This is a true story. Descriptions of companies, clients, schools, projects, and designers may be altered and anonymized to protect the innocent.

Editor: This True I.D. Story comes to us anonymously, from an up-and-coming designer ready to hit the trade shows. All he needed was a little manufacturing help...

I'd been working on this one [tabletop item] design for a while, I think Core77 even covered it. After a long development time, I finally got it to a point where it was time to industrialize it, get somebody else making it. Before that point I'd just been cranking out prototypes myself, with my little shitty little Craftsman router table—in other words, I was not set up to do any kind of real production.

So I'm looking around for someone who can get the job done and I hear about this one older dude, I'll call him OPG for Old Production Guy. He's a friend of a friend of a friend, within an hour's drive of my shop, and is by reputation a fantastic woodworker. He came highly recommended with years of experience in the furniture industry. The word was that he'd eventually moved on into a tangential field related to woodworking machines, but was now reportedly itching to make stuff again. With all of his experience, he sounded like a good fit, and having worked in the industry, he presumably knew all about the importance of deadlines.

So I pay him a visit, and this dude has a gigantic warehouse with access to like every woodworking machine under the sun. Table saws, bandsaws, router tables, shapers, planers, joiners, and all of these crazy contraptions for performing multiple operations at once. He grabbed some scrap wood and demonstrated the tolerances of some of the machines for me and they were pretty impressive. You could tell by the way he handled the wood and the machines that he'd been doing this his entire life.

I figured with a warehouse full of equipment like that I might be too small-potatoes for him—I just needed a small run of these [objects] that I could bring to a trade show—but after I pulled out my drawings to show him, he seemed excited by my design and eager to make it, and my low numbers didn't faze him. I got the vibe that he just wanted to make sawdust again.

So he asked me to bring out two prototypes, as I had designed both a smaller and larger version and he wanted to see them both. I brought them out there and we had lunch and talked about it while he looked the prototypes over. At the end of the meeting he goes "Okay, why don't I try to make a couple of these and we'll see how it goes? And then we'll go from there."

I was like "Wait, don't you need like a deposit? Or to like, give me a quote?"

"Nah, don't worry about it, we'll just test it out," he says. And I'm like "Oh, sweet!"

So this was my first misstep.

A number of my clients now collect compostable materials, either for their own outdoor composting, or for city curbside collection bins. While a home recycling station might include a compost collection section, that's far from the only way to go.

If you're designing a kitchen, you may want to consider having something like the BLANCO SOLON compost system built into the countertop. Shannon Del Vecchio, an interior designer, LEED AP, says that "this useful feature is well on its way to becoming standard issue for new kitchens and renovations in the [San Francisco] Bay Area."

But there are also interesting designs for end-users who don't have the built-in option. The OXO compost bin follows the common approach of not being airtight, to avoid anaerobic conditions and the resultant odors. The lid detaches for easy emptying when the bin is taken outdoors. This bin is designed to be used without a liner; all parts are dishwasher-safe.

One way to control the odor (and the flies) is to freeze the compostable scraps. Scrap Happy from Full Circle, made of flexible silicone, has a wire rim to attach to a drawer, so end users can easily push scraps into the bin. It then goes into the freezer until it's time to use it again—or empty it, by pushing on the bottom. Again, this is a dishwasher-safe product.

Shipping containers have been becoming a lot of things lately—homes, churches, a Subway sandwich shop... the list goes on. We've got another one to add to the list: a larger-than-life kaleidoscope that you can actually walk into. The effect is much the same as a house of mirrors. Designers Masakazu Shirane and Saya Miyazaki are responsible for this psychedelic project, titled "Wink Space." At first glance, the structure comes off as a blinding beacon of mirrors—catch it at the wrong angle you'll be seeing sunspots instead of symmetry—but step inside and you'll find that Shirane and Miyazaki have a few surprises for you.

