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In Portland? Come to the Hand-Eye Supply Grand Reopening Party

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Since we opened in 2010, Core77's Hand-Eye Supply has grown into an international design destination and hub for hands-on people of all stripes. Combining the refined aesthetics of designers with the practicality of the trades, Hand-Eye Supply serves and promotes the movement towards a more beautiful, well-made world.

Join us tomorrow, Thursday, October 2, as we open our distinctive store again—bigger, better and more ambitiously dedicated to the creative community—with a Grand Opening Party! This unmissable design event will give the first public look at the beautiful new space, which features custom architecture, innovative interior design and sculpture, a design incubator, and a metal and wood workshop. If you're in Portland, be sure to stop by the inspiring space some have dubbed the Niketown of Design. RSVP on Facebook and stop by for food, drink, live music, and inspiration.

Thursday, October 2, 2014, 6–9pm
Hand-Eye Supply
427 NW Broadway
Portland, OR 97209

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Vienna Design Week 2014: Sebastian Marbacher's 'Baustellen-Bank'

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Recent Swiss design graduate Sebastian Marbacher has taken to the streets in Vienna, exhibiting some of his furniture as part of the festivities this week. Sebastian caught our eye immediately with his clever 'Baustellen-Bank' (translating from the German as 'Building Site Bench'), a bench made from a simple hack of components usually used to block public access from building sites.

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Success Breeds Success: 'Monocle Guide to Good Business'

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Here at Core77, we get our fair share of business books, in part because to design anything on an industrial level, you need to have business in mind. Perhaps you need to get financing to invest in your first injection molding press plates, to the tune of $250k, and it might be nice to have a little hand holding, someone to tell you the press is good for 500k cycles and at your margin, making $3.00/part on an 8% loan gets you a solid NPV if you can sell 50k widgets a year. And yet, if you stroll into the business aisle of a typical bookstore, you see the face of Jack Welsh telling you Elephants can Dance, and providing his experiences in making an agile multi-billion dollar company, so you might just be entitled to wondering how big the market is for billionaires looking for insight into how to improve their NASDAQ-listed stock, because it certainly doesn't help you. Likewise with the success of Malcolm Gladwell's particular brand of chapter by chapter insight using the case study method by way of aphoristic lessons about obscure ketchup companies.

Given the continual flow of newly minted industrial designers hoping to make a go at their own business with the tools to make products, rather than companies, we've certainly kept our eyes open for new books promising to teach designers how to become business people rather than craftsmen. The latest manifestation of such is The Monocle Guide to Good Business (Gestalten 2014), which is about as far afield as one can go from Malcolm Gladwell while retaining the structure of printed paper laced between two canvas covers. Rather than focus on tycoons and boardrooms, their case studies (beautifully laid out photo spreads with accompanying text) focus principally on small businesses ranging from goat farms to more predictably design-centric shops like type foundries and high street tailors. Each page of the guide has been carefully aligned with the grid and thoughtfully designed, but we confess that at the end of it, we found ourselves far more knowledgeable with how to make an already successful business prettier than understanding how to make successful company in the first place.

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Protecting Your Innovations: Don't Miss the RKS Session On Copyrights, Patents and Trademarks

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If you don't think about your company's intellectual property very often, it's time to pay closer attention to that which makes up, on average, over 90% of a business's value. Trade secrets, copyright, trademarks and patents for businesses can be confusing topics to explore, but thanks to the next RKS Sessions presentation, plenty of light will be shed on how you can do more to protect your company's most valuable assets.

On October 7th at Cross Campus in Santa Monica, CA, you're invited to the fourth RKS Session where veteran IP attorney, Dan Dooley, who will provide extensive advice and insight regarding intellectual property. He will be joined by a client, Matthew Joynes, CEO of the innovative gaming peripheral company Wikipad, who will give advice on intellectual property from an entrepreneurial perspective.

This is a perfect event for anyone building ideas and starting companies. You can secure your ticket and learn more about this RKS Session here.

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Beijing Design Week 2014: Naihan Li Presents 'I AM A MONUMENT' at Gallery All in 751 D.Park

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NaihanLi-IAM-GalleryAll.jpgPhotos courtesy of Gallery All unless otherwise noted.

