If there's any genre of book you'd want to jump right into, sci-fi would probably be at top of the list. Sculptor Grant Louden brings us one step closer to our nerdy fantasies with his series of 3D models based off of popular sci-fi book covers.

The debut piece in the series is straight from the 1978 Sphere edition painting that graced the cover of James Blish's Star Dwellers. Louden teamed up with Colin Hay, the original artist behind their first model's inspiration, after showing him his artist renderings for the project. "I first came across this wonderful picture in Spacewreck in the late '70s, and still find it fascinating," Louden says in an interview with Sci-fi-o-rama. "Not only the mystery of the dead spacemen, but the nature of the small open craft in outer space—like a non-airtight midget submarine. The awkward angularity is also intriguing."

But the astounding level of detail of the final model is just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. The duo also saw fit to meticulously document all of their steps from preliminary sketches to finished product online. When I say meticulous, I mean it—the project's archive of work goes back 24 pages on the site. Needless to say, they went above and beyond the efforts of the average hobbyist, homebrewing an unconventional production method to make some of the parts.

Your final, graduating presentation at ID school is an intense experience. Unlike academic majors, with industrial design everything you've learned in the past few years is embodied in physical objects sitting on pedestals and in drawings pinned to the wall; it is out for all to see, not hidden away in your brain. You likely feel an overwhelming combination of exhaustion and relief from completion. So imagine all of this—and then in strolls Dieter Rams.

That was the lucky experience of last year's Product Design and Graphic Design grads at Art Center, as the school got design legend Rams not only to make an appearance, but to walk the halls to interact with students and give on-the-fly critiques. Imagine, as one student recounts, that Rams is studying one of your projects and you hear the words "I really like this" come out of his mouth!

Rams also sat down on stage for an hour-long chat on design.

SoundFocus is looking for an experienced industrial designer to help them craft the future of consumer audio devices that will improve the lives of millions. Their ideal candidate loves consumer products and has a passion for creating products that people can hold and touch. This is a company with a strong design culture at its heart - both founders have worked in design, and understand its importance in product development - so they're looking for similarly passionate designers.

As the first full-time designer on the team, you'll own all things design from physical design of our product to our website, mobile applications, and all aspects of our brand. You'll work alongside smart people with deep backgrounds in product design, signal processing, software development, electrical and mechanical engineering. Sound fun? Apply Now.

User experience design has quickly become a critical skill in fields ranging from software development to industrial design, but how can a designer already enmeshed in their career make a pivot toward UX? While traditional design schools are beginning to incorporate this area of interest into their curricula, sometimes one class isn't enough.

The Unicorn Institute is a new initiative by Jared Spool, founder of pioneering user experience consulting firm User Interface Engineering, and Dr. Leslie Jensen-Inman, a Ph.D in Learning and Leadership, that aims to provide professional training for experience designers through classes tailored for the market's needs. And while there's value in studying design theory and methods, sometimes designers just want the practical experience that can get them to the next level in their career.

If their success on Kickstarter is any indication, Spool and Jensen-Inman have clearly struck a nerve: The Unicorn Institute has brought in over $70,000 so far, three and a half times its $20,000 goal. Most backers are content to put up a few bucks for "digital pixie dust"—a.k.a. wallpapers for a mobile, tablet and desktop—or "digital awesomeness," the $50 tier, which includes a series of books on experience design; higher reward levels include access to the classes as they become available.

We've been fans of Richard Clarkson's work since he was a dewy-eyed student at Victoria University of Wellington's School of Design—which admittedly was not all that long ago—where he developed projects from the steampunk smartphone to a heady algorithmic chair. Now in his final term at SVA in New York City, Clarkson is a world away from his native New Zealand, yet he is more committed to his craft than ever as he looks forward to completing his MFA amongst the very first graduating class of the Products of Design program.

May 2014 will also mark the two-year anniversary of a project from his Victoria days, which was only recently cleared for publication (more on that below). Working with supervisor Tim Miller, Clarkson took the class on "Creative Digital Manufacturing" as an opportunity to experiment with revolutionary new 3D printing technology—and even though he completed the project over a year and a half ago, he notes that "Blossom" may well be "the world's first inflatable 3D print."

