“What if we could make a projector that you could screw into a light socket?” That was the question posed during one of Oak & Morrow’s brainstorming sessions back in March 2014. Now, exactly one year later, the Netherlands-based design studio is funding the device, called Beam, on Kickstarter—and as of press time, had surpassed its $200,000 goal by more than $450,000, with eight days still to go.

The studio knew it had a good idea on its hands at that very first brainstorming session. “Everybody started sharing ideas on where they would place Beam in their house, and almost all of them were for a different location,” says Jeroen van Geel, Oak & Morrow’s cofounder and creative director. Not only that, but team members quickly dreamed up a variety of scenarios for using the device. “I, for example, wanted to use it in my bedroom as a smart projector and wake up with the weather forecast and latest news,” Van Geel says. “Someone else wanted it to project multiplayer games controlled with smartphones on his dining table. And so on. That’s when we decided that we needed a small computer and if-this-then-that rules.”

Controlled through an Apple or Android application, Beam is essentially an “Internet of things” device, working over WiFi or Bluetooth to make any surface interactive. The if-this-then-that rules allow users to mix and match conditions to result in a variety of actions, from playing personal video messages when a user walks into the room to waking up with the daily weather forecast.

Before developing that functionality, however, the Beam team first had to prove the idea’s technical validity, building out an initial prototype to operate with any e26 or e27 light socket—and making sure it would also work with a range of other light fittings via adapters. For the physical design of the product, the team strived for simplicity. “We immediately understood that if we want to create a new kind of projector that would be placed permanently in a prominent spot in your house, then it should look like a beautiful object, not a tech-thing,” Van Geel says. Indeed, having team members take the prototype device home and play with it proved a key part of the development process.

In its final form, Beam looks a bit like a lampshade, particularly when hanging from its fabric cable. Beyond aesthetic considerations , the team had to balance the need for space for internal components (including an LED Pico projector, LED lights, two speakers, an Android computer, a 1.3-GHZ dual-core processor, and 8GB of storage) as well as provide sufficient ventilation—goals accomplished through a widening head and a series of perforations around its circumference. “We decided to turn the ventilation into a design element as well,” Van Geel says. And since Beam screws into any light socket, essentially replacing an existing light fixture (if you’re not using its cotton cord), Oak & Morrow also added 12 LED lights to allow users to choose between projection or illumination, so that no functionality would be lost.

Early sketches of the projector

The Beam prototype

Another small but crucial detail was creating a slight flatness on one side of the projector, so that it could also be used on a desk or table. “When you put the element on a table it needs to project a good image on the wall, so the angle needed to be perfect,” Van Geel says.

On Kickstarter, the Founder and Early Bird reward levels are already sold out, but backers can still get their very own Beam projector before it hits shelves for $399—and help the Beam team hit their reach goals, where they promise to introduce additional storage, colorful cables, new housing colors and even colored LEDs. Add another $51 and you can get a hoodie, too. Pretty soon, it seems, we’ll all be able to project anywhere, limited only by the length of our power cords—and the thickness of our wallets.

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 Brendan Keim's LED torch.

Remember those cool non-pneumatic tires that we saw first on Humvees, then ATVs? We'd wondered if the unique tires, which are not prone to punctures and accidental deflation, had any commercial potential beyond military and recreational vehicles. I figured it'd just be a matter of time before I saw some yahoo driving around with them on his Tahoe, especially after Michelin released photos of their NP tire design, called the Tweel. If Michelin was getting into the game, surely a partnership with a major automaker couldn't be far behind?

Late last year, automotive blog Torque News speculated that BMW might be adding Tweels to their future SUVs. It made for an exciting headline, but closer inspection revealed the rumor to be based on just one thing: The fact that Michelin's Tweel factory was located 40 miles away from BMW's South Carolina factory. In other words, the rumor was thinner than the spokes on the Tweel.

Well, turns out Michelin has partnered up with a vehicle manufacturer…but it's not the one we expected: It's John Deere.

I love how they laid action-movie music over the video, as if to make us forget that we're looking at groundskeeping.

In any case, you can shortly expect to see Michelin's X Tweel Turf on a massive lawn near you, provided the groundskeepers are rocking John Deere's ZTrak Z900 Series. The Tweels ain't cheap—they're a $750 upgrade, and the Z900s are aimed at fleet owners, not homeowners—but John Deere reckons buyers will make the money back by eliminating flats, downtime and replacement tires; the Tweels are expected to last three times as long as a pneumatic tire.

"YEAH, curb, whatchu know about THAT!"

