Day five of the Core77 Design Awards is quickly coming to a close. After a week full of impressive designs and jury members, we've only got one more category (Writing & Commentary) to follow-up with after we hear from the current category in the spotlight: Transportation. Join Cadillac's Christine Pak and Jeff Nield, RTT USA's Curtis Evey and Curb Industry's Alan Macey as they share this program's winners:

Professional
Winner: Basten Leijh - Sandwichbikes
Runner-up: Paul Wylde - New JetBlue Airbus A321 Cabin Interior Design
Notable: Alon Karpman - The "Hanzo" Dropthrough Wingtail

Student
Winner: Martin Skogholt Hansen / Mikael Johansen - The Future of Offshore Supply
Runners-up:
» Apurba Pawar - Link 500: Concept Railtrack Layer
» Maxime DEPECKER - La Bicyclette
Notables:
» Alexander Turesson - Rescue R-01
» Guillermo Callau / Federico Ferreyra / Mariano Filippini / Fermin Indavere SUDACA TEAM - SUDACA/Electric Vehicle

We'd like to give a big thank you to all of the jurors, entrants, honorees and viewers for helping make this one of the best Core77 Design Awards to date! To top off this exciting week of live announcements, we have an impressive jury team that hails from the pages (web and print) of Gizmodo, Metropolis, The New York Times and Fast Company, among many other publications. Follow along as Jury Captain Alissa Walker, Jade Chang and Margaret Wappler (joined in spirit by Carolina A. Miranda) walk us through their winners for the Writing & Commentary category live from Los Angeles, California:

Professional
Winner: Aileen Kwun - Arts and Letters
Runner-up: Eric Heiman - (Re)Brand USA
Notables:
» "What the pack?" Media Project - Tsaritsyno Reloaded
» Chappell Ellison - You'll Never Guess the Amazing Ways Online Design Writing and Criticism Has Changed

Student
Winner: Ian Besler - Super Models: Or Some Scale Models I'd like to Know
Runner-up: Nicola Mitchell - Open Source, Communication and Collaboration
Notable: Oscar Pipson - Transitional Spaces

If 3D printing had an overly attached mom, this benchmark would be going in a scrapbook. We're all admittedly used to hearing about the innumerable ways additive manufacturing is going to rock our world in the vague future, but maybe this will keep it on your radar: they're sending a 3D printer to space. The printer in question was designed by Made In Space, an aerospace manufacturing startup powered by design and engineering veterans from Autodesk, Planetary Resources, and astronauts from prior space missions. The printer needs to function in microgravity and withstand the intense pressures and jarring of a launch and flight without damage. Yesterday, after years of development and a battery of tests, the printer was cleared for use onboard the International Space Station this fall.

Due to the mentionable difference in gravitational impact, a space printer needs to be carefully adapted to avoid losing layer adhesion, resolution and part strength in a low-G environment. Accordingly, the sweet space printer isn't at the self-sufficient level yet—parts printed onboard will be sent back to earth for testing to determine structural integrity and safety. However, this type of self-contained printing can make way for unprecedented self-reliance and flexibility onboard the whirling science station.

We're only a few days away from "Decoding Design," Ford Motor Company's second panel discussion in a series called "Designing Innovation." Last month, we listened along as fuseproject's Yves B&aeacute;har, Autodesk's Jordan Brandt, Ford's Freeman Thomas and California College of the Arts's Nathan Shedroff shared their thoughts on the role of technology in design and how products stand out from and fit in with the world around them—among many other hot topics. Taking the stage this week is Robert Tercek Panel Moderator and Creative Strategist; Jane MacGonigal, Game Designer; Moray Callum, Vice President of Design at Ford Motor Company; and Gadi Amit, Founder of NewDealDesign. Make sure to tune in on Wednesday, June 25 at 1:15 ET for the live-stream right here on the Core77 Designing Innovation channel. If you've got a question you'd like answered at the discussion, submit it on Twitter using the hashtag #designinginnovation for a chance to hear it on stage.

We caught some time with Moray to tell us a bit more about his history with automotive design and his work with Ford:

Core77: Let's start from the beginning—how did you end up becoming a car designer?

