To broaden your newly Google-supported Lego fantasies, check out this tool to take designs from your computer into the real world. The recent project out of the Hasso Plattner Institute offers a fun and arguably obvious workaround to make rapid prototyping more, y'know, rapid. Their "FaBrickation" program lets you save the 3D printing for only the most vital high-res parts and convert the rest of your design to Legos from the get-go.

Hey Presto!

"Teen Idol"

Blair Buttke, a freelance graphic designer at Philosophy, Inc. in Phoenix, AZ, has graced us with a series of microphone renderings worthy of a double-take. Each design has its own name, personality and role when it comes to audio functionality. The monikers make the microphones' ideal uses pretty obvious and doesn't include any complex serial numbers and letters. The result: another series in the slew of electronics we can connect with past the work desk.

"Cape Canaveral" (left) and "Washington Bureau" (right)

This is the latest installment of our Core77 Questionnaire. Previously, we talked to Moritz Waldemeyer.

Name:Karim Rashid

Occupation: I am a designer—industrial design, interiors, architecture, graphics, art . . .

Location: Hell's Kitchen, New York City. But that's new for me. I just renovated an office here; we moved in four months ago. I was in Chelsea for 20 years, so it's a big change.

Current projects: Right now I'm working on the architecture of seven buildings around the world—four in New York, one in St. Petersburg, one in Latvia and one in Toronto. And then in industrial design, I'm doing everything from branding for new drink bottles to lighting, kitchen design, jewelry, perfume bottles, and lots of furniture.

Mission: My number one mission in life has been to make design a public subject. To basically preach to the world how design not only shapes a better life, and shapes our future, but how it has a huge impact on our physical well-being.

Rashid's recent product designs include the Bruno lamp for Verreum (above) and the Hooka for Gaia & Gino (below), both from 2013.

When did you decide that you wanted to be a designer? My first inkling of that was when I was about five years old in London with my father. He's an artist, and he used to take me to sketch churches. We were drawing, and I looked up at these Gothic windows, and I started changing the shape of them, making them into ovals. My father looked at my drawing and showed me that I wasn't drawing the shape I was looking at. But I had this weird little epiphany that, oh, I could decide to change the windows if I want. So that was a really abecedarian moment of feeling like I could have some impact or control in shaping the world I'm looking at.

Education: I studied industrial design as an undergraduate at Carlton University in Canada, and then I did graduate studies in Naples, Italy.

First design job: Between my third and fourth year of university, I got a summer job designing business telephones at Mitel, in Canada.

Who is your design hero? Naming one is impossible. It's like saying, What's your favorite song? Let me just name a few people that I think had a great influence on me. Luigi Colani. Ettore Sottass, whom I studied with. Joe Colombo. Philippe Starck. George Nelson. Charles Eames. I remember having a Buckminster Fuller lecture when I was at university—that was a huge inspiration for me. Victor Papanek, he was a professor of mine too. And one more I have to add is Marshall McLuhan, whom I also studied with for one semester. He made me realize that design has to embrace theory—that we're not just doers, we can be thinkers.

Rashid's recent interiors include the Amoji Food Capital in Seoul, completed last spring. Photo by Lee Gyeon Bae.

Rashid designed the exhibition Out of the Box: The Rise of Sneaker Culture, on view at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto until March 30. Photo by Philip Castleton.

For over a decade I taught martial arts, and one of the hardest things is communicating to a novice how to correctly move a particular body part through 3D space. What I always dreamt of was to cover them in sensors, like that guy who played Gollum, so that they could "draw" glowing lines in space with their joints, providing a visible basis for corrections.

Teaching kung fu via hologram is probably a ways off, but performance artist Heather Hansen is doing something that reminded me of the concept: "Emptied Gestures," as she calls it.

