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Core77 Gallery: Maker Faire NYC 2010

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Our gallery of photos from Make Magazine's Maker Faire New York City is now live! Read Core77 Correspondent Sara Jacobson's fantastic overview of the show and how it celebrates d-i-y and open source processes of all kinds, from crafting all the way to carnival stunts. Then, pop over to her gallery to get a peep at the highlights: music making with tesla coils and bicycle wheels, improvisational 3d printing, electronic instruction kits, and much more.

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Cut&Paste 2010 NYC Tomorrow!

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Cut&Paste kicks off it's 2010 touring digital design tournament tomorrow night, here in NYC. Save yourself time, and get your tix online while you can.

You'll want to get there early as the evening's schedule expands upon the tournament, with the addition of Show&Tell presentations, a new lecture format presenting some of today's best designers talking shop and demonstrating their chops. NYC-based product designer and friend-o-Core77, Brian Chui (Smart Design) takes the stage to deliver an interactive 20 minute improvised drawing demonstration, modeling yet to be imagined products from your suggestions. You won't want to miss it!

Cut&Paste 2010 Digital Design Tournament from Cut&Paste on Vimeo.

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Design for the surfing subculture

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New Zealand company Surf Curve designs products by and for the specific subculture of surfers, as you can probably guess by their name.

We know surfing. We know the highs. We know the lows. We've scored perfection by hiking over to the next bay, stacked boards till the car roof dents, seen them bounced by baggage handlers, and slept in our boardbags to wake up to surf on our doorstep. We've been there and we've loved it and we've learned. And its made us want to make surf gear better. To discuss, develop, test, argue and design a better way. And to make stuff that makes sense and makes you think 'why didn't I think of that?

Yes, even people who surf all day have problems and design needs, like trying to keep their car trunks from getting wet and sandy. Hence Surf Curve's Changebag, a changing mat that bundles up, keeping your wetsuit sand-free and the car nice and dry.

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Allan Chochinov on Thirty Conversations on Design

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This is so much fun. Thirty indvidividuals provided short videos answering the questions "What single example of design inspires you most?" and "What problem should design solve next?" in the 2010 edition of Thirty Conversations on Design. Just a few in the roster include Daniel Pink, Emily Pilloton, Gong Szeto, Khoi Vinh, Michael Lebowitz, Stefan Bucher, and Tina Roth Eisenberg. Jessica Helfand, William Drenttel, and Ze Frank are coming soon, so you'll have your pick of some pretty great stuff. Did we mention Tony Hawk as well? Core77's Allan Chochinov's is here; hope you enjoy them all!

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The Amazing Tribe's interface design coming to Fujitsu's "radical" dual-screen phone

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A couple of weeks ago we showed you a "Future of Screen Technology" video by TAT (The Amazing Tribe), which seemed pie-in-the-sky amazing and almost too fantastic to be realized. But just today TAT has announced that Fujitsu Japan "will reveal a ground breaking dual screen mobile phone user interface powered by TAT's design and technology initiatives."

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The Astonishing Tribe's interface design coming to Fujitsu's "radical" dual-screen phone

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A couple of weeks ago we showed you a "Future of Screen Technology" video by TAT (The Astonishing Tribe), which seemed pie-in-the-sky amazing and almost too fantastic to be realized. But just today TAT has announced that Fujitsu Japan "will reveal a ground breaking dual screen mobile phone user interface powered by TAT's design and technology initiatives."

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Procter & Gamble is seeking an Associate Director in Bethel, CT

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Associate Director
Procter & Gamble

Bethel, CT

Procter & Gamble has an immediate opening for a Design Leader at Duracell in Bethel, Connecticut. The Duracell Design Leader will be responsible for end to end holistic design across all strategic business priorities. This includes strengthening the core business, broadening our footprint and establishing Design vision/requirements for upstream innovation. You will elevate the role of Design to deliver Duracell brand purpose while bringing to life the equity. You will also lead, inspire & build Design capability that delivers against the business needs now and into the future.

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The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.

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Softbrew: One Designer's Coffee Obsession

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In case you missed it, the New York Times had a nice little interview last week with George Sowden, designer and co-founder of Memphis and now creator of SoftBrew, a pitcher introducing a new way to brew coffee. The interview and the object reveal one of those great moments when a designer's personal obsession results in an innovative solution to a problem. Sowden talks about visiting factories instead of museums as a tourist, and laments the loss of connection between manufacturer and designer. For this reason, with SoftBrew, Sowden closely oversaw production of the coffee maker's two components: a porcelain jug, and a stainless steel filter insert with photo-etched micrsoscopic holes, at porcelain and metal factories in China.