A mover-and-shaker in the Chinese creative scene for a decade now, Naihan Li got her start working for Ai Weiwei upon returning to Beijing after completing her studies at London's Bartlett School of Architecture. After subsequently working with various art and design organizations, she founded her own studio in 2010 and is perhaps best known for her CRATES series. This year sees the debut of the I AM A MONUMENT collection at Gallery ALL in the 751 D.Park, as well as a move from the Red Bricks studio/gallery compound (where she hosted an exhibition in her live/work space last year), around the corner to a converted factory. (Rest assured she's still based in Caochangdi, although she handed off her BJDW curatorial duties to Ben Hughes, who gave us a brief tour of the place last week.)

Some two years in the making, the pieces in I AM A MONUMENT take the form of scale models of various landmarks from the Western world: the UN building, Pentagon, New York Stock Exchange and Edinburgh Palm House, which have been re-imagined as a bookcase, bed, shrine and terrarium, respectively. The four new pieces are exhibited alongside the "Armillary Whisky Bar," which was commissioned by Melbourne's Broached Gallery in 2013. Li's artist statement invokes a critical examination of the relationship between art, architecture and design:

I AM A MONUMENT originated from Naihan's recognition of the Chinese desire for giant art installations in their homes. People want to own things that are monumental. This desire traces back to Chinese traditional paintings, which play with the idea of scale from a subjective point of view and minimize the universe. Chinese artists attempt to zoom in to a large part of the world on a small scale. The I AM A MONUMENT collection shrinks a landmark building 100 times and turns it into a utilitarian furniture piece, allowing collectors to contain something that is extremely large inside a room of their house.

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NaihanLi-IAM-Edinburgh.jpgThe Edinburgh Palm House at the Royal Botanic Gardens

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Rendering Chrome Letters the Hard Way

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One of the first things they taught us in ID Rendering 101 was about reflections: You need a sky and you need some earth, and placing these correctly indicates the contours of whatever you're drawing up. Nowadays software takes care of all that, but in the days of hand rendering, you created sky and earth with markers, Prismacolors, charcoal or an airbrush. And getting the gradations was just a matter of layering strokes and/or going over it with your fingers.

But in this video, hot rod artist Glen Weisgerber shows us how he does it "When the compressor goes down or the power goes out," i.e. not using an airbrush, but an actual bristle brush. At 23 minutes long, the demo isn't short, but it's worth a scan-through to watch him go from zero to done:

Am I the only one who got the design-school-flashback stress jitters while watching him? I almost found myself glancing towards my window to see if the sun was coming up yet.

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Organizing the Year: Designing Calendars and Planners

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Digital calendars are everywhere now—but many end-users still prefer to use paper. Calendars like the one above are attractive, but not really functional; there's nowhere to note what's happening on any given day. Fortunately, designers have created a range of calendars and planners that do help end-users keep track of their time commitments.

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While many wall calendars have illustrations, REDSTAR Ink provides a wall calendar with just the essentials: good-sized blocks for writing in each day's activities. The calendar measures 11 inches by 17 inches, and is printed on heavy recycled stock with a recycled chipboard cover.

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Letter C Design prints this calendar on individual sheets of recycled kraft text paper, which allows multiple pages to be displayed at once. Each page could be mounted to the wall using a clipboard, added to a 3-ring binder using a sheet protector, pinned to a bulletin board, added to the refrigerator door (with magnets to hold it in place), etc.

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Sometimes end-users with lots of wall space like to see the whole year at a glance, and designers have created calendars to address this preference. This one, from Crispin Finn, has one row for each month. It measures 99.7cm × 70cm (39.2 inches by 27.6 inches). "Popular observances" such as East Sunday and Bonfire Night have been noted—which will be useful to the U.K. audience, but maybe not to those from other countries. Deciding which holidays to include will always be a design issue for those creating calendars and planners.

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Texas A&M Traffic Institute's Crashworthy Structures Program Designs an Anti-Terrorist Barrier to End All Anti-Terrorist Barriers

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Down by the Centre Street courthouses in lower Manhattan, where I walk my dogs in the morning, I saw them re-installing one of those anti-terrorist pylons. All government buildings downtown became ringed with them after September 11, 2001. I was impressed to see that the pylon is at least twice as long as you'd think it is, as its metal core is inserted deep into the ground, presumably into some type of concrete mounting block. This is reassuring, as I'd often wondered if those little four-foot-tall cylinders could really stop a dump truck loaded up with explosives.

