Wrapping up the first day of announcements, we've got a solid group of jurors bringing you their favorite elements of the winning designs from the DIY category. See what the jurors—Captina Ayah Bdeir of littleBits, Limor "Ladyada" Fruit of Adafruit, Duann Scott of Shapeways and Marco Perry of Pensa—had to say about this year's entries:

Professional
Winner: Pablo Garcia & Golan Levin - NeoLucida
Runner-up:Brian Campbell - Tri-Horse
Notables:
»Lutz Hornischer - Cafe Latte Stamp
»Henry Hargreaves / Caitlin Levin - Food Maps
»Sukanya Pasi - Share a Seed
»Don Arp, Jr., MA - SherpaLift
»Marcello Pirovano, Patrizia Bolzan - Stampomatica
»Digital habit(s) - Open Mirror

Reportedly developed some four millenia ago and revived by Italian artisans in the 16th Century, murrine is among those crafts that long predates the much-ballyhooed contemporary craft movement. Yet artist Loren Stump has found a way to breathe new life into the age-old glass design technique, in which canes of glass are fused (in parallel) and sliced to reveal intricately patterned sections. (Picture a Swiss cake roll, or that bakeable play-dough that could be mashed together and sliced to similar effect.)

As with Takayo Kiyota's sushi art, Stump
works backward from a two-dimensional image, extruding the picture plane to extrapolate am arrangement of colored rods. Apparently he likes a challenge, considering he tends to to take on extremely detailed historical images like Da Vinci's Virgin on the Rocks (seen above) and Henry VIII. He also does commissioned pieces, if you've got any special requests.

Stump started out as a stained glass artist and eventually made the switch to working with molten varieties and creating his own process and tools—including a mysterious vacuum-controlled apparatus called the Stumpsucker.

From its humble beginnings in Erie Sauder's barn in 1934, Sauder Woodworking Co. is now North America's leading producer of ready-to-assemble (RTA) furniture and the nation's fifth-largest residential furniture manufacturer. They are currently seeking a creative and dedicated Furniture Designer with previous experience to join their Archbold, OH team. New graduates are very much encouraged to apply for this wonderful opportunity.

If you're the right person for this role, you'll travel the world to research design trends to source and/or design domestic dining, case goods, upholstery, accent, occasional and storage furniture solutions. You'll also work closely with Merchants, Marketing, Sales and New Product Development to understand the consumer, manufacturability aspects and cost objectives. Apply Now before this great opportunity disappears!

It's pretty easy to get overwhelmed by all of the stylus options out there. But just as a chef might search for that perfect knife year after year, a designer might undertake a similar quest to find the smoothest / best-weighted / most ergonomic digital drafting instrument. Dominic Peralta, the lead industrial designer at Speck Products, and Jon Corpuz, Lead Industrial Designer at Nook Media/Barnes & Noble, have entered the fray with Timbrr, a new stylus based on the iconic pencil silhouette and designed to be produced locally.

But before we get to all of that pencil-making and local sourcing, let's start from the beginning. "Timbrr's story actually started with a simple game app that took over all the iPhones at one point of time," Peralta says. "We were absolutely obsessed with Draw Something and wanted to have a stylus that said 'I'm playing!' So, we ran to the shop, grabbed some dowels, drilled holes through them (don't try this at home!), inserted a thin stylus, sanded it and painted it pencil yellow."

While the inspiration remained the same, it was obvious the duo pair needed to rethink their materials if they were going to be making these for more than just themselves. After testing about a dozen different wood varieties, Peralta and Corpuz decided to go with an incensed Western Cedar. While many designers turn to wood for its aesthetic or trendiness, a functional criterion informed the Timbrr team's material selection: "It has a high resin content, meaning that a natural resin that grows along with the tree is impregnated into the wood," Peralta says. "This resin helps to transmit static electricity from your hand, through the cedar wood, into the copper core and down to the touch screen device." Other wood varieties with a lower resin content don't hold work as well with touch screen capabilities. Luckily, it turns out that one of the largest cedar mills in the United States is located a mere three hours from their studio in California, anchoring their local sourcing efforts.

