Reporting by Morgan Walsh, photos by Ray Hu

The do-it-yourself trend shows no signs of slowing down, especially when it comes to the culinary arts. The Sausage Maker Inc.—founded over 40 years ago as a company dedicated (if it is not obvious) to sausage-making products—has been growing ever since, adding cheese-making, canning and fermentation equipment to their oeuvre. Their pursuit of homemade food production might have been ahead of the curve, but mainstream culture has caught up and the desire to know where food comes from and how it's made has taken hold.

Today, creating a data visualization that'll grab (and hold) the attention of thousands is a cinch, considering that even the smallest of screens comes equipped with state-of-the-art software and editing capabilities. In the '60s and '70s, not so much. John Whitney, the late founder of Motion Graphics Incorporated, was a man against the technological odds. Even constrained by less-than-desirable computer systems (by today's standards), he created what could be considered an improvement on today's iTunes visualizers.

Whitney's work has been compiled into multiple demo reels of sorts. Best to full-screen these, even with the grainy quality—it just adds an extra layer of trippy texture:

Photos by Isaac Schell unless otherwise noted

On the occasion of the Red Hook Criterium this weekend, the Rapha Cycle Club here in Lower Manhattan is pleased to present Gangs of New York, an exhibition of exquisitely preserved vintage bicycles from the collection of Edward Albert. If Jamie Swan is a "Keeper of the Flame," so too is Albert a dedicated chronicler/collector amongst the current generation of cycling enthusiasts in the Tri-state Area.

What do these bicycles, mostly from the interwar period, have to do with an unsanctioned nighttime race in a Brooklyn shipping terminal? As Albert notes in this brief history of his personal story and the bicycles currently on view at the Cycle Club, all bicycles in New York were fixed-gears until the middle of the last century, when derailleurs finally caught on in the States. So while we look forward to footage of this year's race—Red Bull will be capturing it this year—we are very pleased to have a folk historian share a bit of context for NYC cycling culture.

Albert will be present at the opening reception of Gangs of New York, tomorrow afternoon from 2–4pm at the Rapha Cycle Club at 64 Gansevoort Street, New York, NY 10014 (the Red Hook Criterium will take place later that evening).

As a Ph.D. in Sociology, I taught for 25 years at Hofstra university and retired in 2005 as an Emeritus Professor of Sociology. Many of those years were spent studying the sport of bicycle racing, about which I have published quite a bit in professional journals and edited collections.

I have always been interested in bikes—like most people, I've been riding since I was a kid. But the 60s being what they were, even though I wanted to race, smoking etc. got in the way. In 1974, I was in Toronto working on my doctorate and got involved with a local bike store and club. By the following year, at the age of 26, I was all in. Bike racing became the most important thing in my life. I quit smoking and started racing seriously as I worked on my dissertation. I moved up relatively quickly (to Cat. 2) and continued to race until around 2000. Sometimes I think I stayed in academia because it allowed me the time to train and race—I became a cyclist and continue to define myself as such.¹

I started collecting when I stopped racing. Before I stopped, all I wanted was a bike that would help me do well in races. After collecting for a bit, I got talked into bringing two bikes to the Cirque du Ciclisme vintage bike show in Greensboro, NC. They were a restored pair of Dick Power bikes I had gotten from a guy who knew him, whom I had met while out training. The bikes—one track and one road—won Best in Show. I was hooked. That also started me on the path of not only looking at the bikes but (as a sociologist and social historian) looking at the stories behind them. That ended up with me interviewing countless riders from the day and my as-yet-unpublished book A Dark Day in Sunnyside about the builder and coach Dick Power.

Images courtesy of Edward Albert

I have about 38 bikes, give or take a few, at the moment. Many of the New York track bikes and memorabilia came from the people I interviewed. After interviewing a good ex-rider and member of the German Club, Eddie Troll, I asked if he had any stuff left he would be willing to sell. He took me into the garage and showed me his bike, lots of parts, etc. He said sure, my kids are just going to throw this stuff in the dumpster. This was not an uncommon theme—I got the Drysdale that is in the show (more on that below) from a nonagenarian who had retired to Las Vegas. Same sentiment.