The heart of the design is a mixed material—thanks to a breakthrough in "simultaneous deposition of different build materials in a single print"—that can be rigid and flexible in different regions across its form. "[As in] nature, materials can be distributed seamlessly within objects for structural and functional advantage... The variation offers an opportunity to generate complex forms and dynamic structures that are impossible to make by any other means."

While the video above nicely illustrates the final results, Clarkson shared more about the process—including why he's just gotten around to publishing—and more details about just how he achieved his breakthrough.

As people get more and more used to paying for small transactions with credit cards, one group in particular seems to be losing out—baristas. At least that's what Ryder Kessler noticed in 2008 while using plastic at a favorite coffee shop with a noticeably empty tip jar. A (miserable) barista explained that the rise of credit card payments had meant the decline of cash tips. "That struck me as a huge problem for everyone involved," Kessler says. "The employees were working just as hard and making less money, the store was losing out on incentives for good service, and customers like me who liked the convenience of paying with plastic had no way to tip. I thought that the simplicity of a cash tip jar—just drop your dollar bill in—should have a credit card equivalent. That's how the idea for DipJar was born."

DipJar is exactly what it sounds like, a small aluminum jar with a built-in credit card reader that deducts one dollar per swipe. But realizing the simple device has taken several years. After graduating from Columbia University with a master's in English, Kessler let the idea for DipJar germinate in the back of his mind for a few years as he took jobs at start-ups and gleaned knowledge in how to build companies and ship products. Only then did he set about bringing his idea to production. Skimming websites, Kessler found the portfolio of Simon Enever, an industrial designer based in New York whose work matched the mental image Kessler had for the product. [Ed. Note: We've covered Enever's work before, most recently in an in-depth case study about designing a better toothbrush.] Together, they worked through various ideas for the design until they felt confident putting it into production.

The design evolution, from sketch to the first-generation unit now being tested in the field.

Are you tired of recognizing and enjoying your background jams? Do you strive to have a sonically obscure yet socially sharable music collection? This weekend give a listen to songs literally no one has tried out on Spotify. Forgotify is dedicated to bringing songs with zero plays to an audience of at least one.

The offerings are understandably wide-ranging—apparently there are a lot of stray songs in the world, 4 million if you ask the guys at Forgotify! You'll find off-brand covers of yesteryear pop hits, symphonic arrangements of classical classics, and truly difficult to explain foreign soundtracks. Something is bound to strike your fancy, or at least raise an eyebrow.

Playgrounds are meant for fun, not broken bones and tetanus shots. Looking through the archives, images of, say, poorly fused metal monkey bars might seem more suited to heavy industry than family-friendly recreation stations. Recently, I came across a park that makes me wish it were socially acceptable to barrel down communal slides past the age of 11. A design featuring massive owls and wooden bugs at the Kristine Slott Park in Stockholm from Danish design firm Monstrum (pictured below) set me off on a search for the coolest playground equipment. From giant literature-themed jungle gyms to climbable monsters made of reclaimed material, here are four playgrounds you've got to see whether or not you have kids in tow.

Kristine Slott Park in Stockholm

Gulliver Park in Valencia, Spain

We spotted creative director Tyler Thompson kicking off a boarding pass conceptual redesign frenzy back in 2010, and it was fun to see different designers' takes on what that little scrap of paper should look like.

The latest designer to throw his hat into this (suffe)ring is Peter Smart, who famously tried to solve 50 Problems in 50 Days using design. That project necessitated a lot of travel, meaning Smart dealt with a lot of boarding passes, and eventually stretched his design muscles during a long layover.

Smart had at least one brilliant, simple insight: A boarding pass contains multiple bite-sized chunks of information, and you don't need them all at once. But you do need them in a particular order—figuring out which gate you need to head to is an earlier priority than locating your seat on the plane. And by turning the boarding pass sideways, Smart instantly reduces the visual clutter to a series of easy-to-read lines, like the way a movie script reduces the width of dialogue blocks to make it easier on the eyes.

You can read Smart's full analysis of existing boarding passes and explanation of his redesign here. (Unsurprisingly, the web page is presented in an extraordinarily clear, well-designed manner.)

It's been too long since we've visited Chris Labrooy and his ultra realistic/completely improbable 3D graphics. You may remember his far-fetched work from when we gushed over his typography posters a couple of years ago. At the time, we described his style as "overly perfect"—which is still a perfect description for his work.