While Timbrr 2.0 might have followed true pencil form by sporting a bright yellow coat, the duo chose to go with a more natural aesthetic for the production version. "It was when we machined our first husks of cedar that the realized how beautiful and unique the grain was and decided to ditch the yellow paint," Peralta says. "Keeping it natural also brought out the aroma of the cedar and most importantly encourages the wood to patina over time, so that each Timbrr is unique and special to its owner."

The team used Shopbot to bring their design to life—which seems like a completely natural choice, except for the fact that neither of the designers had any experience using a CNC mill on their own before. Peralta and Corpuz had seen the machines in action at many a Maker Faire and wanted to find a way to forgo expensive classes or costly memberships to tech shops. Peralta shares more on the decision:

We learned lots of skills in a traditional woodworking style shop and had a little experience using a basic hand operated mill... but nothing like this. Early on in the process, we made it a goal to teach ourselves CNC'ing. We decided to go with a Shopbot because they are the tried and true company in that space. The team there has lots of working tribal knowledge of CNC'ing and after talking with them several times on the phone, it made me feel really confident that this was the right direction.

Look down from the basking light of your LCD screen, down there at the lower left of your menu bar to that icon, maybe a blue "e" for Iexplorer, or a fiery fox encircling a blue marble, perhaps a tiny compass to guide you on your safari, and realize that the scope of human knowledge flows so thick through the Internet that we now require a multitude of tools to view it. In the same way that the art of spelling was lost to autocorrect, and our digit span has been diminished by our cell phone's flash memory, the Internet stands to augment our brain's capacity with easy access to the noosphere. Every day the distance between questions and answers shortens by milliseconds, and, while no teacher stands ready to rap our collective knuckles with a ruler in the modern school system, the gulf between the unexamined life and TL;DR gets ever narrower.

So while Messrs. Brin and Page have made a business out of getting us those answers faster, their business plan couldn't be found through the simple call and response of the query field. Their questions had to dig deeper, owing more to the endless tedium of a child's "Why?" than to correlative databases. The central contention behind Warren Berger's A More Beautiful Question, that questions offer more opportunity than facts, should be familiar to any designer who has discovered that loose and sketchy prototypes drive more fruitful conversations than polished finished products. In part, in a world structured to provide the immediate gratification of "answers," the questions often become more meaningful.

Via

It's a safe bet that if you live a networked and urbanized life, you're at least a little intrigued by abandoned places. Chalk it up to our species' contrary nature, physical and psychic thrill-seeking, an innate fascination with death, or desire to experience The Inhuman. The interest exists across cultures and ages and class. Abandoned homes, decommissioned factories, old military bunkers, most of Detroit, never-realized retrofuturism, decrepit malls—regardless of previous use they are each remnants of lives we can't quite imagine. They're physical embodiments of stories about when things stop and sobering glimpses of what the world would be like without us. For those of you who appreciate the peaceful (or terrifying) draw of abandoned places, do yourself a solid and add "Haikyo" to your search terms for cool stuff.

Via

Haikyo are Japanese ruins or abandoned places. The word has also come to describe the act of seeking them out. Whether you do your own exploring or appreciate others' adventures from the warm and unhaunted confines of your computer, these spaces are bound to inspire. Second-hand, haikyo seem more lovely than other urban exploration finds. Though possibly due to the added intrigue of foreignness, I'd argue that these sites have additional appeal because of Japan's history of subdued and tasteful architectural design, and a strikingly intimate relationship with surrounding forests. Some speculators claim the prevalence of Japanese ruins is a combination of old culture and very recent economic booms and busts that resulted in unneeded or unaffordable physical development.