My favorite quirk has got to be the fact that the entire kaleidoscope is constructed with zippers—meaning various 'windows' can be unzipped and revealed from the inside. The designers call this "the world's first zipper architecture." Staying true to the quick assemblage/breakdown nature of shipping containers, they wanted this sentiment to translate in Wink Space. "A thin and light material was demanded to build the zipper architecture," Shirane and Miyazaki explain. "Therefore I referred to origami, which is a traditional game in Japan that can be made both light and strong only by folding. In other words, this polyhedron is built by folding one plane of 15m×8m."

When job descriptions are this fun, we find it's best to let them do the talking...
"Do your Adobe Suite skills rival Beyonce's dance skills? Are you obsessed (not in a creepy way) with typography, spatial relationships, and awesome UI's? Can you design a tasty-looking egg roll with one hand while eating a real egg roll with the other? Alright, you don't have to eat while working, but if it helps with your work-flow we're totally ok with that.

Hi, we're EAT24 and we need a UI/UX Graphic Designer to keep our mobile apps, websites, ads, and email campaigns looking sexy. That means we need you to have at least a few years of experience designing for web and mobile app UI/UX with a kick-ass portfolio to back it up. Ideally you also have some understanding of business strategies and user research, as well as an ability to play well with others and adapt to specific styleguides." Don't miss out on this great opportunity! Apply Now.

Underway as of yesterday, the XX Commonwealth Games in Glasgow have been drawing lots of comparisons to the Olympic Games of London 2012. Some of this commentary has been plainly insipid, while others have been downright mean. Lyn Gardner's review of the XX Commonwealth Games Opening Ceremony review was cruel and nasty, the way New York City fashion editors take pot-shots at Dallas by publishing images of big-haired women in loud dresses when covering social events in the Lone Star State.

While this may all come down to the "Scottish Cringe" (a national trait of self-deprecation), the Opening Ceremonies at Celtic Park on Wednesday night raise the valid question of how one distills culture and values into a stadium floorshow?

To be sure, there were several cliché moments like giant dancing tea cakes, an inflatable Loch Ness Monster and John Barrowman's costume of purple tartan. But there were also some inspired moments like the Scottish Ballet's touching duet to a muted version of the Proclaimers' "500 Miles"; the Scottish terriers accompanying each nation's athletes; and the gay kiss in the opening moments. This last gesture was an unequivocal statement to the 42 participating countries that have laws against homosexuality on their statute books: These Games (a.k.a. The Friendly Games) are a celebration of equality and diversity.

But aside from the impossible task of portraying a nation's historical contributions in a one-hour spectacle (London 2012's supermodels and Sochi's weeping bear seem farther from the mark than highland dancing on whisky barrels), there is some stellar design work associated with the XX Commonwealth Games at Glasgow 2014.

In addition to the Queen's Baton, which we reported on last October, the designs of the medals, podiums and medal bearers' costumes all have a quality of elegant abstraction as they contemporary updates to traditional representations of Scottish culture at the medals ceremonies of the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games.

It's 1952 in Cambiago, Italy, and a young man makes a fateful decision not to go into the family farming business. Ernesto Colnago loves racing bicycles, knows how to fix them, and wants to make them rather than tilling the soil. His father responds by grabbing an axe—and cutting down the family's mulberry tree, to turn the lumber into a workbench for Ernesto.

Colnago started selling high-quality custom steel frames in 1954, and in the subsequent decades gained a reputation for designing and building winning racing bikes. By the '70s, Colnago was making super-light steel frames, and in the '80s, used a then-radical top tube with an oval cross-section in a quest for increased stiffness. Then came the materials experimentation: Aluminum, titanium, and finally carbon fiber in a fateful collaboration with Ferrari in the late '80s.

