No afternoon is complete without a good dose of design inspiration. Ford Motor Company and IDSA have brought Robert Tercek (interactive content creator), Jane MacGonigal (game designer), Moray Callum (Ford's vice-president of design) and Gadi Amit (founder of NewDealDesign) together for a panel discussion as part of the Go Further with Ford Trend Conference. Topics include—but are not limited to, of course—how designers create unique and meaningful experiences for consumers and how to build lasting relationships between brands' products and customers. Catch a recording of the event above or on our very own Designing Innovation channel.

If you tweeted your own question using the hashtag #designinginnovation, make sure to listen in and see if your query made it on-stage for the live panel discussion. You can check out the hashtag online to see what viewers had to say about the discussion. If you didn't catch the first panel in the "Designing Innovation" series, check it out here.

If you're looking for a little more background on the people on stage, read on:

[Images by Fiddler49]

By mastering the assembly of compound materials, the Mongols had created an incredibly powerful bow, as we saw in the previous entry. But the way that they used it, which differed from the European method, necessitated a secondary support object that was the result of early ergonomic observation.

The Europeans used what is known as the "Mediterranean draw" to pull their bowstrings back. This uses the first three fingers of the hand. However, the Mongols used their thumbs to pull the string back, and curled their index and middle fingers over the thumb to support it. This, they reckoned, was stronger and allowed for a cleaner release. Whether you're an archer or not, if you use your own hand to mimic the release of either pull, you can clearly see it's easier to instantly spread your thumb, forefinger and middle finger than it is to release the first three fingers of your hand; that's because the thumb and fingers oppose, and thus balance, each other.

But concentrating over 100 pounds of force against the thumb would damage that thumb. So to protect them, the Mongols had to create yet another object: The thumb ring. This hand-carved object could be made from wood, bone, horn or antler. Here's a shot of a modern-day one owned by this Hong-Kong-based archery enthusiast:

There's a good reason we are experiencing the rise of the so-called "visual web." Our minds were destined to be attracted to visuals over text—since most of our brain real estate is devoted to sight. The visual cortex makes up one third of our brain. And the emerging trend of curved screens for smartphones and TVs feeds right into our desire for awesome images.

There are a few concave screens already on the market and some say the iPhone 6 will show up with a curved bend in the screen. It may be the case that market research found that the user feels it makes for a more immersive experience, but there are scientific studies that show we have desire for curved things.

Such reports are coming from a relatively new field in science: Neuroaesthetics. This is where neuroscience (the study of the brain) meets our appreciation for art or beauty.

A group from the University of Toronto recently studied how our brains react to rooms in a house. They had subjects look at photos of rooms while their brains were scanned in an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) machine.

And the scans revealed that the pleasure centers of their brains "lit up" when they looked at rooms that had curved features as opposed to having the more typical sharp edges. The latter type of rooms actually lit up areas of the brain normally associated with detecting threats.

The curved screens for digital hardware have been constrained by manufacturing—but no longer.

Clockwise from top left: Glider, Kammok; Curface composite panels, Adam Fairweather; Microbial Home Probe, Phillips Design; Bogobrush, photo by Mike Glinski

While the Internet is a seemingly limitless resource when it comes to research or reference, sometimes it's nice to peruse the information in print. Short of actually including samples of ABS, flyknit, etc., Material ConneXion's new book series serves as a handy guide to what's new and what's next in materials for architects and designers (the samples, of course, are available at their materials libraries). Written with an audience of design students and professionals in mind, the first two volumes, on Architecture and Product Design, were published by Thames & Hudson just last week. (The latter, pictured above, includes a preface by our own Allan Chochinov.)

From cutting-edge technological advances to novel applications of tried-and-true methodologies, co-authors Andrew Dent, Ph.D, and Leslie Sherr present a well-curated selection of materials in an impressive series of highly visual, broadly informative compendia. According to the press release, the books also "include a Materials Directory that provides insight on additional materials that are part of the Material ConneXion library and that can be used as substitutes for the projects featured." We had a chance to speak to Dent on the occasion of the launch.

Core77: How did you determine which projects to include in this book? Did you make a conscious effort to include a diverse range of projects in each of the six sections?

