These are most certainly not your grandmas' plates. (Unless yours have an off-kilter sense of humor that indulges dinosaur attacks and robot takeovers—if so, rock on.) Artist Don Moyer has added his own mark to the traditional—and quite frankly, overdone—Willow patterned dinnerware. Typically, commonly seen designs depict various harmonious sceneries and landscapes drawn in blue ink. Moyer doesn't stray from the color scheme, but does add a flying monkey, robot, sea monster, pirate or UFO (or two) into the mix with his Calamityware series. Currently, you can purchase five different designs featuring the mentioned calamities, with a sixth one on the way. What's next? I'm anxiously asking the same question. Moyer gives us a hint on his Kickstarter campaign site for the new plate: "I'm considering a volcano, Sasquatch, mariachis, mimes, pterodactyls, a giant octopus, bats, alligators and several other themes. But probably not all at once." Darn.

As mentioned, Moyer is currently looking to the crowdfunding masses for help producing this delightful design. Check out his video here—even if the dinnerware isn't your style, you might have a change of heart after hearing this designer talk about his work (well-timed jokes ahead):

Artistic? Passionate about music? Looking to combine the two? Capable of scaling tall buildings in a single bound? Fender Musical Instruments Corporation is looking for a superhero of Interactive Design to join their talented Marketing Communications team in Scottsdale, AZ who will continue their innovative history of creative and artistic promotion of their world-famous products and instruments.

You will contribute to the overall look and feel, navigation, and user interactivity for FMIC's website development initiatives across multiple brands. You'll work with members of the Web Team and Marketing department to design and implement large-scale brand websites; online give-aways and promotions; standalone microsites; and mass e-mail marketing campaigns. Don't miss this chance to bring your artistic creativity and apply it to an artistically creative company. Apply Now.

We've all seen commercials featuring picture-perfect slumberers slowly waking up to a casually wafting scent of a freshly brewed cup of coffee. It's something we'd all love to experience, but let's be real—it would have to be a mighty strong mug to pull most of us out of dreamland at the day's first light. Now, instant coffee giant Nescafé has found a way to integrate that visceral coffee aroma into a morning wake-up call with a twist.

Nescafé's new 3D-printed Alarm Cap design— as created by NOTCOT's physical counterpart NOTlabs—awakens caffeine enthusiasts with the sweet sounds of nature (or their take on it, at least), an alarm that can only be turned off once the cap is twisted and removed from the canister. NOTlabs worked with Nescafé's branding agency Publicis Mexico to come up with a brand new function and branding for Nescafé. The coffee brand came to Jean Aw—founder of NOTCOT and co-founder of NOTlabs with Shawn Sims—with the idea and they ran with it. "Having been covering design for the last nine years, I'd been itching for new projects to explore and we've been sharing our experiments on NOTCOT with readers as we've played with our huge laser cutter, 3D printers, wood/electronics shop, garage and more," Aw says. "So, when Publicis Mexico reached out to us with the concept of a 3D Printed Alarm Cap that would turn off when the bottle is opened, we were thrilled to collaborate with them to design and bring it all to life."

Popular though 3D printers are with enthusiastic DIYers and makers, the technology has yet to be adopted by major brands and businesses yet. Without any real precedent to keep in mind, Aw and her team built a proof of concept and got to work. "We were faced with a short time frame, so finalizing the design/electronics and production were nearly simultaneous," she says. "The three main aspects of the design/production are Electronics, 3D Modeling/Printing and Assembly."

So too did the availability of new tools facilitate the design process. Los Angeles-based Aw and Sims worked with Leo Corrales of Publicis Mexico to 3D-model the caps, while Eric Brockmeyer—a digital fabrication designer based in Pittsburgh—joined the team to help spec design parts and code the alarm. The cap prototypes were printed in-house, enabling a nimble, iterative approach to tweaking them until they arrived at the final product.