Via

Welcome to Day Two of the Core77 Design Awards live announcements! Yesterday, we were introduced to the winners from the Food Design, Strategy & Research, Equipment and DIY categories. We're ready to share the honorees from the Service category, as lead by Tennyson Pinheiro, Designer, Founder and CEO of Livework; João Batista Ferreira, Head of Institutional Relations at EISE - The School for Service Innovation, Brazil; Mauricio Manhães, Design Researcher at Livework Brazil; and Mario Fioretti, Industrial Design and Innovation Director at Whirlpool Latin America. See which designs they felt served best:

Professional
Winner: M&M - The Damda
Runners-up:
» PillPack - PillPack, Pharmacy Simplified
» CIID Consulting - Care Maps: Transforming Diabetes Care with Peer-to-Peer Support
Notables:
» Continuum - Advancing Global Financial Inclusion
» Scott Shim - Your Pizza, Your Way
» Smart Blocks - Smart Blocks

Student
Winner: Bahareh Shahriari - Kandu
Runner-up: Andreas Schuster - The Library Compass, A Strategy for Public Libraries in Times of Digitalization
Notables:
» Team Catalyst - Catalyst
» Diane Seaver / Bingjie Qiu - NOMADIQ
» Team Avocado - The Merchant & Muse

There is a graphic design element to tennis courts, (American) football fields and basketball courts, with highly visible lines indicating boundaries and distances. These are fixed in place, as service lines, end zones and free throw lines aren't meant to move.

Soccer, though, has a unique problem that can't be solved by fixed lines: When a player is fouled, he's awarded a free kick from whatever spot on the field the foul occurred. The opposing team is allowed to assemble a defensive wall of players at a distance of ten yards from the kicker. The problem is that people cheat. The ref sets both the spot of the free kick and the site of the wall, and as soon as he's not looking, the two may surreptitiously creep towards each other to improve their chances.

Which is why for this year's World Cup, you'll see the referees carrying an aerosol can filled with a white foamy substance, and they'll spray this on the pitch to clearly mark visual boundaries for the both the kicker and the wall. Seconds later the line mysteriously disappers. (Hardcore footie fans have already seen this spray as it's been in action for years, but this is the first World Cup where it's been used.) So what is this stuff, shaving cream?

Nope. This "vanishing spray" is called 9.15 Fair Play, patented by an Argentinean journalist named Pablo C. Silva. Silva was playing footie in a local league and had a crucial free kick of his blocked by a defensive wall--one that had rushed him to close the distance to a mere three meters. "The referee didn't book anyone and didn't do anything," Silva fumed to The Independent. "We lost the game, and driving home later with a mixture of anger and bitterness, I thought that we must invent something to stop this."

This is the latest installment of our Core77 Questionnaire. Previously, we talked to Giulio Cappellini.

Name: Albert Chu

Occupation: Designer

Location: Los Angeles

Current projects: Expanding and refining Otaat's collection of leather accessories and developing objects for the home and office.

Mission: Paring down complexity to the fundamental beauty, utility and fun of simplicity.

Above: the Drums Clutch from Otaat, the minimalist accessories brand Chu started in 2010. Top right image: the Colla Card Holder

Ninja Pouch

Toby Bag - Small

When did you decide that you wanted to be a designer? Throughout my childhood, I was always interested in thinking and making things, thanks to my sister who made nearly everything a fun creative process. So I was lucky to grow up in an environment where creativity and generative possibilities were the norm. When I was in high school, I applied to Cooper Union (architecture) on a whim and was unexpectedly accepted. That was probably the first time I thought seriously about design as a career, as I decided whether to attend Cooper or not. And I thought, "Wow, maybe I can actually do this for real!"

Education: I ended up going to UC Berkeley, where I got a Bachelor's in Civil Engineering, and then to Harvard University's Graduate School of Design for a Master's in Architecture.

First design job: First unpaid: atrium landscape design for my childhood home; my parents were nice and trusting enough to let me do it, especially since I was about six years old. I think it turned into a small field of kalanchoe with liriope as liners. Perhaps this was a precursor to my fascination with monochrome and textures (at least when the plants weren't flowering).

First paid job: In high school, I helped out at an architecture office doing some basic model-making work. The first project I worked on had so many arches that I learned really quickly how to cut curves in foam core—and learned that patience is key!

Who is your design hero? Martin Margiela—for his anonymity, his genre-bending mash-ups, his conceptual rebellion, his detail-oriented follow-through and his wit.