By 1987 they'd produced their first carbon fiber prototype—but it wasn't ready for prime time. "The first fruit of Colnago and Ferrari Engineering's cooperation [was] the Concept bicycle," the company writes, "with carbon fiber tubes, composite three-spoke wheels and a gear system enclosed in the chainrings. The unusual gears [made] it too heavy for production, but the ideas in its frame [informed] all subsequent Colnago carbon fiber bicycles."

They've spent the years since working it out, and just this month they've updated their flagship bike. The Colnago C60 is hand-manufactured with the same process of "lugged" construction as its predecessor C59. Under this technique, the tubes that Colnago has formed from Japanese-made carbon fiber can be cut to specific lengths and inserted into a range of different lugs, or hubs if you will. This allows relatively quick and easy customization. (The alternative is to mold the frame in one piece, which would require a new, expensive mold for each variation in geometry.)

Watching the bike come together, it almost resembles a plumber cleaning and pasting PVC pipes together:

Sure, smartphones allow us to communicate with anyone in the world at any time and provide access to a global network of knowledge and entertainment, but it's not like we can just pull the things out of our pockets and start using them. No. Instead we are forced to type in a four-digit security code!

This provides a unique set of physical challenges. For example, let's say that your security code is 1-9-8-2. This means you have to send your thumb up to the "1" at the top left of the screen, then move it all the way down to the bottom right to press the "9!" Then you have a little break moving it over to the "8," but that's temporary, because guess what, then you have to move your thumb all the way up to the top again to hit "2!" What are we, slaves?

Thankfully, for those of us who weren't born with Arnold Schwarzenegger's thumbs, help is here in the form of Digital Tattoos. These NFC-based skin stickers come in packs of ten. You stick one onto your body and tap your phone against it to "accept" it, which should be easier than getting your parents to accept that tribal/Celtic/Chinese character tattoo. From then on, you just tap your smartphone (it can be any smartphone in the world, as long as it's a Moto X) against the sticker and boom, the phone is unlocked, no Gatorade breaks required.

The adhesive "lasts for five days, and is made to stay on through showering, swimming, and vigorous activities like jogging," making this ideal for those who like to shower, swim, and/or jog vigorously.

Digital Tattoos aren't free, of course, they're $10 per pack. But that's no problem, because when you run out, you just pay them another ten dollars and then they give you another pack. In other words, you can just keep buying them!

On any given day, many Marines carry more than 15 pounds of batteries along with all their other rations and gear. Add that to the fact that they're mostly on their feet, constantly moving, and you have a recipe for fatigue. But what if you could harness the energy from their movements and the weight of that gear while also decreasing the amount of poundage these Marines have to heft? That was the idea that brought together Lockheed Martin and STC Footwear to design and develop a pair of boots that capture the energy from all those footsteps and turn it into usable power.

The Kinetic Boots were announced early last May at the Marine Corps' Experimental Forward Operating Base (ExFOB) event, where Marines demonstrated their ability to generate around three watts of power after an hourlong walk, enough to charge an iPhone 5 three times. This just a start—Lockheed Martin and STC anticipate that the boots' have the potential to generate nearly twice as much power after further development.

"There were two or three key challenges that we identified on day one," says Michel Bisson, CEO and Chairman of the Canada-based STC Footwear. "The main one was that we wanted to use only the wasted energy generated when the person walks or runs. It was very critical for us that no additional work be required by any part of the body (i.e. joint) other than carrying the two to three ounces that the system weighed." Lockheed had previously explored solar-power chest panels and helmets, but those devices added significant weight, and STC was determined to avoid that trap.

You really have to feel sorry for rich kids living in cities. Because even if their parents own an incredibly rare Ferrari 250GT, it will be parked in the underground garage beneath their luxury building, and their children will never achieve spiritual growth by sending the car over a precipice like Cameron did in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. The car would have to be parked somewhere on an upper story, preferably on the same level as their tony apartment, in order for the kids to experience this kind of gravity-based emotional catharsis.