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Vienna Design Week 2010 On-The-Go: The Dyson Design Process

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In collaboration with designforum Wien, Dyson celebrates 10 years of Dyson Austria with an exhibition detailing the whole Dyson range since the Ballbarrow, including his new air multiplier. Other highlights are cardboard prototypes and models sliced open to reveal the ways he and his huge R&D team have developed innovative air suction/flow patent.

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Vienna Design Week 2010: Eero Koivisto's Laboratory Talk

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Eero explaining the method of creating durapulp.

One of the first talks of Vienna Design Week was by Eero Koivisto, one of three partners of Claesson Koivisto Rune, a Finnish based architecture and design practice that was founded almost 17 years ago.

Based in the Kunsthalle, the hub of the design festival, and part of Design Week Laboratory talks, Koivisto shared the ups and downs of designing and developing products. He introduced a number of past projects from their portfolio illustrating the breadth and depth of experiments, prototypes, and manufacturing successes and failures that go into developing any new product.

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Witty product concepts by Alexander Hulme

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Gotta love the Breakable dish concept, by London-based designer Alexander Hulme. Drop it and yes, it shatters, but at least your accident yields two smaller dishes you can still use.

Two other examples of Hulme's quirky thinking are his designs for a clothing hanger made by growing bamboo into a particular shape and a pencil with an integrated clip (he normally sells the latter on his site but is currently sold out). Check out the rest of his stuff here.

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Vienna Design Week 2010 On-The-Go: The Art of Design

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Pscyhe, 2010 by Ulrike Lienbacher

At ak7's Contemporary Design by Contemporary Artists, International artists collaborate with Tyroloean craftsmen to create a limited number of objects. Very much a show that discusses the growing trend in contemporary design where boundaries between art objects and designed products continue to blur.

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Tech objects that stand and deliver

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Two examples is not enough to call it a trend, but we've recently spotted a pair of designs, both from London, with simple but interesting kinetic abilities.

Jeremy Innes-Hopkins' Nokia Kinetic concept is for a cell phone with a weighted electromagnet in the rounded base. When a call comes in, the phone, if laying flat on a surface, rises up to a standing position.

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Creative agency Chalmers Judd's Floppy Legs uses one technology that's obsolete--a 3.5-inch floppy disc drive--and one that is not: Spill a drink near it and watch what happens.

Floppy Legs Portable Hard Drive from James Chambers on Vimeo.

What we'd like to see next: Combining the two technologies to make a phone that, when on your person and ringing, demands attention by physically fighting its way out of your pocket or purse.

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Video on how printing ink is made

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Making colors on a webpage is easy, it's all numbers. But the colors that go into magazines, brochures and posters is made the old-fashioned way, with ink. In the following video, a Chief Ink Maker from the Printing Ink Company shows you how powders and varnishes are combined to make their product. (In addition to being fascinated by the process, I was surprised at how few of them wear smocks; PIC must hire the least clumsy people on the planet.)

via kottke

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Nokia researching fabric-like electronics for future cell phones

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Dropping your cell phone is a big deal. For most of us it happens sooner or later, with luck dividing us into those standing on carpet and those standing on cement.

Dropping phones might not be an issue in the future if a current line of research Nokia is pursuing takes off. Dr. Stephanie Lacour of the Nokia Research Centre in Cambridge demonstrates a "stretchable electronic skin" that could one day be the form phones come in, in which case we'd be wearing them rather than holding them, and dropping them would be more like dropping a handkerchief than a crystal dish.

Next we're hoping someone can address the far more common issue of dropped calls.

via dvice

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Video of the Fujitsu dual-screen phone with TAT-designed interface!

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Engadget's got video from CEATEC of the wicked Fujitsu dual screen phone with TAT-designed interface that we teased yesterday. We're struck by how different it is for a cell phone, with two super-long screens, and TAT has taken full advantage of the extra real estate to incorporate some of their interface design magic, as you'll see in the vid.

Be sure to check out the form factor switch around 2:50, whereby the screens can be re-aligned from short-ends-adjacent to long-ends-adjacent.