Moray Callum: I was always surrounded by cars, but I actually wanted to be a vet at one point. A day spent on a farm made me change my mind pretty quickly. I started off studying architecture but quickly gravitated towards an industrial design course. I knew a lot about cars and had a true passion for them—the step from industrial design to automotive design was an easy one.

You started at Ford in 1995, went to Mazda in 2001 and then returned to Ford in 2006—how do you feel the brand's design changed during the time you were at Mazda?

In terms of changes at Ford, those are the years Ford developed its kinetic design language—you can see its influence in some of our current products to some extent.

How do you think you helped freshen the brand's look when you returned to Ford?

I learned a lot at Mazda. I found myself working on more exuberant, emotive cars than I was used to. It taught me the importance of understanding different brand values and using them as a guide through the design of a car. The first product I worked on when I returned to Ford was the latest generation Ford Taurus. Every car since that one shows more of that emotional design language.

The 2015 Ford Mustang

At least one inventor of a famous machinegun has spiritually grappled with having invented a tool for killing. But Stephanie Kwolek, a scientist for DuPont who passed away last week at the age of 90, accidentally invented something that protected people from firearms: Kevlar.

Carnegie Mellon grad and chemist Kwolek was a female pioneer in the sciences. She began working at DuPont in 1946, an era when women were expected to be housewives. By the 1960s she was trying to develop an ultra-strong fiber that could be incorporated into radial tires, and created a polymer that, in liquid form, at first appeared to be disappointing.

But she persevered and had her concoction run through a lab spinneret, which turns liquids into fibers. To her and her team's surprise, when the resultant fibers were exposed to stress tests, they would not break at the point that more common nylon would. Further investigation revealed that what Kwolek had created was five times stronger than steel.

When she brought the report to management, "they didn't fool around," Kwolek said in a 2007 interview. "They immediately assigned a whole group to work on different aspects."

DuPont knew they had a materials hit on their hands and threw a reported $500 million in development money at it over the years. And while the resultant material, Kevlar, did make its way into the tires it was originally targeting, by the '70s it had found its lifesaving application as the key component of bulletproof vests.

Kwolek, who put in 40 years of service at DuPont and retired in 1986, racked up a host of accolades: She garnered both the Lemelson-M.I.T. Lifetime Achievement Award and the National Medal of Technology, and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, the National Women's Hall of Fame and the Plastics Hall of Fame at the National Plastics Center and Museum.

But for every medal she was able to place around her neck, there were and are countless men and women around the world who can strap on vests woven with the fiber she created. A local newspaper reporting on Kwolek's passing puts this in perspective:

"When you think about what she has done, it's incredible. There's literally thousands and thousands of people alive because of her," said Ron McBride, former manager of the Kevlar Survivors' Club, a not-for-profit partnership between DuPont and the International Association of Chiefs of Police. The group has documented 3,200 lives saved through use of Kevlar in body armor.

McBride is a former chief of police in Ashland, Kentucky. A vest with Kevlar saved the life of his son, who was serving as a naval operative in Iraq.

"She could look back on her life and say, 'Yeah, I made a difference,'" he said.

Kwolek passed away at the age of 90.

For those interested in learning more, here's a video Called "Stephanie Kwolek - Curiosity and the Discover of Kevlar," put together as part of the Chemical Heritage Foundation's "Women in Chemistry" series:

True industrial design seeks out problems that can be solved with objects. The more common the problem, and the easier it is to produce the item you've designed to solve it, the more successful you'll be. And the Holy Grail, of course, is to find that common problem that no one's solved yet.

So here's a great example of a simple, monomaterial product design that's become a tremendous business success by addressing an unmet need in the kitchen. When it comes to storing food, we've got Ziploc bags, Tupperware, plastic wraps and aluminum foils, which are good at storing most things. But what they're lousy at preserving is a fruit or vegetable that's been cut in half; you've undoubtedly thrown away half of something because you couldn't use it all up in time.

Enter Food Huggers, which are nothing more than little silicone discs molded with a lip and an undercut.

By making them in four sizes—which nest for storage, by the way—industrial designers Michelle Ivankovic and marketer Adrienne McNicholas have covered all of the bases, whether you're looking to save a small or large chunk of fruit or vegetable.

