Do you like getting ready? Or maybe just inspiring others to? Remington Products is looking for an experienced Color, Materials, and Finishes expert to join their award winning creative team in their new global headquarters building in Madison, Wisconsin. (Consistently ranked in the top 10 cities to live!) As the Senior CMF designer, you will be helping to develop their extensive line of personal care products: from strategy to concept to implementation.

Your story telling skills will dazzle their regional stakeholders and inspire their confidence in your design expertise. Their multiple product offerings and quick development times will keep things challenging and fresh. And your 5+ years of experience (preferably in consumer products) and unbeatable skill at trend interpretation, color palette definition, and inspired product specifications will get you recognized and hired. Apply Now.

Over the past few years, since I've started researching education, learning spaces and social education projects, my network has expanded exponentially. This was to be expected, considering how much time I've spent on various platforms trying to find out what is going on out there. Another thing that was expected was to see just how small the education circle really is. Everyone knows everyone in one way or another, or is just one degree removed from them.

In the beginning of my research, when I had just started my master studies at Aarhus Architecture School, I got in contact with Rosan Bosch and her work at Vittra School at Telefonplan in Stockholm, Sweden. This is where I first got into contact with Jannie Jeppesen, then headmaster of Vittra Skolan, now head of of Rebel Learners.

An unexpected meeting on the subway

Rebel Learners is a new initiative created by Rektorsakademin Utveckling (RAU), who also arranges SETT, Scandinavia's biggest education conference, and are the creators behind the podcast Skolsnack (School Chat) and Learning Narratives, a new game developed to build future learning environments.

The short version is that Rebel Learners is a course for teacher-students developed by teacher-students to upgrade and gain knowledge that they feel that they are not learning at their current institutions.

Rebel Learners came about after Fredrik Svensson, former principal and now CEO for RAU, met a former student of his on the subway in Stockholm. She told him that she was studying to become a teacher, but that she wasn't satisfied with the education she was receiving from the university. None of her teachers were actively working outside of the university world, which left her feeling that they were lacking the sort of practical knowledge that she was going to need when she started working.

Sweden has a lot of challenges ahead: Amongst others, the country will be 40,000 teachers short of its needs by 2020; in Stockholm alone, the amount of students will increase from 60,000 to 90,000 Moreover, people who decide to study to become a teacher often are looked upon as if they only chose their field of studies due to lack of any other decision.

Instead of complaining and whining about obstacles, RAU decided to do something about it, they created Rebel Learners as a way to bring a positive and professional voice to the discussion about education as well as to support and lift teacher students, and active teachers, with the help of a vast network of professionals and partners as well as courses, seminars and other events.

If you want to call your friend Jim, you can say "Call Jim" into your phone and it dials him. Five years ago you'd click on the name "Jim" in your phone and it would dial him. Twenty-five years ago, you'd call Jim by punching his number into a touch-tone phone. Fifty years ago you'd dial Jim's number on a rotary dial.

Before that is where it gets interesting.

Sixty years ago, you'd lift your telephone receiver and be met with silence. (There was no such thing as "dial tone" yet.) You'd tap the hang-up mechanism a few times and an operator—an actual human being sitting in a room waiting for just this moment—would come on the line. You'd then say "Please connect me to [two-letter district code followed by five-digit phone number]." The operator would then plug freaking wires into a switchboard and connect you to Jim.

So when Bell Systems started incorporating this amazing new interface called a "rotary dial" into their telephones, they needed to show consumers how to use them. Watch and be amazed:

Last week Argentinian director Fernando Livschitz released this video titled "Rush Hour," shot using some clever film trickery:

What's interesting is that if all cars were autonomous, that scene could one day actually be possible. Maybe the motorcycles are a stretch, and the humans and cyclists travling at such perfectly measured paces that the cars could accurately predict their timing; but at a minimum self-driving cars could certainly be programmed not to hit each other, and to thread the needle at intersections.

The hardest part would probably not be the technology, but garnering human acceptance. As safe as I knew it was, I'd have a hard time not having a heart attack while riding in any of these vehicles.

News about a bad product experience travels quickly. Maybe it's because of the fact, according to a white paper "Designing for the User Experience," that five times as many people will tell a friend about a bad experience than a good one, or that social media makes it easier than ever to share that negative message, but news of design shortcomings and failures spread fast.

"If I'm buying a pair of headphones and the sound is good, but they're not comfortable, they're too small for my head, they are too foamy... I'm not going to have a good Second Moment of Truth with that," explains Stuart Karten, Principal and Founder of Karten Design. The same goes for a bottle of laundry detergent you may have purchased for its swanky packaging: If your clothes don't come out smelling clean, you probably won't buy it again. That Second Moment of Truth (SMOT) often relies on the user experience, what happens when a consumer actually uses the product. As more and more of those products move towards the digital space, that experience comes down to a digital interface, the intuitiveness of those interactions and ease of use. Karten elaborates:

In general, there are multiple trends that are happening in the consumer electronics arena. One is that things are becoming rectangular boxes with user interfaces. The "stickiness" and the appeal and the connection are moving into the digital space. That puts a lot of challenge on—not only the overall form factor of the product on that first level—but the second level of that digital engagement.

The currently fashionable way to "debate" is to start with your conclusion, then seek only facts that support your conclusion, and ignore everything else. (See the commenters on our first phone-bending post who single out Apple while ignoring the bent phones from other manufacturers.) It is essentially the opposite of the Scientific Method. Thankfully, the first item in our update on the overblown "Bendgate" brings a little much-needed science into the discussion.

1. Consumer Reports' Stress-Testing Comparison of Six Models of Smartphone

Consumer Reports subjected the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, LG G3, Samsung Galaxy Note 3, HTC One, and iPhone 5 to a three-point flexural test:

And there you have it. One could argue that the point of contact of the Instron testing machine ought be shaped more like a human butt cheek rather than a focused line, but at the very least this will hopefully inspire others to conduct similarly scientific tests.

2. Veracity of Original Bendgate Video Called Into Question

Redditors took a close look at Lewis Hilsenteger's original Bendgate video, which is now up to some 45 million hits, and found a disturbing discrepancy: The clock times displayed on the phone during the "test" do not jive with the sequence of events as portrayed in the video.

Detractors have suggested that the video is cooked. One claims that Hilsenteger is profiting from the millions of hits and another goes so far as to hint that he is actively manipulating Apple's stock price. Defenders suggest that the time discrepancy is merely to do with video editing, and one suggests that he began shooting the video at 2:26am and again at 1:58pm the next day.

What's more fascinating than watching the progression of a talented artist or designer's work? Also, Creative Dads is becoming a thing. First we saw Michael Chou devising a better way to serve up ice cream to his kids. Now we see Nathan Shields, father of toddlers Gryphon and Alice, devising increasingly sophisticated methods of creating pancakes with aesthetic and representational value.

Using a plastic squirt bottle filled with pancake batter, in early 2012 Shields was drawing primitive forms to amuse his kids, with a hot non-stick pan as his canvas:

However, at some point he discovered that whatever streams of batter were "drawn" first would of course cook for longer, meaning they'd be darker brown upon flipping.

With this understanding of how to create tonality, Shields' drawings swiftly grew more sophisticated and defined:

This technique led to his popular Beatles Pancakes YouTube video:

Necessity is the mother of invention, or in this case, authorship. We at Core77 believe that everyone who loves design, regardless of experience or background, shares a bond of appreciation and curiosity that leads them to seek out what's new, different and surprising. Too often, however, we find "design books" that cater exclusively to one view of practice or theory, ignoring the global perspective, and, more unfortunately, the common spark of excitement that drives us all to bring creative projects to life. With this in mind, we created Designing Here/Now, a powerfully inspirational anthology of the most interesting projects happening today, rendered with insight and depth that makes it simultaneously a perfect snapshot of contemporary design trends and a permanent reference of their impact. It is a singular resource that honors the intention behind great design and presents it in a manner that everyone can appreciate.

Like the Core77 Design Awards competition from which the book originated, Designing Here/Now documents the contemporary practice of design providing a reference point to both casual observer and seasoned pro. It documents an organic and shifting profession by showcasing a broad range of the application of design; by including projects by the next generation of designers, students; and by distributing the editorial process of inclusion across independently organized groups of professionals from around the globe.

With the cheeky tagline "Our competitors are giants," the confident development team behind Chargerito introduces their new object. Billed as the world's smallest phone charger, the diminutive device is just 53mm x 33mm x 18mm (2.1" x 1.3" x 0.7"), featuring flip-out power prongs and your choice of a micro-USB or Apple Lightning plug. And it's an exercise in minimalism, with just barely enough meat to get your mitts onto.

Chargerito Crowd Funding from Chargerito on Vimeo.

Developers Alex Andon, Nick Velander and Drew Hauck set the Chargerito up through crowdfunding--Tilt, not Kickstarter, for a change--offering it at a pre-order price of $19 a pop (it's expected to retail for $39). The sharp-discount strategy worked, as they've exceeded their $50,000 target with $76,716 in backing. At press time there was just one day left to get in on the pre-order price, so if you want one, hurry!

We've seen drones used or proposed for package delivery, elaborate selfies, action sports capture, movie promotion, and even weather control. But a recent creative collaboration points to the possibility of a more domestic usage that we think could be the killer drone app of the future: How about floating lamps? Which is to say, just the lampshade and a light source, no stem, no cable, hovering in mid-air, able to follow you around the room if need be.

In the video below you'll see what it would look like, but before it becomes domesticated, there are just a few (completely solveable) technological hurdles to clear:

Noise. To cancel out the incessant whining of a hovering drone, a small on-board speaker could project a noise cancellation frequency.

Power. During the daytime, the drone could dock itself, perhaps to something attached to the ceiling, where it would recharge the batteries required for both the light and its own sustained flight. (Ideally the power would come from solar, so you're not wasting a bunch of coal-fired juice on an admittedly frivolous technology.)

User Interaction. Remote control, gesture control or voice activation could turn it on and off, adjust the brightness and hue, and ask the lamp to follow you around or focus light on a particular area.

At any rate, a floating lamp would give you one less thing to vacuum around, if replacing a floor lamp, and free up some table space if replacing a desk lamp.

Maybe it sounds silly but it looks beautiful in practice. Check out this sweet video created in a collaboration between performance group Cirque du Soleil, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich and drone developer Verity Studios:

Here's how the team came up with the idea and pulled it all together:

Via Geek Tyrant

I'm not looking forward to winter, because the ex-manufacturing space I moved into last year is brutally cold and drafty. I spent last winter making futile attempts to caulk this and shrink-wrap that, only to achieve zero perceptible gains in thermal efficiency; the space is simply too deteriorated on all six sides for me to determine where I can best make a dent.

What I need is a focused plan, a way of determining where the largest heat leaks are so I can tackle those first. And I think I've found my solution in this awesome-looking Seek Thermal Smartphone Infrared Camera.

The tiny, three-inch, half-ounce, $199 device brings something close to military- or industrial-grade thermal imaging to the common man with the common paycheck. (A commercial infrared camera would run you four figures.) You plug it into the bottom of your smartphone and bang, you've got an image on your screen that can accurately display a range of temperatures from -40 Celsius (-40 Fahrenheit) up to 330 Celsius (626 Fahrenheit).

Here's a demo of it in action from Android Police's David Ruddock, and you can skip the first 30 seconds of pitch-blackness:

The camera comes in both Android- and iPhone-compatible versions. And if you're wondering about the dongle form factor, that's Seek's effort to futureproof it; the developers of the closest competing device, the $349 Flir One, made the poor decision to build their camera into an external case--that only fits an iPhone 5 or 5s.

Editor: This design school story comes to us from Eddie L., who along with two fellow ID students had an eight-week assignment to design a commuter bike. The project started off with a bang....

Crashing your bike at night totally sucks. It sucks a little more when your laptop flies out of your bag during the crash and smashes into the pavement. And it sucks the most when that laptop turns out to be so badly damaged that the data on the hard drive is unrecoverable, and what was on the hard drive are the only existing CAD files for a project that you and two of your fellow design students have been slaving over.

Ironically we were designing a bike, so in that one calamitous moment both a real-world bicycle and the designs for what was supposed to be a sweet future bicycle both got trashed.

'Design Week' season is very much upon us here in Europe. As things wrap in London, we've jetted over to the slightly more sedate and astonishingly grandiose (seriously, Paris ain't got nothing) Vienna—capital of Austria—to hit the trail of Vienna Design Week, running from September 26 to October 5.

We're delighted to see the return of the awesome 'Passionswege' platform—the program in which the city's design department pair traditional manufacturing companies still surviving in the region with emerging international design talent, the partnerships sharing skills and often creating some truly inspiring objects and interventions.

First stop in Vienna this year, world -eknowned crystal manufacturer Lobmeyr—who took part in the Passionswege last year— invited the public to their showroom and workshop to see the fruits of their pairing with design duo BCXSY.

This is a fascinating idea that was developed by a research group at Japan's Keio University. By applying optical camouflage technology and using recursive reflectors, which "[reflect] light back in the direction of incidence," the researchers were essentially able to render the back of a Toyota Prius invisible, at least from the driver's point of view. Take a look:

What we found fascinating is their proposal that this could be applied to all 360 degrees. And aside from average motorists trying to back passenger cars into parking spaces, imagine what a boon this would be to folks driving delivery trucks, tractor-trailers, construction machinery and other bulky, blind-spot-laden vehicles.

Unfortunately, the technology may never come to pass. The concept was put forth in 2011, and there's been no word on an update since the video above was released in 2012. But tell me this thing wouldn't get Kickstarted in a heartbeat.

Via DigInfo TV

Founded by Ian Hall, Arkitrek works to the create socially and environmentally sustainable buildings in Malaysia. I have been following them for several years now, just looking for a reason to contact them other than to just say "Hi! I like what you do. Keep up the good work," and now I have one, so here we go.

Core77: Can you give us a short outline to what Arkitrek is about?

Ian Hall: We are architects and we're motivated use design to solve environmental problems. Problems, like resource consumption, pollution and energy use. To solve these problems usually involves working with people, so we are highly socially minded in the way that we work, but I'm a nature lover foremost and love of wild places and nature is what inspires me

What lead you to start Arkitrek?

Haha. Long story...

One thing led to another. I always knew that I did not want to follow a 'conventional' architecture career. After completing my Part III and getting solid commercial experience, I decided to look for alternatives and I joined an expedition with Raleigh International to Borneo. They asked me to lead a team of young volunteers to do a feasibility study for a jungle research station in Borneo. That was a dream job. I swapped designing shiny urban hotels and started work on primitive huts in the jungle. I joke that 'the people I worked with were primitive too': gap year students mostly. The Raleigh ethos is empowering young people by giving them responsibility for delivering project work in challenging places. After some initial resistance, I embraced this philosophy.

After my Raleigh expedition in 2004, I volunteered to work for The Sabah Foundation, Raleigh's local partner in Sabah, Borneo. The Sabah Foundation manages three rainforest conservation areas and I went on to volunteer for them as an architect, designing jungle camps, staff quarters and research facilities on and off for two years.

I funded this with contract work in London. Six months in London would fund four months in Sabah. During this time, I met the people who would become my first paying clients in Sabah. That's how Arkitrek started.

The name, Arkitrek, was coined by my mate Andy Lo. Andy is a Londoner whose parents are from Sabah. We worked together in London and he came out to visit his family in Sabah and then joined me for a month long design and trekking stint in Sabah's Maliau Basin Conservation Area.

I worked in the most awesome and wild and beautiful places.

What was the main foundation when you started Arkitrek?

During that time with Sabah Foundation I was very concerned with two questions:
1. Should we build anything here? [in this wild and beautiful place]
2. If we do build, what kind of building is appropriate?

A little later, when I was no longer supported by high paying London contract work a third question came into play...
3. How can I keep saying yes to designing small buildings in beautiful places for worthy clients, who can't pay professional fees?

I think that my 'ground pillars' are those three questions.

More from the Passionswege: Young Portuguese design duo Pedrita Studio were paired up with central Vienna glass workshop Karl Stiefelmeyer Glaserei to share skills and explore some new avenues.

Designers Rita Joao and Pedro Ferreira were inspired by the detailed craftsmanship that the workshop staff gave to huge sheets of mirror and glass, wondering if these skills could be turned to small scale objects. Rita and Pedro set out designing a range of table top objects that could be made simply from the huge array of glass types and mirrors in stock at the shop. The designers incorporated colourful felts—the material used extensively in glass handling for protection—giving some lovely contrast to the pieces.

Although Stiefelmeyer have yet to make any moves to produce the objects, they did allow the designers to set up a showroom in a disused office room at the front of the shop to display the wares.

When a book about design covers so much territory, it's important to understand what motivated its creation and what needs it satisfies. Designing Here/Now offers everyone from the casual dabbler to the seasoned design professional a closer look at what moves design forward, right now. More than a mere collection of honorees from the Core77 Design Awards, this anthology reveals why intention is just as important as material results in design. We interviewed Allan Chochinov, Chief Editor of Core77, and asked him to explain the significance of the essential new volume for the design community and future design trends. Get your copy of Designing Here/Now at Hand Eye Supply, Thames & Hudson, Barnes & Noble and Amazon.

From Designing Here/Now, "audioJar" by Sarah Pease, Rhode Island School of Design, DIY - Notable 2012

Why is Designing Here/Now an important book?

Allan Chochinov: This is an important book for a lot of reasons, but let me argue for three:

First, as digital and screens continue to dematerialize information and separate content from form, books have taken on new meaning, new gravity, and can increasingly be seen as a kind of treat. People love books, and though a lot of what Core77 does is on the Internet, our beating heart is in physical things. (Hand Eye Supply, Conferences, bikes, shoes, etc.) This book means a great deal to us, and with it we are proud to have created a tangible (and weighty!) artifact.

The second reason is about the value of time capsuling and creating a permanent record. We see Designing Here/Now as a testament to design enterprise and excellence, but we also see it as an historical record—one that features projects, designers, jury members, design firms, and educational institutions that are critical of the moment we are now living in. The book draws a line in the sand and says, "Design has a long history, but it's also experiencing an amazing moment right now. And here is a group of work that evidences its wonder, its rigor, and its impact."

The third reason (and we're biased here) is that the book was produced by two of the most esteemed design and publishing groups in the world. Thames and Hudson is an incredible publisher with fantastic and essential titles, and Project Projects is the premier design firm for producing cultural printed artifacts. We have great partners, and we're grateful for their contributions.

From Designing Here/Now, "Zoku Character Kit" by Propeller, Inc., Zoku, LLC, Consumer Products - Notable 2012, Team credits - Ken Zorovich, Yos Kumthampinij and John Earle.

To the uninitiated, a CNC mill might sound like a complicated, intimidating and excessively expensive machine to own and operate. And that might have been true twenty years ago. But now we live in an age where the prices are coming down and the interfaces are becoming ever-easier to use—something like what the original Mac did for desktop publishing. So if you're an independent designer or small business owner looking to prototype or produce your own stuff, now is the time to look into a CNC mill. And we're excited to bring you this new series on how to use one.

With regular video updates, we'll walk you through a basic but powerful 3-axis machine and show you everything you need to know in order to operate one, starting with a group of introductory videos and then diving into a step-by-step project. And in order to be as inclusive as possible, we've opted to take a "...For Dummies" approach—so whether you're a traditional shop vet or have never used a power tool in your life, we believe that you, too can use a CNC mill by understanding certain principles and systematically learning to use some basic software.

The first question you would-be CNC millers might have is, which machine should I look at? There are several different affordable desktop CNC mills on the market, and we decided to go with ShopBot, for a variety of important reasons:

Next up we'll give you an overview of the machine, then show you how to set it up.

Having just spent a week in China, my circadian rhythm is pretty much entirely out of sync at this point. Traveling 12 hours into the future was rougher than it had ever been, and now that I'm back, I expect that my usual sleep deprivation will be further compounded by jetlag. Well, Studio Banana Things is looking to put sleepnessness to rest, so to speak, by putting the powernap literally within arm's length away with the new "Ostrich Pillow Mini."

The Red Dot Awards winner's page is usually a fun look at some out-there ideas. But among this year's batch of winners, it's the oh-man-that-is-so-doable concepts that caught our eye. To rethink something simple that already exists can often be far harder, we think, than envisioning a blue-sky solution.

In the Personal Hygiene category, Chen Wanting's clever Tiya Convenient Floor Drain makes perfect sense for anyone who's ever had to remove long hair from a conventional shower drain.