An artist's rendition of Hitchbot on the road

Seeing as self-driving cars won't be a reality any time soon, robots need to find an alternate means of travel for the time being. Case in point, the HitchBOT, a tiny, rainboot-wearing robot who is by (you guessed it) hitchhiking the time-honored tradition of hitchhiking. Even so, he's probably less eccentric than your average itinerant: With bright yellow Wellies strapped to his feet and a cake-saver helmet, HitchBOT has a bucket for a body and pool noodles for limbs and looks something like a child's storybook or TV show... which is kind of the point.

The brainchild of Dr. Frauke Zeller of Ryerson University and Dr. David Harris Smith of McMaster University, the HitchBOT was designed to travel some 6,000+ km from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design to Victoria, British Columbia, by means of friendly strangers. He comes fully equipped with 3G, GPS, WiFi and solar panels, so the hitchBOT team can track and receive texts/photos highlighting the droid's progress and deliver the updates to his quickly growing circle of fans. The robot will depend on the goodwill of travelers when he runs out of juice—once the energy from the solar panels is used up, all it takes is a simple connection to a car's cigarette lighter to reboot.

The droid is pretty limited when it comes to mobility—his only moving part is his arm—but can sit thanks to a retractable tripod. A car seat is attached to his torso for easy buckling. HitchBOT can also speak English (along with a few sentences of French) and has access to Wikipedia for small talk topics. You could do worse when it comes to a road-trip buddy.

If creating dynamic holistic user experiences for industry leading brands is your passion you will fit right in at Wrigley. They create in a high energy, hands on, collaborative environment utilizing state of the art tools and processes you would expect to have as part of thirty billion dollar organization. At Wrigley, they are committed to differentiating our products and experiences through thoughtful design. This is your chance to join their team as their next Senior Industrial Designer.

As a part of the team you will need to excel at the practice of conceptualization, focusing 3D modeling, iterative prototyping, verbal and non verbal presentations. You will participate in research activities and the translation of that data into user insights. If you possess a passion for design, a creative and entrepreneurial mindset and the ability to holistically address brand challenges, Apply Now.

Those are the cities, but not the bikes; the big reveal is below...

Now in its third edition, the Oregon Manifest Bike Design Project set out a challenge for five teams in five cycling-heavy cities: pairing design firms and bike builders, who can make the most innovative utility bike? Once partnered, these designers and builders dug deep into what they thought a utilitarian bike should provide and hustled to bring their ideas off the page and onto the street. Last Friday, the teams from New York (Pensa× Horse Cycles), Portland (Industry× Ti Cycles), San Francisco (HUGE× 4130 Cycle Works), Seattle (Teague× Sizemore Bicycle) and Chicago (MNML× Method) unveiled their creations to local audiences. Public voting opens today, and cycling enthusiasts are invited to determine which design is the most visionary and best suited for the everyday rider; once the votes are tallied following the August 2 deadline, the winner will earn a chance at being put into production by Fuji Bikes.

Details from MNML and Pensa; full bikes below

Check out the teams and what they made and stay tuned for our exclusive designer Q&As throughout the week.

On Friday, July 25, the Scottish Ecological Design Association launched the latest issue of their magazine, which is published two to three times a year, at Greek Thomson's Caledonia Road Church in Glasgow. Local leaders in sustainable design presented their work, from MakLab (a turbo-charged version of your neighborhood fab lab) to the Glasgow Wooden Bike Project and GalGael Trust's covetable reclaimed lumber, among other noteworthy projects.

First up was Oliver Gooddard's "Let it Bee." His beehive and integrated apiary made of sustainable timber ensures that honey stores are kept in sanitary condition by segregating the queen's chambers from those of the worker bees. Based on years of beekeeping experience, Goddard abides by sustainable cultivation practices: Rather than selling all the honey from the bees and feeding them sugar during the winter, they harvest only what they might use and allow the bees to keep the nectar they've worked so hard to create for the long winter months.