Above and below: Otaat prototypes in Chu's Los Angeles studio

From co-founding cycling magazines and participating in performance arts to ladder-climbing interns and environmental chemistry educations, our Soft Goods jury comes from all edges of the work world. For today, they're coming together to share their favorite designs from this year's program. Listen in as Carl Moriarty—Design Director for Apparel at Arc'teryx Equipment—and Industrial Designer Mike Wilson step us through the jury's favorite designs:

Professional
Winner: Ziba Design - SAM Medical Junctional Tourniquet
Runner-up: Skyline Exhibits - Skyline Windscape
Notables:
» Arctic Zone - Arctic Zone Self Inflating Cooler
» Melinda Young - Tool Lodge Drawer Organizer

Student
Winner: Stephanie Knödler - eQu, Therapeutic Riding Saddle for Disabled Children Focused on Children with Cerebral Palsy
Runner-up: Increment - O-rings
Notables:
» Joakim Bergbom / Taís Mauk / Júlia Nacsa / Yedan Qian - Angl°
» Lou Moria - Jacket for the Urban Gatherer

Nitinol is a metal alloy, and its name stems from its roots: This blend of nickel and titanium was developed at America's Naval Ordnance Laboratory in the 1950s. The stuff is capable of exhibiting a surprising level of shape memory when exposed to a temperature differential. Check it out:

Product design applications, anyone? I've got a pretty brilliant one: Make headphone cables out of it. That way, if you're in Alaska and they get tangled, all you've got to do is fly to Brazil and they'll magically unkink themselves!

Via Sploid

We've got the best and brightest of the speculative world ready to share their favorite picks from the Speculative Design category of this year's Core77 Design Awards. Tune in as Oron Catts of SymbioticA shares the winners as decided with his jury (which consists of Zack Denfeld of the Center for Genomic Gastronomy & CoClimate, Dr. Laura Beloff of the IT University in Copenhagen and Robert Foster of F!nk & Co.):

Professional
Runners-up:
» Ai Hasegawa - I Wanna Deliver a Dolphin
» Studio PSK - Parasitic Products
» Marcelo Coelho / Skylar Tibbits - Hyperform
Notables:
» Priestmangoode - World View
» Artefact - Dialog
» Dejan Orlac - Modular Recycling
» Dave Hakkens - Phonebloks
» Robert Meurer - Melihat
» frog - NYC BEACON

Student
Winner: Jacob Brancasi / Betsy Kalven - WHEREABOUTS
Runners-up:
» Faustine Lavorel - Svál'bard
» John Ryan - Declarations of Interdependence
Notables:
» CoSpec - Meat Up
» Western Washington University Sr ID - Communication, Assisting and Advancing Listening
» Jurrian Tjeenk Willink - Embodying Empathic Expressiveness
» Simon Crane / Julian Goulding - Synthetic Anatomy
» Public Design Workshop - Drones for Foraging
» blond & bieber / Essi Johanna Glomb & Rasa Weber - Algaemy, Crafting Our Future Food
» Dionysia Mylonaki - Voice Booth
» Shu Yang Lin / Priyanka Kodikal - Griphint
» Austin Houldsworth - Walden Note-Money

All the way from Treviso, Italy, we're ready to bring you the honorees from this year's Interaction category. Aaron Siegel, Head of Interaction and Online Experience at Fabrica, led this year's jury team in search of the most interactive designs in this year's haul. See what Siegel—along with Electroland Co-Founder Damon Seeley, Directed Play Founder and Visual Strategist at NASA JPL Dan Goods and Founder of City Innovation Group Christine Outram—had to say about this year's entries:

Professional
Winner: Angelo Semeraro / Davide Cairo - Sadly By Your Side
Runners-up:
» Pentagram / MIT Senseable Lab - Makr Shakr
» Second Story - 100 Years of Design
Notables:
» Tellart & Google Creative Lab - The Binoculars
» Registration & Ticketing Team - The Eventbrite Reserved Seating, Seat Designer
» SonoSite Experience Design Team - SonoSite X-Porte

Student
Winner: Tangible Media Group - inFORM: A Dynamic Shape Display
Runners-up:
» Megan Chiou, Alfredo Sandes, and Kunal Chawla - Tink
» Kathryn McElroy / Joseph Weissgold - Loop: Directional Haptic Feedback Accessory
Notables:
» Joakim Bergbom / Taís Mauk / Júlia Nacsa / Yedan Qian - Angl°
» Sylvain Joly / Emilie Tappolet - IDNA: Spatial Storytelling
» Miha Feus - The Haptic Drive
» Peter Buczkowski - Mogli

How many people do you know who can say their designs reach the hands of consumers all over the world? Would you like to add that bragging right to your resume? As the Senior Color, Material and Finish Designer for Spectrum Brands, your designs for their Personal Care and Small Appliances division will reach consumers in Europe, North America, Australia, and Latin America. Sound good?

The ideal candidate for this opportunity will be well versed in trending, color theory, empathic design, materials & processes, presentation, 3D rendering, and leadership skills. They will bring design passion to working with diverse groups across product development phases. If you're ready and excited to design products that will have a real impact on the market, Apply Now.

"If you turn the tablet away from me one more time, Susan, I'm going to throw this margarita in your face!"

Here's what would be perfect: If you would take just two bites of that expensive dessert I upsold you on, one quick sip from the cappucino I talked you into, then pay the check and get the hell out of the restaurant. Because there's people waiting and I need to flip this table so I can make more money.

I learned a few things as a waiter in the '80s and '90s. One was that spiked hair and a fanny pack was not a good look. The other was that a server's job isn't just to take the orders and sling the chow—our job was to sell. Bigger checks meant bigger tips, and the manager was constantly coaching us on which high-margin specials to push, which desserts we needed to move, what the exciting new beer we had on tap was.

Well, now the Chili's Grill & Bar chain has found that, surprise surprise, tablets are better than humans at selling. "When your server is a screen, you spend more money," as The Atlantic puts it. Since installing over 55,000 tablets at tables, the restaurant has found that diners order more appetizers and desserts and even leave bigger tips by going along with the default tip setting, which is of course jacked up. They also tie the kids up with unlimited on-screen games that run $0.99.

The tablets are manufactured by a company called Ziosk, the self-styled "industry leader for tabletop menu, ordering, entertainment and payment" for restaurants. (But they are not without competition, see below.) Ziosk reckons the tablets, which flash attractive-looking food photos to entice diners to click, boost appetizer sales by 20% and desserts by 30%. They also shave about 5 minutes off of each meal, presumably because one never needs to flag a waiter down. Add it all up and these babies essentially pay for themselves, as the company claims: "The Ziosk platform is a revenue center, not a cost center for the restaurant and our offering is 'less than free.'"

Hopefully you had a chance to see last month's panel discussion from Ford and IDSA featuring a rockstar lineup of design leaders. Moderator Nathan Shedroff directed a number of design-centric topics to panelists Yves Béhar of fuseproject, Freeman Thomas of Ford Motor Company and Jordan Brandt of Autodesk. If you missed that one, make time to tune in to the next event in one week on Wednesday, June 25, right here on Core77.

This time around, the conversation is a part of the Go Further with Ford Trend Conference and will reveal how designers create unique and meaningful experiences for consumers and how to build lasting relationships between brands' products and customers. You'll hear thoughts on these topics and more from moderator Robert Tercek, game designer Jane MacGonigal, Ford Motor Company's Moray Callum and Gadi Amit of NewDealDesign. You can catch the live-streamed event on the Designing Innovation channel here at Core77 at 1:15pm ET on June 25.

Like last time around, make sure to tweet any of your own questions using the hashtag #designinginnovation for a chance to get your query answered during the panel discussion.