Much like our previous coverage of Fabian Oefner's exploded exotic cars, Labrooy's "Auto Aerobics" series features cars in his signature puzzle-like positions.

The average work day is far more fluid than it used to be. Coalesse, an award-winning brand of work furnishings, is enabling "crossover" work spaces where the lines between work and life intersect and creativity is roaming. They need your Furniture and Industrial Design Skills to bring artful solutions to life that combine comfort, function, and emotional satisfaction.

They seek creative individuals with diverse interests and experiences to share their passion for exceptional design. Designers that understand where design has come from and are willing to articulate where they think it should be going. Apply Now to join this great team in San Francisco, CA that believes you should work wherever you are inspired to do so.

A few years ago, I became slightly obsessed with embodied energy, which led to a new perspective on both materials and design, in the form of a self-initiated experiment and ultimately a design tool. I wanted to share some of my thoughts from this process to try and pass on a passion for embodied energy.

The whole process started by reading David Mackay's book "Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air." His "we need numbers not adjectives" attitude really appealed to me at the time, as I was getting very frustrated with some of the subjectivity and lack of depth in some sustainable design. It was with this mindset that I went searching for embodied energy data. The first time I trawled through a data set, I was pretty intrigued. This was a single number that summarized the intensely complicated journey of a material from digging its ore out of the ground through to the myriad of processes that lead to a usable material. The numbers also varied hugely between materials, revealing energy stories that I was completely unaware of. In a fairly short span of time, this data had completely changed my perspective on a lot of materials that I previously thought I was very familiar with.

What really caught my imagination was the fact that this was physical data. Unlike electricity consumption, where you need to go to great lengths to record and visualize energy, this data told you that the lump of material you're holding took 10 megajoules of energy to go from earthbound ore to product in hand. I could now define my whole material world in terms of energy—and that's exactly what I started doing, carrying a screwdriver and a set of scales I started disassembling and weighing products to try and calculate their embodied energy. This quickly escalated to doing an embodied energy calculation for everything I owned.

These calculations were very rough, but gave me an approximate figure for everything, allowing me to compare different elements of my lifestyle. Computers and camera gear, with their exotic circuitboard materials and batteries, far outweighed everything else, while other things, like my bikes, seemed pretty insignificant. This showed me that crunching the numbers, however crudely, will reveal all sorts of insights into the energy stories of our stuff.

At this point, I had gathered a lot of data and started to see the world in a slightly different light but what I was really interested in was how this data would affect the design process. There were various tools for conducting life cycle analysis on finished designs but I wanted to experiment with ways of using embodied energy to drive the design process from the start. I set myself a simple design brief with ambitious energy quotas. To redesign the Anglepoise lamp (which had weighed in at 140 Megajoules) to quotas of one, ten and 20 Megajoules. The idea was to put energy as the driving force at the start of the design process and see what happens.

If you're anything like me (and some studies suggest that as many as 20% of you freaks are like me) you have a terrible time reading. Not due to disinterest, but because your eyeballs approach written language like two mice gathering snacks from an open field. Dyslexia and other learning disorders, while obviously difficult to deal with, are often linked to creative problem solving and artistic expression. With that in mind, it's a little surprising that Dyslexie is the first font designed with dyslexic reading patterns in mind. More intriguing, it now appears it might be a failure.

As the video below notes, dyslexia often results in an unconscious misinterpretation of letters by confusing them with similar counterparts. This is often blamed on dyslexics' "3D thinking," where each letter is treated as a physical form, rather than a concrete symbol. Due to this, one letter is often mistaken or rearranged with another through transposition, mirroring or false equating. (For a dyslexic's attractive take on how it looks and feels, check out I Wonder What It Feels Like To Be Dyslexic, a typographic book project that went supernova on Kickstarter last year.)

Fonts like Dyslexie (and now Open Dyslexic, and others) aim to reduce the slippery flippy action of letters that look like other letters... by making them not look so alike. In Dyslexie, the symmetry of the letterforms is reduced, spacing is more deliberate, and every letter gets a pear-bottom treatment, supposedly reducing errors. Individual mileage will always vary, however, and actual studies (done by actual people who know how to study actual people with dyslexia) have largely questioned the effectiveness of Dyslexie. Reading speed isn't mentionably improved, and comprehension couldn't be said concretely to improve either. Breaking even in legibility is a basic typographic goal, but it's probably not enough when you're trying to give a specifically impaired group a leg up. Personal experience, while useful, isn't all it takes to make a problem-solving product.