"I think our life is our most important project. It is full of constraints and challenges, just like a design project. It's this realization that inspired me to apply my design process to my life--that is how Design the Life was born. It has been growing by word of mouth ever since..." –Ayse Birsel

Join Ayse on Sunday, May 18, in New York City, at her acclaimed Design the Life You Love Master Class to think about your life like a designer. Set aside two hours to playfully design your life with renowned designer, Ayse Birsel, using constructive metaphors, inspirational tools and optimistic visualizations. Attendees will draw from concepts in fields as diverse as fashion, design, art and gastronomy, looking to the work of thinkers like Issey Miyake, Ferren Adria, James Dyson and Steven Jobs. No prior design or creative experience is necessary—just a desire to be playful, introspective and to learn a unique process.

A limited number of spaces are available for the Design the Life You Love Master Class being held in at SVA on Sunday, May 18. For firsthand accounts of the workshops can be found at Huffington Post and by Molly Klimas for Metropolis.

Morning Session: 10am – 12pm
Afternoon Session: 1pm – 3pm

School of Visual Arts
D-Crit Studio
136 West 21 Street
2nd Floor
New York, NY 10011

For more information and to reserve your place, please see the Eventbrite page.

Screen images not simulated: That right there is our mobile event guide for NY Design Week 2014 (the widely-accepted colloquial name for second weekend of NYCxDesign), which kicks off tomorrow night. As both design week and our own editorial offerings evolve—we're making a newspaper, maybe you've heard of it—the mobile guide offers a slightly different selection from years past: The folks at NYCxDesign have put together an impressively comprehensive event guide for just about every art and design event that is happening between May 9–20 this year, and we partnered with them to produce a printed event guide that you will certainly be seeing around the city if you have not grabbed one already (we're also updating the list of stockists). Here's the PDF of the print event guide, for you fogies and print fetishists (guilty as charged!).

We'd also like to take this occasion to announce our mobile agenda for this weekend: We're currently forging ahead with the C77 Design Daily and we'd like to offer you, dear reader, a chance to see your work in print! Simply tag your Tweets and Instagrams with #C77DD and we'll take care of the rest!

Speaking of which, are you following @CoreJr on Instagram yet? We'll be reporting live this weekend online and off, so you can get your regular dose of beautiful images and teasers from the events and exhibitions and stay tuned for the full story in print.

Those of you who have nothing better to do can stalk our C77DD distribution team at @C77DD, where we'll be posting updates from our delivery truck and pop-up reading rooms!

So:
Mobile Guide
Print Guide
@C77DD on Twitter
@CoreJr on Instagram
...and #C77DD wherever else you may roam!

If there's one thing you'll never find on a submarine, it's a large bookshelf. Not even one of the purty ones we recently looked at. While submariners eventually have downtime and could do with some literary diversions, a submarine is perhaps the ultimate exercise in space-saving; there simply isn't enough room to store a good selection of books.

So an iPad, you think, would be perfect. Even the 16GB model could store plenty of tomes that sailors could share while taking up a minimum of space. But the problem with the iPad is that it's got WiFi and bluetooth, and you don't want something transmitting or receiving signals that enemy subs could potentially pick up or infect with viruses.

Summer sunlight can change my mood, and I don't suffer from seasonal affective disorder. It's hard to ignore the positive feeling one gets from sunlight streaming through a window. Soon you'll be able to bring sunshine to any cloudy day and even into a dark windowless cave. Or even better, you'll be able to have a "sky light" on the ceiling of a non-top-floor space of a building.

Researchers in Italy have created a lighting panel that uses nanoparticles to create nearly natural daylight. This is much better than fluorescents; think about daylight coming into dark subways or windowless offices.

It starts with white LEDs. But the magic comes from a clear plastic panel filled with titanium oxide nanoparticles that can mimic the way Earth's atmosphere scatters sunlight. Different panels can offer different kinds of sunlight—from super bright to twilight.

We're thoroughly looking forward to heading along to the Product Design + Innovation conference in London next week. Now in it's fourth year, the event—which we've noticed growing steadily year on year—looks set to truly outdo itself, with a decidedly star-studded speaker line up and a program spanning a breadth of critical issues and contemporary dynamics shaping the design industry.