It might be called a cabinet, but anything you're displaying inside of it is going to be overshadowed by the furniture itself. I've long been a fan of Sebastian Errazuriz and his ability to turn his strong and sometimes controversial opinions into eye-catching works of design—in a good, "pushing the boundaries" kind of way (see here, here and here for examples). So it makes sense that he's subverting the very function of a display cabinet with his impressive articulating shelving unit.

As with his "Porcupine Cabinet" from 2010 (a riff on his "Piano Shelf," which dates back to 1997), the Samurai Cabinet is made up of blade-like rotating wooden arms, inspired by the armor of its namesake. The length of each of the four legs serves as an axis for each tapered 'tooth,' some 40 in all, which can be individually adjusted to strikingly different visual effect.

The arms jump to action with a simple slide of the finger, thanks to a counterbalanced pivot point on each of the planks—flip an entire side of wooden arms at once and your ears are in for a treat:

This may be the craziest vehicle I've ever seen. A South-Carolina-based company called Cool Amphibious Manufacturers International produces the Terra Wind, a luxury RV that is freaking amphibious. It's not driving through deep water in that photo above, it is floating and powering through a lake via a separate marine transmission driving a pair of 19-inch bronze propellors. You have to see this thing in action to believe it:

Even crazier is the Terra Wind's origin story, as reported by Car and Driver. It was designed and built by CAMI founder John Giljam, who grew up on a farm in upstate New York, never attended college and never took a single engineering class!

Are you the particular type of awesome that Bellroy wants to add to their Jan Juc team? They're looking for a sharp Product Designer that will help them reinvent how wallets should be, working in a small but awesome design team to help the world carry better. With a narrow focus, constant learning, agile processes and creative thinking, Bellroy can continually improve the solutions and insights they share, in a way that's fun and respectful to both their customers and the planet.

As part of the design team, you'll be conceiving, designing and refining slim leather goods. You'll also work with graphic designers to make sure that the design is presented and communicated well. You also need 2+ years of experience (or an amazing display of design maturity if you have less than that) and to be proficient with Illustrator, cloud based software, and tech in general. This is a great opportunity to work for a fun group so Apply Right Now!

Photos by Alex Welsh unless otherwise noted

We briefly recounted the ongoings at the Core77 Conference in near-real-time last Thursday, breaking up our crowdsourced coverage into two recaps: morning and afternoon. In case you missed it, take a look at what folks were saying on Twitter:

#core77con Tweets

Now that you've had a chance to see what everyone else had to say, we'd like to present the highlights from our inaugural one-day conference. Instead of going in chronological order, we've organized the speakers' collective wisdom into several recurring themes that surfaced over the course of the day.

Thanks again to everyone who attended and we hope to see more faces at future events! Make sure to check back for videos of each presentation to come in the upcoming weeks.

Dong-Ping Wong had the unenviable task of going first...

The Transformative Power of Educational Initiatives

To kick off the conference, Dong-Ping Wong of +Pool [Plus Pool] came to discuss a project looking to change the way urban dwellers define what their water is. By educating the masses with slightly gross statistics relating to what, exactly, lives in our drinking water, Wong and his collaborators at Playlab have created the plans for a giant, floating pool that filters water and provides data in real-time. +Pool—which was chosen by TIME magazine as one of the 25 best inventions of 2013—filters water through the walls of the pool, like a "giant Brita filter," as described by Wong onstage. We've been hearing about the water crisis for years, but it takes a radical project such as +Pool to make some worldwide waves—pun intended. While the project is still searching for the ideal site, it's estimated that ground will break come 2016. In fact, sustainable, responsible design was a theme that cropped up throughout the day.

L: pensanyc; R: industrypdx

Catapult Design's Heather Fleming took the sustainable, educational focus even further and proposed greater awareness of the enormous impact that design has on a global scale. While she rejected the term "design for social impact" on the grounds that all design has social impact, Fleming examined both successful and failed initiatives in the developing world. Among her many insights: "The vision of the designer should be broader than the studio."

On a more literal level, Becky Stern of Adafruit and Ricardo Prada of Google X emphasized the transformative power of incorporating educational components into projects during their panel discussion on integrated technology led by Core77 Senior Editor Mason Currey. Although the two guests work for companies on opposite ends of the spectrum in the tech world, they were able to find common ground in discussing their creative processes and multidisciplinary approaches to ideation. Stern also dropped one of the more memorable quips of the day: "'My prom dress doesn't light up yet,' is a problem that can lead people to want to learn to program." Well said.