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The Challenges of Teaching Sustainability: The RCA's Approach, by Clare Brass and Octavia Reeve

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Rich Gilbert's Energy Trumps, a creative tool to think about energy at the start of the design process. They provide a fast visual reference for embodied energy to facilitate easy comparison of materials.

It is normally taken for granted that economic growth is vital for maintaining economic health, but research has shown that wellbeing depends less on material goods than on our lifestyles. The New Economics Foundation in the UK publishes a global Happy Planet Index, which measures the combination of environmental impact and wellbeing, to quantify the environmental efficiency with which—country by country—people live long and happy lives.

So what can we as educators do to enhance those valuable skills that designers have and get them using those skills to redesign not only the products that we buy but also the lifestyles that we live and the systems that organise our lives, making them better for people? Design education needs to position itself in such a way that designers are trained to design good customer experiences with the lowest possible environmental impact.

We encourage our students to aim their designs at people not industry. We believe that designers can play a valuable role in the difficult but necessary process of changing consumer attitudes and values by articulating new desires and dreams.

Conventional design education trains designers to drive consumerism, which drives growth, and is the established way of achieving prosperity; like many art and design institutions the Royal College of Art is beginning to grapple with the apparent contradiction in the sustainability debate, and is looking for ways to encourage students to explore what this might mean in both their work and their future lives.

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Book Review: Exploring Materials: Creative Design for Everyday Objects, by Inna Alesina and Ellen Lupton

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Every year, new books come out for industrial designers and architects to familiarize themselves with the abundance of new materials they can probably barely afford to buy (see Emerging Technologies and Housing Prototypes or the Transmaterial series). Well, Inna Alesina and Ellen Lupton's new book Exploring Materials is absolutely nothing like that. Instead of glossy double page spreads of avant-garde materials accompanied by highly technical descriptions of their properties, readers of Exploring Materials are given a guided, almost hand-held tour through an exhaustive list of broad material categories along with tips and tricks on their use. Although the back of the book proclaims that it contains "everything designers need to not only jump-start their design process, but also follow a project through from idea to prototype to finished object," it doesn't quite feel like practicing designers are the target audience (and that may not be a bad thing).

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My Concorde Thing, by Nathan Shedroff

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It's not an obsession and it's not quite a hobby. However, for almost two years, between 2004 and 2006, I checked Ebay nearly every day for Concorde in-flight service items. In the interim, I've amassed a substantial collection, mostly from the last British Airways fitting, co-designed by Conran and Factory Design. My friends call it my "Concorde thing" and some joke about the size of the collection (I have service for 16, including full placesettings down to the official linen napkins and placemats, plus a bevy of serving utensils, a thermos, coffee pot, creamers, salt & pepper shakers, etc.). Although I have a bunch of the official Concorde gift items, including some from earlier fittings, the focus of my collection is on the in-flight food service. After all, that's really what the experience was about.

The design direction was to bring the magic of the outside, inside.

I don't want to take anything away from the Mach 2.0 speed that had you landing in JFK before you took off from Heathrow, but the flight itself wasn't so different. It was a much smaller fuselage, with seats the size of current economy seats (though better appointed), but there wasn't much sensation of the speed—just a digital speedometer on the wall at the front of the cabin and, if you were lucky to have a relatively clear day, a glimpse out the window of the curvature of the Earth. It didn't feel any faster when you were in the Concorde—not even on takeoff. However, landing was FAST! Two quick banks after landfall and you were immediately landing. No circling for this bird.

So, the real sensation of flying the Concorde was all inside: impeccable service, good food and great wine, and by the time dessert was finished, they were already packing up for landing.

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Biomimicry, or "Nature Did it Better"

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This post is part of the Inspiration series, made possible by Veer.com.

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In exploring this series on inspiration, certain recurrent themes come to light. We've repeatedly stressed that inspiration shouldn't be thought of as coming from a sudden divine jolt. Indeed, surrendering inspiration to forces beyond our control would imply a near nihilistic randomness to success. That's good news and bad news, because it implies that we can actually work toward inspiration. But right there is the bad news. Inspiration doesn't come magically; it requires hard work.

Nowhere is the amount of work that's required for progress made clearer than in the natural world. In his book Out of Control, Kevin Kelly quotes David Ackley of Bell Labs as saying "I can't imagine any dumber type of learning than natural selection." So that's the good news. If natural selection can create brains smarter than computers, wings more efficient than planes and tongues as sharp as mass spectrometers, then there's hope for even the densest of us. The trouble is that none of us has 3.5 billion years to experiment.

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