Robert Brunner, Beats designer, co-founder of Ammunition and ex-head of Apple Industrial Design Group, looks set to open proceeding with an examination of what design's rise to prominence in organisations means for practitioners. Creative legends and luminaries Richard Seymour and Sir John Hegarty will share a stage to reflect on what design and advertising can learn from one another about 'storytelling'—a topic that has enjoyed a lot of attention of late, but yet to be clearly articulated. If that wasn't enough, NewDealDesign founder and famed FitBit designer Gadi Amit will close the event, with insights from the frontiers of industrial design and interaction.

Having programmed this year's event, Core77 columnist Kevin McCullagh will be chairing proceedings for the fourth consecutive year. Core77 correspondent Sam Dunne will be reporting and, of course, tweeting live.

Check out what else is lined up on the two-day program. Tickets may still be available on the PD+I homepage.

"I think our life is our most important project. It is full of constraints and challenges, just like a design project. It's this realization that inspired me to apply my design process to my life--that is how Design the Life was born. It has been growing by word of mouth ever since..." –Ayse Birsel

Join Ayse on Sunday, May 18, in New York City, at her acclaimed Design the Life You Love Master Class to think about your life like a designer. Set aside two hours to playfully design your life with renowned designer, Ayse Birsel, using constructive metaphors, inspirational tools and optimistic visualizations. Attendees will draw from concepts in fields as diverse as fashion, design, art and gastronomy, looking to the work of thinkers like Issey Miyake, Ferren Adria, James Dyson and Steven Jobs. No prior design or creative experience is necessary—just a desire to be playful, introspective and to learn a unique process.

A limited number of spaces are available for the Design the Life You Love Master Class being held in at SVA on Sunday, May 18. For firsthand accounts of the workshops can be found at Huffington Post and by Molly Klimas for Metropolis.

Morning Session: 10am – 12pm
Afternoon Session: 1pm – 3pm

School of Visual Arts
D-Crit Studio
136 West 21 Street
2nd Floor
New York, NY 10011

For more information and to reserve your place, please see the Eventbrite page.

If Google Glass is anything to judge by, when it comes to physical product, Apple and Google have pretty opposite development methods. Apple waits until it's got the device as perfect as it can get it, and it goes on sale when it's ready. But Google decided to rely on a select portion of the public for their Glass beta testing, while tacking on a surcharge in the form of a $1,500 price tag.

Why the steep cost? "We want people who are going to be passionate about it," Project Glass Manager Ed Sanders told Forbes. "We wanted people who really wanted it." Apple does too, of course, but they don't charge you for it until they feel it's ready to go. Google, on the other hand, felt that end-users would provide valuable feedback that they would not have been able to anticipate on their own, a valid approach commonly taught in design schools today.

Back in February, we livestreamed Made in Brunel's 24-hour design challenge, in which over 150 design student participants collaborated in small groups to respond to one of eight project briefs provided by brands like LEGO, Rolls Royce, IDEO and Seymour Powell. Each team had three hours to answer their brief—including designing, communicating and delivering their ideas.

The event footage is available for those who may have missed the maiden viewing—or, if you've only got a few minutes, check out this quick recap video of the event:

Bailey Williams is an ID major at Appalachian State University, and the oddly specific nature of her recent assignment will be familiar to many an industrial design student. Williams' class was tasked with designing products for people with particular physical disabilities. The card she drew: Two- to five-year-old children who suffer from dyspraxia, a developmental disorder that mucks up brain-to-body signals, impairing a child's motor skills.

As dyspraxia essentially renders children "clumsy" (in an undiagnosed view), making manual skills many of us take for granted difficult, Williams started off the way many of us would: By designing toothbrushes and spoons with easier-to-grasp handles. But then she had an insight: If a child could not get their hand to close around an object, perhaps a glove with magnetized fingertips could.

With a minor in Apparel and the attendant sewing skills, Williams whipped up some prototypes. As more people saw them, it became clear that her solution could help more people than children with dyspraxia:

The more people she shared the mock ups with, the more she learned of other potential users, such as stroke victims working to improve their grip and hand strength. 'The beauty of this product is that every time we show it to someone else they come up with ten more ways it can be used,' said Williams, who consulted with an occupational therapist at Watauga Medical Center. 'I was amazed that something so simple could be so helpful,' she said. That's what good design is about, said Kern Maass, an associate professor and coordinator of Appalachian's industrial design program. 'I tell students that if you design for the fringes, you solve for the masses,' he said of design methodology. 'And that's certainly true of Bailey's project.'

Photos by Véronique Huygue

There's always a certain excitement that comes with bringing an uncounted heft of change to the bank. Unfortunately, that excitement is more often than not followed by a jag of disappointment once you find out that your bag of coins is hardly worth the magical number you had envisioned. This is where Selma Durand's work comes into play. Her design, whose name—"Piggy bank"—is just as minimal as its aesthetic, looks to helps spenders re-interpret the impact of their pocket change.

This isn't for those looking to fund a large trip or buy—think of it more as a reality check. Durand's design focuses on smaller purchases, like a baguette or a cup of coffee. The bank has a weight system—when it's empty, the inner brass container sits above the lip of the ceramic dish. As more money is added, the brass bowl dips lower and you'll know you've got the equivalent of a euro when it lines up with the ceramic edge. While the design is ideal for our European readers, with some quick weight conversions this money-saving method could be translated to American coinage—though it won't render quite as well, considering the weight of a euro is equivalent to three pennies.

Check out these videos to see the inner and outer workings of the bank:

Many of my organizing clients live in somewhat small homes, so I'm always appreciative of furniture that serves a dual purpose—and coffee tables are an ideal place for adding some storage.

This coffee table from RKNL provides storage in a subtle way, with a space that could store magazines, TV remotes, etc.—the kind of things an end-user is likely to want at hand when in the living room, great room, etc. But this would probably be a horrid table for someone with small children, who would gleefully pull everything off that shelf.

This Gus Modern wireframe coffee table makes everything stored totally visible. I can see this being used to store things like lap throws or a child's stuffed animals—if these are things that would be used in the same room as the table. There are bumpers on the bottom of the frame to protect hardwood floors from scratches.

On the other hand, there are a number of ways to keep the items in storage totally hidden. This coffee table from Cummins Design does it with two drawers.

The Chiva coffee table from BoConcepts has a lift top which provides access to the storage compartments; the raised top could also turn this table into a dining space or laptop work surface. One minor inconvenience: End-users would probably want to remove anything placed on the lift-up sections before the tops were raised. And if there were small children around, I'd want to investigate how easy it was to lift and lower the lids; could little fingers get hurt?

Recent graduates Maeve Jopson and Cynthia Poon are on a mission to make toys for all children. The design duo co-founded their studio, Increment, under that premise and launched an Indiegogo campaign this past Tuesday to bring their first inclusive product, a set of stackable rings, into production.

What started at a collaborative degree project at the Rhode Island School of Design developed into a full-time pursuit after graduation last June. In Providence, Rhode Island, the Industrial Design graduates worked with local specialists, teachers, parents and kids at one of the country's leading schools for inclusive learning, Meeting Street School. There, they met Megan, a little girl who became their inspiration.

In addition to blindness, Megan lives with other impairments including low muscle control, which severely affects her balance. Her parents challenged the students to design and develop a toy their daughter could use with her friends. "Most mainstream toys simply don't consider children with disabilities," says Jopson. "Especially as the world becomes more inundated with flat screens that require specific fine-motor skills, many children are unable to use the toys that their friends have."

