From healthcare and sustainability solutions, to lifestyle accessories and housewares, RKS Design has a history of solving complex and wide-reaching problems by paying close attention to user behavior and relying on a cross-discipline, multi-cultural team of experts for insight discovery. While many design firms can claim the same, or similar, qualities and achievements, RKS stands out from the crowd thanks to an uncommon vein of musical influence that shapes much of what the team accomplishes.

In addition to the work they've done with notable entertainment and audio clients like Line6, JBL and In2Technologies, the RKS team developed their own sustainable guitar and line of guitar gear. We interviewed RKS founder and CEO Ravi Sawhney to find out where this musical preoccupation comes from and what it does to further the firm.

Core77: What part do music and musical instruments play in the creative process at RKS?

Ravi Sawhney: Music is our drug of choice. As designers our creative zones are greatly influenced by the visual environment and the sounds that surround us. I found that growing up during the hippie era, I, like so many others, didn't just use music as background it was and is something we listened to, read into, believed in and connected with. As a student of design, I discovered that music could control my brain from being analytical to creative, from sketching to writing; I found the right music to make it happen. When Lance, my partner and RKS Creative Director, joined, we aligned on our love of music immediately and he introduced me to even more audiophile equipment. At the time, the studio rocked out on an NAD system with Canton speakers. It wasn't long before Lance had us listening to Linn equipment, which I still own at home, as does Lance. The studio today rocks out to JBL studio monitors we designed about four years ago. Music is always on here; in the studio, in the canteen, in the lobby and the prototype lab, and it's all different.

Ravi and the RKS team meet with Line 6 CEO, Paul Foeckler in 2012.

How has developing musical products impacted your approach to designing other, non-musical products?

When we work in the field, we observe people's rituals, their processes and their innate learned behavior (meaning muscle memory) in order to understand the user in a more in depth manner. We apply these learnings and insights into everything we design; product, experience or brand. In working with musicians and their gear, we learned that musicians have an innate ability that allows them to transcend thinking about what they're playing which allows them to fully express themselves through their instrument as an extension of their voice. The instruments they work with are time pieces that capture hundreds of years of design and craftsmanship within a single piece.

So, what's this got to do with designing wearables, an insulin pump, a garlic press, a new bicycle, etc? With each case, there are pre-learned behaviors. We all know that changing someone's behavior, or their learned motions, becomes increasingly difficult over time. This means that we have to experiment with consumers to understand their motivations and boundaries for change. The hardest part about designing new innovations and their experiences is finding the ability to motivate and inspire people to do new things. We all love new products, but what we love most, is doing something new and being successful at it. What we seek to do as designers is to expand and enhance what people love to do and take them on yet another great journey of experiences.

Rock and Hall of Famer Dave Mason and professional musician John Sanmatero with Ravi Sawhney circa 2000, reviewing the initial foam concept of a new guitar, the genesis of the RKS Guitars.

Dude STOP BENDING IT!

When it comes to smartphones, thin is in. But it should be of interest to product designers that as ubiquitous as these skinny devices are becoming—Apple sold 10 million iPhone 6 and 6 Pluses over the weekend, for chrissakes—there really are some basic design problems with smartphones that haven't been totally covered.

Here's what's been in the news: Responding to reports that the iPhone 6 Plus can be bent out of shape when carried in a pants pocket—even a front pocket—while sitting, Lewis Hilsenteger of Unbox Therapy posted a video of his iPhone 6 Plus Bend Test. The results weren't pretty, as the image atop this entry attests, and his video quickly racked up millions of hits.

Cult of Mac, however, was quick to point out that this structural flaw is not new to the iPhone 6 Plus, nor Apple in particular. In CoM's "The Shocking History of Bent Smartphones," they round up examples across manufacturers and models:

So here's the issue: We either want thin phones with large screens, or designers are pushing them on us, yet the slimness combined with broadness (i.e. increased leverage) has a major drawback for a subset of users. In your opinion, where does the fix lie—on the design side, or the user side?

So it's the 1980s and you're running a company that makes typewriters. Sure, some of your customers are switching over to these new things called computers, but overall business is pretty good, and sales are growing each year.

Then the '90s hits, more people start using these stupid computers, and business starts to decline. What do you do? Where's the growth market, or at least the steady market? For New-Jersey-based typewriter manufacturer Swintec, their answer was locked up in U.S. prisons.

At some point in the late '90s, Swintec realized that a subset of the incarcerated need or want typewriters, to type up their own legal briefs, write correspondance or pass the time doing something productive. Swintec was also presumably aware of the Sony SRF-39FP portable radio, a.k.a. "The iPod of Prison"—the "FP" in the product name stands for Federal Prison, which is why the housing is transparent. Guards can easily inspect it to see if there's contraband hidden inside.

Just over a decade ago came a great innovation in a staple design material. The kind you'll come into contact with during your first year at design school. And that is an air-cured, hand-formed rubber also known as Sugru - which is the Gaellic name for "play." It feels like modeling clay and you can mold it into any shape. We covered it when it first launched. After curing it is what you'd expect from a rubber-like material, flexible, grippy, sticky and waterproof. And it's very practical. It can repair everything from toasters to computer cables. And withstand extremes from the dishwasher to the Arctic ocean (temperature ranges from -50 to 180 degrees Celcius.) Check out all the creative uses featured on the sugru site site. It's pretty endless.

Its sticking power is best shown when it bonds to ABS (see video below.) It's sold in sets of 12 minipacks, either in multiple colors or black and white. But it's going to stick to a lot: Aluminum, steel, ceramics, glass, wood, many plastics, leather, silicone, butyl rubber, and sugru itself. It is an electric insulator, so that is why you can safely use it to repair electrical cords. You typically have about 30 minutes to work with sugru once it is removed from its packaging and the cure time is 24 hours (per 3-5mm depth.) The cured material is resistant to UV light, oxidation, fire and water.

OK Go is known for making visually complicated music videos, which we've posted about here, here and here, that require a fiendish amount of coordination. These videos are shot in the real world and (as far as we know) eschew CG. The group Brunettes Shoot Blondes, on the other hand, recently released this video for their song "Knock Knock" that swaps out IRL props for a succession of iDevices:

Despite the creepy "True-Detective"-esque plot—as far as we can tell, a woman is being stalked by a dude with an animal head who smokes cigarettes—it's pretty neat, if nowhere near as stupendous as OK Go's kinetically riotous spectacles.

Tent London—and its sister event Superbrands—took over the long retired Truman Brewery (interestingly the old beer may be making something of a rival) once again for London Design Festival exhibiting creative furniture and design work from both big brands and smaller players.

Highlight of the show for us has to go to the mind boggling optical illusion mirrors on show at the Cascade stand. Although the guys wouldn't reveal to us quite how they had achieved this impressive effect, it seems that neon tubes are wedged between reflective plastic sheets giving this three dimensional tunnel effect shooting straight through a solid wall (there was a stand on the other side, we checked).

We couldn't help but be drawn in by the lovely crisp, clean kitchenwares on show as a collaboration between Sue Pryke and Wild and Wood, a range of crockery and chopping boards with subtle references to life in the great outdoors.

Once wielded by everyone from impatient partygoers to crime scene detectives to insurance inspectors, Polaroid used to be synonymous with instant image capture. With that advantage long since evaporated, the company is seeking to move into a new market—one that's already dominated by GoPro.

The newly-released Polaroid Cube is the company's answer to action-seeking shooters, specifically those looking for bargain-basement prices. At just $100 the Cube is an entry-level product, though it's capable of shooting 1080p HD video; it will either help Polaroid get their foot into the action-cam door, or serve as a stopgap measure for kids saving up for a GoPro.

The Cube was designed by Ammunition and was reportedly not an exercise in "form follows function;" instead Brunner and co. dreamt up the cubic shape, and it was up to the engineers to make the guts fit. According to Businessweek,

Cramming all the camera's guts into a package that's less than 1.5 inches around presented some challenges. When the designers handed the plans over to the development team, they were told the battery wouldn't fit. The problem temporarily threatened the designers' vision of a cube until they came up with a solution of using two rechargeable batteries, one on each side. The configuration had the added benefit of creating a balanced block. After a few nips and tucks, each side of the gadget ended up measuring 35 millimeters—a serendipitous homage to old-school film stock.

I love seeing the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to design you normally see in a product category's infancy. That state before the form factor is set, when designers throw all kinds of crazy stuff at the wall to see what sticks. It's not that every object to emerge from this experimental stage is worthy and enduring; instead I like it because it smacks of creativity and evolution, which is how I think we improve as a species.

With Blackberry's new Passport smartphone, we're seeing this approach in a product category's maturity rather than its infancy. I'm happy to see the company willing to take risks and trying to turn their fortunes around by releasing their weird-looking, trend-bucking device, whose shape was inspired by the little booklet that gives us access to the rest of the world. All smartphones are getting taller but the Passport is going wider, and insisting on preserving physical keys when most of the competition is going for touchscreen.

If only all industrial designers paid as much attention to ergonomics as this engineer.

Michigan-based Michael Chou is a dad who loves ice cream, and has scooped a lot of it out for his kids. Here's the thing: He likes the ice cream when it's frozen solid, not partially melted, and found that he couldn't effectively get it out of the container using a conventional ice cream scoop.

An aerospace engineer by training, Chou examined the problem and found the standard ice cream scoop was at fault. "Current ice cream scoops are designed in a way that forces you to use weak wrist joints to scoop ice cream," he writes. "When you are scooping ice cream with standard ice cream scoops, you are doing a prying motion. This prying motion puts tremendous amounts of stress on your weak wrist joints. Your brain then tries to save your wrists by not letting you pry very hard—thus making scooping ice cream very difficult."

Using his "engineer's understanding of ergonomic design and mechanical force," Chou hit the drawing board to create a better scoop. Give it up to the man--it took him three years and some 38 prototypes before he perfected his design, and as most of it was worked on after-hours, he calls it the Midnight Scoop.

[With the Midnight Scoop], you're not using the small weak muscles located inside the wrist. Instead, you hold the curved end with the palm of your hand and "push" into the ice cream. This allows you to keep your wrists straight and protected while you use large muscles like your arms and chest—which are significantly stronger than your wrist.

...The handle is also long enough to help you reach all parts of a giant container of ice cream yet narrow enough to fit inside small pint size containers just as well.

...The front scoop section is thin enough to cut through ice cream like butter, and thick enough to last. The base of the scoop design forces ice cream to curl into that appealing ice-cream-advertisement look, every time.

If you were a fan of KK Studio's Uncomfortable Series—you know, the one where the took everyday products and made them impossible to use with irritating design bugs features—this will also be right up your alley. Weng Xinyu has devised "Good Medicine Tastes Bitter," a speculative series of four familiar household objects that quite literally have their own agenda.

This lamp's name says it all: "Angry Lamp - The Lamp That Turns Off If It's Not Needed." If it senses that another lamp is already on or if it's too bright in a room, it'll turn itself off by pulling down on its own chain with an arm-like extension. If you somehow manage to leave the room without remembering to turn it off yourself, it'll shut itself down.

The "Time Killer - The Clock That Tries to Kill Itself" is probably my favorite of the bunch. Morbid though it may sound, it comes off as almost cartoon-y in its function: When there's no one in the area, the clock's saw sinks into the wood and starts sawing. Once someone comes in to the room, it stops. Weng says that, "as the blade sinks deeper and deeper with time, the passage of time now becomes a vivid scenario which lead us to endless contemplation," but I'd liken it more to something that Wile E. Coyote would attempt.

Design students often need to carry lots of art supplies: pencils, markers, pastels, paints, brushes, sketch pads and more. ArtBin has been serving students for years, and now has quite a collection of products—so there's likely to be something to meet most needs.

Some of the products are designed to hold specific items, such as this brush box, which will hold up to 20 brushes. It has foam inserts to keep the brushes in place, and vent holes at each end to help the brushes dry.

The utensil box is perfect for pencils, with the foam padding to protect the points, although it can also be used for things such as pens, brushes and cutting tools. However, some users have complained that the box, which is 12.38 inches long, is much longer than their pencils. One user says the only drawback is that "Even with new, unsharpened pencils (Palomino Blackwings—which are very long) there is just too much room and it is unnecessary."

For those who want to carry a range of sketching tools, there's the Sketch Pak. As with the utensil box, the Sketch Pak has foam in the pencil wells. Those dividers aren't movable, though, and some find the four smallest sections to be rather useless.

But another user raves: "I have instant access to a sharpener, a few types of eraser, blending stumps, Conte crayons, a few pastels, vine and compressed charcoal sticks, graphite sticks, an ArtGraf carbon tablet and graphite tin, dip pen and nibs, bamboo pen, water brushes, brush pens, a fountain pen, a small vial of walnut drawing ink and around 20 pencils of various types! I did break the Conte crayons and pastels into half-size sticks to be able to fit more colors."

Adjustable dividers are always a nice feature, making a storage box more likely to fit each user's specific (and changing) needs. The Solutions 6-compartment box has movable dividers that allow those compartments to be subdivided; there are five evenly-spaced positions for the dividers. One user notes that each slot can hold "four medium Posca paint markers, 10 Hi-Tech-C Maica pens, or up to 14 Gelli pens."

As we mentioned a couple of weeks ago, we're pleased to be media partners with Beijing Design Week for the fourth year running, since its inception in 2011. The ever-expanding celebration of Chinese design kicked off last night in Dashilar, which endures as the cynosure of the nine-day event even as it evolves as a design-hub-cum-historic-district.

Last night saw the grand opening of the Dashilar Guild House exhibition space, adjacent to the extant area, at the Quanyechang 'department store'—originally built in 1906 and reopened last month following a three-year restoration process—where dozens of projects are on view across four stories of the skylit main hall. As the story goes, the organizers secured the space only after presenting Beijing Design Week at the Venice Biennale this summer, and a follow-up to that exhibition is on view at the Guild House (concurrently with the Biennale, which runs until November).

This year also saw the debut of a one-night-only pop-up in Dashilar's farmer's market, where the local community was invited to celebrate alongside international guests for a colorful launch party.

Color trend research agency Global Color Research took over the green outside Shoreditch station last week at London Design Festival, collaborating with material and surfaces specialist Giles Miller to create this unusual multi-colored obelisk in celebration of the dark art of colour forecasting. "Global Color Research has been successfully prediciting and applying color trends in design for 15 years. The science behind precise forecasting isn't simple but the results are clear..."

The installation—comprised of a frame holding a number swatches from the GCR archives, tracking the developing taste for colors from 2006 to (erm...) 2016—took on something of a religious character, with weary LDF-goers taking rest beneath its predictions past and present.

A smaller version of the sculpture was also on show at design show Tent London for those in need a mid-fair solace. All hail the gods of color!

Contemporary Hungarian design, what is it? - that was the question roaming around my mind when I headed down to Budapest a little while ago. In order to gain a greater understanding and overview of what's cooking over in Hungary, I met up with Judit Osvárt, the woman responsible for Budapest Design Week, at Nomuri, a newly opened design cafe in the heart of the city.

First, a very brief history of Budapest Design Week: Once upon a time, in the early 2000s, the Hungarian Property Office felt that it was time for them to introduce the public to the world of design so as to create a greater understanding of what design is, seeing that it can be rather hard to wrap your head around unless you know what it's all about. They were also very keen on helping Hungarian designers understand their rights in the legal system and teach them more about patents and other mysterious formulas.

The first year, you could attend a mere 28 events, but over the years, Budapest Design Week grew and grew in size, peaking on their ten-year anniversary with a total of 350 events including fashion shows, design exhibitions and festivities for days.

In the design sphere, we often hear about countries such as England, Italy, China, The Netherlands and Denmark when it comes to what is hot and up and coming on the design scene. Hungary is not on this list, but things are changing. For the 11th year in a row, they are arranging Budapest Design Week, an event that this year around starts off with the opening of a major exhibition on October and continues with events in various forms until October 10.

As our debate over whether iPhone bendage is a design issue or a user issue continues, yesterday an Apple spokesperson released an interesting fact: "Through our first six days of sale, a total of nine customers have contacted Apple with a bent iPhone 6 Plus."

Nine. Considering they sold ten million units in the first six days, that means a little less than 0.000001% of iPhone users have reported a problem.

Even if there are more cases that went unreported--let's say the problem is 100 times worse, but 99 people chose to remain silent for every one person who complained--that still means that less than 0.0001% of iPhones got bent.

The video posted by Lewis Hilsenteger in the last entry on this topic clearly shows that you can bend an iPhone while trying to. (That entry also shows photos of a variety of phones from different, non-Apple manufacturers that can also be bent.) I could probably bend my aluminum laptop if I tried, too, but because that object is so important to my livelihood I don't put cups of coffee or any kind of stress on it.

Similarly, if I owned an iPhone 6, after seeing Hilsenteger's video I'd simply place the phone in the "sunglasses/delicates" category of things I own, and care for it accordingly.

Anyone think a YouTube video of me using an undamaged iPhone would get 25 million hits?

What with all the pomp and ceremony, prolonged exposure to design shows and festivals these days can, on occasion, cause a slight feeling of disease— a symptom perhaps of a perceived detachment from reality amongst the shiny objects and chair redesigns. What an oasis of perspective then, on our week-long tour of London Design Festival 2014, to stumble on the humbling sight of a scissor-making workshop in the heart of Shoreditch.

Craftsmen from century-old Sheffield-based Ernest Wright & Sons (fifth-generation family-owned no less) set up shop at The Saturday Market Project, giving demonstrations of blade hand-sharpening and scissor assembly in their mini-workshop. (Some of you may recall that Cliff Denton, a lifelong 'putter' at Ernest Wright & Sons, was recently the subject of a short documentary.) Whilst spending the day working up some intricate bird-like embroidery scissors, the guys also had an impressive selection of their hand-made tools on show—the owners are still passionate about the role of hand crafting in an age of mass-manufacturing when much production has moved out of British towns, like the once industrial powerhouse Sheffield.

We were particularly enamored with the cutting potential of the enormous large bolt 13" tailoring shears—a hell of weight to them! A pair of these hand-crafted monsters will set you back a cool GBP 130/USD 212

Anyone who has had to empty out the entirety of her suitcase's contents on the floor of airport check-in knows the plight of overweight luggage. Sure, you can buy suitcase scales and other devices, but they often get misplaced and—somewhat ironically—can't account for their own weight. Enter the TUL Suitcase, which has its own built-in weighing scale.

Pisan Kulkaew came up with the idea for TUL after watching his mother struggle to weigh her suitcase following a surgery. Unable to lift heavy objects, she incurred excess baggage fees of around $100. Kulkaew, a PhD student at the University of Queensland, Australia, started thinking. "I asked myself, What do I see suitcases looking like in ten years' time?" he says. "To which I answered: Definitely something along the lines of a smart suitcase. Even the cheapest suitcases would at least have the self-weighing function."

With degrees in mechanical and aerospace engineering coupled with mathematics, the Brisbane-based student is no stranger to challenging problems. Kulkaew began by brainstorming with his mother around the functionality this futuristic suitcase would have. After connecting with an electrical engineer who believed in the idea, he used the yellow pages to call up suitcase factories, meeting with owners and trying to convince them to help make TUL a reality.

Due to limited resources, Kulkaew opted to modify an existing suitcase mold instead of designing his own from scratch. With a first prototype in hand, he cracked open his digital bathroom scale to understand its underlying electronics and mechanisms. For Kulkaew, the bathroom scale was a perfect model for TUL, as it removes its own weight from the final calculation. "I'd say that this technology is there for a long time, just that it hasn't been adapted for this application," he says.

With the goal of "revolutionizing the watersport industry," Swedish company Radinn has released their first product: an electric powered wakeboard. The carbon fiber craft carries onboard lithium batteries and is controlled via a wireless handheld remote, allowing the rider to cruise at up to 30 miles per hour.

The coolest thing about having a self-propelled board is that it frees the rider from the beach. With an EPW one could navigate rivers, lakes, public fountains in Stockholm...

Want.

The 64-pound board's batteries can provide 30 minutes of runtime. Currently in its final testing stages, it's expected to go on sale next year. And no, it won't be cheap, but if you've got twenty grand to throw around, you could do a lot worse.

Everyone loves to bash corporations, but few talk about how much good they can do in this world. Their immense fortunes and longevity means they can undertake radical, expensive experiments that smaller outfits simply couldn't sustain.

A good case in point is Walmart and their Advanced Vehicle Experience concept truck. Built earlier this year as a testbed for their fleet efficiency program, it features a 53-foot trailer whose roof and sidewalls are made from single-piece 53-foot-long panels of carbon fiber. This confers a weight savings of some 4,000 pounds, meaning it can carry an extra 4,000 in cargo to burn the same amount of fuel, or carry the same weight of cargo as before and save a tremendous amount of fuel.

Creating carbon fiber panels of that length is fiendishly expensive, and a company would have to ship a lot of cargo indeed before they'd make their money back on fuel costs. In other words, you'd need a Walmart to do something like this. With 6,000 trucks crawling our continent and logging millions of miles, the overall, long-term impact would be substantial.

Artist Hanna Hedman wearing her own work, Loss. Photo: Sanna Lindberg

"Wear it Loud," a bold contemporary art jewelry exhibition at beloved Reinstein Ross's new R|R Gallery in New York's Meatpacking District, is dedicated to exploring the ongoing conversation between fashion and jewelry. Timed to coincide with Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, "Wear it Loud" (on view through October 16) is curated by Bella Neyman and Ruta Reifen, of Platforma. The show presents over 50 pieces of studio art jewelry by sixteen emerging and renowned international artists.

While each piece represents a unique, one-or-a-kind wearable works of art, the show is divided into five categories: artists who reinterpret vintage jewelry through the use of nontraditional materials (the kind often seen in fashion editorials); artists who are inspired by the portrayal of jewelry in fashion magazines; artists who use photography to create their own editorials and act as their own models or brand ambassadors; artists who subvert the logos of popular fashion houses to create original work; and artists who create jewelry that's an extension of the garment.

The concepts behind the work represent a wild range, exploring materiality, politics, gender roles, fashion and personal identity, and the artists present their work in non-traditional materials: silicone, concrete, PVC, found objects, synthetic hair, resin and 3D printed nylon.