Photography by Anki Delfmann for Core77

Every January, IMM Cologne and the off-site exhibitions and events of Passagen kick off the design year as the first international shows on the calendar, hosting nearly 1,500 exhibitions in all. We have bundled up in our winter gear to wander the fair and city to bring you the highlights of 2014 in our gallery. The shows are focussed on (but not limited to) furniture and interior design, and increasingly flirt with other disciplines with each new year.

A recurring theme this year again was sustainability in the shape of local production, longevity and up-cycling. On the engineering side, the implementation of brand-new materials and techniques allowed for exciting previously impossible structures. We also saw compelling examples of furniture design as a discipline that is no longer just about detached objects but rather creating experiences, interactions and stories.

Highlights included the honorable Designer Of The Year show about Werner Aisslinger, the D3 Contest by the German Design Council, Designers Tower, and the whole neighborhood turned exhibition at Design Parcours Ehrenfeld.

» View Gallery

Related Posts:
Highlights from Messe Koeln
t.a.t. new talents
Design Parcours Ehrenfeld

By Christine Todorovich / Design Mind

Curated by Bay Area designer and educator Jon Sueda, All Possible Futures features 37 projects from renowned designers Ed Fella, Experimental Jetset, Daniel Eatock, Martin Venezky, and many more. The idea for the exhibition originated from Sueda's interest in showcasing the value of design projects that failed for any number of reasons, including being rejected by clients. The result is an exhibition of speculative design pieces that celebrate the questioning of boundaries regarding concepts, processes, technologies, and form.

Christine Todorovich / Design Mind: The title of the exhibit is "All Possible Futures"—it seems you're implying something about the parallel lives these speculative projects lead? Can you talk more about the meaning behind the title?

Jon Sueda: Before All Possible Futures was an exhibition, it was actually a title to an article I wrote in 2007 for a publication called Task Newsletter. The original piece was a set of interviews with five graphic designers, and also the renowned critical design team Dunne & Raby, investigating speculative design projects. At that time, the criteria was clearly inspired by "visionary" or "paper" architecture... each project had to somehow distance itself from "real world" parameters, perhaps representing potential imaginings of the future. The final selection ended up being a set of project proposals that were either rejected by their client or critical provocations never intended to be produced. This exhibition is a build-out, or expansion, of these early ideas.

Your interpretation of the title is correct. In fact, I titled the adjunct program for the exhibition Parallel Universe?. In a sense, you could argue that all the work in the show is an example of a "parallel universe" of graphic design... this work operates on the margins of practice, created by designers who initiate their own investigations that exist outside or question the traditional commission structure.

Jeff Zelevansky/Getty images

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.

We're entering a news window where most of the major stories will revolve around sports. Last night we had the Super Bowl and this Thursday is the start of the Winter Olympics in Russia. Designers are notoriously uninterested in sports. I know this because I'm generally the only one of my design friends intently watching a game.

But today, I'm going to try to help anyone who carries only a passing or even nonexistent interest in sports by finding something else to focus on: the aesthetics. Specifically, the design of uniforms.

To help me with this we have, and this is not an exaggeration, the world's leading expert on sports uniform design, Paul Lukas. Paul is a journalist who has been following the nuances of sports aesthetics probably since he was a kid, and started actively documenting them in 1999 for NY's indie newspaper, The Village Voice. Today, he is the editor of one of my absolute favorite websites, Uni Watch, as well as a contributor to espn.com.

Get the Afterschool Podcast, Episode #16 - Sports Journalist Paul Lukas: Available at the iTunes store or direct download via Soundcloud below.

Those of you who watched yesterday's Super Blowout might have found more interesting viewing on the sidelines. You may have spotted, between the bouts of non-action, the chunky-looking benches you see above.

As their size and conformation indicates, those are no regular benches. With early weather forecasts unable to rule out a cold snap, and because it was popularly assumed that Denver was going to show up and actually play some football, keeping the players warm on the sidelines was a concern. So a Florida-based company called Athletic Recovery Zone was commissioned to deliver their Recovery Zone benches, which blow hot air out of the bottom and headrest, encapsulating players in a cocoon of warmth.

The benches first hit the market in 2010 and were originally designed to create the opposite effect: Brian Cothren was contacted by the Jacksonville Jaguars because their yankee players couldn't cut the swamp-like Floridian humidity. Cothren's aluminum, air-conditioned design kept the players from wilting on the sidelines (even if they didn't do a damn thing for the Broncos), and he successfully launched ARZ to produce them.

The Recovery Zone benches are rented, not sold; installation requires a forklift and for ARZ technicians to route plumbing and electrical into the units. They can be switched from hot to cold, and in addition to sports venues—for college ball, the PGA, NASCAR and the like—ARZ is now targeting "the harshest of indoor or outdoor workplace environments" in the commercial and industrial sectors. Smelting operations, oil and gas rigs, and even paper mills are places where workers are exposed to extreme temperatures and could use a little temporary relief.

ARZ claims that the temperature relief is proven to boost employee productivity and morale. But we're guessing they're not going to sell too many in Colorado.

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

Dan Friedman: Born in Cleveland, Ohio, 1945. Died in New York City, 1995.

The best a designer can do is consistently offer forthright attempts at communication, by way of an open and multifaceted mind. The offerings of most designers are meant to be metabolized instantly, as minor tweaks to existing models; this is commerce without content. It is a rare designer who resists what is a very seductive and embedded process. Rarer still is a design practice that weds a loving knowledge of her/his craft with reflections of the self, the client, the globe and the cosmos. The latter description was Dan Friedman.

Friedman was central to the 1980s New York scene. The decade and place was ridiculously fertile, breeding genius in every corner of culture—home to the likes of Sherrie Levine, Alan Buchsbaum, Jim Jarmusch, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Haim Steinbach, John Zorn, David Byrne, Paul Auster, Keith Haring and on and on... This multidisciplinary, multicultural, gender-role-fighting, polysexual vanguard is often placed under the banner of postmodernsim, though many involved bristled at this ism (Friedman referred to himself as a radical modernist). Friedman came to this place of hardcore and restless bounty by way of a fairly rational progression, almost pedigreed. From the Midwest he went to college at Carnegie Mellon, from which he traveled to Basel to study orthodox modernist graphic design under Armin Hoffman (and others) at the Schule für Gestaltung. In the '70s he was the epitome of success in his field, with teaching posts at Yale and positions at Anspach Grossman Portugal and Pentagram. But in 1982, deeply disenchanted, he restarted his private practice. "What I realized in the 1970s, when I was doing major corporate identity projects, is that design had become a preoccupation with what things look like rather than with what they mean."

Left: Friedman's 1988 Fountain table for the Formica Corporation. Right: Friedman in front of his 1985 assemblage The Wall. Top image: Astral shelving and wall elements (left) and Friedman's apartment circa 1982

Left: the Corona chair for Neotu (1991). Right: a Friedman collage for the Cultural Geometry show at Deitch Projects in 1988

My new printer arrived, it's wireless. While setting it up I had to put my glasses on. It took me so long to do that I instinctively turned my head and yelled for my wife to fetch my son to show me how to do it, but then I rememebered that I am unmarried and childless.

Because I don't have kids, my friends who've successfully bred don't forward me child-based YouTube videos, leaving me in the dark as to current child-rearing trends. So I was surprised to see this video of a father giving his daughter a ponytail using a vacuum cleaner:

My first thought was, Well, this is why the terrorists hate us Americans. But it seems this trend has crossed the pond, as there are videos of Brits doing it:

It's not often we see such refreshingly honest job descriptions as the one posted by the fun folks at Moosejaw. They are looking for a Graphic Designer, which is exactly how they decided upon the title of this job posting, even though they were shooting for something much more creative that mentions Tony Danza. See? The job description is off to a smashing start!

Despite being goofy job description, Moosejaw takes their mission and culture very seriously. They want a junior level Graphic Designer who will rock at being a creative visionary and demonstrate a strong affinity for the Moosejaw brand. This is a fantastic read, even if you aren't looking for a Graphic Design job at the moment. If you are, don't let this opportunity to work with such a fun company pass you by. Apply Now.