We've looked at desks designed to cut cable clutter, desks with storage and desks with gutters. But this deceptively-simple-looking desk by Artifox may be one of the most efficient designs we've seen yet for modern-day usage. Designed for pure functionality, if not flexibility, Artifox's Desk 01 is the type of object that an archaeologist could dig up 1,000 years in the future and study to deduce how we worked in the year 2014.

My biggest gripe with modern-day desks is that there's no allowance for the bags we all carry. Artifox has taken care of that with a simple knob on the front that provides easy bag access. Make that two knobs, with the second providing a handy spot to stow headphones for your Skype session.

An angled groove in the desk surface provides a handy (if static) spot to place a tablet and smartphone, or just a tablet if in landscape orientation.

"Remember, folks—I gave you the internet, and I can take it away." Those were the words David Letterman jokingly put in Al Gore's mouth during an appearance from the latter on Late Night. And while no one is really going to take your internet away, an ongoing battle in U.S. courts may influence the way it is delivered to you.

To date the internet has been operating under the principle of net neutrality, whereby all content providers are treated equally; this means that Core77's homepage is delivered to you as quickly as Netflix's, as we and them are viewed as equal. (We may not have House of Cards, but hey, we have "True I.D. Stories.") But yesterday the Federal Communications Commission put forth a proposal that would allow ISPs to charge providers more to deliver their content faster, essentially providing "fast lanes" to whomever's got the money.

On its face that might not sound so outrageous, as it seems akin to a motorist paying more to use the Midtown Tunnel instead of sitting in traffic on the Queensboro Bridge; but it's got folks up in arms, as a closer examination of the proposal raises some troubling questions. One sticking point in particular is the wording of the proposal, which states that service providers dole out these new charges "in a commercially reasonable manner." While this sounds like it is intended to promote some level of fairness—i.e. Core77 can't afford to pay what Google can, so howzabout cutting Core77 a break on the fast-lane price?—even a little scrutiny raises thorny issues. For example, internet service provider Comcast happens to own NBCUniversal; couldn't their lawyers argue that it's "commercially reasonable" for Comcast to charge Disney-ABC more, in order to protect their subsidiary's interests and gain a competitive advantage?

I grew up treasuring the days my dad would head out to refill the propane tank for the cumbersome grill we bought him for some birthday or Father's Day long past. The ghastly Wisconsin winters we continuously weathered were met with late-April BBQ celebrations out on the deck in shorts. And while that unsightly grill—complete with its fire-singed hood and well-worn trays—holds a soft spot in my heart, there's no denying that there are better designed options out there. Enter the Grillo Portable by formAxiom.

Grillo was designed with mobility in mind—and certainly won't send you out on any propane tank trips. The grill can be set up with a single handle (much like and umbrella) and doesn't require any extra accessories or "frippery," in the designer's words.

This is a throwback for two reasons: Andy Warhol and floppy disks. Just recently, a series of digital paintings done by Warhol for Amiga Computers back was exhumed from a group of floppy disks dating back to 1985. The search for these previously unearthed pieces all started with an inquiry from artist Cory Arcangel, who suggested restoring the hardware to the Andy Warhol Museum after seeing a promotional video of Warhol working on the Amiga 100 on YouTube. At the notion of undiscovered work from such a name, Carnegie Mellon University's Computer Club teamed up with the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry and the Hillman Photography Initiative to embark on an extraction project to see if there were any unreleased paintings hidden among the floppy disk fossils—and, of course, there were.

That video Arcangel saw? Here it is (complete with an awkwardly sultry Debbie Harry):

Storage that's hard to reach—the rafters in garages, the top shelves of kitchen cabinets, bedroom closets and tall bookcases—is a common problem in homes, and sometimes in offices. As a professional organizer, I recommend step stools (or short ladders) to my clients all the time, so they can make use of the storage space available to them, without standing on chairs and risking their safety.

And different designs serve different situations. Sometimes the space allows for a step stool that does not fold, but rather sits out and becomes part of the decor. The step stool above, from Infusion Furniture, was designed for a loft-style apartment, for an end-user "who wanted a stool that was interesting and elegant enough to live in the kitchen and not in the closet." The handle makes it easy to carry around to different locations.

The Heaven stepladder, designed by Thomas Bernstrand and manufactured by Swedese, is made of lacquered aluminum sheet metal. There's no second side to provide support; instead, the base does that. This might make some end-users nervous, but others will love the look. That photo is by Fredrik Sandin Carlson.