NASA is in on the concept vehicle game (as long as space suits count as body vehicles) and they want your input on which they should bring to life. One of three Z Series finalists on offer will really be built, put through rigorous pressure and fit tests and used to inform the future of suit development. Though the designs are a bit whimsical, the program exists to spur creative designs and learn where advancement is feasible in the heavily constrained field.

The previous Z-1 competition was started as an exercise in innovative suit design, with an emphasis on increased mobility and Extra-Vehicular Activity. The winner was a flexible-bodied suit above whose colors riff on a certain beloved character. This year's finalists are less famous but no less fun. Let's meet the contestants!

As in the past several years, we are pleased to partner with the International Home + Housewares Show to present the highlights from the annual show. Of course, with some 60,000 exhibitors from all over the world, four days is not nearly enough time to see every thing in the three massive exhibition halls of McCormick Place, and the products and booths you see ">here represent just a tiny fraction of the goods on view.

In any case, we were excited to see the Design Debut section, where ten independent designers and makers—including our friends and some time Core-tributors Craighton Berman & Bruce Tharp—had the opportunity to present their work. Similarly, first-time exhibitors like Crucial Detail, Finell and Mollaspace made a strong showing in the Dine + Design section, while we also checked out new products from OXO, Kikkerland and a few of our other faves.

» View Gallery

International Home + Housewares Show 2014
Live from Chicago with Vicki Matranga, Design Programs Manager, IHA [VIDEO]
Compleat Offers Discrete Brown Bag Options
Cose Nuove's Festive Bottle Opener Makes Us Think Fondly on Winter
Alessi Introduces "Super & Popular" [VIDEO]
Ameico Thinks Spring with Y-Ply
Neo Luxe Housewares by Finell
Martin Kastner Goes Over Some Crucial Details [VIDEO]
Recipes for the Past and Future: Bosign and Joseph Joseph
Manual Meets Materious: Craighton Berman and Bruce Tharp in Conversation [VIDEO]
Revol offers a Classier Party Cup
Student Design Competition Winners [VIDEO]
DIY Trend Stays Strong (the Sausage Maker, Inc.)
Mollaspace Turns Optical Illusions into Functional Products [VIDEO]

ICYMI, check out our galleries from 2012 and 2013 as well.

With the rise of augmented reality (AR) technology, virtual reality headsets like the much buzzed-about Oculus Rift aren't just for playing games in a simulated universe—they can actually help industrial designers do their jobs, too. Four students at the Royal College of Art recently suggested how with Gravity, a 3D sketchpad that they debuted at an RCA exhibition last February.

Right now Gravity exists as a functioning prototype—and it works pretty much exactly how you would imagine. Users don virtual reality glasses and then draw objects in space above the Landing Pad, a handheld glass platform. This space above the Landing Pad is called "GSpace," and it can be comprised of a single drawing or multiple ones. By rotating or tilting the Landing Pad, the user can control the plane the drawing exists on and build out the drawing, much like adding details to a real object in space.

Gravity works by integrating several tracking technologies to be able to pair and synchronize all of the different elements of the system together with the AR glasses, so that the 3D-generated content is overlaid on top of the user's vision in real time. The team has a patent pending on its innovation.

The Gravity team—Guillaume Couche, Daniela Paredes Fuentes, Pierre Paslier and Oluwaseyi Sosanya—is currently finishing the beta software and looking for manufacturers for the Landing Pad and the pen. Users will have to provide their own virtual-reality headsets; the developers have been working with AR glasses by the French company Laster, but they're aiming for universal compatibility. "We have recently made our software compatible with Oculus Rift and we are looking into making it work with all the leading-edge AR glasses on the market (that is, with on-board camera and LARGE field of view for immersive AR)," the Gravity team writes in an e-mail. "Gravity is a tool where augmented and virtual realities can be exploded as creation tools. This is why we are trying to make it available for as many platforms as possible. Our idea is to become the universal platform for 3D sketching in AR."

