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Hell in a Handbasket: The Real Problem with the "White or Blue?" Dress

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Yesterday's viral internet event quickly went from neat to depressing. For those who stayed away from a computer yesterday, this Tumblr photo of a dress went viral as people began to realize: Some of us see the dress as white with gold stripes. But others see the dress as dark blue with black stripes. A third set of people saw first one, then the other, as they revisited the photo later.


Wired spelled out the scientific explanation, and even went so far as to extract the RGB values in Photoshop:

In a nutshell, the explanation for our perceptual differences has to do with the way our eyes and brain interpret light and reflectivity, filling in blanks that aren't there to generate our notion of what a color is. Apparently the particulars of this photo just happen to ride on some kind of perceptual cusp, where the readout in some peoples' brains is white and gold, whereas others' brains fill in blue and black. Here's what the same dress looks like on its online shopping page, by the way:

The depressing part, as always, was the human reactions: The all-caps crowd stating what colors they saw and following up with ARE YOU BLIND, GET YOUR EYES CHECKED, et cetera. It reminded me of reading reviews of Apple's first earbuds. One reviewer would say they fit perfectly; another would say they'd always fall out. The first reviewer would retort with DONT LISTEN TO THIS PERSON THEIR AN IDIOT THESE EARBUDS FIT PERFECTLY and I thought Wow, we've become so stupid that we can't even comprehend that peoples' ear canals have different shapes. These guys are presumably descended from the folks who told Christopher Columbus he was going to fall off of the edge of the world.

As industrial designers, we learn early on about trying to fit one thing to match millions of different people. We're taught in school that the challenge of mass production is coming up with something that everyone can use. Which is of course impossible, so we consult our little bibles—who can forget the pain of having to spend $40, on a student's budget, on Panero & Zelnik's Human Dimension & Interior Space to work out the 95th-percentile human measurements for a chair—or we just take our best guess.

But come crit time, certain things became pretty clear: Few folks can get universal consensus on what's pretty and what's ugly, what works and what doesn't.

What's sad is how this plays out in society. When we can’t reach a majority consensus, or even when folks have the temerity to disagree with us, the next step in the "debate" is These people are all idiots.


Empathetic Design: A UMich Charette On Ebola

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A recent 3-day design charette hosted by University of Michigan's Stamps School pitted students against one of the trickiest global issues in years: Ebola. The multi-disciplinary teams from design, engineering, medical and business programs addressed three topics based on needs established by NGOs, medical professionals and emergency responders with experience in the crisis. Aiming to keep the resulting projects as economical and pragmatic as possible, the categories were pointedly ground-level: design of personal protection equipment, health communication across cultural and linguistic barriers, and transportation of infected and diseased bodies.

The students’ work was informed by seasoned medical and design faculty from ideation through critique, and the simplicity and thoughtfulness of the projects shows it. And putting real walk to their talk, some of the resulting designs are in trials for further development both on campus and with partners on the ground in west Africa. Here are a few highlights.

On the ground, medical responders regularly need to wear two pairs of gloves at a time for safety, multiplying the already irritating process of removing sticky sweaty gloves and adding a deadly serious threat of self contamination during removal. And with high heat and humidity, dextrous de-gloving gets really difficult. To make non-messy glove removal a little quicker, one team developed an internally adhered sticker, which the user can bend and pinch from the outside for easier removal when the time comes. 

Stringent isolation and quarantine are key elements in treating and reducing the spread of Ebola, which is especially hard on patients removed from their homes and families often without even being able to say goodbye. Because human touch is deeply connected to the act of comforting, physical separation of patients and caregivers and family can deepen the trauma of illness. The Embrace was conceived as a safe method for comforting intimacy, and a humanizing tool against fear and alienation. The design is based on existing methods for doctors and patient interaction, and the methods for parents to interact with neonatal babies.

Protective suits can be unwieldy and difficult to get out of safely which can put them at risk of ripping or worse. As a valuable and often scarce resource it’s important to make sanitary disrobing easier. These simple disposable straps are designed to make peeling a suit off easier without a lot of contamination or struggle. Just stick them on the inside of the lapels while suiting up, and remove safely later. Neatly done.

Similarly simple, the Transformative Tyvek project proposes distributing pre-printed but uncut Tyvek with suggestions for multiple hygienic uses in a response environment. Options include use as a bed sheet, vomit container, apron, mask, and body bag. Tyvek is an easily produced material and by producing and shipping flat distribution would be relatively painless.

For more on this charette check out the project page and keep an eye out for more of the school’s work on social design in the future. 

Hell in a Handbasket: The Real Problem with the "White or Blue?" Dress

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Yesterday's viral internet event quickly went from neat to depressing. For those who stayed away from a computer yesterday, this Tumblr photo of a dress went viral as people began to realize: Some of us see the dress as white with gold stripes. But others see the dress as dark blue with black stripes. A third set of people saw first one, then the other, as they revisited the photo later.


Wired spelled out the scientific explanation, and even went so far as to extract the RGB values in Photoshop:

In a nutshell, the explanation for our perceptual differences has to do with the way our eyes and brain interpret light and reflectivity, filling in blanks that aren't there to generate our notion of what a color is. Apparently the particulars of this photo just happen to ride on some kind of perceptual cusp, where the readout in some peoples' brains is white and gold, whereas others' brains fill in blue and black. Here's what the same dress looks like on its online shopping page, by the way:

The depressing part, as always, was the human reactions: The all-caps crowd stating what colors they saw and following up with ARE YOU BLIND, GET YOUR EYES CHECKED, et cetera. It reminded me of reading reviews of Apple's first earbuds. One reviewer would say they fit perfectly; another would say they'd always fall out. The first reviewer would retort with DONT LISTEN TO THIS PERSON THEIR AN IDIOT THESE EARBUDS FIT PERFECTLY and I thought Wow, we've become so stupid that we can't even comprehend that peoples' ear canals have different shapes. These guys are presumably descended from the folks who told Christopher Columbus he was going to fall off of the edge of the world.

As industrial designers, we learn early on about trying to fit one thing to match millions of different people. We're taught in school that the challenge of mass production is coming up with something that everyone can use. Which is of course impossible, so we consult our little bibles—who can forget the pain of having to spend $40, on a student's budget, on Panero & Zelnik's Human Dimension & Interior Space to work out the 95th-percentile human measurements for a chair—or we just take our best guess.

But come crit time, certain things became pretty clear: Few folks can get universal consensus on what's pretty and what's ugly, what works and what doesn't.

What's sad is how this plays out in society. When we can’t reach a majority consensus, or even when folks have the temerity to disagree with us, the next step in the "debate" is These people are all idiots.

The World's Most Beautiful Staircase is in Portugal

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Inside what may be the prettiest bookstore in the world…

…is what has got to be one of the world's most beautiful staircases.

Not impressed? Look at it from this angle:

The bookstore's name is Livraria Lello, "Lello Bookstore" in Portugese, and it's located in Porto, Portugal's second-largest city.

It was designed in roughly 1906 by one Francisco Xavier Esteves. He was neither an architect nor an interior designer, but an engineer.

And it's no wonder: The thing is a structural marvel. From this angle below, look at how little support there is beneath the "wings," yet it's stood for over a century.

I would have trouble designing this in CAD, yet Esteves worked this out on pencil and paper.

You reckon he worked it out first in plan view, or elevation?

Livraria Lello reportedly does not permit photographs to be taken inside the store. But people passing through cannot help themselves. Lucky for us.


Making It Count

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This is the latest installment of In the Details, our weekly deep-dive into the making of a new product or project. Last week, we deconstructed a cloudlike pendant light.

Startup culture may be good for innovation, but it’s often bad for the body—a plight that the folks at Tangram know all too well. “Running a busy startup means our schedules are less than predictable, and we’re always crunched for time,” says Joen Choe, the president of Tangram America. To try to squeeze in some cardio during their long workdays, Choe and his colleagues got in the habit of taking breaks on the office patio to jump rope.

But they quickly noticed a shortcoming in this otherwise efficient and practical exercise. “After any decent number of jumps, it’s very difficult to keep track of how many jumps you’ve taken,” Choe says. Given its expertise in product and UX design, the Seoul-and New Jersey-based Tangram saw an opportunity to create a smarter jump rope that can display fitness data in midair, right before its user’s eyes.

The resulting Smart Rope, which launched on Kickstarter last week, uses 23 high-quality LEDs embedded in a proprietary, patent-pending flexible printed circuit board (FPCB) to show the number of jumps or calories burned on the rope itself. A dot matrix–style display creates the effect known as “persistence of vision”—a phenomenon where light, moving quickly, appears as a streak to the human eye. You may have seen it in your last sci-fi movie, or in this really great explanation from “Mr. Wizard."

But, wait, don’t counting jump ropes already exist, albeit in analog form? “Anyone who’s used a counting jump rope knows that they’re quite poorly designed, and it’s pretty much impossible to read the tiny counter on the handle while you’re jumping—especially when you’re in the hundreds or thousands and you’re focused on powering through a workout,” Choe says. With the Smart Rope, four digits are illuminated with clear visibility, continuously displaying relevant data in front or the jumper. 

For the actual shape and feel of the device, the team at Tangram was inspired by classic jump ropes from their childhood, with their thick wooden handles. “There are all types of handles today, but this classic design has lasted because it’s both intuitive and functional,” Choe says. “We wanted to create something that was sleek and simple but still felt substantial in the hand. And, of course, we wanted to ensure an effortless, natural motion while jumping rope.” To meet that last requirement, Tangram positioned the rope at a 45-degree angle to the chrome handle, using a turning unit and ball bearing to allow for natural, smooth revolutions with a flick of the wrist.

The Smart Gym app

Inside the handle is a customized Arduino board and RAM memory, which stores basic count information detected from magnetic sensors (more on those in a moment). The FPCB is specially designed to be light and flexible enough for an ideal jump rope, but durable and impact-resistant enough to withstand shock and the occasional misstep. The handles also house a Bluetooth 4.0 transmitter, which communicates with a paired smartphone and the Smart Gym mobile application.

As for those magnetic sensors: The Tangram team developed this proprietary component in lieu of using a gyroscopic sensor like the ones found in smartphones or other wearable monitors. “The poorly-kept secret about most wearables is that they really don’t have much functionality beyond what’s already in your smartphone,” Choe says. “We see most wearables on the market as passive monitoring devices—they can tell you that you made a lot of generic movements on a given day, but whether that’s trekking back and forth from the fridge or doing burpees is beyond most of them.” The Smart Rope’s magnetic sensors, by contrast, register the actual revolutions of the rope to precisely count each complete jump. This means that the device can offer a basic jump count even without a paired smartphone, and that it will potentially be able to store several jumping sessions between smartphone pairings (although the details of that functionality are still being worked out). 

Snapshots from the development process
Testing FPCBs
Sketches of the turning unit inside the handle
A rendering of the handle assembly

Choe predicts that the market will continue to move in the direction of the Smart Rope, with more wearables that fulfill a specific, niche function—and he says that Tangram plans to roll out a series of additional smart-fitness products that will integrate with its Smart Gym platform.