Using her body, charcoal, and a large sheet of paper, Hansen "draws" beautiful, Rorschach-like shapes by performing a series of yoga- and calisthenics-like movements while dragging the charcoal across the paper, tracing the exact position of her hands. As the lines are built up, the other parts of her body that come into contact with the loose charcoal powder provide incidental shading and gradations.

Inflatable animals are great—if you don't mind inhaling the vaguely carcinogenic whiff of freshly processed plastic as you re-inflate your chosen shape five minutes. These ceramic dinosaur sculptures by Brett Kern and Justin Rothshank might be perfect for young-at-heart decorators. At very least, they're probably better for your health.

Much like Jeff Koons' balloon animal art, Kern and Rothshank's cartoonish dinos are sculptural versions of the novelties we so coveted as kids. Where Koons deals in finish-fetish stainless steel, these tabletop 'saurs are metaphorical mirrors of our childhood dreams, ephemeral mylar fossilized, in a manner of speaking, as ceramic.

In the You Really Can Draw With Anything Department, we've seen Red Hong draw with coffee cup stains, and Takayo Kiyota draw with sushi; now we've caught wind of Tokyo-based artist Yukino Ohmura, whose renditions of cityscapes at nighttime—something like a Japanese version of Michael Mann's Collateral--are created using adhesive stationery dots.

"These stickers that I have used in my artwork are very popular in Japan, and almost everyone has used them during elementary school," Ohmura told The Verge. "Also, stickers are inexpensive, which I feel creates an interesting contrast by expressing the glamour of the nighttime city through cheap material."

"Last Ship to Rendezvous Point"

When it comes to designs involving LEGO, we're pretty serious. From a prosthetic leg made from the infamous building blocks to hardware design, we can't pass up a chance to show off the post-childhood opportunities LEGO has to offer. This time around, the mini-figs are starring in a series of photographs spotlighting characters from Star Wars films.

"Bossk's Cool Day Out"

"Snowtrooper's Delight"

The main ingredient and ultimate deal-maker? Baking powder.

Learn10x is a new startup within Google Marketing, a small team with a simple and audacious moonshot: to change the way people learn. Their current mission is to create a learning platform to help people learn marketing exponentially -- faster, simpler and continuously. In line with Google's philosophy, they want to let technology to do the heavy lifting so they can make people's lives better.

Where do you fit in here? As their new Product Designer on the Learn10x team, you'll be charged with creating the entire design and user experience for this new learning experience. They want a true problem solver who will contribute a design aesthetic to the product in an innovative way to make it usable, organized and beautiful. Prototyping and production skills are essential, as well as a passion for product design and a point of view about your work. Apply Now.

Seeing as web trends are even more capricious than the weather patterns we've been experiencing here in NYC, the backlash to Squarespace Logo has tapered off by now, but seeing as it launched just two weeks ago, the democratic logo design tool is still worth considering as symptom of how we define design today.

Somehow, I doubt that Squarespace encountered such unanimous antipathy when it debuted as a user-friendly website-building tool, ten years ago; after all, the dog-eat-dog CMS game has come a long way in the past decade, and I've only heard good things about their flagship product. But graphic design, including but not limited to branding/identity/visual communication/etc., is another story. Co.Design rounded up the pithy rejoinders—a few more have trickled in on the de rigueurdata exhaust Tumblr—and garnered a slew of comments, as did the Wired post, so I'll concede that someone else has probably already made this point.

Having only dabbled in front-end development and graphic design in my day, I won't pretend to be an expert in either domain. But as a knowledge worker who spends most of my day tending to an at-times fickle CMS, regularly troubleshooting various glitches as they inevitably arise, I know all too well that an intuitive backend is a bridge between the 'dirty work' of coding/scripting and public-facing content.*

Contrary to its name, 'web design' is not design in the same way that graphic design is—a subtle distinction, perhaps, but a critical one. Web design is largely dictated by best practices, at least when it comes to creating a functional, navigable container for content. Which is not to say that web design is not creative, but rather that the hard constraints of HTML/CSS/etc. (not to mention browser/OS compatibility) are precisely why CMS's and templates make sense: Just tweak the font size and column width, add a social media widget, and you're good to go. "Just another Wordpress site," as the saying goes.