You may remember The Agency of Design from our story on designing with energy, as told by the group's co-founder Richard Gilbert. Just as the Agency's design for a sustainably efficient lamp was focused on hard data—in lieu of the fluffy eco-friendly promises and features we too often see today— their recent project, PullClean, is largely based on research and observation. By investigating the daily movements of hospital employees, the Agency of Design came up with a door-handle-turned-sanitizer that makes it as convenient as possible for hospital employees to keep their hands clean by using one of the most used surfaces to do so.

As stated in their product video, hospital acquired infections kill around 100,000 people in the U.S. every year. As we know from Rachel Lehrer's two-part case study on the topic, sanitizing in a hospital environment is a real problem for employees—and when they're attending to already sick or injured patients, the germ-spreading quotient multiplies.

Gilbert explains in the video:

We witnessed the debut of Schmidt Brothers cutlery at the International Home + Housewares Show back in 2012, when the New York City-based brand started gaining attention for their distinctive, thoughtfully designed kitchen knives. After all, their offerings hit a sweet spot between German quality, fresh form factors and finishes, and a reasonable pricepoint, and brothers Jordan and Jared Schmidt bring the same attention to detail to their magnetic knife blocks and packaging.

Hey folks, your correspondent is on the ground at Holz-Handwerk, a massive trade show in Germany covering everything under the sun related to woodworking and furniture building. Here they've got machines, tools, jigs, inventions, contrapations, guys named Hans, and all manner of cool stuff that you can use to make other cool stuff. The exhibitors seem to be primarily German, though there are pockets of companies from all over the world here.

Unsurprisingly the Italian machines (like this planer from SCM Group for when you need to work boards that are a freaking half-meter wide) have a little flair

With thousands of exhibitors spread over six-and-a-half massive exhibition halls laid out like a sprawling college campus, I realize that I could not possibly see half the stuff in here if I had twice the time, and that makes me want to cry. Plus the flowing crush of 100,000 attendees makes shooting video demonstrations of anything just about impossible. Still, the intrepid Core77 editor soldiers on, bolstered by discoveries like the following:

Deep down inside, I always suspected this is what bored craftsman raised in rustic settings did with wood cut-offs

A gentleman with the unlikely name of Guido Einemann sought to design and build, as Ron Paulk did, the perfect workbench to suit his needs. But unlike Paulk's mobile solution, Einemann wanted something shop-based. A master carpenter & cabinetmaker by trade, Germany-based Einemann needed something that could hold unusual-shaped pieces like staircase stringers, could expand to hold wide pieces, would feature a vise for clamping, could change height while he worked on assembling cabinetry, and could be wheeled around his shop.

Thus he developed Der Montagetisch Einemann, a line of scissor-lift-enabled worksurfaces incorporating a variety of clever features, including vacuum clamping! Check it out:

Here's a closer look at that overhead, powered, tool-holding, cable-and-hose-managing contraption (der Multischwenkausleger, or multi-swiveling boom) and how the vacuum-clamped finishing process works:

Spotted at Holz-Handwerk.

Kettle is a team of passionate, fearless creatives focused on delivering great products, redefining best-practices, and providing new opportunities for their clients and own brands. And they're growing! They're looking for a Senior Product Designer with a portfolio that demonstrates examples of engaging, intuitive UIs in web and mobile applications, to work on a project for a Fortune 100 company with a startup-influenced approach.

Sounds great, right? The ideal candidate has 3+ years of agency/in-house work under their belt, designing clean, modern, inspiring pixel-perfect interfaces across platforms showcasing impeccable layout and typography skills. He/she also has a strong understanding of the development process. Prototyping experience is a plus. To find out more about this great opportunity, Apply Now.

There's a good chance that even those of you who aren't runners are familiar with Nike Free footwear, whether you wear them for other sports or training or as a go-to sneaker for your day-to-day activities. While Tobie Hatfield (Tinker's brother, for the uninitiated) had originally designed the articulated midsole based on the biomechanics of barefoot running, the shoes have been adapted for (and adopted by) anyone who spends time on their feet—in keeping with the Nike credo "if you have a body, then you're an athlete"—which is to say, everyone.