To announce the winners of the Packaging category, we've got a team live from Stockholm, Sweden. Follow along with jury captain Isabelle Dahlborg Lidström (NINE AB) and her hand-picked jury members Fredrik Öst (SNASK) and Charlotte Von Der Lancken (Front)—fourth jury member Mårten Knutsson (Family Business) wasn't available for the live announcement—as they share their thoughts on this year's honorees:

Professional
Runners-up:
» Metaphase Design Group, Inc / Anheuser-Busch InBev / DCA - Budweiser Bowtie Can with Crown Tab
» Uneka - Google Chromebook 11
Notables:
» Uneka - Anki Drive
» Gabriel Collins - Folia
» Ziba Design - Modal Packaging Line for Best Buy
» Dunlop Manufacturing, Inc. - EVH | 35 Limited Edition Packaging

Student
Winner: Jeongdae Kim - Fortune Pill
Runners-up:
» Muli bazak - Spacklit, Smart Innovative Packaging Solution for Spackling Compound
» Lauren HIll - Battement Cosmetics
Notables:
» SanPak Ng - Exercise Ball Set
» Jean Bolliger Wilczek - Packaged Intangibles
» Lucy Plant - KNEAD
» Teo Kean Loong - Mindful Sustenance
» Ja Young Min - nuts.

You may have seen Heimplanet inflatable tents bounce around the Internet before, and they're doing it again. These tubed geometric things are tents you don't have to pitch, held up (and possibly down) by air pressure alone. The German conceptual-outdoor company first debuted the Cave, a dome-like 3-person sleeper, then the smaller Wedge for the lone wolf. Now they're scaling up with the Mavericks—a tent so large and in charge they don't even give a suggested body maximum.

The tents rely on a series of tubes (don't we all?), which via an interlocking and overlapping geometric pattern provide stiffness and stability for the skin of the tent. The tubes themselves are a double-layered pneumatic situation, that can be patched like a bike tube. They're pumped up using a hand pump, and can be connected for quick inflation and then disconnected for safe independence. The pumping process does seem nice and quick, though the larger tents make the larger and heavier Heimplanet pump seem nigh on necessary for the speedy set-up they claim. I'm not really convinced that speed and ease are the selling points here, since a well-designed tent with poles goes up in less than a couple minutes.

The larger two tents don't even seem to use guy lines or stakes. As they put it, "The diamond. Its stability is based on its specific molecular and crystal structure." I have no idea how the molecular stability of a diamond in any way applies to the stability of their tents. But here their original "Cave" tent is put to a wind test, apparently without any kind of stakes:

We've seen an impressive list of honorees thus far in this year's Core77 Design Awards live announcements, and we have several more to come over the next couple of days. Here are the winners, runners up and notables in the Social Impact category, selected by jury captain Nille Juul-Sørensen of Danish Design Centre, and his jury, Tania Ellis and Naima Yasin (The Social Business Company), Anand Vengurlekar (Stoic) and Vinay Venkatraman Leapcraft). Tune in below as Juul-Sørensen shares the Social Impact honorees:

Professional
Winner: Sam Rulli / Xylem Essence of Life - Saajhi Stepping Pump
Runners-up:
» Gustavo Fricke / Scott Summit / 3D Systems / Ekso Bionics - 3D Printed Personal Ekso
» Anupam Pathak / John Redmond / Michael Allen - A Self Stabilizing Spoon for Hand Tremors

Student
Winner: Christian Bremer & Erik Ohlson - Walter—Alter the Wheelchair
Runners-up:
» Migle Padegimaite / Lina Trulsson / Darja Wendel / Emily Keller - Remind—Music for Memory
» Scott E Forsythe - Additio Prosthetic Tool System

When studying industrial design, you'll find most programs will have you build at least a couple of pieces of furniture, whether you're a Furniture Design major or not. But the main output always seems to be in wood or metal, with most programs simply too short on time to teach the art of upholstery.

So it's helpful, we think, for the aspiring but inexperienced furniture designer to see how upholstered furniture comes together. Your program has undoubtedly taught you rudimentary wood-joining, and maybe you've learned to weld and finish with an angle grinder, but there's an entire science of straps, webbing, springs, nails, tacks, foam, glue, fabric, buttons and thread you may have never seen. Here are three different pieces being assembled by Shanghai-based Novaz Furniture.

First up, a bed frame with an upholstered headboard and footboard. It starts off with the woodwork and glue-ups you're probably already familiar with, but the second half covers the upholstery: