As a society, we've more or less got the design of gas stations figured out. Outside is a row of pumps (ground-mounted in most of the world but ceiling-mounted in space-tight countries like Japan), a roof to keep the elements off, a sprinkler system in case Gus decides to light up a Pall Mall. Inside there's snacks, cold drinks and a bathroom where you can cut and bleach your hair when you've been wrongly framed for murder and are on the run from the cops.

But in the early part of the 20th Century, gas stations were neither commonplace nor figured out in terms of design. There was no standard. The few folks that owned cars might be able to find a "filling station," or they drove to hardware stores to buy gasoline over-the-counter. So Frank Lloyd Wright's 1927 design for a filling station must've seemed very radical indeed.

Wright's vision featured two cantilevered roof wings, each of which supported overhead gas pumps made from glass, for chrissakes, ringed with copper. And speaking of copper the entire roof was shod with it. (Impossible to imagine today given the cost of metal, but back then copper was so cheap that there was a huge statue entirely made out of the stuff in New York City, and we'd gotten the whole thing for free less than fifty years earlier.) Two towering "totems," as Wright called them, would have a sign conspicuously suspended between them.

Last April, we wrote about Logbar's Ring, a smart-jewelry concept that aims to provide gesture control of a host of smartphone apps (and that raised more than $880,000 dollars on Kickstarter). But Logbar is hardly the only company competing for this wearables niche. In June, Ringly announced a pre-sale for its own smartphone-connected ring, and hit its sales goal of $60,000 in just eight hours. Clearly, some people really want a smart ring.

Where Ring promises magic wand–style controls, Ringly is more about discreet notifications. The company's CEO, Christina Mercando, came up with the idea for the device after missing a series of important calls, messages and appointments. "I started asking around and noticing other women having similar problems," she says, "so I set out to create a solution that I was also proud to wear."

Through colleagues at her previous employer, the collective-intelligence startup Hunch, Mercando was introduced to Logan Munro, an MIT-educated engineer who became Ringly's co-founder. Together, they worked on creating a device that was, first and foremost, aesthetically pleasing. "The entire idea around Ringly was to create technology that was small and discreet and incorporate it into beautiful jewelry and accessories," Mercando says. "We wanted people to fall in love with the design first and then get excited about what it can do."

Professional organizers are fans of wastebaskets—they help ensure trash actually leaves the space—so I'm always interested in new design twists on this basic product.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, where I work, many cities are banning plastic grocery bags—but before the bans, I saw many clients with huge stashes of those bags. But the bags don't need to go to waste; they can be used in wastebaskets, if those baskets are designed to make use of them. The Urbano Eco trash can, designed by Kevin McElroy, uses one bag for collecting trash and stores other below. The only drawback with this design is it's just a bit awkward to add new bags to the collection while one is in use. And sometimes any bit of awkwardness keeps people from putting things away.

The BagSavr+ from Products That Work does things a bit differently; extra bags (up to 10) are stored in a pocket, so it's easy to add bags at any time. The BagSavr+ has also been designed to allow it to live on the floor or mounted to walls, cabinet doors, etc. It has a flat back and keyholes to allow it to be wall-mounted with a couple screws; it also comes with a mounting bracket.

Other wastebaskets, such as this one from Polder, look more like conventional wastebaskets, but are still designed to hold plastic grocery bags. Some users of a slightly different version complained about it being hard to remove the bag without making a mess—a good reminder that ease of use needs to be paramount with products like this.

Well at least we had a good run, thanks mostly to one Tim Meme Howard; now it's just a question of whether it's unpatriotic to watch the Germany-France and/or Brazil-Colombia matches go down tomorrow or politely abstain in observance of Independence Day. Either way, here's yet another trip through World Cup history (we previously took a look at ticket designs from 1930 to present day). Here's a roundup of noteworthy designs from 80 years of World Cup posters—read on to find out how fascism made its way into one design and when choosing the final poster became a matter of public opinion.

As Il Duce of the host country in 1934, Mussolini took the international spotlight as a way to promote fascism through tournament-themed propaganda. Can you spot the subtle fascist symoblism in the poster? Hint: fasces are represented by a bundle of sticks that comprise the handle of an axe. An abstracted variation appears on the player's jersey, next to the flag—it looks something like a gold tetris block—while a watermarked seal is hidden behind the "Italia, A. XII" text at bottom left.

The authoritative symbol is meant to represent the power and jurisdiction of the magistrate, but it actually turns up far beyond the borders of Italy and fascism: The fasces historically appear in heraldry, including various government seals and symbols of our very own federal government. You can find the fasces inside the White House's Oval Office, on either sides of the American flag behind the podium of the United States House of Representatives, on the Lincoln Memorial, on the base of the Statue of Freedom on the United State's capitol building—the list goes on.

The game ball is main attraction in the 1938 and 1950 posters, for tournaments in Paris and Brazil, respectively (the two intervening tournaments were canceled on account of the war). The 1938 poster features the last lace-sewn game ball—prior to Wilson's star turn opposite Tom Hanks in Castaway, "Allen" was named after the ball's French manufacturers—which was made up of 13 leather panels instead of the usual 12. Like the ball depicted in the poster design, the ball's namesake wasn't printed on the one that was actually kicked around. The actual Allen ball made an appearance at the beginning of matches for pre-game photo ops, but was switched out for an unadorned version for actual game play. According to one account, this was one of the first examples of brand creep in the World Cup—though they didn't achieve the exposure afforded by inclusion in the poster design.

In terms of ball design, lace sewn game balls were nixed in 1950 in favor of a design that allowed the ball to be more easily inflated using a pump. Until the pump was introduced, few people knew how to properly inflate the game balls—it was a delicate task and it was very easy to end up with a lopsided ball. The 1970 cup in Mexico saw the introduction of the iconic black-and-white Telstar; the New York Times has an excellent interactive feature on World Cup balls, if you're curious.

If a client wants six drawings, how do you get away with delivering just three? In this clever bit of illustrations done as advertisements for Jeep, the French outpost of ad agency Leo Burnett has produced what appear to be simple animal mugshots:

However, flip each one over and presto, new animal:

Tom Mabe is a comedian and sort of professional prankster, with a YouTube channel documenting his feats of fooled-ya. While I'm generally not a fan of deceiving people and videotaping it to entertain others, Mabe's most famous video has a a social-minded bent: He fooled a perennial drunk driver into thinking he'd just woken from a ten-year coma, in an effort to scare him straight.

But it's a more viscerally frightening prank of his that really got our attention. Last Halloween, Mabe mated an RC hexcopter with a Grim Reaper costume, and the results were pretty terrifying:

I don't know how, in litigious America, Mabe has avoided being sued. In any case, here's how he pulled off the Reaper stunt:

Happy Fourth of July! We know that our non-Yank readership doesn't care about our special day, especially you Brits. In fact, Stephen Merchant has explained why our holiday of independence rankles his British self—and how things would be better had Britain won. (If you're in the UK, the language is NSFW; if you're in America, crank the volume up all you want—those silly British curse words don't mean anything over here.)

But since the UK came up second best in that particular contest, we are free to launch fireworks on this special day. Unfortunately there's no prerequisite for intelligence when doing so. For one thing, my fellow countrymen, please don't launch fireworks while your dog is off-leash. In the following video this dog appears to have been trained by Al-Qaeda, though thankfully things do not end badly:

Throughout its 80-year history Massey University has played a defining role in the development of New Zealand as a nation. The College of Creative Arts at Massey University is a world-class art and design school based in Wellington, New Zealand with a legacy of creative education. The College of Creative Arts is seeking to extend its activities in design entrepreneurialism/enterprise, design thinking and applied design research and they want three new driven members of staff to respond to the extraordinary demand for expertise in these areas.

The right applications should have a postgraduate qualification in design, a strong record of recent research and an exceptional academic or professional background in Design, or a related field. Proven ability to access external research funds would be an advantage as well as an ability to forge links with industry. This is an outstanding opportunity, so go on, Apply Now!

CHICAGOLAND at WantedDesign. Photo by Alex Welsh

By Morgan Walsh

Now that it's officially July, the city of Chicago has settled into its annual routine of near-constant street festivals, concerts, BBQs, neighborhood 5Ks and other seasonal activities. With the heat and the holiday, it's almost easy to forget the hullabaloo surrounding the Chicago design community and it's myriad events only a few weeks ago. Starting in May and culminating in the first weeks of June, the Guerilla Truck Show, This is Chicago, and CHICAGOLAND set up (and tore down) shop; CHGO DSGN and the Chicago Design Museum hosted opening receptions; and Catalyze Chicago, a young organization offering resources to local designers, hit their membership capacity.

Preview Reception at Chicago Design Museum. Courtesy David Ettinger

The common thread, title-wise, between the names of these events and the organizations collectively represent the Chicago design community and, like the proverbial diamond in the rough, its various facets: collaboration, shared resources and a regular old Midwestern work ethic. Presumably anticipating a sylvan summer getaway, Rick Valicenti likened various groups of Chicago designers to multiple campfires across the city. His thought, which is clear within his show, was that the closer these campfires become, the more light they'll put off, making it easier to see Chicago design from a distance. So before the "summer-of-Chicago-design" fades into just-another-Chicago-summer, here is a summary of just a few Chicago design events that have taken (or are taking) place, how they overlap and what the community can still gain from them.

CHGO DSGN at the Chicago Cultural Center. Courtesy Ross Floyd Photography

"CHGO DSGN" is a massive display of current object and graphic design currently on view at the Chicago Cultural Center. Curated by Valicenti, 2011 recipient of the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award, the opening night saw over 2,000 visitors. With limited promotion, the record turnout was a testament to the interest in local design work, and to the vast network at play. Rick's show, as it is often fondly referred to, features over 100 makers, and over 200 pieces of work, presented in funky, densely packed vignettes. While CHGO DSGN offers the obvious benefit of accessibility to a public audience, it has also helped bring designers in closer proximity to each other. Per his example above, exhibiting together is one way to dissolve the boundaries, both physical and perceived, between object and graphic designers, to see what is happening outside one's bubble and envision future relationships.

Opening Night at CHGO DSGN. Courtesy Alfonso Monroy and Elizabeth Muskopf

More steps forward, and upward, for our robotic overlords: architectural 3D printing gets practical with a little teamwork. A group at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia has developed a 3-robot skeleton crew capable of laying down architecturally relevant shapes and material. Using the most basic tools (off-the-shelf electronics and Erector Set parts), their team based design solves the key problem of large scale additive printing: size of the printer. To date, most "printed" architecture requires a massive external framework, supporting the large single printer in an absurdly scaled-up version of desktop machines. In order for the technology to become more than a gimmicky gesture—that architecture is, in fact, paying attention to trends—that needs to change.

The first robot team member is equipped with a sensor that follows an initial marked path. It lays the first several centimeters of synthetic marble in a coiled foundation. The second robot fits onto the foundation, gripping the sides tightly with rollers. It continues squeezing out coils of marble, smoothing and shooting it with nearly 200° air. The head of the second team member is also mobile, allowing the form to take on curved surfaces as the coiled "building" advances. The third robot is my favorite: Breaking from the horizontal coil-pot method, it uses suction cups and pressurized air to crawl vertically up the structure. Its job is to reinforce the weaknesses of a structure built with all materials laid in the same direction. This is the biggest drawback to a coil-printed design, as anyone vaguely familiar with shear strength can imagine. (Just think about how easy it would be to squish in the side of that coil pot.) By letting this mountain-climbing robot squirt on reinforcing "beams" of marble, it can add rigidity as needed.

From August 13th thru the 16th, the 2014 IDSA International Conference is bringing a list of provocative speakers to Austin, TX, all in the name of sharing valuable, practical and enlightening information with the masses. Core77 is proud to sponsor the event so we wanted to introduce you to one of this year's Conference speakers, Maria Boustead of Po Campo. Maria will be speaking about Designers as Entrepreneurs, a topic she is quite familiar with as the founder of her own bike-centric bag company. We asked Maria about her journey from designer to entrepreneur, where she finds the best creative exchanges and for a preview of her Conference presentation.

What limitations in circa 2008 era biking gear led you to start Po Campo?

At the time, I was working at a design agency. I liked biking to work or to meetings or wherever; I found it to be enjoyable and a good source of both exercise and new ideas. Of course, you need a way to carry your stuff and I quickly learned that backpacks and messenger bags would make my back sweaty and that they would be uncomfortable if loaded up with too much stuff. Therefore, I was on the hunt for a bag I could attach to my bike while riding and then easily detach and carry around as my normal bag throughout my day. There were plenty of good quality bike bags on the market, but they were built more for bike touring and weren't really designed to be carried around, both aesthetically and functionally. When I couldn't find a bag that fit the bill, I decided to design my own.

How did you get into softgoods/bag design?

I graduated from college in 2001, just when the first tech bubble burst. Hardly anyone was hiring junior designers so when I got a job at Arctic Zone, a manufacturer of sewn coolers and lunch bags, I was beyond ecstatic. I had always enjoyed sewing and was interested in softgoods, but hadn't had any experience in cut-and-sew manufacturing before that job. I really fell in love with it; it is perfectly suited for how I like to create. It is a truly iterative process because there is little to no tooling that you have to invest in, so you can literally update and tweak with every production run. I also enjoyed discovering new fabrics and experimenting with textures and colors and prints. Your palette is so much bigger than with other materials, and I find that to be a lot of fun from a design perspective.

In West Pomerania, Poland, stands a rather odd grove of pine trees. Some 400 of the trees have taken the peculiar shapes you see pictured, while the surrounding forest is filled with pines that have grown the ordinary way, true and straight.

The trees, collectively called "The Crooked Forest," were estimated to have been planted from 1930 to 1934, when Pomerania was still a German possession. And while nature-driven theories have been put forth as to why the trees are shaped this way—some think heavy snowfall caused the bends when the trees were sapling-aged—what seems more likely is that this is man-made intervention.

The prevailing theory is that the trees were deliberately shaped, when seven to ten years old, for the purpose of eventually harvesting the naturally bent wood to construct something. Boats, furniture or some type of structure are the best guesses. On the nautical side, IFLScience's Justine Alford dug up this quote from a Navy & Marine article on 19th Century shipbuilding called "Wooden Vessel Ship Construction:"

Oaks from the areas of Northern Europe were fine for the development of long straight planking, but the gnarled English "Hedgerow" Oak was the best for the natural curved timbers used to strengthen the ship internally. Trees were even deliberately bent in certain ways so as to 'grow' a needed set of curved timbers. These curved timbers were known as 'compass' timbers.

Greg Klassen is a craftsman who's extremely attuned to his environment. "I live in the Pacific Northwest and find inspiration in the trees, the rivers and the fields," he writes. "I love the idea of taking a discarded tree and giving it new life." To that end, Klassen has developed a beautiful line of furniture called the River Collection, and it features an unusual twist on the "live edge": Each tabletop is two halves with the live edges running down the center. Klassen then hand-cuts a single piece of glass to make up the difference.

The resultant pieces, which are of course one-of-a-kind, resemble landscapes bisected by a river.

Google Ideas is a team at Google that explores how technology can enable people to confront threats in the face of conflict, instability or repression. As an interaction designer you are at the forefront of every product they build. With a strong portfolio and a deep understanding of user motivations, you could be their new hire!

If you're perfect for this role, your job will be to envision how people experience Google products and bring that vision to life in a way that feels inspired, refined and even magical. In this role you'll tackle complex tasks and transform them into intuitive, accessible and easy-to-use designs for products that can empower people around the world--from the first-time user to the sophisticated expert. Check out the qualifications and responsibilities on the next page and Apply Now for this wonderful opportunity.

Sometimes two tree branches will grow in such a way that they begin to touch. As the wind blows the branches and they rub together, the bark at the point of contact is gradually worn away, exposing the cambium. As the branches continue to grow, becoming thick enough to minimize their movement in the wind, bark can then re-grow around the point of contact, fusing the two branches together. This process is called inosculation, and in the 1920s a Swedish immigrant named Axel Erlandson observed it happening on his California farm.

Erlandson figured he'd give inosculation a go, and soon he was tinkering with sycamores to create geometric, conjoined shapes, symbols like hearts and lightning bolts, and weaving multiple trees in a circle to create baskets. Twenty years later, his property was covered with them.

In 1945 Erlandson's wife and daughter, fresh off a vacation to Santa Cruz, observed that there was a lot of tourist traffic there along the coast, as opposed to their sleepy farm in Hilmar some 100 miles inland. Together they hatched the crazy idea that if they uprooted and moved Erlandson's arboreal creations to the coast, they could sell tickets to tourists to view the oddities.

Amazingly, they pulled it off. Erlandson dug the trees up, carefully pruned the roots and wrapped them in peat moss and burlap, and somehow trucked the things over to a 3.5-acre plot of land he purchased in Scotts Valley, some six miles outside of Santa Cruz. I was not able to find a record of the precise number of trees he transported, but it was enough to open the tourist attraction he called "The Tree Circus" in 1947.

Once again, we're pleased to announce that Core77 will be the media partner for the Bike Cult Show, New York City's annual celebration of handbuilt bicycles and the craftspeople behind them. Now in its second year, organizers Harry Schwartzman, Dave Perry and Benjamin Peck are bringing the two-day bike extravaganza to the Knockdown Center in Maspeth, Queens, a 50,000 sq. ft. event space that will host an impressive (and still growing) roster of exhibitors from the Northeast region over the weekend of August 16–17.

As with last year, we're looking forward to seeing sweet new bikes from the likes of Johnny Coast, Jamie Swan, Rick Jones and Thomas Callahan. Indeed, all of the builders whom we profiled last year will be participating again this year—except, of course, the late Ezra Caldwell, who succumbed to cancer in May, after long outliving his doctors' prognoses. A beloved member of many communities beyond bike building, Ezra is gone but not forgotten, and the show will go on.

Stay tuned for a series of builder profiles leading up to the show, as well as news and updates, here on Core77. As with the inaugural show, the second annual Bike Cult Show promises to be a good one!

In case you missed it, check out our video profile of Jamie Swan

Tech reviewer Marques Brownlee somehow got a hold of what is purportedly the screen for Apple's forthcoming iPhone 6. Made of sapphire rather than Gorilla Glass, the screen has been rumored to be a big step up in durability.

The material-minded will recall that Apple's current iPhone features sapphire covers for both the camera and the home button/fingerprint sensor, and in those roles it is crucial the material not be scratchable, otherwise the functionality would be compromised. But how will it hold up with a much larger surface area, comprising the entire 4.7" screen of the 6? On his YouTube channel MKBHD, Brownlee puts it to the test by working it over with a knife and a set of keys, before finally attempting to bend and break it. Have a look:

Editor: Last time Anonymous Designer ran down the first five hassles with organizing a group design show: Getting funding, organizing your unruly band of designers, wrangling the troublemakers, fighting over the design of the space, and finally producing your own work. Here he lists the remaining five obstacles.

6. Transportation Logistics, Part 1: Group to Home Base

You know what makes you wish you'd gone into graphic design, rather than industrial design? Physically transporting your pieces. First off, in a group show you've got to get every designer's pieces from their separate workshops and production houses to the central loading dock that you will ship out from. And in this city a lot of people don't have cars, so they have to figure out a ZipCar, but they got the wrong size and their piece doesn't fit, or they try to borrow a friend's car, but the friend is late or doesn't show up, and now you're going to miss the truck to City B...

7. Transportation Logistics, Part 2: Home Base to Venue

How do you actually get the entire group's stuff from City A to City B? Do you rent a U-Haul and flip coins to see which two team members are going to make the 16-hour drive? Do you trust the guy who couldn't find your shop from his shop just four blocks away to make it several states away to City B within the prescribed time window?

Last year we ended up hiring a private trucker. He drove the 16 hours to City B, unloaded, then drove to a site we found outside the city where he could dump the truck for five days. Then we put him in a taxi to the airport and flew him back to City A. Five days later we flew him back out to City B, sent someone to pick him up at the airport to bring him to the truck, then he drove the truck to the venue, loaded up, and drove back to City A. Imagine how long it took to plan and coordinate that, and then double your estimate.

Well, you could always take a cue from our favorite IKEA hack of all time and use them to fuel a fire... but not only does burning pallets lack the elegance of the ad hoc bow drill (in the above hack), there are any number of reasons not to scrap them for firewood.*

We've seen from at least a few pallet-based design projects, including upcycled chairs and a full-fledged office, not to mention our own pop-upexhibition design. Among the pallet facts that we picked up along the way—some 700 million pallets are manufactured each year; North American standard pallets measure in at 48” × 40”—we were interested to learn that the EPAL-spec'd EUR-pallet comes in at different dimensions and standards.

It so happens that the 1200×800mm² Europallet, as it is colloquially known, is suitably sized to span the (active) tram tracks that criss-cross certain cities around the world. Whereas several stateside and Italian streetcar systems run on 'broad gauge' tracks—wider than the 1435mm standard gauge that also turns up in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Great Britain, Germany, etc.—the taxonomy also includes narrow gauge tracks, including a one-meter width in cities such as Antwerp, Basel, Belgrade, Bern, Frankfurt, Geneva, Ghent, Helsinki, Zürich to name a few. (Different widths are named after different locales, including Russian, Irish, Iberian and Indian, all of which are broad gauge; see the full list here.)

And while trams are certainly a practical mode of transportation, the tracks can be a hazard to certain smaller-wheeled vehicles such as bicycles or skateboards. Which brings us to Tomas Moravec's pallet hack:

While the Slovakian artist has created many performative works of sculpture, installation and video art since he made the Duchamp-meets-Alÿs piece in 2008, the video went up just a few months ago. The brief description notes that Bratislavan trams run on felicitously narrow 1000mm-wide tracks: "A new transport vehicle brings change into the spatial perspective of a passenger in motion and generally changes the life of the city, through which the pallet can run, guided by a map of the city lines." (We have to assume that it would technically work in any of the cities listed above as well.)

In 1918 Marcel Duchamp, an avid chess player, designed a one-off set and had it hand-carved in Buenos Aires. Depending on whom you listen to, that set has either been lost or is sitting in someone's private collection; either way you're not getting your grubby little mitts on it.

But now, thanks to artists and makers Scott Kildall and Bryan Cera, anyone with a 3D printer can crank out something very close. That's because Kildall, on a mission to recreate lost objects, tracked down some archival photos and contacted Cera, who then took the few images of Duchamp's set and painstakingly CAD'ded over the pieces one by one.