For now, however, it’s focused on the Smart Rope. If Tangram reaches its Kickstarter goal, those funds will be used to cover production costs. “While we certainly have best-in-class manufacturers working on our projects, we’re not a factory or large-scale manufacturer, so we wanted a way to develop the best product possible without the constraints of wasteful inventory,” Choe says. “Kickstarter allows us to get real-time feedback from backers and continuously optimize the product, which is what we’re all about.”

Although Tangram’s Smart Rope has only just launched on Kickstarter, it is making its debut at the tail-end of very similar campaign: Sophia, “the smart skipping rope,” is another connected jump rope that uses a mobile application to track calories and sync exercises over Bluetooth. In addition to connectivity and mobile syncing, Sophia offers a way to gamify your workouts—sharing statistics via social from the mobile application. The product falls short as real-time display, however—it only shows the jump count via a small screen in the handle of the device. “Considering one of the major benefits of jumping rope is cardio, interrupting your jumping like this doesn't make much sense,” Choe argues. He says that his team’s Smart Rope also provides a wider range of data: the duration of your session, the number of jumps executed, the calories burned and recommended interval-training data—based on CDC guidelines for jumping rope. A bonus for the CrossFit community: the Smart Rope also registers “double unders” by tracking the velocity of jumps (based on RPM). 

With the smart jump-rope space already beginning to look pretty saturated, it’s only a matter of time before the next piece of fitness equipment gets disrupted. Hula hoops, anyone?

Welcome to the Core77 Tech-tacular!

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Illustration by Kelsey Dake for Core77.

With the January rush of CES and NAIAS behind us and SxSWi just a few weeks away, this is the time to reflect on the state of design and technology. Oftentimes, these types of events raise more questions than they resolve, sometimes they are more underwhelming than enlightening. Nonetheless, these industry gatherings always give us the pulse of the now and a glimpse of future.

At Core77, we’re taking this moment to celebrate the now with a new site design, take stock of the past as we mark our 20 year anniversary as the premier online resource for industrial designers and look to the future with the first ever Core77 Tech-tacular! Over the next few weeks we explore the myriad ways that new technologies are shaping the future of design: the ways we ideate, create and relate to design objects. 

For our first Core77 Tech-tacular, we explore the range of possibilities that lie in the next 20 years with a deep dive into the tools of making—3D printers to sketching apps, design school workshops to game-changing power tools that can transform the way we design and build things. In our Tech Specs series we talk to ten designers who work on a variety of different products—from consumer electronics to experimental architecture, home furnishings to some very large pickup trucks. We mine the vast archives of the Core77 Discussion Boards and compile some of the questions, advice and insights that the Core77 community (that’s you!) have shared over the past few years; don’t hesitate to join in on the conversation. And finally, we ask a few experts to weigh-in on the wider implications of wearables, autonomous automobiles and so-called Smart Cities for a glimpse at what the future might hold for designers and the business of design.

So sit-back, bookmark our Core77 Tech-tacular channel and share your thoughts in our comments section as we roll out the Core77 Tech-tacular, celebrating 20 years of Core77.

Introducing 'Tech Specs,' Our Interview Series on Designers' Digital Tools

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In Core77’s 2015 Tech-tacular—launching today!—we’ll be reviewing some of the latest software offerings for industrial designers, as well as considering the wider implications of wearables, autonomous automobiles, so-called Smart Cities and other big-picture design-tech developments.

But we also wanted to know what kinds of digital tools contemporary designers are actually using on a day-to-day basis. So we got in touch with ten designers from different industries, and asked them each a batch of questions about their computer setups, most-used software, favorite apps, biggest tech gripes and related issues. 

We intentionally cast a wide net, interviewing designers who work on a variety of different kinds of products—from consumer electronics to experimental architecture, home furnishings to some very large pickup trucks. We hope that the resulting interviews provide a window into how designers are incorporating new digital tools into their workflows—very often, in tandem with tried-and-true analog tools—and that readers come away from the series with some ideas for novel software solutions or tech workarounds to integrate into their own practices.

The first of our interviews—with Thomas Murray, a senior industrial designer at Bresslergroup—is now live, and we’ll be posting a new one each weekday morning for the next two weeks. So check back, and be sure to weigh in with your own tech-related wishes and gripes in the comments.

Photo: the desk of Paul Hoppe, art director at New York’s Local Projects. Check back tomorrow for our interview with Hoppe.

This article is part of the Core77 Tech-tacular, an editorial series exploring the myriad ways that technologies are shaping the future of design.

Tech Specs: Thomas Murray, Senior Industrial Designer at Bresslergroup

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This is the first of our ten Tech Specs interviews. Read the series introduction here.

Name: Thomas Murray

Job title: Senior Industrial Designer at Bresslergroup in Philadelphia (and industrial design blogger at StudioClues)

Background: I've been at Bresslergroup for two years now. Previously, I worked at a design firm called Design Central in Columbus, Ohio. And before that, I was an industrial designer at Stanley Black & Decker for about seven years. 

Computer setup: I have a Windows 7 tower with a 24-inch Wacom Cintiq. I don’t use an additional monitor, just the Cintiq—it has an upright position that I use for CAD and e-mail and things like that, and when you pull a lever it folds down closer to your lap for drawing.

Believe it or not, I use a corded mouse—I find that cordless mice don’t have the sensitivity and reaction time I need when using programs like Illustrator. I do use a cordless keyboard, however, because you need to be able to move the keyboard out of the way when the Cintiq is in drawing mode. 

Otherwise, I always keep a big pair of headphones on my desk—that’s key. And I also have a little pair of digital calipers next to me, because I’m constantly measuring things.

How much of your workday do you spend in front of the computer? Probably 75 to 80 percent

Thomas Murray at work

Most used software: In order of usage, the top three would be Sketchbook Pro, SolidWorks and an image-capture program called SnagIt, which does quick screen-captures and lets you annotate them. The next most-used would be Photoshop, followed by PowerPoint. PowerPoint doesn’t have great creative tools or font controls, and you can’t draw very well in it, but it’s what clients are familiar with. When we’re sending presentations to clients, they’re generally going to want a PowerPoint file so they can edit it. 

Finally, we use Bunkspeed quite a bit. It’s a digital-animation rendering software that does really well in 3D animation for industrial designers. We tend to do a lot of product animation and we find that it’s the easiest to use—and it’s fairly cost effective. We are also looking into using Modo, which is another animation package. 

Software that you thought you’d use more often than you do: Well, I guess I see people outside my profession using things like Excel and Word a lot—and generally I don’t use programs like that as much as I do the creative software. We do use Outlook for company e-mail, as it integrates well with calendars and scheduling. It also works well with online meeting platforms like GoToMeeting. 

Phone: iPhone 5

One of Murray's designs for Stanley Black & Decker, where he worked for seven years.

Favorite apps: Feedly to catch up on blogs. Tweetbot to look at Twitter. The Podcasts app. And an app called IFTTT, which is an automation app that can give you customizable notifications for various things. 

Apps that are actually useful for your work: The camera is extremely useful. When I was first starting out, you would have to grab the studio camera and bring the model or prototype somewhere with good lighting to get a good picture, but now it’s so handy to snap a photo with your phone. Having a good camera available all the time really makes a difference when capturing the design process.

Other devices: Nothing of note. I don’t use an iPad or anything like that. I carry a spiral-bound notebook with me everywhere in the office. Maybe I’m a little old-school, but I feel like when you’re in a meeting with clients and you have a digital device in front of you, they may think you’re not paying attention to them. When you have a notebook in your hand and you’re writing stuff down, it feels like you’re giving them more attention.

Other machinery/tools in your workspace: We have multiple 3D printers in the office that we’re constantly using to build prototypes for projects. We utilize the latest 3D printing technologies available. Other than that, I have a few X-acto blades on my desk and a cutting mat nearby, for cutting paper and foamcore and things like that. 

Tools or software you’re thinking of purchasing: I have thought about getting a second monitor to see e-mail, but I have to figure out where I could fit it on my desk. And I’m trying to find a good-quality charging station for my desk, because the USBs on my Wacom are always taken and I constantly have to reach down to plug and unplug things in my tower.

A side project by Murray—the SmartiPi, a Raspberry Pi B+ and camera case with Lego and GoPro mount compatibility
One of Murray's projects at Bresslergroup, a portable HD video magnifier for Freedom Scientific

How has new technology changed your job in the last 5–10 years? I’ve seen a huge transition to digital sketching. When I was in school about ten years ago, it basically didn’t even exist—and now I’m almost 100 percent drawing on-screen. That’s probably the biggest change for me. Otherwise, 3D printing has just gotten so cheap. We have multiple 3D printers in the office and they really speed up the design process. We can sketch a concept in the morning and hold a print of it that afternoon. Easy access to this and other rapid prototyping solutions really accelerates innovation. 

When it comes to new tech, are you a Luddite, an early adopter or somewhere in between? Generally I know about stuff pretty early, because I’m constantly reading blogs, but I like to wait for all the bugs to get flushed out before I actually adopt something. So I’m highly aware of new technology but slightly slower to adopt it.

Do you outsource any of your tech tasks? We sometimes outsource some of our 3D printing or machining jobs when we have too much volume internally. 

I’ve seen a huge transition to digital sketching. When I was in school about ten years ago, it basically didn’t even exist—and now I’m almost 100 percent drawing on-screen.

What are your biggest tech gripes? Buggy software. Poor interfaces. Having too many features. And online-meeting issues—I must have used close to ten different online-meeting solutions, from Microsoft to GoToMeeting to WebEx, and none of them are foolproof. It’s amazing how many issues they still have. It seems like it’s a technology that’s just impossible to perfect. 

In terms of my design process, there’s always the issue of file-format compatibility. So when we’re doing 3D design, we need to export it out of SolidWorks and bring it into our rendering program, and that’s a constant nuisance, because the export may not work correctly and then the file has issues. That’s a problem I see nearly every day. 

What do you wish software could do that it can’t now? This isn’t exactly a software problem, but I never see good artificial intelligence—I never get good tool tips in software or good recommendations on Amazon or eBay. They’re just not very accurate. 

Finally, we've all had instances of software crashing at the worst possible moment, or experienced similar stomach-churning tech malfunctions. Can you tell us about your most memorable tech-related disaster? The biggest issues I’ve ever had were working with extremely large files in SolidWorks 3D. Working on a really large assembly or part, I’ve had instances where the file just got too big—and what I find with SolidWorks is that when the file gets too big, it gets really buggy and things just stop working. And there have been cases where I had to take the file apart and almost start over—where you have to delete a lot of stuff and break the file into two or three files and then link them together. That’s where I’ve really run into some walls. 

This article is part of the Core77 Tech-tacular, an editorial series exploring the myriad ways that technologies are shaping the future of design.