And if we're talking about step stools that don't fold away, the Cramer Kik-Step has to be included. This one has been around for 50 years, and it's often found in libraries—but I know someone who uses it in her pantry. The Kik-Step has hidden casters to make it easy to move around on most floors; the casters retract when someone steps on it, and the stool locks into place. The bumpers keep it from scratching the walls. It's made of steel, and supports up to 500 pounds.

But many end-users, especially those in small spaces, will want a step stool that does fold up. The Lucano step stools, created by Metaphys and Hasegawa Kogyo Co., will each hold up to 220 pounds. The step stools are made of a combination of aluminum and ABS; end-users comment that the light weight makes them easy to move around. One drawback: The grooved steps are too narrow for some end-users; the bottom two steps on the 3-step ladder are just 2.75" deep.

We're working on an upcoming video series about the ShopBot Desktop, and now that I've got some hands-on experience, I've discovered that I love CNC milling. I also, by the way, love whiskey. But these two things don't go together, at least not in the real world.

The real world is not the advertising world, though, so I'm enjoying Suntory's "3D Rocks" campaign. The Japanese spirits giant has enlisted the services of some company with a 5-axis CNC mill to create the world's most sophisticated whiskey-on-the-rocks orders. Up above is a shot of Kyoto's famed Kinkaku-ji temple, but for the rest they've gone with Western icons:

The Art Institute of Chicago is seeking an Executive Director of Fabrication and Facilities Management to develop and maintain a shared vision for the growth and development of Instructional Fabrication facilities and services throughout the organization. The Executive Director will not only gain free admission to the Art Institute and other Chicago cultural institutions, but they'll also

The ideal candidate will have experience with the operational aspects of running fabrication facilities such as a woodshop, metal shop, ceramics facility and digital output or similar studio environment where multiple tools and techniques are used in the fabrication of objects. Three to five years employed in a technical academic facilities management position along with increasingly responsible administrative experience working in higher education is strongly preferred. Apply Now, if this sounds like your kind of gig!

All photos courtesy of Atlanta's High Museum of Art // Buick Streamliner, 1948

It ain't just New York, Los Angeles and Chicago that get the killer design shows. Next month Atlanta's High Museum of Art is hosting an exhibition called "Dream Cars: Innovative Design, Visionary Ideas," co-curated with the automotive writer and historian Ken Gross, and the show will highlight some socks-knocking concept cars going all the way back to 1935. ""It's a really exciting exhibition that explores the ideas behind design [and] what innovation means in something as ubiquitous as the automobile," says Sarah Schleuning, the museum's Curator of Decorative Arts and Design.

Alfa Romeo BAT 7, 1954

Stout Scarab, 1936

Gotta love our readership. Following Wednesday's post admiring the design of Lytro's forthcoming Illum camera, Core77 regular Slippyfish pointed out that it was pulled off by product design and development firm Artefact Group, and shortly after that, Artefact themselves dropped us a line to elaborate on the project.

We only had time to get a few questions in, and I usually can't stop myself from asking the most pedestrian one first: So how long did this project take?

"[Lytro had been developing the guts] for several years, [but] the industrial design portion of that enormous effort lasted only a few months from early ideation to the definition of final design intent," says Markus Wierzoch, Artefact's Design Director. "After that we continued to collaborate with Lytro on some of the design, feasibility and manufacturability details up until the early stages of tooling."

The biggest challenge in designing it?

"Since it is at the same time intended to bring computational photography to the experienced and sophisticated photographer," Wierzoch continues, "our biggest challenge was to find the perfect balance between the new and the familiar, in order for Illum to both stand out from the crowd and at the same time be attractive to the very opinionated group of creative pioneers that it is built for."

Had Albrecht Dürer been able to attend this year's Salone Milan, he would have been pleased to see his designs getting a new breath of life thanks to the work of deJongeKalff. The Dutch design studio based its silicon Table Skin Embroidery on one of Dürer's woodcuts as part of m2, an exhibition put on by Droog featuring new works adapted from some of the 8,000 objects in Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum.

The artists Jennifer de Jonge and Roos Kalff founded deJongeKalff in 2011; since then, they've continued to work independently while pursuing some projects jointly, having discovering the benefits that come with co-working and the cross-pollination of disciplines. (No doubt Dürer, who was a painter, engraver, printmaker, mathematician, and theorist, would have approved.) One of the beneficial byproducts of this arrangement was the Table Skin. Kalff got the idea for the product after observing de Jonge experiment with pouring leftover rubber from another project over various glass plates. Fascinated with how the heavy material fell and revealed the structure beneath it, Kalff immediately thought of the drapes and folds of a tablecloth.

Albrecht Dürer's woodcut Pattern from the Series of Six Knots, completed in 1507, was the inspiration for a new version of deJongeKalff's Table Skin on display in Milan earlier this month.

So the designers set out to create an actual tablecloth in this manner. First deJongeKalff covered the top of a table with a large bread of clay weighing roughly 22 pounds, building it up to about six millimeters in thickness and rubbing it until it was mirror smooth. Then the artists experimented with pressing various objects into the clay: "pineapple, knots, spoons, different strings, all we could find in the studio and its surrounding shops," de Jonge says. Pouring rubber over the surface, the designers would look at the results and evaluate them before trying something else.

"Ultimately, we chose to work with haberdashery," de Jonge says, referring to the small sewing items sold by a haberdasher, such as beads, buttons, needles and ribbons. "You will see the very detailed wire work in the rubber, the weaving, the fineness of the design." Not that everything they tried was a success. "A lot of objects worked better than others," de Jonge admits. "It depends on the thickness, the smoothness, how big the object is. Of course, it really depends on the end result you are looking for." For Roos and de Jonge, that result was a design that blended the understated elegance of white damask linen with the ornate detailing of Persian carpets.

The designers started by pressing various objects into a layer of clay spread across a tabletop, then pouring rubber over the surface and evaluating the results.

Don't tell me how to live.

File Under: Real Reasons to Have Kids. If you're not already familiar, littleBits is a source for super simple snap-together electronics. They operate on a kid- or idiot-friendly design that uses magnets to connect function-specific Bits to each other in endless modular ways. In addition to basic components like motors, sensors, LEDs, switches, usb power sources and inverters, they also batch up kits for the lazy and excitable. The one that got my motor going this week: Space Kit! Among other projects, this kit can help you build a satellite dish, learn how to measure particles in the atmosphere, and make a totally cool "robotic space arm" called THE GRAPPLER:

"Did You Hear That?"

We're big fans of Star Wars, if you couldn't tell. (See: snowy Star Wars photography, our recent forum discussion on Star Wars design vs. Star Trek design, our breakdown of the opening scene text crawl—the list goes on.) New York artist James Haggerty has created another one to add to the list: Star Wars themed staple mosaics. He recreates the classic characters using thousands of the colored office supply pieces.

Details from "Did You Hear That?"

Haggerty is strategic with his staple-use—by using the dark background of the canvases, he's able to create a bit of depth that offsets the sheen given off by the staples. Taken out of context, bits and pieces of this series could easily come off as unrelated abstract artwork.

"The Side

At long last, the first Core77 Conference is officially open for business! We've got the initial round of speakers listed, with more still to come. Hopefully you've already arranged your schedule to be in Brooklyn on Thursday, June 19, so all you have to do now is buy your ticket and you're good to go. We recommend you act now, as the tickets are very limited and are going fast.

In addition to a full day of presentations and discussions, we'll be broadcasting two Core77 Design Awards jury announcements from the stage, giving away some great shwag and then throwing a bash that night to wrap it all up. All conference attendees will get VIP access to the party (a.k.a. cut the line and get an open bar) as a bonus for spending the day with us.

Check the website now for a list of speakers, information on the schedule and venue and a convenient link to the ticket purchase page. See you there!

IBM Design—a newly created division— is looking to transform the way IBM thinks. After recently celebrating 100 years, the company is looking to bring on a fleet of designers who can change the way the brand designs products and help drive an era of design-led innovation.

If you've got a Bachelor's and/or Master's Degree in relevant field; are willing to work in either New York or Austin, Texas; are passionate about solving critical and complex problems; deliver exceptional client experiences; can interact directly with end-users and can work with powerful technology, this might be the place for you. As a UX Software Designer, you will craft intuitive interactions and workflows informed by market and audience research—typically in the form of sketches called Wireframes. Think you're the person for the job? Apply Now!

Andy Warhol, BMW M1 Group 4, 1979

There is, for the most part, a fairly clear distinction between art and design. The former contains its meaning within itself, while the latter points towards external goals or values, for which it is merely an instrument or vehicle to achieve or access those ends. In both cases, function is an overarching constraint: Art, by definition, has no practical purpose; design is precisely the opposite.

Of course, artists and designers alike have challenged this boundary, typically with by questioning the very concept of one domain vis-à-vis the other, whether it's Duchamp's readymades or speculative design projects that point to alternate universes or futures. If the concept car (the subject of a forthcoming exhibition) is an earnest attempt at elevating design into art—at least to the extent that few of them are ever realized—BMW's ongoing Art Car project inverts the dynamic by forcing artists to conform to the immutable shape of a functional object. In short, the automobile is less a three-dimensional canvas than a sculpture in itself, a machine intended, designed and optimized for performance on the road or racetrack.

Jenny Holzer, BMW V12 LMR, 1999

Last week saw the publication of the first comprehensive catalogue of the Art Cars thus far, 17 in all, commissioned in irregular intervals over the past 39 years. From Alexander Calder's inaugural BMW 300 CSL in 1975 to Jeff Koons's BMW M3 GT2 in 2010, BMW Art Cars (Hatje Cantz 2014) includes in-depth stories behind each one, alongside archival images and a wealth of very attractive photography of the cars.

Jeff Koons also designed the slipcase

Roy Lichtenstein, BMW 320 Group 5, 1977

As the seasons are changing, there's no better time to introduce a little bit of the outdoors to your indoor decor. Some of may choose flowers or houseplants, but Pudelskern designer Horst Philipp has created something for those looking for something a little, ehm, different. Introducing: His lamp, Heumandl ("Hayman" in English), which features alpine hay and flowers. Obviously enough, allergy-ridden design aficionados, beware.

The design is inspired by the same-named haystacks found scattered among the fields of Austria's Tyrol. While the photos have the lamp featured in the great outdoors, I'd bet the fleeting shadows would fit in right at home indoors on a huge, blank wall.

A California-based man quietly began posting videos of padlocks on YouTube a couple of weeks ago. The traffic for "LockMan28's" account was what you'd expect, given the subject matter: A couple hundred views here, several hundred views there. But after posting video of an unusual bike lock over the weekend, traffic rocketed to nearly half a million views in less than two days.

Here's the video of the unusually-designed bike lock that did it. The unfortunately verbose poster wastes the first two-and-a-half minutes blathering about nothing, so skip ahead to 2:40 to see the mechanism in action:

Neat design, and while it is technically unassailable using conventional picks, anyone who's ever lived in a city knows that any lock is only a temporary deterrent to whomever really wants your stuff. The thing can still be cut, and even if angle grinders didn't exist, a casual jaunt through New York will reveal scores of rusting bike frames shackled to racks—and missing every part that could be removed using conventional tools.

As far as who designed it, "Lockman 28" is purposefully vague, as he has plans to distribute the Chinese-packaged lock for $140 a pop. But we have faith in the internet; it's just a matter of time before some fanatic uncovers the "Asian market" manufacturer, and perhaps then we'll learn of the brains behind the actual design.

Leave it to the Finns to update something as unimprovable as the axe. Finland is a nation populated entirely by (as far as I can tell) woodland elves and reclusive hermits, and the heavily forested country knows its way around making firewood. I'm a "don't fix what ain't broke" kind of person, but the oddly weighted Vipukirves Leveraxe genuinely seems to fix the few things that suck about chopping firewood. While a lot of the viral popularity of this slick axe comes down to the fact that most people appear to know nothing about chopping wood, this invention is seriously interesting. It looks like a rejected logo for the Artist Again Known As Prince, but the design's true value is its combination of unusual functional features. First, the head is heavily weighted to one side, rather than balanced like a traditional axe head. Second, the cutting face has an odd concave angle. Third, what the hell is that tang on the side about?

These features intentionally force the axe head out and to the left as soon as it sinks into the wood. Rather than relying on the even outward leverage of a wedge to split a log in half, this "Leveraxe" takes the same amount of kinetic energy and directs it outward which makes the gap created by the head larger and makes splitting faster. Swing it like a normal axe, chip away from the outer edge, and let its eccentric weight do the work from there. This brings the number of whacks needed way down and reduces the chances of accidental injury by directing the swing away from your innocent shins. And that bizarre metal curl on the head? It functions as a brake, keeping the axe from getting stuck or striking the ground, and reducing the amount of time between swings. Neatly done.

