The creation of metals is an often forgotten but critical business involved in most modern innovations. And since startup fever is all over innovative techniques, startups are starting to spread to those slower-moving industries that can support the "disruptors." Infinium is one such startup. They've found a cheap and environmentally-clean way to make the rare earth metals neodymium and dysprosium. And these metals are important because they make magnets that are integral in the generators found in wind turbines and electric car motors.

The polluting problem is in the process of taking metal oxides (metal bound to oxygen, among other elements) and isolating the pure metal by placing the oxides in molten salt while an electric current runs through the mixture. The problem is that this process releases significant amounts of carbon dioxide. So what the researchers at Infinium have done is replace the carbon electrode, which creates the electric current and the CO₂, with a ceramic material made of zirconium oxide, to obviate the carbon emissions.

This year's Visual Communication jury has worked on the staffs of numerous consumer publications—from InStyle and Creative Review to Vancouver Magazine and Azure—to which we say, what better group to introduce this year's program honorees? Listen in as Marian Bantjes (Jury Captain), Dr. Shelley Gruendler and Vancouver Magazine's Mark Mushet and Paul Roelofs report on the 2014 Core77 Design Awards winners from Vancouver, Canada:

Professional
Winner: Valentina D'Efilippo - The Infographic History of the World
Runners-up:
» Studio Matthews - Bezos Center for Innovation
» Hello Design - Herman Miller Collection
Notables:
» aruliden - AM, A Movement Against Screen Schmutz
» Gustavo Piqueira - Memória Militante Collection
» Gustavo Piqueira - Brazilian Clichés (Clichês Brasileiros)
» The Center for Urban Pedagogy and IntraCollaborative - Rent Regulation Rights
» Melcher Media and Headcase Design - S.
» Pentagram - New York City Beaches
» Nick Adam / Matthew Wizinsky - Archive13: Ritual Posters
» Elizabeth Ward - EXP CAL YYYY Calendar Poster
» SapientNitro - Hatch 53: Datastronomy

Student
Winner: Young JooTak - LAXART MUSEUM
Runner-up: 512stew - 512stew
Notables:
» Chloe Scheffe - Oded Ezer Lecture Posters
» Justin Bechard - Gauthier & Nolet Architects Identity
» Valentine Mayuran Emmanuel - 1daywaste
» Youngeun Sohn - Christopher's Room

Sorry for the title, but I just don't know what else to call this assemblage of objects. Tasked with designing the interior of a small apartment, Russian architecture firm Ruetemple came up with this "mobile solution for recreational areas." Ruetemple's website is so sparse that the principals' last names are not even give—all we know is the firm consists of "Alexander" and "Daria"—and the project pages offer little in the way of description, so we'll have to let the photos do the talking here.

What they came up with is three separate, wheeled components that can be assembled in a seemingly infinite variety of ways:

The chair is often cast as a pincushion, so to speak, for critiquing the self-serving rigmarole of design festivals: It is essentially the basic unit of a furniture fair, and for all of the marketing muscle and star power behind the purportedly major product launches, the chair remains a close second to the wheel when it comes to reinvention.

Yet it endures as a mainstay of our homes and our lives—unlike, say, the objets du jour axes and bows-and-arrows of dubious utility for their target market of hip citydwellers—and if it is a byword for furniture fatigue, it is precisely because it symbolizes 'design' writ large. To extend the trope, a chair could even serve as the physical manifestation of a designer's mission statement.

This may well be the case for Keiji Takeuchi, who debuted an unassuming dining chair—the first production piece to his name—at the Fuorisalone in April. As with any deceptively simple design, there's more to it than meets the eye: The backrest and seat read as a squares, but the elegant lines are subtly curved throughout, striking a nice balance of formal integrity and anthropomorphic comfort. When Takeuchi notes that he'd painstakingly refined the proportions and radii, which are formed by CNC, it's less a boast than a matter of fact—the chair simply could not be any other way.