Logos, on the other hand, are meant to express an identity—the very heart and soul of a company—in a painstakingly-kerned font and/or ideographic vector illustration. Graphic design is a creative endeavor; as such, it is more than a matter of simply dragging and dropping elements or picking your favorite color. Think about it: Websites hew to a half-dozen standard layouts, where details such as fonts and colors evoke a general look and feel but rarely, if ever, denote a specific brand—which is why you look to the top left corner or center of the page for a logo.

From Seinfeld to Friends, from Rhoda to The Odd Couple, NYC apartments are always depicetd on television as being ridiculously huge. Of course that's a far cry from reality, but at least one show has not only got the scale correct, but has actually injected elements of space-saving design into it: Charlie's sub-200-square-foot studio apartment on HBO's "Girls."

I don't watch the show and don't know if the apartment still figures into the storyline, but a couple years ago the L.A. Times ran a feature on the fictional apartment's design, cleverly created by production designer Laura Ballinger Gardner. While it is in fact a set, it's pretty stunning how simultaneously realistic and tasteful it looks. On top of that, the design solutions to small-space storage and living, from the bed-topping loft-lounge with storage stairs to the "Mondrian-inspired birch plywood" storage wall to the bedsprings-cum-pot-rack, would be a welcome addition to many an NYC studio.

That's the SeaOrbiter, a 200-foot tall floating platform for aquatic exploration, and construction on it is due to begin this spring. It is the brainchild and passion project of a French ocean explorer named Jacques—no, not that one: Jacques Rougerie, a "sea architect" who has spent over a decade designing and securing funding for the concept, in addition to his 30 years of research in subsea architecture.

Slightly over half of the structure will be submerged, and as you can see the core of the design is a sort of eight-story building housing a variety of labs and living quarters for the crew. The underside of the structure houses dive pits, special pressurized living quarters and "underwater garages." Human divers living at atmospheric pressure can get down to 50 meters below the surface, while "saturation divers" living in the pressureized chambers can get down to 100 meters; beyond that, the SeaOrbiter will deploy exploration vehicles that can travel down to 1,000 meters, and will also deploy a bad-ass diving drone that can descend to 6,000 meters.

Here's a few key innovations in the massive and ever-growing video game industry. The blockbuster studios have laid down the hardware, but it's the smaller indie joints that are ditching the TV screen and creating entirely new games out of the already-existing consoles, batons, wands and controllers. Just as Twitter became something beyond what Ev Williams had envisioned, video games are evolving with purposes never imagined by the original designers.

Here is a sample of the best new designs in gaming, according to MIT Tech Review.

Spin The Bottle: Bumpie's Party

This game makes use of the Nintendo Wii motion controllers and the Wii-U console and has players compete in teams to play various mini-games. For instance in so-called "Rabbit Hunt" one team hides the Wii remote controllers and then the other team tries to find them, in only one minute, while the controllers emit random sniffing rabbit sounds. So the room itself becomes the set for the game. It's a great example of how a hack of hardware can become a new game in ways the original developers never intended.

Private Eye

This game uses the new and powerful virtual-reality headset created by Oculus Rift (see video below of the Oculus Rift creator's 90-year old grandmother playing with the VR headset). Inspired by Hitchcock's Rear Window, it's a detective game in which the player spies on occupants of a building from our wheel-chair (head movement is all you can do), knowing a murder will take place at 10pm. We then need to piece together answers by catching key details. What a refreshing change from the bloody war and killing rampant in most vid games.

The Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 are pleased to announce the winner of this year's Young Architects Program (YAP), an annual call for proposals for a temporary outdoor installation for the converted schoolyard space in Long Island City. In keeping with the institution's mission to support contemporary art, architecture and design practice, the entries invariably err on the side of experimental even as they meet a brief to 1.) provide shade, seating and water, and 2.) address environmental issues, including sustainability and recycling. New Yorkers and well-heeled visitors alike have probably encountered one of these structures during MoMA PS1's weekly Warm-Up summer concert series, when these spectacular projects serve to elevate the courtyard (literally, at times) from a humble outdoor venue to a visionary social space.

The winner of the 15th YAP is The Living, an architectural practice led by principal David Benjamin, whose "Hy-Fi" is billed as a "100% organic" structure. Designed using "biological technologies combined with cutting-edge computation and engineering," the ambitious eco-edifice comes in at roughly three stories tall, with its lower portions constructed from organic bricks developed in conjunction with bio-material specialists Ecovative. Its upper extremities are made from hollow reflective bricks—"produced through the custom-forming of a new daylighting mirror film"—by 3M, which will first be used as the "growing trays" for the corn+'shroom bricks.

The organic bricks are arranged at the bottom of the structure and the reflective bricks are arranged at the top to bounce light down on the towers and the ground. The structure inverts the logic of load-bearing brick construction and creates a gravity-defying effect—instead of being thick and dense at the bottom, it is thin and porous at the bottom.

Globetrotting photographer Amos Chapple has shot in sixty countries, eventually working his way up to be named Cathay Pacific's Travel Photographer of the Year for '09. More recently, New Zealand native Chapple recently photographed a region with weather very opposite from that of his home country: Oymyakon, Russia, where the average winter temperature is negative-58 Fahrenheit (negative-50 Celsius). As Chapple told Weather.com, "occasionally my saliva would freeze into needles that would prick my lips," and "focusing the lens would sometimes be as challenging as opening a pickle jar."

Viewing these photos officially means you can never complain about being cold ever again. The temperature is so brutal that Oymyakon residents' lives are structured around surviving it, with inconveniences aplenty. For example: No wearing eyeglasses outdoors, unless you want them to stick to your skin. Even worse, there's no indoor plumbing. It's impossible to keep underground pipes from not freezing, so guess where you'll go when you need to use the bathroom:

Then there's the gas situation: When you stop your car, to run into a store for instance, you cannot turn the car off, or it won't start again. So everyone leaves their cars running (except at night, when they're parked in heated garages)...

"Last Ship to Rendezvous Point"

When it comes to designs involving LEGO, we're pretty serious. From a prosthetic leg made from the infamous building blocks to hardware design, we can't pass up a chance to show off the post-childhood opportunities LEGO has to offer. This time around, the mini-figs are starring in a series of photographs spotlighting characters from Star Wars films.

"Bossk's Cool Day Out"

"Snowtrooper's Delight"

The main ingredient and ultimate deal-maker? Baking powder.

JVST Inc, founded in 2008, is a full-service digital advertising and design agency based in San Francisco specializing in innovative and high-impact creative work tailored to inject brands into the cultural currents. Here's why you're going to want to join their team as a Junior UX Designer:
- They run a tight ship of miscreants and corporate robots, where fun is outlawed.
- You'll be asked to solve design and functional challenges with a user-centric approach that aims for the best solution, not just 'a' solution.
- They work with clients like Sony Music, The Pokemon Company, Ubisoft, American Giant, NXP, Applied Biosystems and Capitol Records.

If you are an S-M-R-T designer and very creative, to the point of being a little weird, this is the job for you! Apply Now.

'Toto Wooden Dolls' by Artek. The villagers, called Martta, Kerttu, Aaro and Eemil, are made by turning wood and finished with painting by hand.

The 'Toto Wooden Dolls' were designed by Kaj Franck in 1945 as collectables for the Finnish magazine Kotiliesi.

