A pressurized cylinder of aluminum is hardly habitable as it is, but some companies are arguably (or hypothetically) taking things too far. Meanwhile, designers continue to seek incremental ways to make airplane cabin more comfortable, namely by tweaking the seats—anything to get a few inches farther from the head-drooping drooler in the middle seat.

Bruce Campbell took the idea to heart: He purchased a out-of-commission aircraft, complete with wings and landing gear, for $220,000. It's final destination happens to be in the woods just outside of Portland, OR, where Campbell resides in the kitted-out ~153-foot "cabin" he calls home.

A former electrical engineer by trade, Campbell ditched any notion of traditional housing with his work-in-progress—which has taken over a decade, seeing as the first photos that Campbell posted of the plane date back to May of 2002. Today, the 727 features a kitchen, shower and electricity. He didn't completely gut the 149–189-passenger capacity aircraft, either. The original design details are still there, from the uncomfortable teal, "sanitary headrest"-clad seats to the turquoise and brown color combo in the bathroom. Check out this video of the plane in it's not-so-natural habitat (unfortunately, it only shows the outside of the home):

I occasionally see a septic collection truck in my neighborhood with a big motto painted on the side: "We're Number One at Picking Up Number Two." That's a pretty good one. Artist David Rees' motto is somewhat similar, as he terms himself "The number one #2 pencil sharpener in the world."

In this hilarious and spot-on video, Rees calls out the nonsense of faux hipster craftsmanship by revealing his Artisanal Pencil Sharpening trade (which clueless YouTube commenters apparently think is real!). What do old rap group T-shirts, a leather strop mined from your grandfather's tomb and the criticism of luthiers have to do with sharpening $40 pencils by hand? You'll see:

Tonight Curiosity Club welcomes Dave Selden, witty designer and founder of 33 Books. We'll hopefully learn about creative work as a small business, making graphic design useful, and why printing coffee-themed diaries with coffee ink is a good idea.

Tuesday June 10, 6pm PST
Dave Selden: "1,000 Paper Cuts"
33 Books
In store at Hand-Eye Supply or streaming online!

When I released my beer-tasting notebook to the world in November 2009, I had a stressful full-time job, a new baby boy, a lovely wife, and absolutely no idea how to start a business. Now, five years later, I've ditched the day job, kept the wife, added another child and ... I'm still feeling my way through this whole small business thing. I'll share what I've learned along the way, after releasing ten kinds of tasting books, three posters, creating a network of retailers worldwide, and trying to balance it all with a happy home life. Also, there will be prizes. And maybe some tasting

Dave Selden is a Portland, Oregon-based graphic designer and creator of the "33" series of pocket-sized tasting notebooks. He's an avid runner, woodworker and beer geek in his spare time, which is fleeting these days, thanks to the recent arrival of his second child. He hails from the great state of Iowa and smokes his own bacon, two facts which may or may not be related.

Wonder, curiosity, exploration—all spot-on descriptors of a child on the verge of forming an opinion of the world. Yet these are the things that designer Christina Kazakia thinks kids are missing out on, thanks to technologies that keep us inside and constantly distracted. "There's less opportunity to learn more about yourself and the natural world that surrounds you," she says. "Lack of curiosity, lack of risk-taking, lack of wonder, lack of imagination. The outdoors is a wonderful stimulation and provides all of these things while giving children a sense of independence." Her solution? A new toy called Stick-Lets.

Stick-Lets aren't a "tear open the packaging, turn on, tune out" kind of toy. Their function is simple: In order to use the system, kids have to scavenge a group of sticks to use the connectors with, the end result being a fort of some shape or form. The silicone connectors come in different sizes and can be stretched to fit larger sticks and other materials. And, of course, they come in a number of child-attracting colors with equally amusing names: Pardon My Purple, Huckleberry Blue, Birch Bark White, Grasshopper Green, Starfish Red and Kazakia's favorite, Monarch Orange. Kazakia has been working on the idea since it was conceived in her graduate studies at Rhode Island School of Design, but now she's taken to the crowdfunding world to help bring kids a dose of fresh air and creative inspiration. Why? The project's tagline says it all: "Because nature misses us."

"Building forts was a common childhood memory for many adults and parents and sticks are found almost everywhere—so I thought designing a joint to connect sticks would be rather universal and understood by families," she says. "My research informed me of the fact that kids enjoy finding sticks and playing with them. Sticks trigger kids' imaginations! It seemed like the perfect material to work around." The hope is that after kids have had a few go-arounds with Stick-Lets, they'll gain a little more appreciation and engagement with the nature that fuels their fort-making.

A man and his bucket

Sometimes when you love two things very much it's easy to delude yourself into imagining an ideal pairing where you can enjoy them at the same time. This can be guiltily true for burger toppings (you're sticking okra where?), close friends (those arranged dates are only a favor to you), and very often design features. There is a dangerous zone of thinking that wantonly combines Feature A and Feature B, with slight regard for whether they truly do a better job together. Snuggies. Meat thermometer spatulas. We have all borne witness. Sometimes though... those weird pairings are pretty good.

Today's test case is the Beach Vault, the screwy red security bin for your beach trips. While it sounds As-Seen-On-TVesque, this project serves a few real problems experienced by even casual beachgoers. First and foremost, the beach wants to mess up your gear. Wallets and keys love to scatter themselves, and your phone hates you for even thinking about wet, sandy, rambunctious environments. Meanwhile sunscreen, books and spare towels quickly become clutter. Second, your valuables do look awfully inviting tucked obviously under the corner of your blanket once you finally cave and take a quick dip. Third, billowing beach towels are a sand-flinging drag, and while you might visit the beach for recreation, tracking down your wet butt-printed blanket through other people's picnics is a bad look.

Dads are great! They're helpful, handy, and hilarious... in that decidedly dorky way. They make us laugh, they make us barbecue, they fix things, break them, and fix them again. To highlight that tinkering sprit we visited bike frame builder Tony Pereira in his Portland shop. Tony has been hand-building beautiful fillet brazed frames since 2006, and now operates both Pereira Cycles and Breadwinner Cycles out of his neat home shop. Check out our peek into his workshop!

Take a gander at our collection of dad-worthy items, and show your pop you're proud of his pro moves and inspired by his can-do attitude (even when the project goes south). Order before 3pm PST Wednesday for a free Priority Shipping upgrade and a Saturday delivery within the States!

"029: Lucha Libre"

There's something glow-y about a person who truly loves what they're doing. For Jennifer Beatty, the glow comes through in her upcycled art. She managed to tie-in her two passions into one 100-piece series titled "100 Hoopties"—a hooptie being "any car that meets the following: a) Driver must enter car through passenger side; b) Three different brand and size tires (three of them missing hubcaps); c) Exhaust is held up by half a clothes hanger, other half replaces the antenna..." as defined on the ever-entertaining Urban Dictionary. Beatty gives us her own working definition for the poster project:

• A bicycle with at least one part dangling off that has duct tape holding it together and/or makes you aware of its impending arrival by the volume of the squeal coming from the petrified brake pads or lack thereof.
• A Huffy or Murray mountain bike with three broken spokes and the shift lever unattached, commonly ridden by New York City food delivery riders.

"023: Weezer"

"020: Volkswagen

If you couldn't tell, Beatty is both an avid cyclist and a graphic designer, and she combines her passions in her project, recreating famous graphics ranging from movie posters and works of fine art to video games and logos.

"030: Pac-Man"

Starting on April 7, 2014, Beatty started creating a new composition every day and plans to keep it up for 100 days—meaning this series will see its end on July 15. This project is one in a group of "100 Days" assignments taken on by the 2014 Masters in Branding graduate students at the School of Visual Arts.

Let's let this job description speak for itself...

"You're tired of being a cog in the machine. You don't play by the rules. Why should you be judged by them? Innovation flows through your veins and your current company could care less. Tick tock, tick tock... you can't wait for the day to end and get back to your garage where your next mind blowing invention is just a few wrench turns from completion. You crave an environment where science is wrapped in art and design is king.

Oakley is looking for rule breakers. Design engineers who are undaunted in expressing their ideas, thrive on chaos and are disruptive by design. You're a freak and we're the show." Apply Now.

The World Cup is nearly here, with seemingly every bar in NYC hanging international flags out front and advertising Watch the matches here! Footie fever finally seems to have spread to America, as it's been reported that 111 million Yanks tuned in to the 2010 matches, and that Americans bought the most tickets to this year's event second only to the Brazilians. For the next month or so, the melting pot that is NYC will be filled with multilingual shouts of joy and agony echoing from bars across the city.

But it is, as always, a German company that will be at the center of every match, and this time with Pakistani fingerprints involved. Adidas' new FIFA World Cup Official Match Ball, the Brazuca, is manufactured in Pakistan using a variety of high-tech machines and manual handwork. Have a look:

Innovation springs up in the gaps between the available and the unimagined, so it follows that applying a familiar technology towards a familiar goal can still feel unexpected. The Mink makeup printer debuted at TechCrunch Disrupt, and sits solidly in the penumbral zone between Wacky-Futuristic and Both-Obvious-&-Feasible. Simply put, Mink is a printer for make-up. Using the primary functions of inkjet printing with cosmetic grade inks and substrates, inventor Grace Choi wants to turn a mundane technology into one of the most practical applications of 3D printing that I've seen yet.

The Mink proposition is to take the good parts of boutique cosmetics retailers (quality materials and niche color options) and mass-market retailers (low cost, high accessibility), and ramp them both up. Prestige brands capitalize on on-trend colors that you can't find at a standard drugstore or Walmart, charging incredibly high prices for materials that are only marginally different from cheaper options. Meanwhile, mass market vendors keep costs down by streamlining color and material options, which drastically reduces the diversity of options... to the dismay of color-hungry and non-Caucasian makeup consumers.

Choi's solution would allow home users to use any imaging software (from MS Paint to Photoshop) to capture any digitally rendered color, save the hex code, and print it directly into the desired base material, using nothing but FDC certifiable dyes and bases. Pure, custom makeup, on demand. Choi raised eyebrows by live-printing eyeshadow at the TechCrunch event, and specifically mentioned the possibility of working with the different media needed for different types of makeup, from foundation to lipstick to powders.

When was the last time you were so impressed and inspired by something that you thought to yourself, "Wow... I'm going to use that"?

It doesn't happen every day, but when it does, it's usually because we've broken away from the well-worn grooves of routine. When we set aside our regular to-do list and priorities we are suddenly open to shifts in perspective. The result: We walk away energized to apply what we've discovered to our work and our lives.

This is what the Core77 Conference is great for—breaking your routine and walking away energized. It's the perfect event for exposing yourself to theories, people and projects that will snap you out of your groove, but in a really good way. But don't worry, this event doesn't require a house sitter or an extended absence from your desk. All you need is one day and an open mind. We'll take care of the rest, from the presenters to the food, drinks and music later in the evening.

The only thing you should worry about is getting a ticket. With the event only 8 days away, seats for the conference are almost gone! It may be fashionable to wait until the last minute to solidify your plans for Thursday, but in this case, it pays to think ahead. Get your ticket today so you don't miss out on what could lead to your next big idea. You won't know unless you attend.

Editor: You're an up-and-coming designer getting ready to show your stuff at a big furniture show. You've got a great design and know exactly how it should be made--so what could go wrong? Here an anonymous furniture designer shares one of his early-career tales.

This article was originally published in the C77 Design Daily, Vol. 1, Issues 1 & 2.

With the big furniture show coming up, I had spent the past few months designing this large dining table that was going to be produced for the show by a new-to-me fabricator. I'd never worked with these guys before, but they were billed as fabrication experts and had a good rep, so I felt I was in good hands.

This dining table was made entirely out of a heavy type of wood (which I am not going to name, for reasons of anonymity). The base was the most complex part, with a fairly complicated structure involving a lot of joinery. This is the part I was sweating because of how difficult it was to manufacture: They had to get all of these different pieces to meet up very precisely, while still leaving enough play to compensate for wood movement. There were complicated radii and angles, and if the parts were joined incorrectly, the top wouldn't register with the legs.

Well, these guys nailed it! Totally got every single part exactly correct, it was just perfect. Up next was fabricating the top, but I wasn't sweating that—the top was just a plain rectangle that needed to be glued up from narrower pieces to create a thick, hefty slab. In total it would be eight feet long by 42 inches wide. This was expensive stuff and I didn't have the money—or the time, with the show looming—to do this twice.

Now I had specified that the glue-up had to happen with the individual pieces laid with alternating grains, to compensate for each piece's tendency to cup. By flipping every other piece before the glue-up you can get the cupping to largely cancel out and I can then flatten the table out with a sander.

Well, instead, these guys glued the thing up with all of the endgrain MATCHING. Meaning all of the cupping would happen in the same direction. So when they took the clamps off and the slab adjusted to the ambient humidity, the whole goddamn thing just taco'ed.

Would you like ketchup with that Ford Focus? No joke. Ford announced yesterday that it will partner with Heinz to possibly use tomato fibers to make cars from a new form of bio-plastic.

Okay, it's not about engines or doors made from tomatoes. But it is about taking dried tomato skins and turning them into those containers in the car where we dump our loose change, hair ties and other random objects. The skins could also become the wiring brackets used in a Ford vehicle.

Their goal is to develop "a strong, lightweight material that meets our vehicle requirements, while at the same time reducing our overall environmental impact," said Ellen Lee, plastics research technical specialist for Ford.

It all started two years ago when Ford began collaborating with Heinz, The Coca-Cola Company, Nike Inc. and Procter & Gamble to develop a plastic made form 100 percent plant-based material. The intention is to have a far lower environmental impact than we get from the current petroleum-based materials.

Heinz stepped up with innovative ways to repurpose the peels, stems and seeds from the two million tons of tomatoes they use annually to produce their number one product: ketchup.

When you think about wearables, clunky watches might come to mind first—not how many steps your dog takes each day or how your neighbor's horse's blood pressure. I did a brief stint at an agriculture/country living publication and if there's one thing I learned, it's that animal wearables are turning farming upside down—in a good, "we're making/saving lots of money" kind of way. (I picked up plenty of trivia tidbits on fertility monitoring for cows and how corn mazes are surprisingly tech-savvy, but that's another story.) Upon recently coming across a statistic that brought me back to the days of crop yield discussions and grazing data, I couldn't help but share. According to a study from IDTechEx, the animal wearable market is set to hit $2.6 billion by 2025 (the jury is still out for human wearables, as estimates vary wildly at this point).

We're not just talking simple GPS chips and other pet-tracking strategies. The tech on the market for our furry companions is just as high-tech as the activity tracking accessories we wear ourselves—you might recall the thought-translating No More Woof headset we covered a while back. So, in the spirit of inter-species comparisons, here's a sampling of the presumed-to-explode animal wearables market and their human counterparts.

FitBark / FitBit

I'd think it's safe to assume that we all know how the FitBit works—you work out, the bracelet/armband/whatever-you-want-to-call-it calculates your activity into calories burned/steps/however-you-want-to-measure-it and the data is stored to motivate you to beat personal goals (read: make you feel bad on lazy days to come). FitBark does about the same. The collar collects data like activity levels, sleep schedules and behavior patterns—it even has a built-in comparison guide so you can compare your pooch to breed-specific guidelines to see how he/she marks up. Even more, you can link up your human activity tracker—like your FitBit, woah—to compare your activity levels to your pets.

Tequila

Scotch

I loves me some booze, but I can't stand cocktails. Anything I drink, I drink straight. This has nothing to do with manliness and everything to do with respecting the craft of the liquor manufacturers I patronize. There are families that spent centuries getting their distillation process just right, tweaking the flavors, getting the profiles just so, then you animals go and dump your pomegranate juice into it? You don't cover a Le Corbusier chaise longue with a throw blanket, nor spray fluorescent green paint on a Rembrandt because it's trendy. Please remember that cocktails became popular during Prohibition, when you needed to mask the taste of the nasty bathtub gin that was all you could get back then.

BevShots is a company that recognizes booze as art--but in their eyes, a visual art. Started by research scientist Michael Davidson, the organization puts crystallized booze on a slide and photographs it through a polarized light microscope. The results are stunningly beautiful, as you can see here.

Vodka

When you think of drones, you probably think of military ones, and viewers of the current season of 24 have watched Army drones targeting innocent civilians in London. But if the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada has its way, drones may soon have more to do with Al Roker than Jack Bauer.

That's because Nevada's DRI hopes to control the weather using drones. Their Weather Modification Activities division, in conjunction with the Federal Aviation Administration, will begin using drones to seed clouds and create rain.

While it sounds like science fiction to most Americans, cloud seeding is real (if hard to accurately control). Officials in China fired over 1,000 rockets into the sky during the Olympics, gaming a storm into dumping its water before it got to Beijing.

The way cloud seeding works is, silver iodide or dry ice is fired into clouds using ground-based anti-aircraft guns or rockets. It can also be dropped into clouds via airplanes. These compounds then cause a chemical reaction in the clouds that create water or snow to form. The Sacramento Bee reports that "California has been seeding clouds for at least six decades," and points out that "Once viewed by some as a fringe science, cloud seeding has entered the mainstream as a tool to pad the state's crucial mountain snowpack."

As a typographer born in Lebanon and educated in the United States, Wael Morcos recognizes the importance of communicating meaningfully across cultures. For Wael, tools such as Adobe Illustrator and InDesign facilitate multilingual cultural production and enable communication. Indeed, bridging linguistic and cultural divides is at the heart of his design practice.

Wael speaks and uses four languages in his designs, particularly Arabic. In 2010, he worked with renowned Dutch designer Artur Schmal on the Typographic Matchmaking project to design Arabic companions for Dutch fonts. The team of Arab and Dutch designers collaborated to bridge cultural boundaries through type design. More recently, he worked with 29letters to create Azer. a bilingual typeface that was awarded the Type Director's club award.

Today, Wael lives and works in New York City, where his design skills afford him opportunities to engage clients worldwide. At C&G Partners, his client work focuses on the design of websites, apps, and brand identities. When not working on corporate design, he takes on freelance projects that are often more artistic and cultural in their overall feel. Regardless of the project, Wael enjoys work that gives him the freedom to use different materials and apply his designs to a variety of shapes and objects.

For instance, a collaboration with Isometric Studio involved a poster for a Princeton University lecture about Palestinian-American intellectual and writer Edward Said and his views on the Middle East crisis. Because Said held a strong respect for origin and identity, Wael incorporated Arabic type elements into the poster.

In the poster above, the Arabic text at the top spells the name "Edward," which was first carved from foam board, dipped in paint, and stamped on paper. Wael then imported the design into Photoshop to create the textured look. The resulting effect was landscape viewed from above—distressed and contested, but still lyrical and hopeful.

Hosted by Don Lehman, Core77's podcast series is designed for all those times you're sketching, working in the shop, or just looking for inspiration from inspiring people. We'll have conversations with interesting creatives and regular guests. The viewpoint of Afterschool will come from industrial design, but the focus will be on all types of creativity: graphic design, storytelling, architecture, cooking, illustration, branding, materials, business, research... anything that could enrich your thought process, we'll talk about.

If you take away only one thing from this episode of Afterschool, I want it to be this: If you're in San Francisco this Saturday, June 14, you have to, have to, have to go to the Women in Industrial Design show. As far as its organizers can tell—and this sounds crazy but it's true—this is the first American show in at least several decades to be dedicated to the work of women industrial designers. [Ed. Note: This is not the case, as the venerable AWID organized a similar exhibition at the turn of the millenium, but in any case, they are certainly few and far between.] It's being held at Astro's design studio on 348 6th St, as part of San Francisco's design week festivities. It's a one day only event running from 6–10pm on the night of the 14th. Tickets cost 15 bucks at the door and they cover hors d'oeurves, drinks, admission and the cost of the non-profit event.

The Women in Industrial Design show also happens to be run by today's guest. Ti Chang, is an industrial designer and the co-founder of Crave, a luxury sex toy company based in SF. We talk about her path to starting Crave and how she came to organize the Women in Industrial Design show, which, remember, you are going to this Saturday night at 6pm.

Get the Afterschool Podcast, Episode #20 – Ti Chang, Organizer of the "Women in Industrial Design" Show: Available at the iTunes store or direct download via Soundcloud below.

As 3D printing slowly but surely goes mainstream, we've been seeing more and more products that might just be ready for the seemingly endless shelves of big-box retailers. Sure, it allows for the production of forms that previously would have been impractical if not altogether impossible to create, but more often than not, the end result is a plastic doodad that screams, "I was made by a cute little whirring robot!"

Madrid-based industrial designer Octavio Asensio manages to avoid these pitfalls. Previously, we took a look at his color- and size-customizable Tyrannosaurus Rex sculpture—which was funded four times over on Kickstarter. Now, he's back with some new (completely customizable) eye candy for us: Oinky, the Whimsical Piggy Bank.

The name is a bit misleading because, as you can see, the design doesn't limit itself to the use case of a traditional piggy bank. But you'd better believe that anything you decide to store in Oinky will look damn good. Asensio has taken the skeletal properties of 3D printing filament and transformed it from cheap-looking and easy to break to, well, whimsical. As the designer says it himself, "After all, what's life without whimsy?" As long as it's in the form of well-designed housewares, we've got to agree.

There's a building around the corner from me that I always notice, because they've got these sexy little floating numbers on the front of it. They're a bit more work to install than hanging a placard, but they sure look a damn sight better.

Although 185 there is the only guy in the neighborhood rocking these, I started poking around and found that floating house numbers are more common than I thought. Both Home Depot and Amazon sells this Hillman Group variant pretty inexpensively at six bucks per digit.

On the more expensive (and garish) side, Luxello LED sells a back-lit variant that's aluminum up front, acrylic in the back, for $57 per digit. And I imagine these are a pain in the ass as you've got to wire each numeral separately.