In fact, Takeuchi had only committed to exhibiting a few weeks prior to the Salone, when he received a satisfactory prototype from a local factory; his friend Henry Timi was happy to display the chair at his new-ish showroom of his eponymous luxury brand. Set off from its street entrance on Foro Buonaparte by a small courtyard, Timi's skylit gallery featured just a small selection of work: a monumental kitchen island by the proprietor himself, alongside Antonio Sciortino's wrought iron pieces and Leonardo Talarico's geometric, vaguely suprematist vases: a minimalist manifold of marble, wabi-sabi and modernism. Takeuchi's work occupied the equally spare side galleries—besides the chair, his modest debut included just one other piece, a marble dish—rounding out the work on view with a touch of understated refinement.

Small though this step may be, it's a proverbial leap for Takeuchi, who is keeping his day job as a designer and Milan liaison for a certain small Tokyo-based design studio. As the story goes, he's something of a black sheep, an idiom that might resonate with the sometime Kiwi: Takeuchi spent the formative years of his youth in New Zealand before enrolling at ENSCI Les Ateliers before returning to his native Japan, where he landed a coveted job at Naoto Fukasawa Studio.

After cutting his teeth on a broad range of client projects, Takeuchi relocated to his current home in Milan, where he logs plenty of face time (the pre-app version) with the Fukasawa's Italian clients, including heavyweights such as Alessi and B&B Italia. But as of this past April, he has declared his ambitions beyond stable employment. Takeuchi is the first member of Fukasawa's small team—all designers, all in Tokyo—to set out on his own, both geographically and now professionally as well.

Today's World Cup ticket design (left) versus the design from 1930 (right)

You don't have to go very far to find evidence that the World Cup is making headlines at just about every media outlet out there, ourselvesincluded. It's easy to find yourself caught up with footie fever, packed into a tiny bar with fifty other screaming fans pushing you away from the bar (and television). While 100 Chileans recently demonstrated otherwise, tickets are coveted enough to make for a keepsake or even a prized possession, should your team prevail. Here's a look at the ever-evolving ticket designs from 1930, when FIFA started distributing them, to present day.

1930

1950

The ticket from the inaugural World Cup games in Uruguay may look pretty basic, but used ones go for close to $1,700 on collector sites nowadays. The outbreak of World War II meant a 12-year hiatus, which returned to Brazil in 1950 with a new design feature: the stub.

1954's World Cup ticket

The stub was overall shortlived, it seems. In 1954—the first year the Cup was televised, by the way—tickets came in different shapes/sizes depending on which round it was, incorporating the stub only in tickets for the final.

Back in 2010 we showed you designer Jinsun Park's nifty Color Picker concept. The idea was that a magic marker would be loaded up with both a sensor and RGB ink cartridges, allowing you to instantly scan a color—and draw with it on paper. Here's one of her original renderings:

Jinsun Park

Now a new company called Scribble may be bringing us what Park originally envisioned (though it's unclear if she's involved). Their soon-to-be-posted-on-Kickstarter Scribble Pen operates exactly like Park's concept proposal, though they've opted for CMYK rather than RGB. "This innovative pen can hold over 100,000 unique colors in its internal memory," the company writes, "and can reproduce over 16 million unique colors."

If Park is not involved, Scribble's choice of promotional imagery seems pretty coincidental. Below is Park's rendering from 2010, side by side with Scribble's rendering from their press release:

Or maybe I'm just comparing apples to oranges.

In any case, the company plans to release two models: The Scribble Ink, described above, which can be used to draw on paper. They'll also have the Scribble Stylus, which has the scanner but no ink cartridges; the idea with the Stylus is that you scan colors to beam over to your smartphone or tablet via their mobile app. "Your colors become more useful when they are organized, tagged, searchable and converted to various color models," their thinking goes.

The Kickstarter is slated for July, with the Ink going for $149.95 and the Stylus for $79.95. But they're offering a 20% off deal for those willing to sign up for pre-orders here.

If you haven't heard, we're hosting our inaugural Core77 Conference: Object Culture in Brooklyn right this minute. The room is packed with designers of all kinds, wise words are being shared on stage and the air is filled with the buzz of anticipation for what new thought each presenter will bring to the table.

But just don't take our word for it. If you couldn't make it to the big event, follow along on Twitter for updates from attendees. Check out what they're saying on Twitter below:

#core77con Tweets

We're excited to kick off the fourth day of our Core77 Design Awards live announcements with two live announcements from our inaugural Core77 Conference! First up, we've got the Consumer Products jury—presented by Johan Liden and Brett Tom of Aruliden, joined by Josh Morenstein of Branch, Isabelle Olsson of Google X and Wyatt A. Cline of Newell-Rubbermaid in judging—ready to share their favorite work from this year's program:

Professional
Winner: Radius - SOMA Water Filtering and Carafe
Runner-up: IDEO - Brooks C17 Cambium Saddle
Notables:
» Box Clever - Clip Card Reader
» FiftyThree Design Team - Pencil by FiftyThree

Student
Winner: Mugi Yamamoto - Stack
Runner-up: Simon Fredriksson - Ventum
Notables:
» Alex Hubbell - Wire for Wire
» Hui-Wen Wang and Kasia Burzynska - Respire

Image on left courtesy of Industry PDX

The Core77 Conference: Object Culture is off to a great start and we've got a solid line-up of presenters to take us through the rest of the day. If you weren't able to join us this morning, or you're just looking for a quick recap, read on to see what attendees are saying on Twitter and stayed tuned in the coming days for more in-depth coverage.

Dong-Ping Wong, Founding Partner at Family and + Pool
There's no argument against the fact that New York's water isn't the best for swimming, fishing or even drinking. Dong-Ping Wong took the stage and shared his in-progress project, + Pool—a floating, water-filtering pool perfect densely populated cities looking for cleaner water. For more information, check out our coverage on the project from earlier this year—or check out what audience members had to say about Wong's presentation:

Jordan Brandt, Technology Futurist at Autodesk
With a title like Technology Futurist, a presentation title like "How Do We Teach Our Machines to Design" is expected and highly anticipated. Brandt brought us through a number of Autodesk's projects and reminded us of an important lesson that hails from a time long past: "We've always been crazy about 3D printers that can print anything, but the Industrial Revolution taught us that there is a place for purpose-built machine—we're going to see a boom in niche machines." Here are a few pull-out points from the peanut gallery:

Closing out the second-to-last day of Core77 Design Awards announcement is the Interiors & Exhibitions jury team with this year's line-up of honorees live from the Core77 Conference. Watch as Front Studio's Michi Yanagishita and Yen Ha, EFGH's Hayley Eber and Gizmodo/BLDGBLOG's Geoff Manuagh walk us through their decisions. (Local Project's Jake Barton was also on the judging team, but is not included in the live broadcast). Make sure to tune in tomorrow for the last day of announcements for this year's program!

Professional
Winner: Volume Inc. with Studio Terpeluk - Sustainability Treehouse
Runners-up:
» HouMinn Practice - Breaking the Mold
» Marc O Riain (CIT) / Neil Tobin (RKD) - Architecture Factory
Notables:
» C&G Partners - Against The Odds: American Jews & The Rescue of Refugees 1933-1941
» Carter LeAmon - Melbourne Now Design Wall
» INABA Inc. - Red Bull Music Academy
» Volume Inc. - Western Gallery
» Rockwell Group - Shinola
» IDEO - Edison: An interactive light installation for Joie de Vivre Hotels
» Tellart & Google Creative Lab - The Binoculars

Student
Winner: Chris Natt - Blastproof
Runner-up: Tanya Shukstelinsky - Cocoon

After an enlightening morning of discussion, coffee and idea sharing had a lot to live up to—and it did just that and more. Read on for a quick recap of what went on in the afternoon sessions of the #Core77Con in Brooklyn:

Colin McSwiggen, Technologist and Writer
What responsibility do we have as designer to those who make and use our designs? McSwiggen showed us all the immense social and cultural impact created by the very rise of design in industrial and manufacturing settings. When white collar, clerical work began to separate from factory based work, a rift between the two worker classes was born, supported by architecture and maintained by further advances in technology. Today, we look at process of designing to make something easier as a potential introduction of more difficulties and stress into our own lives and the lives of those. Colin's presentation was an eye-opening exploration of the real results of design. See what the crowd in attendance had to say:

Marta Salas-Porras, Creative Director at Obscura Digital
The remix is starting to take off and Salas-Porras encouraged us to pay close attention to the possibilities and opportunities all around us. From models of open source that are becoming standardized (think Getty Images and the Tesla patents) to the growing understanding that the "accepted" form of formal, post high-school education is nearly useless, we have countless chances to leverage the last unregulated resource available to us: Our creativity. Once we gain a firm grasp of the social and socioeconomic consequences of our designs, we can truly change the future, but it requires that we focus on the moment. Check out the audience's reaction on Twitter:

Last week, Jules Yap (above right), the founder of the IKEAHackers website, released a blog post with a worrying first sentence: "I am afraid I have a bit of bad news." Yap had been cease-and-desisted by IKEA, which took issue with the fact that Yap had been advertising on her site—a reasonable thing to do, I thought, as it cannot be cheap to maintain the site, and she is arguably helping to promote IKEA's products. But the furniture giant cried IP infringement, and as Yap explained, "I don't have deep enough pockets to fight a mammoth company in court. Needless to say, I am crushed."

The internet cried foul. Gizmodo called IKEA move "beyond boneheaded" and "a huge mistake." BoingBoing's Cory Doctorow pointed out that "IKEA C&D is, as a matter of law, steaming bullshit. There's no trademark violation here—the use of Ikea's name is purely factual. The fact that money changes hands on IKEAHackers (which IKEA lawyers seem most upset about) has no bearing on the trademark analysis."

And of course, commenters on Yap's blog offered support, including this one purportedly from an ex-Ikea employee:

Katherine says:

I used to work at IKEA as a coworker - so I have a different perspective. I love Ikea AND your site. and without much research, you'll just have to trust my statement - your site HELPED developers and designers create new products, and not only that, the last catalog was nearly a tribute to YOUR BLOG! Telling us how we could use our creativity with their products to make our homes our own - isn't that what IH is all about? I also recall a page on their sight (sic) that encouraged creative use of their product. They should be paying you - and this should be your full time job. I seriously doubt the Container Store would be so quick to dismantle something that has reinvented the way the world looks at it's (sic) products.

But the support went well beyond Yap's blog. IKEAHacker fans apparently deluged IKEA with tweets, e-mails and entries on IKEA's contact page, and the company has relented. As Jules explained in an update from yesterday morning:

Inter IKEA Systems BV called me! You made a difference. Thank You! Fresh talks launched!

...And it could not have happened without your support. Every email, twit, comment and message that you have sent in support of IKEAhackers has led to this moment for us - that it is possible for fans to cause a ginormous corporation to rethink its actions. THANK YOU! I am very grateful, moved and humbled by your outstanding support over the last few days. I love you guys to bits.

So, [I was contacted by] Anders of Inter IKEA Systems BV...to express that IKEA would like to dialogue with me to find a new way forward. What does that mean? I don't know yet. But I am hopeful, though my guard is still up. From our conversation, I do not have to make any changes to IKEAhackers (including the ads) till we settle on an agreement.

Details of the new solution have yet to be hammered out, but it will hopefully be an improvement over last week's situation. It would be really silly, and bad for goodwill, for the company to shut down Yap, she being a true-blue IKEA supporter. "On the whole, I am so excited," she closed the update with, "I could pee in my FRAKTA pants."

Welcome to the last day of the 2014 Core77 Design Awards live announcements! To bring us into the final stretch, we have Naihan Li, Founder of Naihan Li & Co and Ben Hughes, Founder of A4-Studios to share the honorees from the Furniture & Lighting category. They were joined on the jury team by Isabelle Pascal, Founder of Wuhao, and Wu Xuesong, President of Sinocrane Group China.

Professional
Winner: Steelcase Design / Glen Oliver Lowe - Gesture
Runner-up: Jean Marie Massuad - Lightwing
Notables:
» Martin Keen - Mobis Leaning Seat
» Keter kids development team - Multi Dine High Chair
» Karim Rashid - Newform Hook Desk
» Yves Behar / fuseproject - PUBLIC Office Landscape
» Matthias Pinkert - Lamp RIMA
» Patricio Ortiz / Planitia - Hexalampara

Student
Winner: Youmin Vincent Kim - SOAK Charging Side Table
Runner-up: Brian Pughe / Conor Brown - Dynamik Standing Desk
Notables:
» Andy Zhou - Plus Pendant
» Ming Kong - Foamy Wood No.3
» So Eun Choi - Flippo
» April Tapley - Lemonair Decor Headboard
» Karl Frederik Scholz - Buoy
» Sebastian Aumer - EGGO!
» Brett Mellor - The Morgan Felt Folding Stool

Herbst Produkt has designed a new product called HYVE: a polypropylene container that can be clipped to other HYVEs, creating a modular storage system. It's available via Kickstarter.

I recently spent some time talking to Scot Herbst about HYVE and seeing the product first-hand. HYVE can be used to store a wide range of things: pens and pencils on the desktop, craft supplies in the classroom or playroom, flatware in the kitchen (for those without enough drawers), all sorts of things on a workbench, and much more. Because the HYVEs can be continually reconfigured, they might serve one use now, and another in later years. The HYVEs are about 3.5 inches tall, and a bit under 4 inches wide.

The concerns I had looking at the HYVEs online vanished when I saw them in person. I was afraid a HYVE might tip over easily, but it seems quite stable. The polypropylene means it's easy to clean and hard to damage—important factors in anything that young children might use. The hexagon shape helps to make it strong. For most people, it will be pretty easy to clip the units together, and easy to take them apart. The clips seem very sturdy, too; they're not something that's going to break after a few uses.

Continuing our last day of Core77 Design Awards live announcements, we have the Educational Initiatives jury—as led by Charlie Cannon, Associate Professor of Industrial Design at RISD and Chief Design Officer at EPIC Decade—live from RISD in Providence, Rhode Island and ready to share their favorite work. Joining Cannon on the jury team are Damien Ewens, CEO at Achievery; Adrienne Gagnon, Founder and Executive Director at DownCity Design; and Mickey Ackerman, Chief Design Strategist at Business Innovation Factory. Tune in below:

Professional
Winner: Media Design Practices (MDP) Core Faculty - Media Design Practices/Lab+Field Curriculum Redesign
Runners-up:
» Design for America - Design for America Process Guide
» The Center for Urban Pedagogy - City Studies
Notables:
» Ilana Ben-Ari / Twenty One Toys - A Toy for Empathy
» Makeshift - Appropriate Technology
» Yestermorrow / UMass Semester in Sustainable Design/Build - Carton House
» Commonstudio - D3 Toolkits: Teen Empowerment Through Design
» Core Studies ncad - ncad Folio Brief
» Ritika Mathur - Little Treasures
» KBL Studio / Brandway - Einhorn 21st Century Studio

Over the course of four days from September 9–12, attendees of the UX Week Conference in San Francisco will have the opportunity to participate in workshops, take in the wisdom of the impressive speaker lineup and interact with fellow professionals seeking inspiration and practical knowledge.

The speakers include the likes of Amanda Dameron, editor in chief of Dwell magazine; Ken Jennings, Jeopardy! whiz; Josh Clark, designer and author; and Karina van Schaardenburg, UX research lead at foursquare... among many others. And this year's workshops range from touchscreen design, creating a responsive redesign, experience mapping, visual design literacy for non-designers, user testing—you get the idea.

For a taste of what to look forward to, here's a video of a presentation by CNN's Vice President of Design, Marisa Gallagher, one of last year's keynote speakers:

Early bird tickets are available for the discounted price until June 30, and our readers can take an additional 15% off with coupon code CORE77. You can find the full schedule of events here.

While thoughts of surfing may evoke summertime and warm, sandy beaches, there also exists an entirely separate sect of surfers who brave sub-freezing temperatures to catch waves on frigid waters. "Cold-water surfing" has become the alternative for die-hard surfers who have moved to a cooler climate or who are looking to catch a wave on a less crowded shore. And the British company Finisterre has set itself the challenge of providing gear that serves these hardcore athletes—including, most recently, the world's first surf knife designed specifically for the brutal conditions of freezing waters.