Here's a quick round-up of some of the noteworthy stuff we came accross at the Accent on Design section of the home and giftware show NY NOW (f.k.a. NY International Gift Fair), which faced some stiff competition last weekend, coinciding with Chinese New Year festivities and the Superbowl. This year's show was loaded with some really impressive ceramics, as well as Tom Dixon's ever-expanding catalog of products, and it was great to see so many young designers with really solid product photography, personal branding, and marketing collateral. Check out the highlights below:

Ceramic 'Buddie Vessels' by Mirena Kim.

'Nest' storage containers by Joseph Joseph with their signature color-coding.

Rocking wooden and brass paper-weights 'Tipsy' by Bower.

...They'll build the coolest urban park you've ever seen. The city may have lost the bid for the Summer 2012 Olympic games, but that didn't stop anyone from showing off just how cool the winter games could've been (or could be—who knows what the future holds) if the event had taken place on the densely-populated island. The New York Times took a stab at superimposing Olympic-level venues on the Big Apple, with courses spanning tourist destinations and lesser-known landmarks alike.

From alpine in Central Park to icing over Broadway, the Times has considered every detail, right down to the measurements, and it should go without saying that the bobsled/luge/skeleton track in Times Square is a major upgrade from the temporary toboggan run that was there just last month for Super Bowl Boulevard. Think of it as a glorified version of an elevated train track—maybe we could turn it into a park after the games, à la the High Line.

Here are the Times' proposals for Times Square, Bryant Park, Central Park and a 5K stretch of Broadway

Downhill, Central Park
"Alpine events would be challenging. But if you could fashion a facsimile of the 2.2-mile downhill course at Rosa Khutor Alpine Center, it would tower over Central Park. Starting above 59th Street at a height of two Empire State Buildings, the course (without many of its notorious turns) would end on the ballfields of the North Meadow."

Are you designing an office for someone who needs a good way to hang drawings or documents on the walls—for reference while working on a project, or just to keep frequently used papers readily accessible? Does you own office need that kind of product? Or are you designing products for those with this kind of need? Here are some of the many ways to use the walls effectively while accommodating various personal styles.

Bulletin/cork boards, and the pushpins to go with them

Bulletin boards have one downside—you wind up with tiny holes in the papers. But if that's not a concern, they can work quite well. Note that anyone with pets or small children will need to be careful about how the pushpins are stored.

Bulletin boards can be made interesting in a number of ways. For example, you might cover them with fabric, as Pulp does.

Or you could use an unusual shape, as with this flower from Three by Three and this map from Luckies of London. But if you want to make the most use of limited space, you'll want to keep the shape somewhat close to a square or rectangle.

Another option would be to put the cork board in a colorful frame, as Maine Cottage does.

Yesterday it snowed in NYC, and as always happens, today you can see which parts of the street have been plowed and driven through and which parts are still snowbanks. And recently a movement has begun that claims we can use those snowbanks to help determine urban road construction.

Photo via This Old City

Way back in 2001 Transportation Alternatives Magazine suggested that the untouched snow on city roads are where "neckdowns"—i.e. curb extensions—ought to be installed, to slow traffic at intersections for the greater safety of pedestrians. Here in 2014, that suggestion has really caught fire, with news organizations and urban activist blogs now referring to the phenomenon as "sneckdowns" ("snow" + "neckdowns).

The BBC ran an article called "Sneckdown: Using snow to design safer streets," stating that "snow can be helpful in pointing out traffic patterns and changing street composition for the better." To bolster their argument they interviewed Clarence Eckerson Jr., whose StreetFilms organization creates short films on smart transportation design and policy. "The snow is almost like nature's tracing paper," Eckerson explained. "When you dump some snow on this giant grid of streets, now you can see, visually, how people can better use the streets."

The thinking is that curbs should be made to reach towards each other at the corners of intersections and shorten the crosswalks, with three goals:

- While crossing, pedestrians spend less time in the actual street
- Since cars cannot now park close to the corners, turning visibility is improved for drivers
- The narrower space means cars must take corners more slowly, and presumably more safely

Here's a video from Eckerson himself explaining the concept of sneckdowns: