck inside and those of us with incredible talent spend large amounts of time making tiny works of art. If you're slow on the Internet draw, you might have missed this miniature workshop that blew up on Reddit. If you've already seen it, look again anyway—maybe it'll give you garage organization ideas. Or just make you wish all of your aunties were this cool.

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As dollhouse design goes, I'm floored by how accurate the tools are, and how realistic the configuration of the space is. I mean, look at that neatly laid out yet well-used bench! If my workbench were this tiny I'd probably have an easier time keeping it clean too. It's all particularly impressive, knowing that many of the materials are repurposed from careers as other household items.

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Tom Dixon and Brad Shellhammer Come Together to Form a Rock Band of Well-Designed Proportions

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TomDixon-Funkapolitan.jpgThe Dixonary entry for "cool"

Monday morning brought interesting news and an even more intriguing collaboration. In a significant pivot, British designer Tom Dixon and Fab's ex-design chief Bradford Shellhammer announced that they would be combining their talents—in the form of a rock band named Rough. Shellhammer is going to take the stage as the lead vocalist and Dixon will pick up the bass. (Lady designers looking for a musical outlet: They're currently seeking for a female within the design industry to fill the third spot on Rough's roster.) And, of course, they'll be debuting the trio at Milan Design Week.

DixonBand-Comp.jpgThrow some leather jackets on them with a pair of ripped jeans and we're in business

While this might be a new industry for Shellhammer, Dixon is no stranger to the stage—he began his career playing bass guitar with Brit-funk band Funkapolitan (who toured with Rita and Ziggy Marley) and later on gave on-stage welding demos at various clubs. Check out this throwback to one of Funkapolitan's hits, "As the Time Goes By":

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