"Trillo," published in September 1978

Everyone loves a good cutaway illustration (and we've got no shortage on Core77 (just take a look at our entire series on cutaway masters). We've brought you the illustrative inner-workings of boats, Star Wars machinery, planes, tanks, cars and even castles—and now, nuclear reactors. Even the most simple of apparatuses become twisting diagrams of workflow when broken down and forced into 3D detail on a 2D plane. (Although, I don't think anyone would necessarily call a nuclear power plant a simple set-up to begin with.) Thanks to The University of New Mexico, we can view an extensive archive of nuclear reactor cutaways—all of which made an appearance as inserts in Nuclear Engineering International magazine at some point from the 1950s to the 1990s.

"Grand Gulf," published in September 1980

"Guangdong Nuclear Power Plant," published in September 1987

With so much detail, it's no surprise that some of the more minuscule components became hard to comprehend over time. Luckily, Engineer Ron Knief noticed this and started on a quest to digitize all 105 diagrams published by the magazine.

Anthropologie seeks to create an inspirational shopping experience for their customer base: Fashionable, educated and creative women between the ages of 28 and 45. Their average customer seeks to have her expectations exceeded in unexpected, delightful ways, and that's what the product lines at Anthropologie achieve. Join this Philadelphia, PA based company as a Designer of Home products and provide their customers with an unimagined experience.

If you're the right person for this job, you will create brand-appropriate product that fits within a season's conceptual vision, and speaks to the customer, under the supervision of the Senior Designer. This requires that you have a keen awareness of market trends, a firm understanding of how design impacts product costs/pricing, and the skills to manage multiple projects at one. What are you waiting for? Apply Now.

When forging into new design territory, one of the biggest challenges a designer or engineer can face is ridding their mind of the incumbent form factor. For instance, the earliest sewing machine prototypes attempted to mechanically replicate human hands, to pierce and pluck the needle through the fabric. Those all failed, and it was subsequent inventors who created wholly mechanical, inhuman-looking solutions more in line with what a machine could do.

Similarly, creating a humanoid-shaped robot that can run on legs is difficult and awkward. DARPA and Boston Dynamics have shown that it can be done, but the results are often terrifying and do not look mechanically harmonious.

But if the goal is to create a robot that can run on legs, form should be allowed to follow function. And the robot eggheads over at Florida-based Robotics Unlimited have gotten it right. Check out their amazing and elegant OutRunner:

If there's one thing I quickly realized about rainy days when your own two feet are your main source of transportation, it's that you don't want to be listening to music on your iPhone in a torrential downpour. Take a minute to lower your eyes to switch the song or check Google Maps and risk being drenched by an unobservant taxi driver speeding through a profound puddle—you can kiss your music (and other phone functionalities) goodbye. But there's something about walking outside on a rainy day that calls for a soundtrack. Maybe it's the desire to be mentally removed from the situation or the necessity for some adrenaline-pumping jams to get through the mess. Either way, the Radio Poncho concept from Carnegie Mellon University student Liana Kong is a welcome alternative.

Designed for an Experimental Form class, Kong incorporates music listening into the traditional poncho form (much to the satisfaction of our waterlogged technology budgets). Not only is it aesthetically bright solution to keeping our tech safe and sound—another thing we don't get enough of on gloomy days—it also keeps us attached to the environment some of us are looking to escape. "The key point in my concept was to stay connected to one's surroundings while listening to and enjoying music in harmony with the rain, sans earbuds or headphones which create walls to the outside," Kong says on her website.

The way the wearer interacts with the music is the best part of this design. Once the hood is pulled up onto the head, the tunes start. Adjusting the length of the drawstrings affects the volume of the music. All of the buttons are assigned radio "channels" and can be changed by buttoning and unbuttoning the poncho. Here's a video of the raincoat in action:

Well, it was a long night and an early morning, but the C77 Design Daily is off to a good start. Our team of newsies has delivered the very first batch of Issue #1 to Sight Unseen OFFSITE, WantedDesign, Matter and of course our Official C77 Design Daily Reading Room at INTRO/NY.

Look for these friendly faces as they pound the pavement in Soho and cruise around Chelsea via Nimble Scooter!

Stay tuned for more updates...

C77 Design Daily at NYCxDesign 2014
@C77DD on Twitter
@CoreJr on Instagram
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