Of course, the concept of Natural Motion is a natural extension (so to speak) of Nike co-founder Bill Bowerman's seminal insight into performance footwear: that it should "provide protection and traction but minimal weight and zero distraction." But like most any design challenge, it's easier said than done. For more on the history and background of the Free—now in its tenth year, Nike recently unveiled the 2014 Collection—we had the chance to chat with Hatfield, Director of Athlete Innovations, on his personal journey, the inspiration behind the Free and what the future holds for Nike.

Core77: Let's start with a bit of your background—tell me a little bit about yourself and how you ended up at Nike.

Tobie Hatfield: Sure—I was a track athlete, grew up in the state of Oregon and knew Coach Bill Bowerman (I didn't know Phil Knight when he was an athlete). When I was a senior in high school, he actually made me my first pair of custom-made track spikes. At first, he X-rayed my feet to actually find out where my bony prominences are, underneath my foot, so he could re-drill the holes and put the spikes in the proper places just for my foot. Little did I know, at that time, he was already starting to teach me about innovation—about working with an athlete, listening to an athlete...

It's something that I look back on, even today, 23+ years later at Nike... but I didn't know I was going to be a footwear engineer, footwear designer, I really wanted to be a track coach—my dad was a track coach for 40+ years. After high school, I went to college, and then I [continued] pole-vaulting for a couple more years. I got into coaching, and I coached at the collegiate level.

During that time, Nike was recruiting me because I spoke Mandarin, because I was married at the time, and my wife is from Taiwan. They were always trying to get people to go overseas, to work with the factories, and knowing that I already spoke one of the languages would make it a bit easier.

But I denied that for a while until my dad came down with cancer—I'd been away from Oregon for about ten years at that time and felt like things were pulling me back to the state... like, well, if I'm going to go back, I might as well go ahead and see what Nike has to offer, so I accepted their offer to have some interviews. At the end of a week of many days of interviews, I was actually offered two jobs, and I took the one where I actually started learning about materials, which is perfect because [at the time] I didn't know much about shoes at all, let alone the ingredients of them.

A brief history of Nike Innovation: Cortez (1972), Nike Sock Racer (1985), Air Huarache (1991), Air Rift (1995), Air Presto (2000)

With workbenches like Ron Paulk's and Guido Einemann's around, is there any demand for an old-school workbench? Apparently so: Swedish company Sjöbergs does a brisk business in producing the traditional variety, with only slightly-modernized updates, like steel-cored, rubber-wrapped bench dogs (with half-round tops to accommodate angled workpieces), cork jaw protectors for the vise's clamping surface, and precision steel hardware for the vise's guts, ensuring they close perfectly parallel.

Though dated (if the soundtrack doesn't tip you off), the following company video gives you a pretty good look at the bench:

Hopefully you've had enough time to submit your designs to the Core77 Design Awards after we extended the deadline to midnight on April 6. If the chance to win one of our awesome DIY trophies—which you can use to make giant Design Award chocolate bars—isn't incentive enough, we're offering a limited edition pre-release of our brand new "Designing Here/Now" book. You can get your own copy for $10 with any Core77 Design Awards entry. The flocked black-edge book is currently only available to 2014 entrants and features 448 pages filled with 500 past program honorees.

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

T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings: Born in London, 1905. Died in Athens, 1976.

Neoclassicism is a fairly dubious tradition. It wouldn't be wrong to associate it with all that is bad about the nature of Western Empire—powerful men looking to underscore their power by lazily and arrogantly appropriating the aesthetics of perceived Greek supremacy. Just look to the Federal and Fascist exploits of our last century. This vilification, of course, does not extend to the bizarre and awesome exploits of a few mid-18th-century architects and artists (Claude Nicholas Ledoux, Govanni Piranesi, etc.), and it excludes the entirety of ancient interests during the Italian Renaissance. But for the most part neoclassicism is almost an architectural plague, an endless cycle of "knocking off the knock-offs" (to quote John Chase).