Andrew Dent: Diversity was essential to demonstrate our thesis, that the material trends we see are independent of product type. The decision about which projects to feature was determined by a group at Material ConneXion along with my co-author Leslie Sherr. Though we looked at predominantly very recent projects, where an slightly older project could exemplify an arc in a material type's trajectory, it was included. Clear presentation of material innovation was essential, though it should not detract from the overall value of design.

The inclusion of Iron Man 2 body armor, in particular, points to noncommercial (or at least non-traditional) applications of new technologies, yet it also suggests a potential use case for 3D printing, while student projects, concepts and prototypes depict possibilities that may be years away from becoming a reality. As a resource and reference, do you have the sense that the Material Innovation series may shape the future of design (i.e. by introducing designers to new or alternative materials) as much as it documents it in the present?

Our hope is that the series opens designers' eyes to the value of material innovation and the range of material possibilities that exist beyond what they currently know (the "unknown unknowns"). We also hope that it can show how materials can jump product type, from say consumer electronics to automotive, or from sports equipment to home appliances. This cross-pollination gives designers greater freedom to design, and offers the potential to stretch existing beliefs about how a product should be.

If you haven't heard about why the Tesla name has been all over the news lately, perhaps it's time to discover what makes this company so innovative. On July 1st, you have the chance to get the inside scoop directly from the Director of Product Design and Project Management, Javier Verdura. In their second event in this series, the RKS Sessions presents Designing Disruptive Innovations, a look under the hood of the innovative company- sharing their history, design process and where they're headed in the future.

Get your ticket today for this event and check out the rest of the RKS Sessions series for more thought-provoking presentations.

A statue is supposed to be forever, and we're all lucky that Michelangelo's David has survived for over five centuries. But a recently unveiled statue in the Kazazh city of Ust-Kamenogorsk lasted just one day before authorities yanked it off of the public corner where it was installed.

The statue featured two people, Kazakh philosopher/composer Abay Kunanbayev and Russian scientist/political activist Yevgeny Mikhaelis. Unfortunately, the sculptors of the memorial were reportedly not given adequate time to develop their masterpiece; as a result, the poorly-proportioned men resemble fantasy creatures more than human beings. Even worse, Mikhaelis is depicted as holding some sort of rectangular object in his outstretched hand. The result, irritated locals reported, resembles two Hobbits taking a selfie.

"We were in a huge rush," co-sculptor Vladimir Samoylov said, "and look what happened."

Authorities say the statue will be re-worked and re-installed.

Flowers are great—until they wilt after a couple of days and find a new home in the trash can. Harvard research fellow and chemio-"botanist" Wim Noorduin has found away to capture the same beauty of a fresh bouquet in an entirely new way. His microbial art—what he calls crystal nano flowers—may be invisible to the naked eye, but take a look at them under a microscope and, lo and behold, an entire arrangement has blossomed in front of your eyes.

Much like nurturing a bonsai tree, Noorduin engineers the crystals as they bloom into floral bouquets. The process itself is surprisingly simple: Noorduin combines a mixture of inexpensive chemicals in a beaker, which crystallize over the course of two hours. He manipulates the crystals as they grow to give them them shape, color and dimension. Each structure measures in at around the diameter of a single hair.

Check out the video from Creator's Project for more insight into the work:

We've talked about filing solutions for normal office papers—but what if the papers the end-users are dealing with are blueprints, maps or other large items?

Flat files are one obvious solution. They're incredibly easy to use—you just put your papers in the drawers (which can easily be labeled so you know what's where). The enclosed structure means the papers are protected from dust, spilled coffee, etc. To a limited degree they files are modular; the ones shown above can be stacked two high, if they're placed on a closed base rather than this open one. There's usually a locking option, if the end users need that level of protection. But they do take a lot of floorspace, and they're heavy; the Facil flat files from Safco weigh 118 pounds and up, and that excludes the base. So end users aren't going to casually move these around.

On the other end of the spectrum, there's the mobile trolley, such as the Hang-A-Plan from Arnos. Vertical storage like this takes less floor space, and the trolleys are easy to move around (as long as you don't need to go up or down some stairs). With this design, the binders that hang from the trolley hold up to 150 papers, with no need to add strips or holes.

The Offset Rack from Jalema is available as a two-tier unit—an interesting option for end-users with nine feet of clearance, and a collection of documents they don't need to access very often. Jalema uses staple strips—a reasonable option for archive-type storage, where the end user doesn't need to add or remove documents from the bundle. Color-coded index tabs are available to help end-users find the files they need.

For end-users with the available wall space, there are designs such as this Pivot Wall Rack from Brookside Design, with a maximum capacity of 1,200 sheets. The mounting holes are stud-spaced. If end-users are unable to locate wall studs, Brookside recommends using hollow wall screw anchors rather than the one-inch screws used when mounting to wall studs.

The easiest thing in the world is to be a critic on the internet. But the hardest is to be an internet critic who's funny. Internet personality Maddox, who first cracked me up with his brutally honest criticisms of children's drawings in the early days of the internet, is one of the few who's got the harder category locked down.

While the children's drawing series sparked painful memories in anyone who's sat through a design school crit (and has since been turned into a book), Maddox takes on far broader targets with his "The Best Show in the Universe" YouTube program. This week's topic: Pushed over the edge by inane living tips, Maddox takes on the recent glut of lifehacks that no one asked for. (Be warned: The language is NSFW!)

Today in Things-We-Take-for-Granted history: Barcodes turn 40! The now ubiquitous barcode has a slightly convoluted origin story—automated checkout was first proposed way back in 1932 by Wallace Flint, then in 1949 a symbol reader for that use was patented by Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver, but not developed further. However, it's agreed that George Laurer is the inventor of the modern bar code.

Despite recognizing that manual check-out is a point of inefficiency and human error in retail operations, it took until 1970 for technology and design to catch up to the need for a better system. In that year a corporation made up of the American grocery industry's leading trade associations (called the UGPCC, for the Uniform Grocery Product Code Council) established a standard numeric system for identifying products—the basis for the Universal Product Code, or UPC. A good first step, but hand0keying 11-number serials wouldn't have been much of an improvement, so they reached out to every tech company they could for ideas. While many had previously developed optical and scanning equipment, IBM hadn't made a splash in that department, despite having early pioneer Woodland on staff! With blessings from Woodland, the IBM project was spearheaded by George Laurer, whose contributions are beautifully explained in a recent 99% Invisible episode.

Up until that point, the closest approximation of a feasible barcode was a target-shaped graphic with concentric circles of varying thicknesses carrying the requisite information. The round shape was elegant in its way, but presented serious issues for visibility and printing. Laurer flattened this design out into a neat rectangle, and built both the code and the physical reader needed to implement it.

So it came to pass that early the morning of June 26, 1974, in scenic Troy, Ohio, the first UPC was scanned in a grocery store (probably without that satisfying bleep). The first item to earn use by this complex and powerful new system? Juicy Fruit chewing gum. That pack is in a museum, and the barcode was unanimously approved for use by the UGPCC.

Brookstone is one of the nation's most exciting specialty retailers, known for its high-quality, innovative products and gift ideas. They are currently searching for a Senior Mechanical Engineer to work in their Merrimack, NH Headquarters. This is an excellent opportunity to work in a dynamic and challenging environment where you'll have the chance to help shape a leading national brand and also enjoy a competitive salary/benefits package that includes a generous store discount.

As a key contributor to B-Lab's product design and development efforts, the right person for this job will apply sound engineering principles during all phases of B-Lab product development activities. He or she will be responsible for reviewing product drawings, design optimization, evaluation of product samples (POP, engineering, pilot, production), develops product performance standards, supports QA initiatives and more. Apply Now.

With any career, there are a lot of details that get lost within a job title. Someone looking in from the outside can have a hard time knowing exactly what a designer does when it comes to "deciding" what products, services, software, hardware, etc., are going to look like as finished products, to say nothing of his or her other responsibilities. The exploration into the many hats of a designer was exactly what was addressed at the "Decoding Design" panel discussion earlier this week, the second event in the "Designing Innovation" series presented by Ford and IDSA. By bringing a game designer, an automotive designer and a product designer together, moderator and author Robert Tercek bridged the gap between these industries, addressing topics revolving around the way designers create experiences that connect consumers to the products that they choose to live with.

The event started out with introductory presentations from each panelist, who elaborated on their current projects and other design thoughts. Ford's Moray Callum, the first to take the stage, spoke directly to the audience about how important it is for designers to focus on creating an entire journey—not just a specific product. "You're either seduced or you're not," he says of the first impression a car gives. "Design has to set an expectation—it needs to deliver and complement prior experiences." The second panelist, NewDealDesign's Gadi Amit, briefly shared his work rebuilding and reimagining devices like smartphones and handheld cameras. Having worked with wearables and consumer products, as well as software and hardware, Amit framed these issues in a broader context, beyond the dashboards and heated seats of Callum's work: "A lot of the problems we have now with the technology world is getting more and more options out there."

Game Designer Jane McGonigal added a comedic touch with her attention-grabbing statistics on the current state of game play and the positive effects it can have. While the numbers provided concrete evidence for McGonigal's insights, her biggest message came from defining her job as a designer as composing the perfect achievements for gamers before taking on the actual visuals. Here are a few of my favorite data points from McGonigal:

Speaking of IKEA hacks, the Russian division of the Swedish brand has cleverly 'repurposed' Instagram to transform a profile page into an online catalog for their new collection. Developed by ad agency Instinct, the @ikea_ps_2014 'website' is optimized for mobile, made up of a dozen tiles in the social media platform's signature three-column grid. Individual items are tagged to link to product pages (also in Instagram).

Canny though it may be, the website is subject to a drawback of Instagram itself: No outbound links—how am I supposed to buy that "Wall shelf with 11 hooks, birch" from the non-retail confines of my Instagram feed? And although the video description boasts that the campaign had "zero media and production budget," the proper IKEA PS 2014 homepage suggests otherwise: Perhaps they spent their rubles on the ultra-hip, globetrotting sizzle reel:

Since the Mongol bow we've seen a lengthy list of advances in long-range killing. Guns, machineguns, artillery, bombs dropped from planes, and Germany's famous V-2 "flying bomb," which is featured in many a World War II documentary.

But here we look at a lesser-known Wehrmacht design, which was not a bomb that flew, but that could be driven. It started seeing battlefield action in 1942. Roughly two feet tall, three feet wide and five feet long, the Goliath resembled a miniature tank, but one that had a long cable trailing behind it. This cable was over 2,000 feet long and had a real, live Nazi at the other end of it, driving the Goliath with a joystick like some deadly Atari game. When the "pilot" got the thing to its desired position, he pushed a button, and the 130 pounds of explosives inside the Goliath went KABOOM.

They say, not unfairly, that the only upper body workout cyclists get is having to pump up their tires. That's certainly one reason fixing flat tires is such a bummer. To give your feeble T-Rex arms a break, and to save you mysophobes from a day of despair, check out the skepticism-inducing-yet-promising tool from PatchNRide.

The PatchNRide system is a little oblique, modeled largely by CAD drawings and a distractingly good-looking actor. From what we can gather, it works like this: you locate the source of your flat, remove offending debris, push the pointed business end of this tool into the hole, depress a needle into that hole, inject a rubber sealant into the inner tube, remove the tool, and refill the tire with air. In less than 60 seconds your ride has gone from bummertown to back in action. No tire removal and minimal grumbling at the side of the road.

Don't look at the strap*

Bootlegged jazz records might be one of the last things that comes to mind when you think about Soviet Russia. But decades before the tape recorder made its groundbreaking debut, oppressed Russian music fans found a way to listen to their tunes using discarded X-ray films from the dumpsters and archives of hospitals.

The music was pressed onto the discarded films using phonographs converted into very primitive CD burners for vinyl. (There's not a whole lot of information out there on how these hacked phonographs work, so we welcome any insight in the comments.) The copies were then cut into discs and a cigarette was used to burn a hole in the middle of the disc. Featuring the skeletal remains of the original substrate, the handmade discs were appropriately known as "bone music."

As we saw in an earlier post, part of what made the Mongols so militarily successful is that they had an unstoppable weapon that they learned to fire from horseback, providing both mobility and firepower. This is remarkable becase a galloping horse is not the most stable platform to aim and fire from. A modern-day sniper, for example, would ideally be laid up in a stable perch.

But modern-day situations do not always allow for stable firing positions. Think of the Captain Philips incident, for instance, where the Captain's captors were dispatched by Navy SEAL snipers operating from the deck of a rolling ship.

Now a company called Paradigm SRP is seeking to reconcile the deadliness of sniper fire with the jouncing that comes with riding around in a helicopter, Humvee or boat. And interestingly, whereas civilian technologies often borrow from military technologies, this time it's the other way 'round: To design their product, Paradigm looked to the film industry's expertise in gyro-stabilized cameras.