Another stunning installation was the dining set "Sexy Legs," a walnut and sycamore ensemble by cabinetmaker David Watson. Each piece is finished with an alternate set of burr walnut or fiddleback sycamore "stockings." From his Clyde-side workshop in central Glasgow, David and his team of skilled craftsmen manufacture high-quality furniture sourced from only certified sustainable forests.

Perennially the most popular—and competitive—category of the Core77 Design Awards, Consumer Products encompasses everything from health and wellness to comfort and convenience. If you didn't catch the announcement of the Consumer Products winners back in June (live from our first annual Core77 Conference, no less), here's a closer look at the honorees, along with comments from the jury team led by Johan Liden.

As always, this year's honorees represent a full range of forward-thinking and noteworthy products released in 2013, for which mass market appeal is as much a criteria as the incremental innovations behind these objects. In fact, each of these products represents an upgrade from the average, unremarkable things that you might use everyday to the rarefied canon of products that you actually enjoy using.

Professional Winner: SOMA Water Filter and Carafe, by Moreless & Radius Product Development

It's a simple yet powerful premise: That a humble water carafe might serve as a centerpiece for a kitchen or dining room. Moreless and Radius Product Development rose to the challenge and developed the SOMA Water Filter and Carafe for that very purpose. Here's what the jury had to say: "SOMA is just as much about presentation as it is about purification. While other filtration pitchers may be intended to live on the dinner table, SOMA is the first one that belongs there... When you see it you ask yourself 'Why hasn't anyone done this before?', which we felt is at the heart of great design."

» Learn more about the SOMA Water Filter and Carafe

Student Winner: Stack, by Mugi Yamamoto

It's easy to see why Mugi Yamamoto's compact inkjet printer earned the praise of designers, including the jury team. Stack sits atop a column of paper and works its way down. The jury appreciated the transparency behind the work: "We loved the deconstruction and reductive thinking of an otherwise clunky, dated device and it's ability to solve for some real world pain points—imagine always knowing if the printer has paper in it!"

» Learn more about Stack

Vacheron Constantin timepieces have been worn by the likes of Harry Truman, the Duke of Windsor and even Napoleon Bonaparte. So when the luxury watch manufacturer needed a special case built to house a one-of-a-kind watch (a "tourbillon minute repeater," buyer unknown), they couldn't exactly buy off-the-rack. Instead they turned to UK-based Method Studio, a highly specialized manufacturer of one-off furniture and cases, to create something truly unique.

Method Studio, which is comprised of the husband-and-wife, cabinetmaker-and-architect team of Callum Robinson and Marisa Giannasi, along with the input of Callum's master-cabinetmaker/woodcarver/designer/builder father David Robinson, is located on the east coast of Scotland. But they were able to source some "rare old-growth brown oak" from a woodlands in Northampton as their starting point.

Today saw the unveiling of the collaborative bicycle designs that are going head to head in the third edition of the Oregon Manifest, in which five teams in as many cities set out to create and craft the best urban utility bike. As of this morning's launch, the public is invited to vote on their favorite one, which may well be produced by Fuji Bikes in the near future. We are pleased to present exclusive Q&As with each team so they have a chance to explain why their bicycle is the best before the voting period closes this Sunday, August 3.

First up, Brooklyn's own Pensa× Horse Cycles, representing New York City.

Core77: Did you and Thomas know (or know of) each other before the collaboration? What was the matchmaking process like?

Mark Prommel (Pensa): We had seen Horse Cycles on various design and local maker blogs, and were already really into his work. When we were invited to participate as the NYC representative for The Bike Design Project, Thomas Callahan was definitely at the top of the list of bike craftsmen we were interested in talking to. After meeting a few builders, the choice was easy.

By its very nature, the design-fabrication relationship for this collaboration is far more intimate than your average designer's relationship with a contractor or manufacturer. To what degree did you educate each other on your respective areas of expertise? Has the collaboration yielded broader lessons?

One of the things that really made this relationship work well was the fact that Thomas is an established designer in his own right, and we at Pensa are also accomplished makers and fabricators. So it wasn't just a "we design it / you build it" relationship—it was a fully collaborative from the first day. All of our concepts were born out of our first few weeks of open collaboration workshops. Thomas was very open to our approach of establishing the big picture story of the bike first, ensuring it was unique, compelling, and based on real insight about the New York City urban rider. We had to make sure that we were looking at the full range of possibilities for the bike and that the foundation of our concept would have enough layers to make the end result truly special. In developing our early concepts together, Thomas lent a wealth of experience and expertise that prevented us from going down paths that would have been wrought with insurmountable challenges.

Although the perennial buzz around 3D printing has yet to materialize into a proper industrial revolution, the increasingly powerful technology has gained some traction in the medical world, where customizability and on-site availability trump the constraints of cost and scale. It may come as no surprise, then, that one of the 2014 Core77 Design Awards honorees that caught our eye was developed by a previous winner, whose work we'd covered as far back as 2010, before the the inaugural awards program.

This time around, Scott Summit took Professional Runner Up in the Social Impact category with the EKSO personal exoskeleton, a mecha-like medical device at the intersection of robotics, rehabilitation and digital fabrication. As a replacement for a wheelchair, the device has the potential to revolutionize mobility for paraplegic individuals.

Summit shares credit with Gustavo Fricke, 3D Systems and Ekso Bionics, all of whom worked together to print parts that connect a person to their robot as naturally and respectively as possible. "This is an unusual design effort on every front," designer Scott Summit says. "We had challenges with the technical details, since these are massive files, and almost entirely organic, but very precise. It's also very tricky to scan a paralyzed person, and expect the data to be exactly as desired. We found that even the slightest detail could lead to dangerous bruising." All of that considered, the prototypes have been met with a great response. The test pilot loves it so much, she wants to use it all of the time. But like many of these things go, the team has to wait until the design is FDA certified to be worn daily.

If you appreciate organized and efficient living spaces, and would like to create tomorrow's home storage and organization products, Lynk would like to hear from you. Lynk is a leader in the home storage and organization market and they are looking for two industrial design interns or part-time designers who have strong creative problem solving skills and desires to bring valuable new product ideas to life.

As part of the Lynk design team, you will have direct involvement in all areas of design from concept to market. This means you'll need knowledge and understanding of industrial design processes, strong ideation and visualization skills and proficiency using Photoshop, Illustrator and SolidWorks. If you want to create new products that improve people's lives and build up your resume at a company with 35 years of market leadership, Apply Now.

Images via Robbie Khan / PetaPixel

While I'd previously caught wind of LG's new 34" monitor, the company's hero shots showed little more than a rectangle covered in Photoshopped fake screens and devoid of local scale. But I just came across photographer Robbie Khan's write-up on his, and seeing it with actual work on it drives home how gi-normous this thing is.

Like many of us creatives Khan spends long stretches in front of a monitor, and the 34UM95's 21:9 aspect ration and 3440x1440 resolution would go to good use in his work editing panoramic photos.

LG's product copy points out that they've included a "Screen Splitter" feature (both Windows and Mac compatible) that automatically tiles out four screens with a single click...

You might exchange ideas, motivations and inspiration within your own circles on a regular basis, but how often do you get to do it with people from all across the globe? Your chance to do just that at 2014 IDSA International Conference is almost gone. Late registration for this annual IDSA event ends this Sunday, August 3, but you can also register on-site from August 3rd to August 16th.

Not only is there an impressive line up of speakers and events to attend, the local arts and culture of Austin, TX should keep you busy and perfectly entertained when you're not at the conference center. And don't forget about the Core77 Party on Friday, August 15, at the historic Scoot Inn, kicking off at 9pm. Get your tickets today before it's too late and we'll see you there!