But there is a disconnect here: what of the Greeks themselves? When one turns to the actual texts and art, whether Apollonian or Dionysian, one is struck less by their military heft than by the simple beauty of the metaphysical question. Our subject, Terence Harold (T.H.) Robsjohn-Gibbings, was supremely aware of this anomaly and set out to skip the entirety of two millennia of Greek revival. Instead, he went to the source itself in an attempt to materialize, as he put it, "the first recreation of a fifth-century setting in some twenty-five hundred years." The work turned out to be extraordinarily and profoundly poetic.

The Klismos Chair, circa 1961. Top image: Robsjohn-Gibbings furniture installed at the House of Dolphins on the Island of Delos (left) and his Diphros stool, circa 1961

Left: an alternate version of the Klismos chair. Right: Robsjohn-Gibbings's first offices, circa 1937

My project-crush for the day goes to the FlyRig. This thing was designed and built by Real Art for the University of Dayton's basketball team hype videos, and despite having interest in neither professional photography or ball sports, I really want one. It's a 360-degree rig with the camera mounted below a rotating 16-foot arm, mounted to the ceiling of their workshop. Modeled after a massive ceiling fan and powered by an electric wheelchair motor, it allows for fast, smooth centripetal pans of the subject. In this case the subject—the University of Dayton Flyers themselves—came out looking great.

Better yet, Real Art documented the making-of the rig in a short case study:

At the Holz-Handwerk show there are tons of circular saws, tons panel saws and tons of CNC mills. But there's only one Logosol M8 Portable Sawmill. This crazy contraption is something like a chainsaw combined with a tracksaw, and one man (or one Swedish man, anyway) can unload the thing off the roof of his Volvo, carry it into the forest, and start making boards.

You're undoubtedly wondering, from the photos above, how that lone dude got that big-ass log up onto the stand all by himself. It's not just brute strength, there's design involved, as you'll see around 3:08 in the demo video:

From German machine manufacturer Martin comes the Speed 20/10, a rollable spray station for varnishing. The one-meter by two-meter surface is covered with a roll of ordinary, cheap packaging paper, which varnish won't stick to; so when spraying your piece, there's no need to mask the underside. And it has a couple of other cool tricks, watch the vid:

What you might not be able to see in the vid is that it's foot-pedal controlled; tap one pedal to get those two rollers to pop up, so you can lift your piece away from the sides, or you can hit the other foot pedal to either advance to a clean sheet, or roll smaller pieces off of the surface and into your waiting hands. The action requires an air compressor, being all-pneumatic; they don't want any electricity jumping around, the rep explained, if folks are spraying explosive substances.

Spotted at Holz-Handwerk.

If there's one thing that'll kill the creative process quicker than a computer crash with no Time Machine backup handy, it's a lack of understanding and communication when creating a new product in a collaborative environment. Our friends at IDSA have teamed up with Loughborough Design School to create a simple way to keep us all on the same page during the New Product Development (NPD) process. If you've been to a previous IDSA conference, you may remember their token informational fold-out iD cards (not to be confused with these). The cards break down the names, descriptions and images for 32 different design representations in four different groups—sketches, drawings, models and prototypes. The cards share what the representation stands for in terms of use and the information it provides.

The new app that consolidates the cards and information in one convenient, color-coded resource, taking the mystery out of unknown terminology with straightforward appeal to all levels and genres of design, making it easy for for teams to work together cohesively. Check out the video overview of the app and its features:

I bet you didn't realize this, but your front door sucks. Yes, it does. It's made out of steel or wood or even worse, steel disguised to look like wood. It offers little thermal insulation, your neighbors can hear you arguing through it, and burglars can easily kick it in. Even worse, it's just plain ugly.

The 85mm-thick doors by Slovenia-based Inotherm, on the other hand, don't suck at all. They're made out of 3mm-thick sheets of folded aluminum with polyurethane sealed inside to offer a winning blend of both thermal and sound insulation. The escutcheons are made of stainless steel and designed to protect against drilling and turning. And most importantly, they're way better-looking than your lousy door.