Their resultant Talon Gyro-Stabilized Marksman Platform/Universal Weapons Mount is like a Steadicam loaded with death. Gyro stabilizers keep the weapon steady, while onboard cameras feed live footage back to the operator, who's holding a monitor--and has access to the remote trigger.

Cityboy that I am, I find guns terrifying, and watching this thing operate kind of scares the crap out of me:

"Take it with a Pinch of Salt!" (a dish exploring the street noise levels in Barcelona throughout the day)

Last week, BoingBoing picked up on a TL;DR study that validated the value of artistic presentation... when it comes to salad. A team of psychologists from Oxford recently published the finding that thoughtful plating goes a long way towards enhancing the overall perception of the dining experience. In short, if it looks good, we're more likely to think that it tastes good too (and that it's worth a few extra pounds—sterling, that is).

Gathering data on our cultural misconceptions is one thing; presenting it is another thing entirely—but it so happens that a couple of designers have undertaken this very task. In an (unrelated) inversion of the Oxford experiment, Data Cuisine is a research project in which socioeconomic data is presented as culinary visual- and gastronom-izations. Whereas the psychologists tested the eaters with an edible Kandinsky, Susanne Jaschko and Moritz Stefaner lead workshop participants in translating data sets into recipes: "Have you ever tried to imagine how a fish soup tastes whose recipe is based on publicly available local fishing data? Or what a pizza would be like if it was based on Helsinki's population mix? Data Cuisine explores food as a means of data expression—or, if you like—edible diagrams."

"Age & Language in Lentils" (a visualization of the median age, population sizes and languages spoken in the USA and Italy)

"First Date Noodles" (a look at the number of people who will have sex on a first date)

So far, there have only been two workshops (one in Helsinki and one in Barcelona), but the plates that they've posted to the website have proved thought-provoking. For example, the noodle arrangement pictured above, titled "First Date Noodles." The tangled ball of noodles represents the number of men and women (denoted by pink and blue noodles) who will have sex on a first date—59 percent of women and 86 percent of men, based on an informal survey among the cooks' Facebook acquaintances. The outlying noodles represent those who abstain.

Emigration Fish" (a dish representing the number of young people who emigrate from Spain)

Schools kill creativity. This simple message was the point of Sir Ken Robinson's TED talk, now the most viewed of all time. Robinson challenges the way we view education in todays society, and highlights the fact that it hasn't developed in the speed that it needs to, but is stuck in the old way of thinking.

The talk was released in 2006. And while much has changed since then (how many of you are now reading this on a smartphone or a tablet?), our schools have remained dully familiar. In the UK, things have arguably got worse, with unpopular figure Michael Gove damning progressive education as a 'misplaced ideology' and swinging the curriculum back towards good old traditional methods.

Four students at Royal College of Art in London have decided to do address this issue by developing a summer program where kids can enjoy thinking and learning in different ways. Project 42 is expressly intended for creative learners (ages 9–12) who really don't fit into the framework of today's educational institutions. The program will take place between July 28 and August 8 at the Royal College of Art. Why Project 42? Well, according to the one the founders, Ed Tam:

The name is inspired by the book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In the story, a supercomputer was tasked to find the ultimate answer to life, the universe and everything. Millennia had passed and the computer came back with the answer 42. But the people soon realized that it's going to take a much bigger, more complex computer to arrive at the question. Project 42 was set up to help young people discover the power of the question.

An interface design is not successful just because you can figure out how to work it. The true test is whether you can explain to your parents, over the phone, how to work it. For any of you who have served as de facto tech support for your folks in this manner, this spot-on video by comedian Ronnie Chieng will be the funniest thing you'll see all week:

YouTube is of course a Google product, and they've got a lot more to worry about than how to delete comments—namely, their Android mobile OS intended for the next generation of smartphones, tablets, smartwatches and Glass. To that end, the Google Design site aims to spread the gospel of their design approach while laying down guidelines for those looking to operate within the Googleverse.

They've coined their approach to interface design "Material Design." By this they mean that interface design ought mimic the design of something involving a physical material. This does not refer to skeuomorphism, like Apple's scuttled faux-stitched-leather etc.; rather they mean that physical materials have easily comprehensible properties and that this predictability ought be emulated. You can pick a piece of paper up, flip it over, fold it in half, write on one side, write on the other. It does not zoom around your desk on its own nor spontaneously change color, but instead obeys the laws of physics and your physical manipulations.