The knife marks a new direction for Finisterre, which is looking to expand from clothing into tactical equipment. So it enlisted the help of the skilled knife-smiths at Joseph Rodgers and Sons, based in Sheffield, England. "This was a new product for them and they relished the challenge," says Ernest Capbert, Finisterre's marketing director. "After specializing in folding knives and cut-throat razors for centuries, it was a nice change for them to experiment with new ideas and create a new model of knife."

To make an effective cold-water surf knife, the two companies had to focus on the symptoms one experiences when confronted with stage-two hypothermia, such as muscle miscoordination, labored movements and contracted blood vessels, which make it hard to use tools quickly and accurately. The Finisterre design team drove across the country to work in-house with Joseph Rodgers and Sons for six months, sketching and ideating potential designs.

"Some of the earlier sketches featured saws, simple triple-blade editions, built-in fin keys, separate bottle- and tin-opener blades, a cork handle and various lanyard and clip styles," Capbert explains. "In the end, we opted for a two-blade knife—a simple multi-use blade and an additional blade that could handle a flat head, tin opener and bottle opener in one." The 3/32 hex fin key was removed from the main knife and an "easy pull" loop was added, making the blade more accessible in the harshest conditions.

The knife blade and fin key are made of 420S45 high-carbon stainless steel, hardened to 51-55 on the Rockwell scale. The decision to go with stainless steel was not an easy one. Carbon steel blades hold a very sharp edge, but are brittle and can rust and dull quickly, needing extra care and sharpening. While stainless isn't as hard and is more difficult to sharpen, it doesn't rust. For Finisterre, the 420S45 high carbon stainless struck the perfect balance.

A prototype being tested on a can of beans

It's probably not what London-based artist David Mach has in mind, but I can't help but imagine that the angst-ridden expressions of the sculpture in his ongoing series "Coathangers" resembles my own when I encounter a mass of tangled metal hangers. Known for taking unexpected materials and creating larger-than-life sculptures from them, the artist takes the simple abstracted form of metal hangers and combines them into familiar silhouettes.

To render the solid outline of each sculpture, Mach wraps the hangers around a plastic mold of the form, which is subsequently coated in nickel. The overall effect is that the figures seem to be fighting their way fro static-y striations into a more solid state of being.

When the Mexican national railway system privatized in 1995, passenger lines were decommissioned on the grounds of low profits. Despite their viability, almost 6,000 miles of physically intact track were abandoned. Artist brothers Ivan Puig and Andres Padilla Domene are Los Ferronautas, intrepid explorers of dead railway lines and co-pilots of SEFT-1. The SEFT-1 is an outer space-inspired craft for discovering the inner space of the country. Short for Sonda de Exploraci&ocaute;n Ferroviaria Tripulada, or Manned Railway Exploration Probe, the SEFT-1 is an aluminum-bodied, data-gathering, manned vehicle that takes to the tracks, or takes off from them when need be.

Between 2010 and 2012, the two artists steered their retrofuturist creation through miles and miles of track, eating and sleeping in the trundling pod. Like any well-developed mission, they observed, documented and collected. Video, photos, objects and stories that they gathered provided supportive material that clarified how the rail system once functioned and illustrated contemporary life at its dead ends. How the network connected and then disconnected communities, and what the country looked like, 15 years after economic politics stopped the trains.

I consider your average sinkside soap dish a design failure. They either have no drainage, leaving the bar to sit in a puddle of water that transforms its underside into slime, or they drain into a container, and either way you have to empty the damn thing. The notion that this thing is designed to hold soap for you, yet you must constantly attend to it by draining it into the sink, is absurd. Oughtn't good industrial design free us from this minutiae?

A far better idea is this design for a slanted soap dish pictured up top. But Jeez Louise is it ugly. It looks like the bottom half of a mouth, with two fangs and a leering tongue.

That being said, it looks like it would get the job done, at least for certain types of sinks, and one variant of this design has a suction cup on the base so it doesn't tip over. (Both are made out of plastic, not porcelain, so it's probably too light to not tip over during use.)

Where the overall the shape came from is no mystery—the form clearly follows the function (the function being self-drainage). Which begs the question: What do you do when form follows function, and the result is freaking fugly?