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

Gae Aulenti: Born in Palazzolo dello Stella, Italy, 1927. Died in Milan, 2012.

"[A]rt exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar,' to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object: the object is not important." —Viktor Shklovsky from Art as Technique, 1917

The subject of the above quote by Viktor Shklovsky is poetic language, and the subject of our brief essay is the architect and designer Gae Aulenti. Admittedly, "poetry" and "poet" have almost become useless terms. In our age, to call someone a poet seems either anachronistic (like, "Oh, they're still doing poetry?") or vague, like one is weakly praising some indistinct whiff of beauty. "Poet" and "poetry" clearly need some scrubbing and recalibration. Obviously, the word's main connotation is a practitioner of the literary sort, but it would be valuable to expand it, and stabilize it, to mean something like: those who make objects of communication, and whose main material for these communicative creations is poetic language—whether imagistic, textual, sculptural, or what have you. In light of this attempted definition, Gae Aulenti was a great poet.

Aulenti studied architecture at the Milan Polytechnic. After graduating she worked at Casabella magazine from 1955–65 under Ernesto Nathan Rogers. Although she was a graphic designer at the magazine, she completely absorbed Rogers's architectural tutelage—saying later that Rogers was the most significant influence of her life. The influence is clear, and his Torre Velasca is a great example; the building (designed with his Milanese firm, BBPR) is highly idiosyncratic and elegant, and almost all of Aulenti's work has this particular, uncommon charm. Throughout her career she was a very successful industrial designer, originating many pieces for Knoll, Zanotta, Kartell, Artemide and other companies. Most of Aulenti's architectural commissions were for museums (the Musée d'Orsay, the Pompidou Center, the San Francisco Asian Art Museum), and Aulenti was one of only a few major female architects in Italy in that era. When asked if being a woman affected her practice, she simply replied "yes."

Left: the Pipistrello lamp for Martinelli Luce (1965). Right: Rimorchiatore, a combined candleholder, vase, light and ashtray (1967). Top image: Aulenti's 1993 Tour table for Fontana Arte

The Jumbo coffee table for Knoll International (circa 1965)

In the 1960s and early '70s, Aulenti was part of a loose international network of radical designers and architects, including the likes of Superstudio, Ettore Sottsass, Gruppo Strum, Hans Hollein, Archizoom, Ant Farm and many others. This web of progressives was perhaps best represented by MoMA's seminal 1972 show Italy: The New Domestic Landscape. The tone of the exhibit clearly and distinctly promoted the theoretical, neo-science-fictive atmosphere of the time. Although Aulenti contributed much to this speculative era, the core of her work had zero utopian conceits; she made consciously provisional objects and environments, and she was aware of the untenable nature of any future predictions. "If I now look at the lamps I made, I never see them as machines for producing light," she said. "They are forms suggested by the work that I was doing in that moment for a particular space, so they went there first and then they went into production; they went to an entirely new destiny."

Victor Shklovsky wrote that "The technique of art is to make objects unfamiliar..." The overlap between this notion and Aulenti's work is quite incredible; what better could be said when looking at Aulenti's Pipistrello lamp or her Jumbo coffee table? Neither are not a coffee table or not a lamp but strange versions of these objects. As with much of her work, there seems to be a "roughening" of design language—not an abstracting, not a proposition, but an attempt to "impede" or "slow" the actual perception of the designed object. (These last quoted verbs are taken from a further section of Shklovsky's essay; he writes, "The language of, poetry is, then, a difficult, roughened, impeded language.")

Above and below: La Grotta Rosa on the Amalfi Coast (1969–72)

Back in the day, you just couldn't go to a European sidewalk cafe without a bloody man collapsing at your table and pressing a roll of microfilm into your hand, urging you to keep it safe while an unseen assailant cut his final sentence short with some kind of ranged weapon. Nowadays, of course, your average crossbow-bolt-riddled spy's whispered last words would probably be the password for his Instagram account. But back then it was always microfilm.

That monopoly aside, storage media devices were once a varied and peculiar assemblage of objects. I was reminded of this by coming across the "Relics of Technology" project, shot by Oregon-based photographer Jim Golden, as seen below. (The awesome game consoles shot atop this entry belongtarget="_blank"s to Golden's "Collections" project.)

Aesthetically, Beta was betta