Hopefully we'll never have to find out—but the U.S. State Department isn't taking any chances. Since 2001 they've been working with Texas A&M's Transportation Institute, and the latter organization's Crashworthy Structures Program is responsible for designing barriers, including the kind that ring government buildlings. They've recently tested a U-shaped steel kind designed to stop a truck dead in its tracks, even with a 50 m.p.h. headway. Take a look at this:

Insane, no? And impressively, according to The Texas Tribune, the 24-foot-wide barrier is only buried 18 inches deep. (The concrete pylons I saw being re-installed appeared to go a lot deeper than that.)

The Crashworthy Structures Program, by the way, designs at least two variants of barrier. Some are "highway safety appurtenances" while others are "perimeter security devices" like the one in the video. And obviously the design considerations with the latter are quite different. "The focus [with perimeter security devices] is on keeping a terrorist from breaching the barrier," TTI's Dean Alberson told the Tribune.

"The ability of a driver to survive such a crash," the article concludes, "is not a primary concern."

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Vienna Design Week 2014: 'Cake's New Dress' - Lucy.D x Cafe Landtmann

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Institution of Vienna cafe culture, Cafe Landtmann, have partnered with local design studio Lucy.D to explore the impact design can have on cake decorating. The cafe's management tasked designers Karin Santorso and Barbara Ambros with the brief of finding a new way to allow their customers to order custom-decorated cakes whilst avoiding the possibilities of their brand being tarnished by potential clienteles' kitsch creations.

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Adam Michaels & Anna Rieger of Project Projects on Designing Core77's First Book, 'Designing Here/Now'

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DHN-ProjectProjects-AdamAnna.jpgAdam Michaels and Anna Rieger of Project Projects looking over Designing Here/Now

Core77 was delighted to work with New York-based studio Project Projects to design the Designing Here/Now, published by Thames and Hudson. Headed by Adam Michaels and Prem Krishnamurthy, Project Projects is a design studio focusing on print, identity, exhibition and interactive work with clients in art and architecture. In addition to client-based work, the studio initiates and produces independent curatorial and publishing projects.

We sat down with Michaels and designer Anna Rieger to talk about the inception of the project and how it took form.

Core77: We were excited to work with Project Projects on one of the most ambitious projects we've ever taken on. Tell us how you began the design process and what challenges you saw at its inception?

Adam Michaels: We, too, were thrilled to be asked by Core77 to collaborate on Designing Here/Now. It's always a pleasure to work on projects in which design itself is the overt subject matter, as we certainly remain obsessed with this stuff. As potential readers, we found the book's vast array of projects (spanning innumerable media and materials) to be an intriguing, valuable source of information.

Anna Rieger: Core77 had never published a book about their awards before, though they've had a well-visited website for years. In considering the book's design, we thought about the web's interactive features (for example, the live video announcements about the awards, and videos helping to show objects' materiality). For the book we tried to emphasize the strengths of the medium, creating a design that would reward sustained attention (still easier with a book than in the midst of the web's many distractions) and contemplation, while allowing for quick, occasional browsing (the book's navigation is always quite clear so the reader would never feel lost).

How did you approach this project given how many categories and discrete elements of content were involved in the final piece?

AM: As book designers, we're drawn to projects with a degree of complexity and scale, in which we determine through typographic, formal, and material means how best to bring clarity to substantial amounts of information. So we were enthusiastic to develop an overall design that balances a consistent, overarching structure (crucial when working at a scale such as that of this 448-page book) with a varied, playful flow through the book's contents from spread to spread.

This flow is first structured by the book's categorical breakdown (also articulated through elements such as running headers); then a relative weighting of projects kicks in (award winners are generally shown at a greater scale); subsequently, the spreads become the result of a process akin to that of assembling a kind of free-form, information-dense jigsaw puzzle. Variables include the details of text per entry; type of image; potential scale of image (resolution issues remain the scourge of this sort of project, involving hundreds of images from nearly as many sources). Each layout is then the result of an attempt to produce an appealing composition—also making sure a given set of projects works well together on the page—after taking this significant range of details into account.