Embracing the Wild World of Wearables

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There’s something about the current design buzzword, “wearables,” that is spectacularly mesmerizing. As a tech nerd, I’ve seen it coming for some time, and have been intrigued to see its recent explosion in new product launches and popular media coverage. When the UP band from Jawbone emerged on the market in 2011, I had one of the very first, dutifully tracking steps, exploring sleep and otherwise trying to use and misuse this new type of device. I have also tried the FuelBand, the Fitbit, the Pebble Smartwatch and many other first generation products that have joined my collection of smart artifacts. My most recent test drives have been the Logbar Ring gestural interface (above) along with the Sony SmartWatch 3. And as a hands-on design technologist I’ve been experimenting with DIY kits such as the Metawear, Bitalino and Lilypad Arduino

By their nature, wearable devices are intimate: they are in constant contact with us, covering sensitive skin and hugging curves and creases like parasitic prosthetics. They come to life on their own exposing the special powers of information flow, divulging otherwise invisible characteristics from the inside out (stress, temperature, heart activity) or making tangible some measurement from the outside in (phone alerts, environmental stats, social network activity). Their inner knowledge can be intended as a clandestine message that only the wearer perceives, or a visible badge of outward expression. They leave behind trails of data points that fade away in an instant, or persist as memories over a long period of time. Wearables allow data to essentially become a “material” that a designer can select and edit for specific types of users. And beyond the practical implications, data can become an important emotional trigger, evoking memories, bolstering confidence and actively building a sense of identity.

There’s an infinite amount of uncharted design territory left to explore in this area, so it’s no wonder that it’s captured the imagination of all kinds of designers. In this piece I’ve taken a step back to look at what’s ahead for design when the worlds of technology, fashion and wellness collide.

Looking Beyond the Wrist

Apple Watch

So far, wearable technology has barely scratched the surface of what’s possible, with an inordinate amount of design in the form of bands, bracelets and multi-functional smart watches. Though there are many benefits to the wrist as a location, it’s a thin piece of on-body real estate and the advent of Apple’s Watch will inevitably redefine the category, bringing fierce competition with it.

Instead of fixating on the wrist, we’ll find many more opportunities by looking elsewhere on the body. Clothing is an obvious choice, where the fabric itself has electronics woven into it, like the experimental Ralph Lauren Polo Tech shirt launched at the US Open and designed to track and broadcast fitness stats. Under Armour has been introducing garments designed to accommodate wearable technology, such as shirts that work with their removable “bug” sensor. In addition to sensors like an accelerometer for movement, it is ideally positioned to measure the wearer’s heart rate and breathing.

Ralph Lauren's Polo Tech shirt track and broadcasts fitness stats.

Several companies have begun to explore other forms of jewelry, such as the Ringly notification device and the Logbar Ring mentioned above. The Misfit Shine Fitness and Sleep Monitor has led the way in thinking about smart jewelry as a system, where the core sensor module can be worn as a wrist band or pendant, or even as part of a sock or T-shirt insert.

Beyond familiar structures such as jewelry and clothing, there are several new reusable adhesive technologies that can enable smart products in the form of decals and wearable tattoos. The Bloom Technologies pregnancy monitor, a product I recently helped develop as part of the team at Zinc Group, adheres directly to abdominal skin, avoiding the need for uncomfortable bands or compression clothing during a time when women need comfort the most.

Exploring Materials

As an early-adopter’s market, it’s been a one-size-fits all landscape in terms of materials, but this is one exciting area where we’re starting to see change. As designers seeking to tap into human emotions and expression, we owe it to ourselves to think broadly, looking towards more natural materials that have unexpected tactile characteristics. Some interesting glimpses of possibility include luscious woods, such as the shells used for the Bellabeat collection of products for expectant mothers, or porcelain as used in Joey Roth’s iconic ceramic speakers. A recent collaboration between Swarovski and Misfit Shine shows the potential for looking towards more expensive materials such as crystals and other types of stone. 

The Bellabeat Leaf is marketed as smart jewelry.

Furthermore it’s not just the physical aspects of materials that we’ll select, but the dynamic aspects as well. Wearable electronics open up a “fourth” dimension based on how the object changes over time, both in terms of graphical displays as well embedded mechanisms. Google has created a guideline for digital interfaces that’s literally called “Material” design, to suggest a reference to physical characteristics in the digital world. 

The smart object maker WiThings has made the boldest move in this direction with the Activité watch that has an analog dial as its main tracking display. As designers, we know that firmware upgrades and changes in preferences will be best accommodated on a digital display that can be reprogrammed when needed. On the other hand, an analog dial harnesses the emotional value of a familiar, reliable and classic interface, harkening back to sports cars and precision tools. There is a visceral pleasure to the interaction, which is something that we miss with so many swipes of fingertips on slick glass. 

History and Culture

One clear abrasive aspect of today’s wearables is that many of these objects take a step into the future too quickly, making it difficult for people to feel comfortable including these objects in their everyday lives. All objects, to be easily embraced, have to flow into existing culture. It's certainly exciting, empowering and a little frightening to us as designers to think about how the objects we introduce into the world can change culture, but at the same time, they will never be truly accepted if we don't design with a sensitivity to what exists. 

When the Nike+ system first emerged, the sensor was embedded deep within a shoe, so no one really needed to know that that piece of footwear was any different than any other type of sneaker. And while fitness bands were new, we already had a history of wearing information on our wrists, so what was essentially an evolution of the watch became an easy transition. But things went awry for the general public when it came to the first incarnation of Google Glass. 

Culturally we’re not used to seeing glasses worn on the face without some kind of corrective feature, and when it comes to form, the glasses didn’t evolve from an existing shape like horn-rimmed, Ray Ban or cat eye; they perched precariously on the nose and traveled across the face with an asymmetrical block suspended from the frame. We simply weren’t ready for something that didn’t evolve from a familiar archetype. By contrast, the WiThings Activité high end watch pays serious respect to classical watches not just in terms of form and mechanisms but, by offering a high end Swiss made option, amplifying the cultural value of a historically-valued, finely crafted object.

Context is Key

Perhaps the most important aspect for designers to consider is context. Where will people be when they are wearing this device? Will it be hidden or visible? Do they wear it to bed, like the Jawbone UP encourages people to do? Or do they put it in a jewelry box with other precious items? What happens when it needs a charge? How does it sync? When do they look at that app? We can’t assume that what we envision as use cases will be instantly embraced, and if the experience doesn’t mesh with everyday life, the objects will fail to become part of new rituals. As far as design methods go, deep research with real people is more important now than ever, and envisioning use over time through tools such as scenarios are critical.

Google’s Android Wear watch interface, for example, can take its cues from the Google Now platform, changing automatically according to the context you’re in. If it knows you are driving, it will switch to the navigation interface, providing tactile vibration feedback for directions and listening for voice inputs so you don’t have to fumble with an interface or take your eyes off the road.

Six watch bodies and a dozen watch faces are currently offered through the Android Wear store.

It will be interesting to see how the two giants, Apple and Google affect the landscape of wearables in daily life. In the case of Google, the Android platform will be available for developers to go wild, opening up the potential for products from smaller and more eclectic manufacturers to emerge, appealing to niche markets. Experimental contextual shifts can also be explored, like allowing the device to be worn all day and then plugged into an alarm clock at night, once again changing its interface to be appropriate with the situation at hand. In Apple’s case, I anticipate that the OS will be tightly controlled as it has been for the company’s previous generations of mobile devices, but there will be carefully scripted and well-planned scenarios baked into the OS from the start.

Creating Products with Integrity

With so many design considerations to keep in mind, how can you introduce a totally new type of product? How can you take history into account, allowing for individual tastes, and accounting for changes in trends? And how can you also take into account the changes in fashion while also accommodating shifting technology standards? For example, how long will Bluetooth be the dominant communications protocol? What happens when the next mobile OS emerges? It's a scary proposition! But it's clear that the one-style-fits-all era of the Jawbone UP and Fuelband are over. As a designer, my hope is that creating culturally sensitive, thoughtful objects that have that ever-elusive quality of integrity will encourage their longevity. Can we design something that people love and cherish, maybe even pass on to a future generation? 

There’s so much work to be done, but one thing that’s for sure is that the future is ours to create.

This article is part of the Core77 Tech-tacular, an editorial series exploring the myriad ways that technologies are shaping the future of design.


The Sweater Stone, Patagonia, Product Longevity, and How to Keep Customers for Life

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"Sustainability" is a popular buzzword, but I think we should also consider "longevity." When a company has sustainable practices but you must re-buy their products every few years, it seems obvious that we should be leaning more towards longevity.

This is Patagonia's Men's Better Sweater Hoody, which I purchased three years ago for $159:

Because my apartment is freezing and I spend a lot of time outside in the winter, I wear it literally every day from the start of November to mid-March, a solid 4.5 months, every year. From a functionality standpoint it's lightweight, warm, has handwarmer pockets and a hood, which I have grown to prefer over hats (less things to lose outside).

After three years of use, the surface has become pilled:

Because the garment is so functional, I've lived with the pilling and have resisted buying a new one, because it just works.

Until yesterday morning, that is. Something happened when I was hurriedly yanking it on and the zipper separated from the lining, preventing me from zipping it up all of the way.

I resigned myself to the fact that I'd have to replace it and headed to a local Patagonia store. I'd only gotten three years out of it, but in this day and age, I figured that was the best I could do.

At the store a 20ish sales clerk approached me almost immediately to see what I needed. I asked if they had any more Better Sweater Hoodies in my size. "I'm sorry, we're out of that one for the season," he apologized. "All we've got is XL. May I ask why you're looking for that one specifically?"

I unzipped my outer jacket to show him the Hoody I was wearing underneath. "The zipper has started to separate," I said.

"Oh, we'll just fix that for you," he said. "We can replace that entire zipper lining. This store is a new location and our sewing machine hasn't arrived yet, but it should be here next week or the week after. Bring it by and we'll fix it for free."

"Uh…really?" I said. It was so long since anyone in any retail environment had ever offered to fix something rather than trying to sell me a new one.

He took a closer look at my Hoody. "And in the meantime, I've got a Sweater Stone you can use to get rid of that pilling," he volunteered. He disappeared downstairs and came back with this little white box:

"This thing does a great job, you can literally make the Hoody look brand-new," he said, handing it to me.

I looked around for the register. "Great, where do I pay?"

"No no, it's free," he said. "Take it, and let us know how it works out. Start using it under the armpit or an inconspicuous area until you get the hang of how to use it. And check back in next week or the week after when we've got the sewing machine, and we'll fix that zipper too."

I'd never heard of a Sweater Stone, but I went home to try it out.

It's a black piece of pumice stone and didn't take long to figure out how to use: You lay the garment flat on a table, then drag the stone's edge along it and it just snips the pills off after a few passes. I found it works best when you go "with the grain" of the garment, and in only one direction. After maybe two minutes, here's what one side of the garment looked like versus the other, un-stoned side on the right:

Pretty awesome.

The Sweater Stone isn't an expensive item, I looked it up and it's available for mostly sub-$8. But this is the third Patagonia retail episode I've had that has reinforced that I'll be a lifelong customer.

With the first, the waterproof lining on an expensive jacket I owned failed after three years. I found it was because I had washed it improperly and caused it to delaminate; after the clerk educated me on the right way to do it, they still replaced it for free.

With the second, the waterproof lining on a pair of Torrent Shell pants I bought there failed after four years. These had delaminated due to pure heavy use and friction. Again, they unhesitatingly offered me a free replacement. This episode was notable because it was handled by an older, more senior sales clerk who had a younger, new clerk in tow and instructed him, on the fly, how and why they handled replacements like this.

Then there's this third one with the free repair.

I'm impressed with Patagonia not only for their policies regarding sustainability and longevity, but because they have somehow managed to train this into their front-line retail employees, and have empowered them to offer solutions on the spot. They didn't have to call a manager and have me wait: The first two offered me replacements unprompted, and the only questions asked were seeking to understand how their product had failed. This latest guy asked the right questions to figure out what I needed and offered to fix it free. He also spotted the pilling, something I hadn't even asked about, and instantly enabled me to fix that for free.

In contrast, after my North Face jacket failed five years ago, after just a single season, I brought it to the store to ask about repair. The bored teenage sales clerk looked at me like I was crazy and suggested I buy a new one. That was the last time I patronized that brand.

And I've gotta say, Patagonia does a pretty good job promoting another kind of longevity: That between the company and the customer. Whenever I need to buy garments that last or that will be fixed or replaced should they fail prematurely, I'll return.

Jenny Nordberg's Five-Minute Furniture

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In design and in building, we all know that speed is bad. Particularly where power tools are concerned. I don't know if any of you have been watching Spike TV's "Framework," but if so, was anything sadder than hearing BK's story? To fill you in, he recounts having a nasty near-accident in his younger years because he was rushing around in his shop. Now, however, the pendulum's swung too far the other way: On the show he is presented as lumberingly, maddeningly slow, to the point of not being able to complete simple tasks in a reasonable amount of time.

BK would be the first to tell you you can't build a piece of furniture in three to five minutes. I'd be the second, and there would be an army of folks behind me. But Jenny Nordberg, an experimental industrial designer based in Malmo, is willing to go against conventional wisdom for the sake of exploration.

Hence her “3 to 5 Minutes – Rapid Handmade Furniture” project, recently exhibited at the Stockholm Furniture and Light Fair, seeks to "[use] speed as a method to achieve new expressions and procedures."

“3 to 5 minutes – Rapid handmade furniture” explores the making of furniture by hand under time pressure often to found in mass production. Each piece of furniture must be made within the timespan of three to five minutes. All production steps are clocked and added together as the designer turns herself into an artisanal assembly line.

Materials and components are to be found in regular hardware stores as well as the pre-cutting of the board material. The project includes two easy chairs with additional pillows, a small trolley and a dining table with four chairs, all together made in less than an hour.

The design, materials and details are all the result of the lack of time. For example – the coating does not cover the whole surface, details are few and imperfect, assembly screws are visible and the design is restrained.

At the very least, I can just about guarantee this will be the most…unusual thing you've seen on the internet today:


Design for All Life

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By Prasad Boradkar, Co-Director of the Biomimicry Institute, Arizona State University

It was sixty years ago that pioneering industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss first introduced us to Joe and Josephine in his seminal book Designing For People. Every industrial designer has encountered this couple in the anthropometric charts and diagrams Dreyfuss created; they appear in side view, front view and top view, marked with lines, arcs, arrows and numbers, quietly promoting design for the human body. With the 1955 publication of Designing for People, Dreyfuss clearly paved the way for the discipline of human factors and ergonomics. He reminded us that the objects we design are “ridden in, sat upon, looked at, talked into, activated, operated, or in some way used by people individually or en masse,” and taking into account their physiological and psychological needs should be central to the design process.. Since then, we as industrial designers have taken our task of designing for people rather seriously, and this has given rise to approaches called user-centered design, human-centered design, participatory design, and emphathic design. This is design of the people, by the people, for the people. 

But I wonder if this anthropocentrism in design has encouraged a myopic and self-centered conception of our goals as designers. Clearly, the things we design with such diligent research and utmost care for people do not impact only people. The consequences of design activity (human-centered or otherwise) reach far beyond humans. We are, after all, one of several million species who live on this planet. Why then, should our design be so anthropocentric? Can we not design products and services keeping in mind not only people, but also other species and entire ecosystems? Can we not envision the potential impacts of all that we design not only on people, but on all inhabitants of our biosphere? Is it time to re-examine our anthropocentrism in design? 

Perhaps we need a new paradigm that distinctly recognizes and explicitly extends design’s locus of action to move beyond anthropocentrism and towards biocentrism. This, in no way suggests that we reject human-centered design; instead, it recommends that we re-imagine our goals and adopt new methods that acknowledge the other millions of species who are our neighbors. Interestingly, it is not quite clear how many species cohabit this planet with us. While reports of the total number vary widely and wildly, according to a recent issue of Science, “the number of species on Earth today is 5 ± 3 million, of which 1.5 million are named." Modern day humans are but one subspecies called Homo sapiens sapiens, with Homo sapiens being the only surviving species of the genus Homo. And while we might be the apex predators seemingly ruling land, water and air, biologists are quick to point out how hopeless things would be should insects, microorganisms and other creatures cease to exist. Louis Pasteur famously said, “life would not long remain possible in the absence of microbes.” This notion has since been refuted by biologists who contend that we might still survive, but with a significantly degraded quality of life. As we start learning more about the other species we share this planet with, it is not unusual to encounter startling facts. For instance, according to biologists Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson, "all ants in the world taken together weigh about as much as all human beings." Surely this must give us pause. 

If we refresh the paradigm of anthropocentric thinking and human-centered design to biocentric thinking and life-centered design, our solutions might start exhibiting a sense of care that extends beyond people. Of course, sustainable design, green design, ecodesign, and other similar practices do address issues of the environment. However, what I am suggesting here is an essential expansion and unambiguous reframing of whom we identify as the target user. Can our target user include all living beings?

In addition to acting in neighborly ways towards other species by including them in our design goals, we can also learn from them. And this is where we can turn to biomimicry, an emerging field of study described by Janine Benyus as “innovation inspired by nature.” In her groundbreaking book published in 1997, Benyus explains the new paradigm that biomimicry represents. “Unlike the Industrial Revolution, the Biomimicry Revolution introduces an era based not on what we can extract from nature, but on what we can learn from her." Implicit in this explanation of biomimicry is the focus on sustainability. Biomimicry can certainly inspire ingenious solutions to thorny problems, but its true promise lies in helping us devise solutions that are ecologically sound. 

Soon after the publication of her book, Benyus teamed up with biologist Dayna Baumeister to further the concept of biomimicry. Their partnership has resulted into two organizations—Biomimicry 3.8 and the Biomimicry Institute—that are constantly developing new resources to practice design and innovation inspired by nature. One of the more powerful tools developed by these organizations is called Life’s Principles, a collection and distillation of deep patterns in nature that help organisms adapt to and survive in their ecosystems. According to Baumeister, “Life’s Principles are intended to represent nature’s strategies for sustainability, that is, how life has sustained on Earth for 3.85 billion years." And these principles can inspire design strategies which, in turn, can be used to create new products, building, business plans, engineering solutions, resource management strategies, and so on. 

At Arizona State University (ASU), we are exploring the concept of life-centered design as a means of developing sustainable solutions inspired by natural systems. In 2008, we started working with the Biomimicry Institute to introduce principles of biomimicry to design, business and engineering students. This week Biomimicry 3.8 and ASU launch a new partnership and initiative called the Biomimicry Center. This center represents an interdisciplinary effort by biologists, designers, engineers, business professionals, writers, ecologists, material scientists, chemists and others to address the complex opportunities and challenges we face today. 

The rapid urbanization we have witnessed over the last few decades is distancing us from the “realities of the natural world,” warns Sir David Attenborough in an interview in The Guardian. Speaking about the world’s population, he says that “over 50% is to some degree out of touch with the natural world and don't even see an animal from one day to the next unless it's a rat or a pigeon.” Have we, through our concrete jungles, created artificial boundaries between the human-made world and the natural world? Do we think of ourselves as distinct from nature? What is the nature of our relationship with other organisms? Biologist Edward O. Wilson believes that people have a hereditary affinity for other living creatures. His term for this human proclivity is biophilia, and he defines it as “the innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes." This notion has inspired biophilic design, described as “an innovative approach that emphasizes the necessity of maintaining, enhancing, and restoring the beneficial experience of nature in the built environment." It also inspired Icelandic singer and songwriter Björk to release a multimedia album titled Biophilia in 2011 as an artistic response to some of the ongoing environmental challenges in her native country.

Biomimicry “attenuates the sense of aliveness we feel when tapping one of our most primal identities — our biophilic, or life-loving, selves." Have we, as designers, become too technophilic? Can we turn to our biophilia and to biomimicry to imagine new paradigms by which to create more sustainable solutions designed not only for people, but for all life?

About Prasad Boradkar

Prasad Boradkar is Professor in Industrial Design at Arizona State University (ASU) in Tempe. He is the Director of InnovationSpace, a transdisciplinary laboratory at ASU where faculty and students from design, business, sustainability and engineering partner with corporations to develop human-centered product concepts that hold societal benefit and minimize impacts on the environment. He also serves as the Co-Director of the Biomimicry Center at ASU, an organization dedicated to the exploration of biologically-inspired solutions to problems of sustainability. Prasad is the author of Designing Things: A Critical Introduction to the Culture of Objects (Berg 2010). He is the co-editor of Encountering Things, an anthology of essays on the cultural meaning of objects, and is currently working on a book on Indian design.

Tech Specs: Paul Hoppe, Art Director at Local Projects

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This is the second of our ten Tech Specs interviews. Previously, we talked to Bresslergroup's Thomas Murray.

Name: Paul Hoppe

Job title: Art director at Local Projects, a New York–based media design firm for museums and public spaces

Background: I got a B.A. in graphic design and fine art at Azusa Pacific University, worked for a few years, then went to Art Center College of Design for a B.F.A. in graphic design. At Art Center, I started with a motion-graphics emphasis but then began learning to code and moved more toward interaction design, and starting to meld installation and interaction together. That’s how I ended up at Local Projects—I’ve been here for just over a year.

Computer setup: At my desk I have a 27-inch iMac, which is pretty standard issue for the graphic design department, plus my own personal 15-inch MacBook Pro that I use for meetings. They’re both 2011 models, and in my MacBook I swapped out the optical drive for an SSD so I can run it a lot faster. I also have a vertical external monitor that I put next to the horizontal iMac—so my e-mail, calendar and web stuff is on the vertical monitor and then I do all my design work on the iMac screen. 

Other than that, I use a wireless mouse—the two-button, wheel style, not a Mac mouse—and I have my headphones. That’s about it. 

How much of your workday do you spend in front of the computer? It varies, but somewhere between 50 to 90 percent of the day. As an art director, I do a lot of walking around to visit the different designers whose projects I’m overseeing—sitting with them at their computers or in meetings, brainstorming and working through ideas. But on some days I’m doing heavy production work, not talking to people, and then I’m in front of my computer most of day.

Paul Hoppe
Hoppe's desk at Local Projects

Most used software: I use Adobe Illustrator most heavily. After that, Keynote, which is basically the Mac version of PowerPoint. We use it for client presentations, bringing together all the graphics from our designers. Keynote also does a great job of making rough animated prototypes of our wireframes, so we can say, “If someone taps here, then this happens.” It’s faster than animating everything in After Effects and rendering out into video—and it’s a lot more flexible because we can iterate on it. But I do use After Effects as well, and then Photoshop would be the other big one. 

Software that you thought you’d use more often than you do: Processing. I know it and use it sometimes, but for a place that does so much interactive work, I thought I would be using it more. It turns out that the developers here as so good at what they do that it’s much more efficient for them to handle this work than for me to do it.

Phone: iPhone 6

Favorite apps: Nothing special, really. Google Maps, Spotify, Podcasts, Twitter. I really like Dark Sky for the weather.

Apps that are actually useful for your work: We use Basecamp for our project management, and I use the app for that—it’s decent. I also use the Sonos app for our office speaker system and playlists. And the app that I rely on when I really need to focus is called SimplyNoise. It’s just different colors of noise that I play through my headphones to drown out everything else.

Other devices: Nothing, really. I don’t have a Wacom tablet or anything like that.

Other machinery/tools in your workspace: We have a mock-up room that’s a mashup of different things. Sometimes it’s full of projectors and monitors; other times there’s someone in there with a saw, making some weird, rigged-up projector mount. I do wish we had a proper shop—that’s on my wish list of things I hope we can get soon, because we are moving toward doing more architectural design, and being able to build things in 3D with real materials would be super helpful. Hopefully we will be able to make it happen soon.

Tools or software you’re thinking of purchasing: It would be great to get a big plotter to do full-size graphics. Also, a laser-cutter and a 3D printer for more material kind of stuff. Those would both fall under my shop wish list.

Local Projects has done several projects for the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York City, including a custom software application for the arrangement of names on the memorial. 
For the Cleveland Museum of Art, Local Projects created Gallery One, a suite of new interactive installations.

How has new technology changed your job in the last 5–10 years? Ten years ago, I was doing mostly installation art; I was really interested in augmenting physical spaces to create meaningful experiences. So I would basically make videos and project them—there wasn’t a huge amount of interactivity, other than people moving through the space. In the last five years, as programming and interaction design has become more accessible, that’s really opened up ways for me to get involved with that. 

Most recently, that would be the advent of programming language like Processing or vvvv for prototyping through code and patching. Being able to prototype and design through code and see the results immediately is something that has really grown a lot recently, and it leads to design solutions much more quickly. In the past, that kind of thing was possible but a lot less accessible. So that has really changed the way I work.

When it comes to new tech, are you a Luddite, an early adopter or somewhere in between? Somewhere in between. I’m super interested in, and try to be aware of, what’s happening on the “bleeding edge” of technology. But when it comes to spending my own personal money on new tech, I like to wait until it has proven itself and gone through a couple release versions. 

Do you outsource any of your tech tasks? When we’re doing more 3D architectural design—which is a relatively new area for us—we will outsource work to different fabricators, to get samples of materials and to build small-scale prototypes. Like I said, we don’t have room for a proper shop in-house, so that’s work we have to outsource for now.

We also outsource our A/V hardware and installation—so when we’re installing a huge monitor wall, we’re not the ones going out and buying the monitors and so on. We do oversee that process really closely, however; we’re in constant communication about the specs and how the hardware will work with the software. And we get test models in the studio. But at the end of the day, someone else is handling the nuts and bolts of actually installing that stuff.

Being able to prototype and design through code and see the results immediately is something that has really grown a lot recently, and it leads to design solutions much more quickly. In the past, that kind of thing was possible but a lot less accessible.

What are your biggest tech gripes? I think this culture of cool new technology is causing us to become a little myopic. The technology is fascinating and it allows us to do what we do—but if that becomes the focus of the work, instead of thoughtful ideas and compelling stories, then we’re missing the point of why we’re designing and who we’re designing for. So my biggest tech frustration would just be when the technology gets in the way of the story or the human aspect of the design.

And on a more day-to-day workflow level, one minor gripe would be keyboard shortcuts across Adobe programs—they don’t line up. Some are the same and some aren’t, and when you’re jumping around between different Adobe software all the time, that can get very annoying.

What do you wish software could do that it can’t now? Do my job for me? It’s funny, because some clients think that’s how it works already: “Oh, just throw it in there and it will be great.” And it’s like, “Uh, no, there’s not a button that says ‘Design it’—the computer doesn’t just spit it out automatically.”

Finally, we've all had instances of software crashing at the worst possible moment, or experienced similar stomach-churning tech malfunctions. Can you tell us about your most memorable tech-related disaster? As I mentioned, we outsource the final installation of certain pieces—but we’re always on-site during install, doing final tweaks for the interaction settings and the motion and that kind of thing. In one instance, we were on a project on the final day of installation. It was a large-scale touchscreen wall, and the way it was put together, the monitors were separate from the touch hardware. So the night before the client presentation, everything was working fine. Then we come in the next morning and the monitors are working but the touch isn’t working at all, and we can’t figure out what’s wrong. There was no reason for it to just stop working overnight. It was a real freak-out moment, like, Why isn’t this working? What happened? 

Finally, we came to find out that the building was still kind of under construction, and one of the construction guys had leaned his ladder against our wall to reach something higher up. He didn’t lean it against the actual monitor, but against the frame right above the monitor—not realizing that was our infrared-emitting frame, which shoots an infrared field across the whole monitor and reads where users’ fingers are for the touchscreen functions. So the guy thought he was leaning his ladder against a normal frame when, in fact, it was this very delicate LED infrafed hardware. It took us forever to figure out that he had knocked out our touch hardware—and, fortunately, once we figured it out we were able to fix it before the client presentation. But it was a close call.

This article is part of the Core77 Tech-tacular, an editorial series exploring the myriad ways that technologies are shaping the future of design.

Tools That Change the Way We Design & Build: The Festool Domino

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For our Tech-Tacular Design & Technology special, we sought out game-changing power tools: Ones of such unique utility and intelligent design that the capabilities of the tool itself actually change the way we are able to design and build. We then looked for an experienced user of the tool—someone from a field familiar to the Core77 readership—to interview on how and why these tools can make such a difference.

The Domino "XL" DF700

Origin of a New Tool

Around 2005, a master cabinetmaker in Germany came up with a great idea for a power tool. Perhaps experienced craftsmen have those fantasies all of the time, with no way to realize them; but this particular cabinetmaker, Vitus Rommel, happened to work in product development for Festool. In business since 1925, and having a long history of innovation, Festool had the experience—and the design and engineering muscle—to turn a great idea into a fantastic product that would eventually be called the Domino.

The Domino DF500

What the Tool Does

The Festool Domino takes the best elements from a variety of machines, combines them, and gets rid of those machines' inherent drawbacks. (More on this down below.) The result is a handheld tool that allows the user to quickly, cleanly cut precise mortises in workpieces. Those pieces can then be joined together using the titular Dominos, loose tenons that Festool makes in a variety of sizes. With glue added, the joint is every bit as strong as a traditional mortise and tenon, but created in a fraction of the time and with great accuracy.

The user can quickly set the depth and width of the mortise to be cut, as well as the angle of the fence, and the height of the mortise location relative to the top or bottom of the workpiece, via intelligently-located switches, levers and dials. The tool can be used horizontally, vertically or at an angle.

Retractable protrusions on either side of the bit enable quick repeatability: With the bit centered, the user can place the left-hand protrusion against the edge of workpiece A, cut the mortise, then place the right-hand protrusion against the edge of workpiece B to cut the corresponding mortise. (And if you wanted to do this down the length of a longer workpiece, an optional cross-stop lets you register an adjustable indexing pin inside the mortise you just cut, giving you infinite repeatability, and no need to mark each mortise location.)

The Domino currently comes in two sizes: The standard DF 500, which cuts mortises for 4mm- to 10mm-thick tenons, and the Domino "XL" DF 700, which is for 8mm- to 14mm-thick tenons.

A Different User Experience

Much has been written about the Domino's features, but being Core77, we also wanted to take a closer look at the design's impact on the user experience. The tool's seemingly simple functionality belies the complexity hidden within its housing; the Domino is saturated with Festool's design, engineering and ergonomic expertise, and production shop veterans will instantly spot the difference in user experience when comparing the Domino with what came before. For instance:

- The Action Required of the User. With a traditional slot-mortising machine, the user must move the cutting head in multiple directions, first plunging it into the material, then from one side to the other to achieve the mortise width. And depending on the mortise depth, multiple passes may be required.

In contrast, the Domino user performs a single motion—similar to slowly advancing the butt of a pool cue—while the tool takes care of the side-to-side motion, and knows how deep to plunge via user settings.

If you imagine having to cut 50 mortises in a row, it's obvious which approach has the ergonomic advantage. In other words, not only did this tool not require compromise in going from stationary to portable, the transition actually improved the user experience.

- The Action Performed by the Bit Combined with the Dust Collection. The cutter achieves the mortise width by oscillating from side to side. Production shop vets will be reminded of a swing-chisel mortiser. While it's not mentioned in the product literature, I believe the oscillating motion not only prevents kickback, but keeps the bit cool as it's constantly moving within the material.

With the chips simultaneously evacuated via the dust port and attached vacuum, it is an almost absurdly clean operation compared to using a slot-mortising machine or a router in a jig.

- The Form Factor and Accuracy Adds Up to Greater Speed and Less Work. Imagine needing to glue up a bunch of 8/4, eight-inch-wide slabs: You can either align them with a biscuit joiner and live with the imprecise fit that comes from football-shaped biscuits, or you could try cutting mortises on a stationary machine. Neither of these are time-effective options. The biscuit-using results will require a lot of re-work. The slot-mortising machine option would require you to wrestle each piece onto the machine, clamp it, cut, unclamp, slide it down to the next pencil mark, clamp it, cut again, etc. and wrestle it off at the end. Rinse and repeat.

With the Domino, you'd simply carry a 7-pound tool (or 11.5 pounds, in the case of the larger Domino XL) over to the work, moving down the board as needed, and you'd get the accuracy you want. And unlike with a slot-mortising machine, you can tote the Domino to the jobsite.

- Allowing You to Do Things You Couldn't Before. The form factor of the Domino means you can cut into the ends of narrow parts that you simply wouldn't—or couldn't—with a biscuit joiner, traditional slot-mortising machine or router-with-a-jig. An optional trim-stop on the 500 means you can easily place mortises in the end-grain of narrow pieces like this:

The Response to the Tool's Release

When the Domino first came out, folks hadn't seen anything like it before, and it naturally generated interest. Upon its North American release, it didn't take long for reviews to start popping up.

"The real sizzle here is speed," wrote longtime Fine Woodworking editor Asa Christiana, after getting his hands on a Domino just prior to its U.S. release in 2007. "I assembled an entire table, with two slip tenons at each joint (32 mortises in all), in about half an hour, with perfect alignment of parts. I can't think of a way to do this faster with the same strength and results--not even close."

"This is a dangerous tool," joked Gary Katz, the experienced finish carpenter behind the Katz Roadshow. "It must be kept out of the hands of non-professionals—homeowners, serious enthusiasts, motivated do-it-yourselfers, etc. Here's why: a tool like this can turn a neophyte into a professional overnight."

Effusive reviews also began popping up on hobbyist forums, like this one:

I have NEVER, in my life, seen a machine as PRECISE as this one, and accurate. I have built 3 tables in the amount of time it would have taken me to build 1, AND, I was able to set up the aprons and legs without making ONE pencil mark to align the machine.

My next job was to tackle a bookcase using "Domino Joinery" and the thing went together easier than anything I have ever put together in my life, AND it was 10 times faster that my old Rabbet-and-Dado construction.

What About Furniture Designers?

Okay, so we've listed positive reviews of the Domino written by a professional woodworker, a tradesman and a hobbyist. And all of these reviews were written shortly after the tool's release, i.e. during the honeymoon phase. But what happens after you live with the tool, and use it day-in, day-out, for years? And closer to the Core77 audience, what can this tool do for a furniture designer? Is it possible a tool could actually alter the way one designs their pieces, in addition to merely speeding up traditional construction processes?

To find out, we interviewed furniture designer/builder Jory Brigham of Jory Brigham Designs. Stay tuned.

This article is part of the Core77 Tech-tacular, an editorial series exploring the myriad ways that technologies are shaping the future of design.

How Ikea is Managing Their Natural Wood Push

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Ikea recently launched their NORNÄS line, "a modern collection in raw, untreated, high-quality pine from slow-growing forests in Northern Sweden." When they announced it earlier this year it was a bit of a surprise, for two reasons: One, the company is known for using MDF or particle board more than natural wood; and two—how can they possibly manage, from a resource standpoint? Wouldn't a company doing Ikea levels of volume—the kickoff shipment alone was 200,000 pieces—quickly deforest all of Scandinavia?

To address that second point somewhat tangentially, I want to show you a couple of photos. Last year as I traveled through Helsinki, I passed what appeared to be a massive highway construction project:

As you can see, it's all framed in timber scaffolding. And yes, Finland is not Sweden, but the two countries are side-by-side and share a common topography. My point is that the construction crew didn't use this absurd amount of wood because they like the smell of fresh-cut timber, but because the region has so much of it that it's the most economical material for them to use here. I.e. if this was in Vietnam, that would all be bamboo.

Before I get you a more satisfying answer, I'll point out there was a third surprise to Ikea's announcement. The NORNÄS line took just 14 months "from the first design sketch to the finished products on the shelves,” according to Ikea Product Developer Roger Olandersson. "Close collaboration between the designers and the production team allowed quick decisions to be made, which helped speed up the process."

All of this made us very curious. In our previous entries on Ikea, we’ve covered the company’s mastery of production methods—for example, the board-on-frame technology that goes into the Lack table and others, creating a perfectly flat, sturdy, yet lightweight panel. However, working with natural wood brings great challenges: Wood is a more “alive” material that does not always cooperate with being uniformly machined with affordable yields. And veteran furniture makers must all deal with the science of countering wood movement.

Our interest piqued, we reached out to Ikea to get some more detailed answers. With the exception of one glaring omission, here's what we got back from them. It appears these answers came directly from HQ in Sweden, as there are some slight translation quirks that we left as-is:

Core77: Can you walk us through how one of the NORNÄS pieces is manufactured, literally starting from the tree in the ground and ending with the finished product?

Ikea: NORNÄS production starts with cutting of Pine logs (Pinus Sylvestris) from the sub-arctic region in the northwest part of Sweden where Pine forests are covering huge landscapes. The forests are grown up after plantation or reforestation with Pine seeds.

The logs are cut in length of 2,8 m and diameter from 100 up to 180 mm which means very small logs in purpose to get as much wood with small and fresh knots as possible. This means also that we can utilize a lot of logs from thinning operations and not only clear cutting.

In the sawmill at Glommersträsk the logs are sawn with fix thickness but the width of every board vary in purpose to maximize the utilization of the log. The boards are dried directly to 8% moisture content after cutting in sawmill and then the operation of making glueboard and components starts.

This operation we do in the glue board factory in Malå where the boards is cut in to 2,8 m lamellas and is moulded to their optimal dimension. These lamellas are pressed together to glueboard and then cut to size of different component sizes.
The furniture production in Lycksele starts with glueboard components from Malå where edges are moulded, drilling operations, final surface sanding and the packing in to boxes. The deliveries from the factory goes then either by train or truck.

How has Ikea’s production team managed to streamline the harvesting/manufacturing process of using natural wood?

During the development of the NORNÄS range the technical specification were written according to the natural features of the raw material. Typical for the Northwest Swedish Pine is slow growth with lot of very small black knots like spots and fresh knots with same colour as surrounding wood (red/yellow).

High raw material utilization is crucial not only for sustainability but also prerequisite to be able to reach a price level on the final furniture so that the many people can afford to buy.

The dimensions of the products were also adapted to the length of the logs so that the utilisation of the logs where optimised.

So the NORNÄS range were optimized both from the natural variation and outlook of the Swedish Pine and from the dimensions of logs available in the forest.

What happens to the waste material?

The waste material from the sawmill like the chips and sawdust goes to the pulp/paper industry and the bark is used for heating to the drying kilns. The energy in the bark is used to dry the wood. From the glue board and the furniture factory the waste is compressed to bio fuel products and the sold to the local and regional heating plants.

What steps have Ikea’s designers taken to counter and compensate for wood movement of the final pieces?

[Despite two tries, this was never answered by Ikea.]

What sustainability practices are involved with the NORNÄS line?

Related to production:

- IWAY* at all suppliers (new suppliers have max. 12 months implementation time)

- IWAY Must at critical sub-suppliers (IWAY Must represent the most essential IWAY requirements that need to be in place to start a business relation)

- Supplier development in areas like energy efficiency and energy management, renewable energy solutions, raw material efficiency, the Sustainability Scorecard rate is quite high due to the material.

*By way of explanation, IWAY is the IKEA Way on Purchasing Home Furnishing Products, is our code of conduct. It specifies the minimum requirements we place on suppliers and describes what they can expect from us in return.

* * *

Lastly they sent along this video, which touches on the production while explaining the motivation to pursue more pine:



Core77 Techtacular Forum Frenzy: Automation Arguments

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A controversial tech topic showed back up in the forums over the last year: the onward march of automating design. With the steady progress towards smarter programs and ever greater computing power, some designers look forward to more automation and some remain skeptical. 

The role of generative computing or automation has been contested for as long as it’s been suggested. A breathless article and interview with Autodesk CTO Jeff Kowalski raised eyebrows and questions again with its grand claims about reducing trial and error to a completely digital experience—not to mention the choice quote that current design methods produce,"pretty much the first thing that [works], as opposed to the best one that could be found.” 

In response to the claim that design processes will benefit from automated design reducing the amount of digital-to-physical translation, poster Sanjyoo9 had this simple concern:

Putting a creative decision in the hands of an algorithm means you are surrendering your fate to an algorithm, that some person wrote, so you are letting someone else make a decision for you.
It's the equivalent of turning down the sucks, and turning up the rocks.

It’s a common enough qualm, but others see the benefits of greater automization as less threatening and more like the increase in programs’ technical knowledge and testing (a la SolidWorks). 

Cyberdemon countered that most contemporary tools would benefit from an update to keep up with developments in additive manufacturing, which has made previously impossible work viable:

It doesn't undo the need for designers (or engineers) but starts to provide more decisions for how to create better designs. …I for one think we are in need of a big rethink of tools around additive manufacturing. Traditional CAD tools don't enable you to build objects that are optimized for some of the crazy structures and shapes you can achieve with 3D printing - that's why so many of these new tools have been evolving to fill in that niche.

Still others eschew the entire debate for its distastefully jargon-heavy and unsubstantiated self-important futurism. 

Regardless of the type of use and user, the overarching concern seems to be that proponents are pitching automated design software as a tool that replaces designers' decision-making rather than enhancing it. As designers should know, the argument “if you don’t like it don’t use it” is deceptively simplistic, since our tools inevitably shape our work and our thinking about it. 

The debate likely won't be over for a while, but the questions provoked are still interesting. Are all design process inefficiencies fair game for elimination? In a field that straddles creativity and pragmatism, are the slower tactile parts of prototyping overdue for replacement? Are the current automation options appealing? 

Weigh in with your thoughts in the comments below or over at the Discussion Boards.

This article is part of the Core77 Tech-tacular, an editorial series exploring the myriad ways that technologies are shaping the future of design.

Hackaball: A Toy for 21st Century Launched on Kickstarter

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We've had an eye on the "Hackaball" project by London based agency Made by Many since we heard wind early last year. What started out as a brief for two talented incoming interns, slowly grew legs and spiraled into a learning project that saw the studio stepping back from the screen to hold up a torch to the still murky frontier of seamless physical/digital interaction, with the aim of taking the idea to market.

Two years on and the creators are now putting their hard work  and shiny prototype to the test—embarking on a Kickstarter campaign to raise $100,000 in 30 days to bring their programmable ball—with supporting app—to manufacture.

As the pitch video illustrates, Hackaball is a modern, technologically infused take on the humble ball. Packed full of sensors, LEDs, speakers and a mic and coming with a delightful supporting app, the ball allows kids to imagine and program their own games (and other fun little functions) in a 'if-this-then-that' style system.

Ahead of the launch the team at Made by Many invited us along to their canal-side London studio to get the low-down on the story behind the slick prototype video and crowdfunding campaign.

Whilst the idea of a programmable ball is a simple one — and very much in line with other toys, games and products attempting to introduce a generation of unsuspecting kids to the logic and power of code — the attention to design detailing across the products elements (refined form, playful UI, considered sound design, sophisticated lighting, free-wheeling game-play, branding, packaging and even out-of-the-box experience) is of a rare level of sophistication for the realms of Kickstarterdom.

An out-of-the-box experience that breaks down expectations and preconceptions of technology

Cracking open the circular, star-studded box, lucky kids of a successfully crowd-funded future will be presented with a toy in bits—the guts, skeleton and skin on show from the get go, subverting the normal preconceptions of the unapproachable and delicate nature of technological devices. The hardware-packed core module is placed between two rugged plastic sphere halves and then held together by stretching the perforated rubber skin over the shape to bring the ball to life.

Getting to the point of a Kickstarter ready prototype saw the Made by Many team go through dozens of iterations—true to their philosophy of 'Make, Test, Learn.' The first experiments, the team tell us, were little more than a clunky Arduino taped to a foam ball—the quick and dirty device mock-up still wired in to cables as it was thrown around.

Being a digital agency at heart, Made by Many collaborated with Barber Osgerby spin-off MAP to develop the ball's form and CMF. Giving the object a distinctive form converged with competing needs to protect the balls inner-workings, inviting rough and tumble play, as well as a desire to keep the toy as gender neutral as possible. The final design took a small amount of inspiration from other toys on the market—the circular opening at the top giving something of a personality with an "eye."

An early iteration of the toys digital interface

With a team of digital specialists at hand, the digital element of the product is where the most delightful creativity would shine through. After early experiments with a simple flat, drag-and-drop UI—with games arranged in lists— the team soon realized that increasing the animation and reducing the amount of text were important factors for their young, digital native audience.

The final UI does away with lists and presents itself as something of a space-scape—saved games floating around the screen in constellations, simple icons and animated flourishes hinting towards the game-play involved.

Happy customers

Throughout Hackaball's development, Made by Many carried out extensive user-testing with kids at varying ages. Presenting their prototypes to the youngsters, the team was repeatedly astonished by the children's creativity — games that the kids created often bearing very little resemblance to normative ideals and narratives of game-play, often replacing competitiveness for drama and roleplay.

Made by Many were, of course, also savvy enough to glean the opinions of parents as part of their testing—at a very premium toy price point of $65, the team knows that convincing parents is one of the key challenges of getting Hackaball out into the world. Whilst impressed by the creative nature of the product, parents feedback inspired other nuances to the experience including an evolving product lifestyle to boost longevity (certain programmable actions remain locked until certain tasks are completed), sharing of games between children is limited by proximity (open exchange being a world of fear for parents) and multi–functionality such as the option to record new sounds as well as program the ball for task such as as an alarm clock (switched off with a good hurl at a wall).

With such loving craft having gone into the toy this is surely one Kickstarter campaign bound for Stretch Goal glory. We're looking forward to getting our hands on the real thing.

For more info or to put your money where your drool is check out the Hackaball Kickstarter page.

The Real Smart City

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The Smart City is a huge, vague and ubiquitous idea. The phrase—so insistent yet so slippery—suggests a way we can understand how cities work and how we might get them to work better. But deep down it raises serious questions of what we think cities are and what they could or should be. And the idea that it suggests—of the relationship between the physical and digital attributes of the city—is far too important to outsource to corporate providers.

Every age has its own idealized image of the city. From the ancient Athenian polis that invented the notion that we are citizens of a political and social framework, through the 19th-century vision of the city-as-body that gave us the “circulation” of traffic as if it were blood, to the 20th-century conception of the city as fabric of the welfare state, these ideas and metaphors have shaped, first, how we understand the city, and then helped make the city in that image.

The Smart City is our own era’s idealized image of the city. It imagines the city as an ecosystem of data, nature and culture. The image it suggests is of information gently collected as we cycle through a park, the soft whirr of a sensory device embedded in the fabric of the city tracking us. Smartness suggests the city itself gaining a kind of intelligence, an intelligence that is responsive and interactive with its citizens.

It’s the kind of benign techno-utopian fantasy that we’re well familiar with, sharing as it does so mush of the optimism of early Internet culture. Indeed, the Smart City is a post-digital phenomenon. It’s the city as framed by the digital—the physical fabric of the city plus all the flows, velocities, trajectories, systems and networks that pulse through it.

Early Internet culture promised to evolve new, brick-less, pixelated, virtual worlds that would liberate us from traditional hierarchies, power structures and societal definitions. But now digital culture is part of the physical world: Bricks and pixels are tightly interwoven.

Brickstarter used digital platforms to develop a suite of new participative municipal strategies

The promise of the Smart City is of efficiencies, of data collection and number crunching, of algorithms performing dexterous maneuvers. It promises, too, to re-negotiate our individual relationship to the city, offering new forms of interaction with services that suggest a new kind of city-democracy. The examples of this are myriad: apps that allow citizens to “adopt” city property like trees and fire hydrants; dynamic touchscreen kiosks distributed throughout a metropolis; Brickstarter, developed by Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund, which used social media and digital platforms to develop a suite of new participative municipal strategies, legislative frameworks and political structures. All these alongside the out-and-out commercial apps like Uber and Airbnb that interface with traditional city services. In the immediate postwar period, if you were really smart and wanted to change the world, you’d apply to work for municipal planning departments. Now, the smartest urban-aware minds are more likely to be developing apps. It’s software and interfaces with the city—rather than the hardware of traditional urban planning—that’s now the frontier where it seems the city might be reimagined.

But just like all of those early promises of the Internet—of the dissolution of traditional boundaries, the disruption of vested interests, the freedom of inventing new paradigms—we are right to remain suspicious. In part, precisely because of the failures of digital culture to deliver on those freedoms. Instead, the Internet has increasingly become the domain of gigantic corporations whose morality and sense of duty has often been called into question, on everything from issues of tax “efficiency” to privacy.

The Smart City comes to us through these corporate interests. It comes hand in hand with the privatization of public space and the privatization of public services that once were the responsibility of municipal government. It comes as a solution to the shrinking capabilities of municipal power and the decline of local governments’ own ability or willingness to administrate or provide services. 

In the UK, the joke goes that whomever you vote into City Hall, you’ll get Serco—or one of the other outsourcing companies providing everything from public and private transport and traffic control to aviation, military weapons, detention centers, prisons and schools. Many of the things a city once did—or things we still thought it did—are now contracted out to the private sector. As Serco explains on its website: “With rising service expectations, finite resources and budget deficits ... Serco helps governments and corporations across the world deliver better services for less.” 

From a Cisco interactive graphic showing how smart-city technologies could be deployed in Songdo, South Korea
An IBM infographic from 2013—part of its Smarter Cities initiative

As the conception of the municipal authorities are broken up and privatized, and their tax revenues reduced, a new raft of companies are positioning themselves to take on these roles. Companies such as Serco, Cisco and Siemens offer cities and their mayors a range of services, from infrastructure “solutions” to urban planning. The demand for these services is huge. But that is also because cities right now have nowhere else to go.

The Smart City is the gloss that’s applied to this fundamental shift in the nature of the city. It’s a way of describing these changes without having to acknowledge the failure of the late-20th-century model of the social-democratic city, and without having to declare the market-oriented ideology of the 21st-century city.

And that is the biggest danger of the Smart City. Of course, we’d all like our cities to be cleaner, smarter, greener—even more "livable," if that is something one can still say without conjuring the image of bland city-ranking surveys. And, of course, new technology, big data and interactivity are ways of helping to rethink the city.

The Smart City is a way of describing these changes without having to acknowledge the failure of the late-20th-century model of the social-democratic city, and without having to declare the market-oriented ideology of the 21st-century city.

But the only way we can really achieve "smarter" cities is to stay smart to the fact that cities are political and social entities as much as they are technical problems to be solved. Really being smart would mean articulating a clearer idea of what contemporary cities actually are. For that we need to draw on the thousands of years of urban culture, on the history, theory and practice of the city itself. We need to draw on the expertise of the old roles of city-making—of architect, planner, developer, municipal authority and politician, roles that are increasingly eclipsed by the corporate logos of Smart City consultancies. Instead, they should be joined at the table by coders, software developers, data wranglers and a whole host of new roles that can weave the digital into the fabric of the city.

A real smarter city would be one that openly acknowledges the inherent politics of the city. One that has a fuller understanding of the texture and depth of what life can be. One that recognizes the sheer difficulty of the idea of the city and, most importantly, its fundamentally democratic nature. 

We should beware the takeover of urban culture by management consultants and technology firms. The city is us: nothing less than the summation of our collective desires made real, the physical precipitation of the abstract ideas of society and culture, democracy precipitated into stone. The question we should ask in the face of the rising ubiquity of Smart City culture is: Who is the city for? And there isn’t an app for that. 

For more on Jacob's work, read his answers to our Core77 Questionnaire from last November.

This article is part of the Core77 Tech-tacular, an editorial series exploring the myriad ways that technologies are shaping the future of design.

Tech Specs: Ladies & Gentlemen Studio

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This is the third of our ten Tech Specs interviews. Previously, we talked to Local Projects' Paul Hoppe.

Names: Dylan Davis and Jean Lee

Job title: Founders of Ladies & Gentlemen Studio, a multidisciplinary design studio based in Seattle

Background: 

Dylan Davis: We met in college—we were both studying industrial design at the University of Washington, in Seattle. We did a couple group projects together and realized that we had semi-compatible working styles. But then when we got out of school, we both got separate jobs. I worked for six years for Henrybuilt, the high-end kitchen system company. 

Jean Lee: And I was working at Reload, a handmade messenger-bag company that was based in Philadelphia but also had a store in Seattle. 

DD: Also during that time, in 2005, Jean partnered up with a coworker and started their own company called R&L Goods. That was our first foray into independent design and business ownership. And then in 2010 we started Ladies & Gentlemen Studio.

Computer setup: 

DD: We do most of our work from home. We each have 13-inch MacBook Pros on a little desk set up in our kitchen/living room area. So it’s a pretty condensed working area.

JL: It’s pretty low-tech.

DD: Yeah. In general, our working style is very hands-on, so computers and technology are just tools in that greater process. The only fancy thing we do have is a laser cutter. It’s not something that we use every day, but in terms of prototyping and a few details in our products—those are produced using the laser cutter. 

JL: That’s not in our living area—it’s in the garage, where we have a shop set up. But in terms of communication and administrative work, we’re here at our desk in the house.

Dylan Davis and Jean Lee in their living room. Photo by Charlie Schuck

How much of your workday do you spend in front of the computer? 

JL: I’m probably around four to six hours a day.

DD: My use really varies. I handle a lot more of the production end of things. So one day I could be running errands all day and only checking e-mail in the morning and the afternoon. Other times I might be doing some kind of CAD work and that would take five hours of the day.

Most used software: 

JL: I use Illustrator, Photoshop, Acrobat—all Adobe software pretty much. And then, does Google Calendar count?

DD: Yeah, we’re on the web a lot, so we’re using the whole Google Apps suite for our spreadsheets and shared documents and stuff like that. That may be the thing we use most frequently, because we’re running the business end as well.

I’m usually the one to do any kind of CAD work. I use SketchUp and DraftSight, which is an affiliated version of AutoCAD. And in that program I only work in 2D. We try to get in and out of CAD as quickly as possible. At first we’re doing sketches and physical models. Then when it comes time to get into proportioning and trying out different variations of things, we’ll go into CAD. But as soon as we can get the CAD to the point where we can step back and make something real again, we’ll do that. 

And then from there, most of our vendors are pretty lo-fi. So, for instance, I have a machine shop where I make two-dimensional technical drawings of the pieces I need, and I’ll e-mail him PDFs of those. If we’re water-jet cutting or laser cutting something, then we might send a CAD file, but more often it’s a fairly low-tech process. 

JL: And I use Illustrator and Photoshop for a lot of our marketing materials—for designing postcards and mailers, and for doing color studies and mood boards. And Photoshop, of course, for editing all our photos.

Software that you thought you’d use more often than you do: 

DD: Every once in a while we’ll get on a time-management kick, where we’re using an app to track all of our time. And it always ends up being too much work to keep it going. So it kind of messes with the fluidity of our workflow. Things like that we end up finding to be less useful than we originally thought.

Davis in the garage shop. Photos by Charlie Schuck

Phone: 

JL: I have an iPhone 4S.

DD: And I’ve got an iPhone 6.

Favorite apps: 

JL: Instagram.

DD: Jean is very good at Instagramming. And it’s really become a creative engine for our business. It’s hard to quantify how much actual business comes from us being active on Instagram, but there are definitely a lot of connections that are made that way—with fellow creatives, architects and interior designers, potential customers. 

Apps that are actually useful for your work: 

DD: We both listen to podcasts all the time. When we’re working on something that’s a little monotonous, we like to pop on something that relates to our business, where we can learn while we’re doing something—that’s really been useful to growing the business.

JL: Plus, Square for running credit cards—and now Square Cash is the new thing.

Other devices: 

JL: We use an iPad occasionally.

DD: That’s definitely one of those things that we thought would be more useful. But it helps when we’re at an event and trying to run purchases or show someone our website or something like that.

Other machinery/tools in your workspace: 

DD: A lot of what we do is using analog tools. Like, we have an old mechanical metal lathe that we use all the time. 

JL: In terms of digital tools, the laser cutter is pretty much it. We’ve had that for six years. I got it with my previous business partner, and we used it primarily for producing small accessories. Now we use it more for packaging and branding. Prototypes, occasionally. But we don’t use it to make products. 

Tools or software you’re thinking of purchasing: 

DD: I have toyed with some 3D printing options, in terms of outsourcing that work. That would be a new direction for us. But I can’t think of any new technology that we want and need. Our process is very physical, so a lot of times technology feels a little cumbersome in the process. A lot of what we make is designed to be made analog. 

Balance Studies. Photo by Amanda Ringstad
Forward/Slash desk light. Photo by Charlie Schuck
.Org Deskscape System, in collaboration with Pat Kim

How has new technology changed your job in the last 5–10 years? 

DD: Well, in the last five years we’ve started and grown L&G Studio, so it’s really been more about delving into those tools that are for managing the business. So, bookkeeping software, credit-card transactions, spreadsheets, and things like that. 

Our bookkeeping software is online-based. It was originally called Outright, but they were recently acquired by GoDaddy, so the name is changing to GoDaddy Bookkeeping. It’s linked to our accounts and it automatically tracks our transactions. We can go in and categorize things and make invoices. Everything’s connected, and it’s much more intuitive than QuickBooks. So it has allowed us to not have a bookkeeper and easily look at our financials at a glance. We’re not math people, so having something really intuitive is kind of empowering.

When it comes to new tech, are you a Luddite, an early adopter or somewhere in between? 

DD: Degenerate Luddites. I got the new iPhone 6 when it came out—that was a big step for me. I had a really ancient iPhone 4 that had a cracked screen, so it was a bit of a necessity. 

It’s not that we’re anti-technology—it’s more that it’s just not part of our process that much. It wasn’t what we built the studio around. 

Do you outsource any of your tech tasks? 

DD: We have a marketing manager who generally works remotely. So we’re all connected through Gmail and other Google tools. That’s not really outsourcing, but it is a remote arrangement—using technology to work remotely. 

I can’t think of any new technology that we want and need. Our process is very physical, so a lot of times technology feels a little cumbersome.

What are your biggest tech gripes? 

DD: The transfer of files and formats between different programs and devices. I still think that’s a really cumbersome process. Even just the printing process, or saving to PDF. All those little things that seem like they should be easy often feel cumbersome. 

JL: Even just saving files—like, how many versions you have to save. After a while, I lose track of which ones I’ve saved and which are the most current.

DD: They’re little examples. But say you’re trying to save a presentation as a PDF to send to your clients, and you want the file to be small but the image quality to be good. It always seems like you have to save the file in a few different formats and open them to see how they look, and . . . that seems really unnecessary. There’s always a handful of things with each software service that are limiting.

What do you wish software could do that it can’t now? 

JL: Right now the main thing that we’re running into is that we use Squarespace for our website and e-commerce—but then when we ship something, we still have to manually make a label and go to FedEx or the Post Office. I think there are probably programs to streamline that process, but we haven’t yet figured out which ones might work for us.

DD: It’s almost like there needs to be a website or a service that takes into account all your business’s needs and synchronizes all these services so that you’re covering all the bases. And this might be a matter of hiring some IT person to connect all these things for us. But I think part of it is that every business has all these idiosyncratic things that it has to do, and maybe it’s just impossible to automate some of those things.

Finally, we've all had instances of software crashing at the worst possible moment, or experienced similar stomach-churning tech malfunctions. Can you tell us about your most memorable tech-related disaster? 

DD: I can’t think of anything that’s epic. Things tend to wear out at really inconvenient times. But I can’t think of one that’s a great story.


This article is part of the Core77 Tech-tacular, an editorial series exploring the myriad ways that technologies are shaping the future of design.

Tools That Change the Way We Design & Build: Jory Brigham on the Festool Domino's In-Shop Impact

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In our Introduction to the Festool Domino piece, we discussed the tool's design and listed some examples of the public response to it. But in this piece, we wanted to do a deep-dive with an experienced designer/builder who knows, and uses, this tool intimately. Mere product hype doesn't last long in a production environment, and if the Domino lives up to it over the long term, we wanted to hear it first-hand from a fellow designer—particularly one with a deep stable of tools from a variety of brands.

Jory Brigham is a California-based furniture designer/builder, and you may recognize him from "Framework," Spike TV's furniture design competition show. We first spotted Brigham's work in 2011, and we certainly weren't the only ones: After making a splash at that year's Dwell on Design, his pieces began steadily making the blog rounds.

Image Credit: Ron Bez Photography

A woodworker since childhood, Brigham first hung out the shingle for Jory Brigham Designs back in 2008 and began producing furniture, built-ins, retail displays and custom woodwork for customers as far away as Florida and Australia.

The year before, Festool had come out with the Domino amid much fanfare; Brigham, often up to his ears in sawdust trying to meet orders and with no time to sit in front of a computer reading websites about woodworking, had heard of neither the company nor the tool. Then he spied the Domino on a jobsite being toted around by a fellow builder.

"I didn't even know what it was, at first," says Jory. "But as soon as I saw what it did, it made total sense. And then I was like, 'Oh man—I gotta have this.'"

He picked one up later that week. To say it then found a permanent place in his shop is an understatement; and ironically, over the years this designer/builder who had never heard of Festool subsequently amassed so many of their products—often visible in the background of shop videos he used to post to his blog—that five years later, Festool contacted him and asked if they could feature him in their marketing materials.

(Editorial Note: Brigham is not a paid employee of Festool and has no official affiliation with the company, beyond being one of many American craftsmen they have featured over the years.)

Here's our interview with Brigham:

Core77: You mentioned that after first seeing a Domino, you had to have one. Why?

Jory Brigham: Well for what I do in furniture, there's just so many times you need to join wood together. I mean it's every day, ten times a day. So I really had an excuse to spend the money.

What had you been using to join wood, prior to seeing the Domino?

At that point, all I had was a biscuit joiner. I was using it for glue-ups and face frames and picture frames, stuff like that. And picture frames are just such a pain to make with the 45's, so I had initially bought a biscuit joiner figuring "Hey, this'll come in handy!"

It didn't?

No. It's like this—the biscuit joiner was so bad, you try to find ways around using it. There's so much slop in it. Let's take a glue-up—you'd cut the biscuit slots and put the biscuits in there, you'd clamp it up—and it would slide on you. The biscuits gave you that false sense of safety that it would be fine. Then you take the clamps off and find out it had slipped, and it's just not all flush.

Like let's say you're joining a bunch of large stock to make a wider piece, a slab. So with the biscuits you'd glue these pieces up and one would slip up, one would slip down. You run your finger over that seam, that joint, and find it wasn't flush—so you'd have to take a belt sander to the top to get it level, then flip the piece over and sand the bottom to do the same thing. You're losing time and now you're losing material, the piece is no longer as thick as what you had planned for.

And after you got the Domino, how did that change your workflow?

Oh, man—now I don't even dry-fit it. With the Domino the glue-ups come out perfectly flush. You don't have to sand that material down to even it out. It ends up thicker and it's way less labor. You just do it, and it works, and you don't have to worry about it. You can worry about other things on the project.

Was making that transition from one tool to the other immediate? Do you remember the very first project you used the Domino on?

Gosh, no, I don't. I remember at first, using it on material that I wasn't going to use, just to try it out and test it—you know, with any new tool you sometimes get a little leery, so you want to try it on something that you won't ruin.

How long did it take you to really get comfortable with the tool?

Probably two weeks. At first I still had that paranoia from the biscuits and I was still doing a lot of dry-fitting before a glue-up—you know, putting the Dominos in there and joining it to the next board with no glue, making sure it all fits, and then pulling it out, and then gluing it up. But as I used the Domino more and more, I started to realize that I didn't have to worry about that anymore. And at this point, today, 95 percent of the time I just glue it up without dry-fitting it first because I trust it so much.

I mean it's pretty much a no-brainer. If you hold it tight to the board, then you're good. There is no slop, so less clamping is necessary. And when the boards are joined properly that takes the majority of sanding out of the equation. The bottom line is that it saves me time and saves me work. And less labor equals more profit.

What else do you use it for besides joining large stock to create slabs?

Anything from joining miters to make a box, all the way to making petite, but strong, joints in a chair. And with a lot of my pieces the Domino has allowed me to minimize material around the joint. That means I can now make more delicate-looking joinery without compromising strength. That capability has opened the doors to a lot of possibilities within my designs.

Oh, and another thing: It's even changed the way I shop for wood.

How so?

Well, I'm pretty picky about wood. When I go to the lumber yard or the hardwood place, I really want to make sure that the face grain on this board matches up with the face grain on that board perfectly. And a lot of that comes down to if you can join the boards really well.

But when I was still using the biscuit joiner, the tool actually influenced what wood I would buy—I would subconsciously just try to find the widest piece possible. I was like "I don't care how it looks, I just want a wide one" because I didn't want to mess with gluing it up and [the problems I mentioned earlier].

But now when I'm looking at boards, the confidence I have with the Domino opens up these new doors: Thick ones, thinner ones that I wouldn't have touched before, I can buy all these things because I know I can join them easily.

Are you able to talk about how, exactly, you've used the Domino in specific pieces? I mean I don't want you to say anything that would help a competitor who wants to know how your pieces are constructed...

No, that's one thing I'm never worried about. I love what I do, and I love talking about it! Yeah, I'm not worried about that.

I mean I'll be honest with you—on most of my pieces, I don't use any nails, no screws, so I rely just about 100 percent on the joinery. I'm sitting in my bedroom right now looking at this piece I made a long time ago—there's got to be 100 Dominos in it. At every joint, on the legs, the body, the top, the sides, and a lot of times I'll do drawers with little wrap-around on the edge, so I'll use the Domino to join the drawer faces. It's so easy and precise that I just rely on it.

I've even used the Domino for stuff like doing spindles on chair backs.

Or let's take—I'll give you some specific examples—are you still on my website right now?

Yes.

Can you see [the credenza called] Mack?

The one with the cat-eyes and the yellow color behind it? Yep.

Okay, so for that door, it starts off all in pieces, and then I cut out each of the little slits, and then I put it all back together. And of course, that's all Domino. The legs on that, those four-by-fours, all those angles that come up to the 45s—that whole entire leg assembly, I could not do that without the Domino. Then there's the drawer faces, you know, how it has the wrap-around drawer I mentioned before, and of course, the whole body. The inch-and-a-quarter-thick walnut top that wraps around, that's all fused by the Domino.

That's a lotta Dominos! So, at this point, you've been using the tool for about how many years?

Let me think. Probably about six years.

Is there any feature that you would like to see in the tool that it doesn't currently have?

Man, not that I can think of. I don't think I could out-think those Germans!

_______________________________________________________________________________

Below is more of Jory's Domino-joined work:

Image Credit: Cana Family

You can see more of Jory's work here.

By the bye, we're pleased to report we've got a full profile piece on Jory in the works: The story of how he got into furniture design in the first place, what prompted him to start his own business, his design process, a combination of lucky and unlucky breaks, and what really went on behind-the-scenes on "Framework." (Hint: TV editors are sneaky with what they do and don't show you.) We'll air the profile after the show completes its run this year.

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