For big problems, I'm a big fan of big solutions. After all, the sheer scale of systemic issues all but demands concerted efforts when it comes to fixing them. Even so, we can build in small developments that distribute the burden of change over a wider area. In the case of air pollution, where causes and effects are both diverse and widespread, it makes sense to hit it from both angles. This month saw a noteworthy development for long-tail environmentalism: students at University of California, Riverside have positively tested smog-eating roof tiles. Students at the University's Bourns College of Engineering developed a titanium dioxide coating that, when applied to the roof tiles of an average sized home, "breaks down the same amount of smog-causing nitrogen oxides per year as a car driven 11,000 miles [produces]." Not a small claim.

To put it in context, they calculated that if tiles on one million roofs were coated with their titanium dioxide mixture, 21 tons of nitrogen oxides would be eliminated daily. Particularly impressive if you consider their report that "500 tons of nitrogen oxides are emitted daily in the South Coast Air Quality Management District coverage area, which includes all of Orange County and the urban portions of Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino counties." Nitrogen oxides are produced by burning certain fuels at high temperatures, and when exposed to sunlight and volatile organic compounds they form the cozy city blanket known as smog. Not known for its rejuvenating effects, smog has a growing bad rap sheet and efforts to dock it are vital to urban health.

There are pollution-absorbing or -neutralizing tiles on the market already, and several proposals using titanium dioxide, but few have sufficient data to qualify their claims. Although their work hasn't been peer reviewed yet, the finding is promising. Additionally, the students anticipated that their coating could be applied to existing roofs for as little as $5 per roof. With an adoption cost that low, large scale implementation could be feasible. Impressive enough work that it got an honorable mention in the EPA's recent P3 Awards.

As a pioneer and mentor in the field of design for social impact, the late Sylvia Harris was an inspiration to designers of all stripes, and her legacy lives on in with a new opportunity for design professionals looking to make a difference. To honor her work and spirit, Design Ignites Change and AIGA are pleased to present the Sylvia Harris Citizen Design Award to support like-minded designers committed to public design.

Practicing professionals from all design disciplines (graphic, product, architecture, interior, interactive, service design, etc.) are invited to apply for the $10,000 award to be used towards realizing a well-researched and considered concept for a project to encourage change in their community. All applications will be reviewed by a committee of creative professionals, business, civic and non-profit leaders. Submissions will be judged based on the overall concept, viability and potential for impact.

To find out more about Sylvia Harris and her legacy, as well as details about how to enter, check out the Design Ignites Change website. The official deadline is August 1, 2014.

The Mikihisa Folding Knife is a cool take on the kiridashi style. Kiridashi (often translated as "to cut out") are traditionally used for scoring wood, carving, splitting bamboo and small cutting tasks in the shop or classroom. These kiridashi knives are single beveled for an extra fine cutting edge, ideal for super flush cuts in all kinds of crafts. Use with a square for satisfyingly precise lines, and cut paper, plastic, leather, light woods and more with ease. The blade is "blue paper" number 2 steel, a high carbon cutlery steel laminated warikomi style, providing both wicked sharpness and durability.

Kiridashi are usually a single fixed blade with no additional handle—more than a little unnerving to have lying around in a tool box. The Mikihisa adds safety and portability by adapting the style into a folding knife and adding a more ergonomic bubinga wood handle. This thing is pretty large for a folder, more shop tool than EDC pocket knife. It comes nice and sharp, and is super easy to maintain. The lock back is a simple side to side lever. Not the most rugged we've ever used, but dependable. Forget the irritation and waste of wimpy little X-Actos, get yourself a traditional(ish) Japanese craft knife that you can count on.

Available now at Hand-Eye Supply.

Editor: Is there a community of like-minded designers in your area? Have you ever thought about teaming up with them to set up a group show, one that you could export to another city? Well, Anonymous Designer figured he'd do just that--and here's what he found.

Where I live in City A, there are a lot of individual designers, but not much of a design community. So ever since I graduated design school I've been trying to organize some group shows here to get some community going. We all want to get our work out there and explore the larger markets outside of City A, so a group show held in larger City B made sense.

So last year, me and a half-dozen other designers put together a group show and exported it to City B. It ended up being a bit of a nightmare because the curator was sort of a train wreck. But this year we decided to repeat the experience and hold another group show in City B. We figured it would be easy this time—new curator, and we had the experience, contacts and relationships from last year that taught us what we needed to do and in what order. Simple, right?

Wrong. This year turned into a clusterfuck. You festival-goers probably have no idea what's going on behind the scenes, so here's my list of Top Ten Problems with Organizing a Group Design Show, in order of how they unfold.

1. Getting Funding

To set up a group design show, you need sponsorship and funding. Last year we hit up corporations, manufacturers, wealthy families that patronize the arts, anyone local who had anything to do with design. After they all said no we resorted to cold-calling everyone in our network. Here's what we found: Everyone in City A was excited about the prospect of this group show, but except for just one production house willing to sponsor us, no one was excited enough to fork over some cash.

So this year we decided to try crowdsourcing, turning to Kickstarter for our funding. And we found that putting together a Kickstarter campaign is a real bitch! It is a process: Writing and editing the script, finding a good videographer, setting up the lighting, shooting video clips, traveling around different shops to shoot more video clips, finding a video editor, recording the voiceovers for the videos, not to mention getting all of the stuff organized for the actual campaign web page. Don't underestimate how long it takes to try to get all of these things right.

2. Organizing Your People
Setting up a group show involves endless emailing. You've got a dozen designers in the show, several organizers, sponsors, partial sponsors, and it's a constant communications snafu. Some people weren't CC'ed when they should've been, someone did a "Reply" when they should've done a "Reply All" so now some people only got part of the information, someone typed "can" when they meant to say "can't," et cetera. You are constantly glued to your phone and practically getting an electromagnetic tan from the screen.

This is nuts. An inventive Russian YouTuber has figured out how to turn plastic bottles into string, using purely mechanical means. After "unraveling" a single bottle he's left with what appear to be several yards' worth of filament, which he then uses to bind things together. Hitting the resultant plastic twine with a heat gun causes it to partially melt and shrink, more or less fusing it into place.

We all have our favorite memories of summer, but we're more inclined to forget the rather less pleasant thought of mosquito bites that might come with those adventures. I fondly recall summer a camp deep in the woods of Wisconsin, from which I would return home with arms full of craft projects... and legs that were completely destroyed from compulsively scratching bug bites. In fact, the winged blood-suckers may well be the most universally despised creatures on earth—some ecologists believe we do away with them with no ecological consequences—so anyone can appreciate this innovation from Sri Lanka's Mawbima newspaper and ad agency Leo Burnett. But for many across the world, appreciation is an understatement, since a mosquito bite can mean much more than a temporary inconvenience on an otherwise healthy body.

For the 2014 World Health Day, the publication printed the world's first mosquito-repelling newspaper, adding citronella scent to the newspaper's ink. It's a far more elegant way to deliver insect repellent than the chemical-laden sprays we're used to... and it keeps citizens informed about current events to boot.

The alphabetic branding behind the mosquito-repelling project

The scented newspaper ink is indicated by an intriguing graphic identity—even for those of us outside of its impact zone—featuring mosquitoes being smashed behind each character of the local Sinhalese script. The newspaper shared the illustrated vernacular over National Dengue Week and on Facebook previous to the citronella newspaper run. Check out this video from Leo Burnett on the entire project:

Smart Design has been turning insight and innovation into successful consumer experiences for 30 years. Their mission is to create informed and inspired design for people and memorable brands for their clients. They're looking for a sharp Brand Communication Intern to join their NYC team to help them bring their brand experiences to life.

The Brand intern needs to be a visual communicator, well versed in designing for screen, packaging and print. Working with multi-disciplinary teams, the brand intern will work on a diverse range of design challenges from brand identity to design languages to branded user experiences. This is an outstanding opportunity to gain experience working with researchers, interaction designers, product designers and technologists on projects for clients ranging from fast-growing startups to some of the world's most recognized brands. Apply Now.

You probably have that one project. It's a little stupid, a little outlandish. It wouldn't fit into your real work, unless... you changed your work. Bill Webb is a partner at Huge Design, and he rides motorcycles. With a tech-heavy background in product design, Bill had always thought of designing a custom motorcycle but never had an excuse to try. It took some bad luck and a deep appreciation for bike design to make it happen.

After selling off all his motorcycle gear to start Huge four years ago, a friend gifted him a tired old Kawasaki zx7 Ninja. Despite its slightly regrettable "purple David Bowie" graphics, he rode the bike daily... until it was stolen. They recovered it from a San Francisco tow yard, parted out and bedraggled, and began thinking about what to do with it. Two years later, the bike has a completely different—and very distinct—personality, reinvented by its industrial designer owner. The resulting design is a stylistic blend of two very different aesthetic schools, pulling elements from both cafe racers and streetfighters together in a slick, stripped down package. To unpack the complex project Bill walked us through his inspiration, design and build process.

Words and images courtesy of Bill Webb

Design Vision

To combine elements from two very different styles of custom bikes (cafe racer and streetfighter) and create the CAFE FIGHTER. Cafe racers have been the hottest trend in the custom motorcycle scene for the last few years. The cafe racer usually starts with a Japanese street bike from the mid-70's. Unnecessary parts are stripped off and usually the seat/subframe area is heavily modified into a very minimal, flat single seat. Because the bikes are 30+ years old, there is very little technology to deal with and the bikes pretty much design themselves once all the factory parts are removed. The CB750 is probably the most used-donor bike to create this look. This style is pretty popular with hipsters and city riders who value the raw urban vibe of these bikes.

Street fighters by contrast are usually modern sport bikes that have been spun into aggressive-styled mean machines with wild graphics, neon lights and loud colors. Usually the streetfighter starts with a modern sport bike that has been stripped of its racing plastics. Without the plastics, these bikes can look a bit raw with random bits of electronics and plumbing exposed that were never intended to be seen. These bikes celebrate the ugliness and own it as an aggressive, mean aesthetic that the owners take pride in.

Our goal was simple: apply the honesty and proportional beauty of the cafe racer with the raw aggression and performance stance of a modern sportbike/streetfighter...and call it a Cafe-fighter.

I've always bought my soap pump bottles from a company I used to work for, because I remember doing the renderings and CAD drawings for the dispenser head. As ID'ers, we don't get a lot of compensation or credit, so little, quiet ego boosts like this go a long way. But several years ago I started feeding my dogs raw meat, and because I was handling it so frequently, I realized the design of soap pump I'd worked on would no longer cut it.

When your hands are covered in raw meat juice that you're trying to wash off, obviously you don't want to touch the soap dispenser with them. I tried using my elbow in the beginning but it was unworkable. So I switched over to Simplehuman's touchless Sensor Pump—but it's turned out to be a pain in the ass.

The sensor gets triggered every time I turn the lights on in the kitchen, squirting soap onto the counter, so I have to leave a sponge under it to catch it. I've tried cleaning the sensor to no avail. I hate the amount of soap this thing wastes, and because it goes off so frequently I have to change the batteries out often.

The hard part about killing people is that sometimes they kill you back. (Just ask Prince Oberyn.) So at some point, some primitive pugilist concluded it would be better if one was not within arm's reach of the person one was trying to kill.

One way you can do this is to kill your opponent with kindness. But this can take an unsatisfyingly long time. A more immediate way to kill someone from afar is with a ranged weapon.

Spears and slings were relatively simple to make, but no civilization could gain an enduring military advantage with such basic and duplicable weapons. The earliest example of an object that required both design and manufacturing know-how, and which led to a tremendously decisive advantage, was probably the 13th Century Mongol bow.

Bows and arrows have been around for tens of thousands of years—depending on who you listen to, we may have had them 64,000 freaking years ago—but the Mongol bow was a standout. First off, it was made out of something like the carbon fiber of that era, a complicated-to-make sandwich of horn, wood or bamboo, and strands of animal sinew all laminated together with animal glue. The horn provided the rigidity, the wood or bamboo provided the flex, and the elastic sinew laminated to the wood helped store potential energy as the string was drawn.

The traditional problem with composite bows was that they tended to delaminate when wet, as water dissolved the animal glue holding them together. Since the Mongols didn't like the idea that they would have to surrender if it was raining out, and throwing arrows by hand didn't seem terribly practical, they either developed or stole the technology to produce a waterproof lacquer. By coating their bows with this stuff, they effectively made them all-weather. And the results were simply devastating.