DNH-ProjectProjects-Office.jpgThe Project Projects office in New York City

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Can You Guess Which of These Cars is the Most Likely to Be Ticketed?

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Years ago I was driving down Interstate 80 when a minivan rocketed past me in the left lane. I was doing about 70 in my Golf, the Dodge Caravan was doing maybe 95. Seconds later my rearview mirror filled with the flashing lights of a New Jersey State Trooper. As I pulled to the side to let him pass, I then realized he was pulling me over.

The cop explained that he had me going 87 on his radar gun, rolled his eyes at my suggestion that he tagged the wrong guy, and wrote me a big, fat ticket. It was obvious to me that the gun picked up the minivan, but as the cop came over the rise in pursuit, he saw my sporty little Golf and figured I was the culprit.

They used to say that if you bought a car in red, you were more likely to be pulled over. And if I was a cop tagging a group of cars and unsure of whom was the speeder, yeah, I'd probably pull over the car with the sportiest design. Backing this up, if a recent U.S. auto insurance study is to be believed, seven out of the top ten Cars That Get the Most Tickets (doesn't say for speeding, so it could be for any traffic infraction) have what we consider sporty designs. What's surprising is how un-sporty the other three are. Admittedly our parsing of this study involves a little guesswork, as only the models, not the specific production years, are mentioned. But here's the top ten, judge for yourself:

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10. Mazda2

Some 28.1% of drivers that own this tiny econobox with a rather dramatic side swoop get ticketed.

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9. Toyota FJ Cruiser

A bit too bulky to be considered sporty, we think, though you can't deny it has an aggressive profile. At any rate it's good enough to get 28.4% of its drivers pulled over.

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8. Scion tC

This diminutive but fat-fendered coupe, particularly in this color, looks like trouble. It also has 28.8% of its owners reaching for their license and registration.

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Death to Cam Lock Nuts: Flatpack Hardware That Will Hopefully Become Obsolete

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If you've ever assembled a piece of IKEA furniture, you've undoubtedly seen the two items up above, and you understand how they fit together:

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For the average consumer that doesn't know what they're called, they're named cam lock nuts and cam screws. You'll hear them referred to colloquially as "knock-down fasteners" (and occasionally "Confirmat fasteners," which I believe is incorrect; if enough of you are interested in why, let me know in the comments and I'll pull another entry together). They've been a mainstay of IKEA's flatpack product line for as long as I can remember, although from a design perspective, it seems clear that their benefits are outweighed by their drawbacks.

The meager benefits of cam lock nuts and screws is that they can be driven with a Philips screwdriver, which most consumers have rattling around in a drawer somewhere, and they provide a relatively quick connection method that's low on labor. And on the manufacturing side, they can be used with butt joints, which is by far the simplest and least expensive thing to cut on a production line.

The drawbacks are far greater. The key flaw is that they're designed to be used with particle board, which does not take fasteners well. Because of this it's easy to drive the screw in at a slight angle. The screw is then forced straight when the end user inserts it into the cam lock nut, and this further weakens the point of connection between the screw threads and the mushy particle board fibers. The resultant connection will not withstand shearing forces well, and multiple cam lock nuts and screws are needed along a single edge to form even a barely tolerable connection. Lastly, cam lock nuts are unattractive, and IKEA designers of course take pains to put them on the insides or undersides of surfaces.

IKEA's global influence alone is enough reason for independent manufacturers to keep producing these inferior pieces of hardware. (You can find them everywhere from Amazon to eBay to Home Depot from a variety of manufacturers.) Thankfully though, the designers at IKEA's HQ have been working on a new connection method with several advantages over cam lock nuts. Stay tuned.

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IKEA's New Tool-less Connectors and a Potential End to Particle Board?

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What you see above are the new, no-tools-required connectors Ikea's designers have developed for their new Regissör line of furniture. Rather than using knock-down fasteners, they've created a wooden plug that looks like a cross between a dowel and a honey dipper.

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The way that these "honey-dipper dowels" (not what they're officially called, but better than the "wedge dowel" title other blogs are calling it, which makes no sense) work is that the narrower end is pre-installed at the factory, leaving an exposed male end.

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The female end of the connection, meanwhile, has been plunge-routed into the surface-to-be-adjoined, keyhole-style:

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Because the router bit has the same accordion-like profile of the dowel head, the male end then slides into the routed grooves, maximizing the contact area to create a nice friction fit. You can see this in action in the video below.

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The Principals and Devonte Hynes Present 'Ancient Chaos,' an Immersive Sound Installation, at the Sonos Studio in NYC

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Normally we'd be skeptical about a pop-up venue by a wireless speaker company, but seeing as Sonos was hosting the likes of John Maeda, The Principals, and New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones—to say nothing of the musical artists—at Neuehouse this week, we'll give them the benefit of the doubt. Billed as a "weeklong exploration of the intersection of music, art and technology," the Sonos Studio includes several multimedia pieces and performances especially commissioned for the pop-up at the event space, including a collaboration between The Principals and Devonté Hynes, a.k.a. Blood Orange. The design studio and musician recently unveiled "Ancient Chaos," a site-specific installation at the venue in Lower Manhattan: a series of articulating, ceiling-mounted panels (made of mylar 'scales') that is complemented by an 11-minute composition by Hynes.

Given an open brief to collaborate, Drew Seskunas of the Principals noted that their introductory meeting two months ago was "really wonderful, kind of abstract... we kept it loose." You wouldn't know it by looking or listening, but Hynes was reportedly inspired by none other than J.S. Bach, specifically a book called The Cello Suites by Eric Siblin; The Principals, for their part, took the opportunity to reimagine the "Cosmic Quilt," which they originally exhibited at NY Design Week 2012. "It was a system that had a lot of potential but wasn't fully realized in the first iteration of it." Where the original piece responded to movement—i.e. differences in light and shadow—the new one responds to the physical sound wave of the music.

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Design Week Portland: Something for Everyone

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Tonight marks the start of a dense week of design, craft and innovative thinking as we kick off this year's Design Week Portland. This evening's opening party will feature installations by Set Creative and a DH set by local legend Rev Shines of Lifesavas. From October 5th through 11th, the rest of the events are cast far and wide over the city. This year there is an official HQ, located inside a series of geodesic domes in Pioneer Courthouse Square, where information and registration are centralized and where experimental events will take place throughout the week.

Like the design field itself, the festival's highlights are all over the physical and conceptual map. The lineup is thick with speaking events, open studios, demonstrations, curated shows, and panel discussions. The exhibited work ranges from modern architecture and cutting edge advertising to letterpress and ecosystem design.

Stay tuned for live and almost-live coverage of the highlights and question marks of this year's DWP.

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Changing the World is All in a Day's Work When You Work at Apple

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Work for Apple, Inc.!

Changing the world is all in a day's work at Apple. If you love innovation, here's your chance to make a career of it. You'll work hard. But the job comes with more than a few perks.

The Production Artist supports the Interface designers who create Apple software. Production is directly responsible for building, speccing, slicing, and resizing all pixel-perfect design assets. They maintain up-to-date files, uniform naming conventions, and ensure design consistency across all assets and products, i.e. Q.A. Production is responsible for delivery and follow through of all design assets and specs to engineering.

If you are passionate about software and visual design, and want to work for one of the greatest companies on earth, here's your chance: Apply Now.

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Core77 Photo Gallery: London Design Festival 2014

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LDF-2014-Gallery.jpgPhotography by Sam Dunne & Anki Delfmann for Core77

The London Design Festival, now in it's 12th year was back bigger than ever with festivities spreading even further into the metropolis. The usual suspects; designjunction, Designersblock, Tent, and Superbrands were out in full force with more design eye-candy than you can wave a well crafted candlestick at. There was a lot of unexpected treasures to be discovered in peripheries, and once again the organizers did an amazing job with producing and branding the design festival.

» View Gallery


London Design Festival 2014:
» Highlights from LDF14 at the VA
» Lee Broom Launches 'Nouveau Rebel'
» The First Law of Kipple
» Dominic Wilcox's Stained Glass Driverless Sleeper Car and Dezeen x MINI Frontiers
» Highlights from Designjunction
» Highlights from Designersblock
» Highlights from Tent London
» Global Color Research x Giles Miller Studio: 'Ten Years of Color'
» Ernest Wright & Son Scissormakers on Shoreditch Design Triangle

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The Future Is Here (Sort Of): The TBD Catalog Is Available Now

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Back in September 2012, I travelled to Detroit for a few days with Julian Bleecker and Nicolas Nova (two of my partners at the Near Future Laboratory). We invited many of our friends along too, for three days of discussions about the future. These friends included science fiction writers, designers, artists, engineers and makers, and we wanted to talk about a very particular type of future. For those of you who read my previous Core77 piece 'The Future Mundane,' this will come as no surprise. We wanted to talk about a future of middling indifference, of partly broken things, of background characters. A future where self-driving cars weren't a fantasy, but another place to be bored. A future where drones didn't draw gasps of awe, but eye-rolls of indifference. A future where today's 'technology' had become tomorrow's ho-hum.

Over three days, we ran a couple of workshops at the Henry Ford Museum and the university of Michigan discussing future product cycles, emerging behaviors and societies, but we had a very real purpose. Rather than facilitating a think tank, whose output was another written tome, blogpost or article, we wanted to produce a thing. A very real thing. A diegetic prototype. This thing was a catalog.

When we look at catalogs of any sort, they give us a tremendous understanding of the current state of things. In a very succinct way, they describe an entire society, its cultural norms, behaviors and tolerances. What's exciting about catalogs is that they become anthropological references over time. If you have ever picked up a catalog from the seventies for example, you'll instantly be transported to a place and time where the smallest details in shoe buffer design, TV remotes or advertisements tell much more about a society than any dry historical document. (As an aside, visit the Wishbook Archive and prepare to lose an entire afternoon).

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Creative Minds: Athena Maroulis on Cultural Heritage, Social Design and a Never-Ending Love of Knowledge

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It's interesting how things sometimes end up in your lap—in this case, it was a bag belonging to a friend of a friend that ended up on my kitchen table, and things developed from there. Those of you who already have read a few of my interviews from this interview series know that I have a tendency to stumble upon people and things that catch my interest. Well, the bag on my kitchen table sparked my interest and led me on a quest to find out more about the woman behind the brand. Turns out, she's been staying in Copenhagen for a few months. Lucky me!

Read on to learn how a woman born and raised in Australia ended up starting a bag brand in Guatemala.

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Core77: What inspired you to start designing?

Athena Maroulis: I've always loved colors, patterns and dressing up since I was a kid. My mother is an architect and both of my parents have travelled a lot and have an appreciation for art. Our house was full of paintings, art deco furniture (my dad's obsessed), African jewelry, millinery ribbons (my great grandmother was well known hat-maker) and exotic fabrics amongst other things. I think that growing up in this kind of environment makes you conscious of shapes, colors, textures and how things are put together.

Other than that, I have been sewing since I was around 13 and learned how to make garments. From there, I placed top 10 in the state in my final year textiles and design and knew I wanted to have my own fashion business. It seems that design has been in my life from an early age.

Being exposed to items from so many different cultures most have triggered your imagination on many levels. Do you remember any particular piece that you found extra interesting?

It's hard to pinpoint one piece specifically. I have a huge appreciation for structured lines and symmetry and I think it's due to the art deco buffet table, drink cabinet and side board that we had in our home. However, I think my favorite thing (now and forever) has been dressing up, so I've probably spent countless hours fossicking through and trying on the fabulous pieces in my great grandmother's old costume jewellery box. There are the most amazing chintzy, glitzy, rhinestone encrusted statement jewellery pieces in there. I still find them so fascinating and beautiful.

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Vienna Design Week 2014: Recycling Design Prize

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Our tour around Vienna Design Week last week gave us a chance to finally get a first-hand glimpse of winners of the 6th annual Recycling Designpreis—the touring exhibition of the awarded works having already made their way slowly form Berlin to Hamburg to Dusseldorf this year.

The winners and shortlisted works on display showed some awesome creativity in turning discarded items into surprisingly desirable products—upcycling at its best. Some of the most ingenious pieces even managed to identify a material stream beyond the obvious—fashion student Viktoria Lepeschko made striking outerwear from the skins of old tennis balls and designer Michael Hensel created uncompromisingly industrial furniture from used escalator steps.

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Furniture designer Henry Baumann snagged first prize with his clever and intricate use of fruit crates to create a range of benches, stools, lamps and coffee tables.

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