Remember when you said to yourself, "Oh, yeah, I want to enter the Core77 Design Awards this year, but I still have plenty of time. I'll get to it." 

As of tonight, "plenty" will officially turn into seven days until the Regular Deadline hits on Tuesday, March 24th at 9pm Eastern. Once those seven days are gone, the Late entry period (which is only a week long) starts, and the price of entry goes up. Sure, two weeks may seem like a long time, but it will be over before you know it, and once it's gone, you'll have to wait a full year before you can enter the Design Awards again. 

Are your furniture designs this good? 2014 Furniture & Lighting Professional Notable, "PUBLIC Office Landscape" by Yves Behar & fuseproject

Just remember what's at stake—your Consumer Product designs being examined and commented on by Hoang and Anh Nguyen, the founders of Creative Session. Or perhaps you're a Service Designer who wants to hear Cathy Huang, President of CBi China Bridge, remark how viable and beneficial your program designs are. Maybe you're vying for the new Community Choice Award so you can bask in the glory of winning the first ever public voting portion of the Design Awards AND attend the 2015 Core77 Conference in October on us. 

Do your transportation designs challenge an established industry? 2014 Transportation Student Winner, "The Future of Offshore Supply" by Martin Skogholt Hansen & Mikael Johansen 

No matter what your motivation or which of our 14 categories you want to enter, your opportunity to do so is closing fast, so don't take this week for granted! Enter your design in the 2015 Core77 Design Awards today! 

It's not often that we get to see a new form factor evolve before our eyes, but with the impending release of the Apple Watch, it's happening. We're not talking about the watch itself; design intricacies aside, its overall form factor is the same as for all wristwatches. We're talking about the charging stands, which a plethora of designers are undertaking for the aftermarket.

We know that the Apple Watch combines their MagSafe connection with inductive charging, and that single point of contact leaves plenty of room to design a form around.

What should it look like, how will people use it? Should the watch be elevated or lay flat? How will the cable be managed? Where does this object "live," on a desk or a nightstand? How much space should it take up? These are the questions designers have to answer, and we thought we'd take a look at some of their approaches:

Dodocase has opted for the elevated approach, choosing handsome Californian Walnut as the chief material. The magnetic contact nests into a cavity, and the cable exits via a channel routed in to meet it. We'd like to see the back of this thing, to see what happens to the cable between the stand and the outlet, but there's no image of that.

The base is a small chunk of solid steel, with its weight intended to prevent tipping.

The designers envision the case being toted along on trips, so the space beneath the charging surface and the base has been sized to fit the plug block. The cord is then meant to be wrapped around the entire thing, holding the plug block in place, though I can't see it looking this neat in reality.

Pad & Quill's Luxury Pocket Stand is also going with wood, in this case American Cherry or African Mahogany. They also envision the device being traveled with, and in the interests of keeping it slim, they've gone with a folding design. [Note: The copy on the photos are the company's words, not ours.]

With this one we've got a rear shot, so we can see what happens to the cable.

The slimness is certainly less chunky to travel with than Dodocase's design, but we don't see any provision to hold the USB end of the cable in place, nor is the attendant plug block accounted for in the design.

The arch-like design of Calypso Crystal's Timeless Moment perhaps uses less overall material than the previous two offerings, but takes up more space; with the orange leather, this object is apparently designed to be more of a focal point that a background object.

The cable is meant to ride along a channel inside the arch and defies gravity, we imagine, via a friction fit.

This object is apparently not meant to be traveled with, though they've designed this attendant case to carry the watch and, we assume, the loose charging paraphernalia in the side pockets.

I initially thought this strange because I assumed one would travel with their watch on their wrist, but this product is presumably targeting the luxury market, i.e. people that own multiple watches.

Rest's Composure Dockhas the most simple design of all of these—and in the unlikely event they can consistently find chunks of Walnut as striking as the one in the photo, I think the prettiest.

A steel base fitted into the underside provides the weight to keep it in place on a table and houses the cable, which sneaks discreetly out of a little mousehole in the back.

What I find most appealing about Rest's approach is that they're thinking of this as part of a system: The rectilinear shape is meant to jive with a forthcoming phone charging tray and change tray.

There's no provision in this design to travel with, but frankly, I don't think I'd travel and lug a charging base along with me, just as I don't travel with my phone's dock; that just becomes one more thing to carry when the cord itself will suit me fine on the road.

Of course it's subjective, but in terms of solving a design challenge, which of these four approaches most appeals to you? I think the Rest team has got this one hands-down.

Titanium's a good choice for a camping mug. You can use it to create a super-strong single-walled 600mL container that only weighs 90 grams. And you can stick it right over the fire to heat up some soup or coffee.

But this mug being single-walled, you can burn your lips right off of your face by sipping directly from it.

The kiss of death

So the folks over at Snow Peak creating this amusing accessory for their titanium mugs: Hot Lips.

These simple silicone crescents slip right over the top, keeping your kisser cool while you sip your chowder.

And the product's apparently popular; they're currently sold out!

Last Friday, we wrapped up our ten-part Tech Specs interview series, in which we talked to designers from a variety of sectors about their computer setups, most-used software, favorite apps, biggest tech gripes and related issues. Obviously, this is too small of a sample size to extrapolate any broad generalizations about the design community's tech needs and wants. Nevertheless, we noticed a handful of outstanding themes (and complaints) emerge from the interviews. Here are our seven top Tech Specs takeaways.

Immediacy is key

Over and over, our interviewees pined for a more immediate digital experience—for a way to interact with software via less clumsy interfaces and with fewer redundant tools, and with a far greater feeling of directness and intimacy. As Microsoft’s Andrew Kim pointed out, even with relatively straightforward drawing apps, “there’s still that difficulty of getting out the tablet, turning it on, going into the app, opening your notebook, creating a new page. It’s not the same as just opening your sketchbook and putting down an idea.” The digital artist Jonathan Harris made much the same point: “I wish it could be more direct, the same way a pencil is direct—you just make a mark and there is the mark, whereas with software there are all of these steps you need to go through in order to make a mark.” Maybe software can never achieve the same immediacy as paper and pencil, but the designers we interviewed are hoping it can get a lot closer than it has so far.

After immediacy, designers crave speed

From laser-scanning pickup trucks to generating experimental architecture through code, faster digital processes have made it easier than ever before to create innovative designs. And for the designers we spoke to, more speed would mean even more possibilities. As THEVERYMANY’s Marc Fornes said, “speed equals variation, and in our work, variation equals design. . . . The reason we change our laptops every two years is to keep building up speed.”

Of course, some of our interviewees were also wary of the effects of too much acceleration in the design process. As Ammunition’s Victoria Slaker told us, “being more responsive with the hardware [design] side of things, and more iterative—that’s something we’re always chasing. And that has pushed the ID and engineering side of hardware to go faster and just be more nimble.” And this can be a blessing and a curse.

Elaborate work does not necessarily require an elaborate computer setup

As a writer, I have a pretty bare-bones computer setup—laptop, external monitor, printer . . . that’s about it. Going into this interview series, I expected designers to have much more complex and personalized configurations, and for the most part this was not the case. Most of our interviewees use a MacBook Pro with an external monitor. A few also had a Wacom tablet or maybe an iPad, but for the most part everyone was focused on keeping their hardware as streamlined as possible.

Indeed, most of our interviewees do not consider themselves early adopters of new technology, and many were wary of adding new digitals tools to their workflows until absolutely necessary—and careful not to let the tech itself become too central to their designs. As Local Projects’ Paul Hoppe put it, “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.”

Analog tools still rule

This one is not so surprising: The designers we spoke to still sketch with a pencil or pen; they still build models using an X-acto knife and paper or foamcore; they still make to-do lists on sticky notes or whiteboards. Not everyone we talked to starts with physical media—Bresslergroup’s Thomas Murray has switched to 100-percent digital sketching—but everyone incorporated analog tools at some point in their process.

Apps are not a crucial part of anyone’s workflow

Designers certainly rely on their smartphones for e-mail, text messages, maps, photos and social media—as does virtually everyone these days. But when asked for apps that are crucial to their workflow, most of our interviewees struggled to name more than one or two kind of useful examples. Their favorites included some neat tools for distraction-free writing, photo editing, ordering lunch, creating legal agreements and viewing 3D files on the go. But none of them were absolutely essential to anyone’s design process.

Everyone just wants to work from the couch

OK, maybe not everyone—only a couple of our interviewees specifically mentioned the couch as an ideal spot for their design work. But almost everyone we talked to placed a high value on portability, and many of them were willing to sacrifice a bit of computing power in exchange for being able to work from anywhere. Ram Trucks design chief Greg Howell, for instance, initially worried that he wouldn’t be able run Alias on a laptop, but now he’s so hooked that he’s hoping for a tablet version next. And Outlier cofounder Abe Burmeister has embraced a dual computer setup, with a powerful desktop workstation and an iPad Mini for couch work sessions. Guess which one he spends the most time working on.

Dude, back up your work!

This last one is more of a recommendation than a takeaway. When we asked designers for to tell us about their most epic tech fails, most of the stories involved lost data—a hard drive that fell onto the floor at the worst possible moment; a MacBook that died in a remote mountain cabin; an office auto-backup system that turned out to be faulty. All of these designers learned the hard way the importance of religiously backing up their data. So if anyone out there has not yet devised a rigorous backup system, take heed! You don’t want to be the next designer to lose months of work to a spilled Coke.

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

Leave it up to the creative Izzy Swan to come up with a small wooden crate—just 20" x 20" x 30"—that unfolds into a table for four, complete with seating:

Alas, someone on Facebook—we won't link to them—snagged the video and posted it to their page as linkbait, without giving Swan credit. This weekend Swan discovered this was going on and contacted them, to no avail; multiple clickbait Facebook accounts then also started "hosting" the credit-free video, which had swiftly gone viral, clocking over a million views.

In desperation Swan re-released the video above, this time with his watermark on it, and appealed to his Facebook followers for help. They swiftly barraged the offending pages and within an hour, comments to the video were filled with credit and links back to Swan, and the million-plus-views account finally revised their post with Swan's name.

Sadly, the video with Swan thanking his followers for pitching in only has 3,182 views, versus the million-plus for the pirated video. It's a sad comment on our society that people like seeing cool things, but seem completely uninterested in who created them.

Izzy Swan, by the way, is selling plans for his Eizzy Folding Table here.

Our homes have plenty of horizontal surfaces, whether desks or dining/coffee/end tables, on which to rest our objects. Our sofas, meanwhile, are meant to rest our asses on. But Dutch design label Spell uses wood to create a novel object-supporting platform that can straddle both horizontal surfaces and the curvature of a sofa armrest.

The Embrace Interaction Platform, as it's unwieldily called, is a wooden tray with a neat trick. Hinged slats mean it can either lay flat or be draped over a curve; assuming your sofa's armrests aren't too much of a parabola, this provides a handy way to create an instant surface.

A slot running around the perimeter of the centermost portion can support a tablet, though it seems that with the angle adjustment, you'll have to live with what you get.

The slot also does double duty as cable management, though it's not clear how the cable's exit towards the power source is handled.

I'm not sure how stable it is when arched and standing on its "feet," but if they've worked that out, it appears you could also use the tray to elevate a tablet on a desk surface.

This isn't a mere concept, by the way; Spell sells the Embrace right here for €318. (Their Coroflot page mentions it comes in either walnut or oak, but on the commercial site it appears they've jettisoned the oak.)

For something that gives life to our planet, the sun can be a pain in the ass, at least in cities. From morning to late afternoon, my home office gets blinding sun, then no sun, more blinding sun, no sun, then some sun as it travels between Manhattan's tall shadow-casting buildings. It's no wonder my circadian rhythm is in tatters.

Architecture firm NBBJ isn't going to solve my problem, but they have designed a pair of buildings that takes the sun's daily travel into account. After plugging the sun's route into Rhino and setting some building parameters, the firm began running simulations. They eventually generated models for two buildings that essentially erase much of the shadow cast between them, like so:

Of course, whatever's behind the taller of the two towers will still be left in shadow, but this is a step in the right direction—and a damn sight better than the Art-Deco-era practice of "staircasing" buildings as they increase in height, for clerestory purposes.

Although NBBJ's buildings are parabolic, the firm claims the light will be diffused enough so as not to cause the "death ray" effect that plagued Rafael Vinoly's "Walkie Talkie" building in London, which famously melted parts of a parked Jaguar and set a nearby doormat on fire. As miserable as I am with my on-again, off-again sunlight in here, I'll settle for that over having things burst into flame.

Via Wired

For the past two years, a company called Carbon3D has been secretly developing a new type of 3D printing—one that would be far faster than polyjet, stereolithography and selective laser sintering. This week they pulled the sheets off, and it looks pretty nuts.

Called CLIP, for Continuous Liquid Interface Production, the technology combines elements of SLA with a photochemical process, and the result is that parts are not so much printed—that is, they're not laid down/cured/sintered one layer at a time—so much as they are grown, out of what seems an impossibly shallow dish of liquid:

It looks even more eerie when producing a taller object:

It works by combining photochemical curing processes with precisely controlled flows of oxygen drifting through the liquid resin. Oxygen stymies the curing process, and Carbon3D's proprietary technology can place the oxygen precisely in the negative space of your part while the UV light they hit it with cures everything else.

The heart of the CLIP process is a special window that is transparent to light and permeable to oxygen, much like a contact lens. By controlling the oxygen flux through the window, CLIP creates a "dead zone" — a thin layer of uncured resin between the window and the object.

This makes it possible to grow without stopping. As a continuous sequence of UV images are projected, the object is drawn from the resin bath. Sophisticated software manages the entire process by controlling the variables.

The first benefit is speed. Take this complex object here, which is a latticed ball that's 51mm in diameter:

That part took 6.5 minutes in a CLIP machine, and Carbon3D claims the same part would take three hours on a polyjet, 3.5 hours on an SLS machine and 11.5 hours with SLA.

The second benefit, according to Carbon3D, is the quality of the part:

Traditionally made 3D printed parts are notoriously inconsistent. The mechanical properties vary depending on the direction the parts were printed due to the layer-by-layer approach.

Parts printed with CLIP are much more like injection-molded parts. CLIP produces consistent and predictable mechanical properties, creating parts that are smooth on the outside and solid on the inside.

This kind of breakthrough wasn't cheap to develop, and the company has $40 million behind it thanks to some big-dog venture capitalists who believe in the tech. "If 3D printing hopes to break out of the prototyping niche it has been trapped in for decades," said Sequoia Capital partner Jim Goetz, "we need to find a disruptive technology that attacks the problem from a fresh perspective and addresses 3D printing's fundamental weaknesses…. [When we saw what Carbon3D] had invented, it was immediately clear to us that 3D printing would never be the same."

The humble bicycle has literally changed the way the world operates and lives on a day-to-day basis. Symbolizing everything from an active lifestyle, to sustainable habits, the bicycles’ importance worldwide goes beyond just transportation, impacting environmental concerns, human health, economic development, and much more. 

VP of Marketing for SRAM David Zimberoff illustrates the transformative power of the bicycle

This month, the 8th installment of the RKSSessions Series featured current VP of Marketing for SRAM, David Zimberoff, and his illustrations of the transformative power of the bicycle on lifestyle, advocacy, and humanitarian efforts. Watch the full presentation below to gain a greater appreciation for our two-wheeled rides. 

2015 is the year of the future. 2015 marks Core77's 20 year anniversary as the leading online industrial design resource. And, as Marty McFly discovered in Back to the Future, the technology (and a tricked out DeLorean) in 2015 has the potential to shape the way we think about our past and the power to change our future. In our recent editorial series, the Core77 Tech-tacular explores the myriad ways that new technologies are shaping the future of design: the ways we ideate, create and relate to design objects.

Besides Tech Specs, our 10-part interview series with designers from various professional backgrounds about their digital tools, the Core77 Tech-tactular took a look at digital power tools that are changing the way that we design and build with a deep dive into the Handibot and the Festool Domino. Our editor examines the design of the tools themselves and interviews users about how and why these tools make such a difference. Core77 also goes back to their beginnings in ID school by touring the workshops and facilities of four New York City-based design and technology programs to look at the tools  and technologies that design students have at their disposal today.

From left to right: Handibot and Domino

 We surveyed experts in our community about their opinions on technologies surrounding modeling knowledge, automating design and the ongoing search for a jack-of-all-trades device. You can still join in on these conversations and more in the Discussion Boards. 

We also surveyed experts outside of the community—Carla Diana rallies designers to embrace the "Wild World of Wearables," Sam Jacob warns against techno-utopian fantasies of "The Real Smart City," and Tamara Warren speaks with automotive leaders about "Designing a New Mobility," and the role of design in steering the auto industry into the future. Material ConneXion's resident expert, Dr. Andrew Dent, opens up the library to share insight on the new materials defining connected technology. And Art Center instructor Arnold Martin gives a NURB-tastic review of the newest version of solidThinking's 3D modeling package, Evolve 2015.

LumaFilm, a thin and flexible planar LED light emitter that does not require a heat sink.

Finally, we put away the sketchbooks and pulled out the styluses for our Sketching App Showdown. No matter what your style or needs, the apps for sketching on-the-go or on-the-couch are only getting more powerful and robust. We wade through the options and ask some seasoned sketchers about their app-inions and how and what works for them.

Take a breath, dive in and enjoy our look at the technologies and ideas defining design in 2015 and beyond. As Doc famously reminds us in Back to the Future, "Roads? Where we're going we don't need roads!"

A few years ago a Japanese variety show pitted three Olympic fencers versus 50 average fencers—all at the same time, Chinese-Connection-style, to see what would happen.

Any of you who saw that must surely have wondered: How can I apply those odds to ping pong? Well, wonder no more: Singaporean artist Lee Wen has the solution.

Conceived of way back in 1998 for an art performance in Australia, Wen's "Ping-Pong Go Round" was created as an interactive art installation.

Alas, it was not actually designed to allow many players to battle one or two stuck in the middle, but rather to give players "a different perception of the limitations" of the normally linear, dialogue-like game, in order to provide players with "new possibilities of a broader dialogue," in Lee's words.

In 2012 the Singapore Art Museum invited Lee to revisit the project and offered to sponsor two versions: The first was his original six-meter-diameter table, located outdoors, while the second was a scaled-down version that shared space alongside other exhibitions inside the museum proper. "At first I was not too happy to present the smaller one as it was scaled down," Lee writes. "But as it turns out the smaller table had its advantages, as [one viewer] observed the smaller one is more intimate where players have to hit the ball with more care, just like a more considered speech at the international meetings or conferences of globalization and diverse societies and countries of multi-culturalism."

Last year Lee was again invited to break out the table, this time at Art Basel Hong Kong. Call me shallow, but that being HK, there's another Lee I would have loved to see in the middle of this thing.

Via Neatorama

Among all the benefits that come with entering the Core77 Design Awards, having your work critiqued by the juries is perhaps the most valuable. These are established experts with extensive experience in your field of design, looking over your plans, ideas and executions. For those who win, the jury comments become a permanent record of your achievement that gets shared across the Core77 Design Network and make an excellent addition to your resume. With the Regular Deadline on March 24th only 5 days away, there's not much time left to enter, so let's take a look at the design experts that will be critiquing your work this year. 

Consumer Products

Co-captains: Hoang and Anh Nguyen, Founders of Creative Session

Hoang & Anh are the founders of Creative Session, a collaborative space for presenting trends, insights and impulsive ideas among the brothers in ways of industrial design. Industrial designers by trade but obsessed with story telling, graphics and branding. Beyond Creative Session they are leads at respectable agencies in San Francisco; Astro Studios and Matter Global. With 15 years of combined experience in consumer electronics they bring keen eye for sex appeal and functionality. They've worked on projects from small start-ups to fortune 500s.

The Consumer Products Jury Team is completed by Shujan Bertrand, CEO and Owner of APLAT, Jason Mayden, Vice President of Design at Mark One, David Whetstone, Design Director at Astro Studios, Adam Leonards, Principal Designer at Matter Product and Max Burton, Founder and Chief Designer at Matter Product.

Built Environment

Co-captains: Laura Allen & Mark Smout, Senior Lecturers, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL.

Mark Smout and Laura Allen are Senior Lecturers at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Their work takes two routes, architectural competitions, where the particular rigor of the competition brief, site and program provide the basis for new investigations and, conceptual design projects which test out the agenda and methodology of the design research practice. They focus on the dynamic relationship between the natural and the man made and how this can be revealed to enhance the experience of the architectural landscape.

The Built Environment Jury Team is completed by Will Hunter, Founding Director at the London School of Architecture and Vicky Richardson, Director of Architecture, Design and Fashion at the British Council.

Interaction

Captain: Jill Nussbaum, Executive Director of Product and Interaction Design at The Barbarian Group

Jill works with clients to develop long-term product experiences that explore emerging technologies and manages the Interaction Design team at the Barbarian Group. Previously she was an Executive Creative Director at R/GA, and a key player behind the design of the Nike+ platform. In her role, she oversaw the evolution of the platform to include Nike+ Fuelband, Nike+ Basketball and Nike+ Training.

Jill is an active member of the New York design community and enjoys teaching, public speaking, writing, and advising young designers and tech start-ups. She currently teaches in the Interaction Design MFA program at SVA, and is a contributing writer for PSFK. She frequently guest lectures at conferences and learning institutions like Fast Company, SxSW, AIGA/NY, IxDA and General Assembly.

The Interaction Jury Team is completed by Ian Spalter, UX Lead and Manager at YouTube, Carla Echevarria, Vice President and Head of Creative at MakerBot and Matt Jones, Interaction Design Director at Google Creative Lab.

Design For Social Impact

Captain: John Thackara, Director at The Doors of Perception

For thirty years, John Thackara has traveled the world in his search of stories about the practical steps taken by communities to realize a sustainable future. He writes about these stories online and in books; he uses them in talks for cities and business; he also organizes festivals and events that bring the subjects of these stories together. John is the author of a widely-read blog at designobserver.com and of the best-selling In the Bubble: Designing In A Complex World (MIT Press) – also translated into nine languages. As director of doorsofperception.com, John organizes conferences and festivals in which social innovators share knowledge.

John is a Senior Fellow of the Royal College of Art, in London, and a Fellow of The Young Foundation, the UK's social enterprise incubator. He sits on the advisory boards of the Pixelache Festival in Helsinki, the Future Perfect festival in Sweden, and Design Impact in India. He is also a member of the UK Parliament's Standing Commission on Design.

The Design for Social Impact Jury Team is completed by Babitha George, Partner at Quicksand, Dr. Mathilda Tham, Design Professor at Linnaeus University and Gill Wildman, Co-Founder and Principal at Plot.

Speculative Concepts

Captain: Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, artist, designer and writer who leads Studio Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg Ltd.

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg is a designer, artist and writer. Seeking new roles for design, Daisy is developing experimental design approaches to help us imagine alternative ideals around technology. Through the design of objects, workshops, and writing and curating, her practice investigates both aesthetic and ethical futures for design. Daisy's collaborators include scientists, engineers, artists, designers, social scientists, galleries and industry around the world. She began a PhD by practice, The Dream of Better, exploring the idea of a 'better' future, at the Royal College of Art in London, in 2013.

As Design Fellow on Synthetic Aesthetics (Stanford University/University of Edinburgh, 2010-2013), Daisy curated an international research project, developing novel modes of collaboration and critical discourse between synthetic biology, art and design. Daisy is lead author on Synthetic Aesthetics: Investigating Synthetic Biology's Designs on Nature (MIT Press, March 2014). She led the curatorial team for Grow Your Own… Life After Nature, a flagship exhibition about synthetic biology at Science Gallery, Dublin (October 2013–January 2014).

The Speculative Concepts Jury Team is completed by Lucy McRae of Body Architect, Cher Potter, Research Fellow at Victoria and Albert Museum, James Auger, Partner at Auger-Loizeau and Jan Boelen, Artistic Director at Z33.

Commercial Equipment

Captain: Dan Harden, President, CEO & Principal Designer, Whipsaw

Dan is President, CEO, Principal Designer and cofounder of Whipsaw Inc., a highly acclaimed design firm in Silicon Valley, California. Whipsaw designs products and experiences for companies around the world including Google, Cisco, Clorox, GE, Haier, Intel, Leitz, Merck, Motorola, Nike, Olympus, Samsung and TP-Link, plus many exciting startups including Apnicure, Dropcam, Highfive, Livescribe, Nod Labs, and Yubo. Dan is a hands-on designer and directs the strategic and conceptual direction of most client accounts.

The Commercial Equipment Jury Team is completed by Bill Evans, Principal and Founder at Bridge Design, Mike Gallagher, Vice President of Design at Crown Equipment Corporation and Sam Lucente, CDO and Co-Founder of Cookbrite.

Visual Communication

Captain: Astrid Stavro, Partner & Creative Partner at Atlas

Astrid Stavro graduated with a First Class Certificate from Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design and with Distinction from The Royal College of Art in London. In 2004 she returned to her native land of Spain to start her own design practice in Barcelona. Astrid Stavro's strongly rooted conceptual solutions and distinctive typographic approach quickly won international critical acclaim. Her work has been recognized nationally and internationally with over 150 highly acclaimed creative awards including D&AD, The Annual (Creative Review), Design Week Awards, The International Society of Typographic Designers and Art Directors Club of New York. She is a recurrent jury member in design competitions and lectures in design conferences worldwide. Stavro writes for various design journals and is currently the Art Director as well as a contributing editor of Elephant magazine.

The Visual Communication Jury Team is completed by Matt Willey, Art Director at The New York Times Magazine, Pablo Juncadella, Founder of Mucho, Professor Teal Triggs, Associate Dean of the School of Communication at the Royal College of Art and Marion Deuchars, Author and Illustrator, www.mariondeuchars.com

Service Design

Captain: Cathy Huang, President of CBi China Bridge

Cathy founded CBi China Bridge in 2003, the first insight-based innovation consulting firm in China. Recently, she co-founded Successful Design, a platform aiming to amplifying the value of design. Under her guidance, CBi has become a leading innovation firm, acting as the bridge linking creative design with business.

Having broad influence both socially and on the global design industry, Cathy is frequently invited to conferences in North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. She enjoys adventures; from crossing the Gobi desert in Dunhuang to bungee jumping in New Zealand. Her continued dedication to challenging the limits fuels her creativity for both business and design.

The Service Design Jury Team is completed by Adam Lawrence, Co-Founder at WorkPlayExperience, Luis Arnal, President and Founder of INSITUM and Martha Cotton, Partner at gravitytank.

Design Education Initiatives

Captain: Mike Weikert, Director & Founder, Center for Social Design & Master of Arts in Social Design at MICA

Mike Weikert is founding director of the Center for Social Design and Master of Arts in Social Design at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). In 2008, he established MICA's Center for Design Practice, a multi-disciplinary, project-based studio bringing together students and outside partners to collaborate on innovative solutions to social problems. Previously, he served as co-chair of the graphic design department at MICA, partner/creative director at Atlanta-based Iconologic, and as a design consultant to the International Olympic Committee. In 2011, he was nominated for the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award and in 2014, received the Ashoka U-Cordes Innovation Award.

The Design Education Initiatives Jury Team is completed by Becky Slogeris, Social Design Associate for the Center for Social Design at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), Sarah Hemminger, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Thread and Jess Gartner, CEO and Founder of Allovue.

Open Design

Captain: Jennifer Turliuk, Co-President of MakerKids

Jennifer Turliuk is Co-President of MakerKids, a maker learning company that operates one of the only maker spaces for kids in the world. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Wired, Fast Company, Forbes, a Harvard case study and more. Jennifer keynoted the first MakerCon in Europe and has also spoken at various Maker Faire, MakerCon and TEDx events. She attended the Graduate Studies Program at Singularity University at NASA and business school at Queen's University. In her spare time, Jennifer does marketing and strategy consulting. She also enjoys dancing, kiteboarding, playwriting and DJing. Follow her on Twitter: @jenniferturliuk.

The Open Design Jury Team is completed by Mark Hatch, CEO at TechShop, Darrel Etherington, Writer at Techcrunch and Yancey Strickler, Co-Founder and CEO or Kickstarter.

Furniture & Lighting

Captain: Paul Cocksedge, Founder of Paul Cocksedge Studio

Paul Cocksedge studied under Ron Arad during his MA in Product Design at the Royal College of Art, and was introduced to Issey Miyake and Ingo Maurer, both of whom staged early exhibitions of his work. Maurer went so far as to give Paul a show within his own show at Milan Design Week 2003, introducing his lights 'Styrene', 'NeON', and an early work that was to be developed into 'Life 01' with FLOS. Paul has since gone on to become one of Britain's leading designers, founding Paul Cocksedge Studio with business partner Joana Pinho in 2004. The Studio's catalogue includes an imaginative range of design products, architectural projects, sculptures and lighting, all infused with the sense of simplicity, joy and wonder that has come to characterize Paul Cocksedge's work.

The Furniture & Lighting Jury Team is still being assembled at the time of this post. Stay tuned!

Packaging

Captain: Nishma Pandit, Director & Principal Designer at Ticket Design

Nishma is a co-founder and Director at Ticket Design, a design and innovation consulting firm involved in product, packaging and UX design. Under her leadership, Ticket Design has established itself as a respected design consulting firm, with a wide variety of award winning products launched in the Indian as well as International markets. Some of the awards that Ticket Design has won under her vision are Red Dot Product Design Award in 2013, CII award for UX design 2013 and Silver award at US Appliance Design.

During her tenure at Ticket Design, she has been the force of converting ideas into reality. With a robust background in design and years of hands-on design realization she brings her extensive knowledge of product development to the projects. Her project management experience has helped her team to get to the root of a problem and look at meaningful creative solutions.

The Packaging Jury Team is completed by Ayush Kasliwal, Founder of Ayush Kasliwal Design Private Ltd., Manabu Tago, President, Art Director and Designer, MTDO Inc. and Dinesh Korjan, Founder and Partner of Studio Korjan.

Transportation

Captain: James Thomas, Industrial Designer and Founder of BicycleDesign.net.

James Thomas is an industrial designer with interests in cycling, photography, architecture, lighting, active transportation, sustainability, and generally speaking, all art & design. Over the course of his 20 year design career, James has worked on a wide variety of consumer products and interior environments and his award-winning designs have received recognition from top national outlets including the Wall Street Journal and Better Homes and Gardens.

In 2005, James started BicycleDesign.net, a website that quickly became a central place on the internet for discussion of design in the bicycle industry. All types of bicycles (and other human powered machines) are covered on the site, from the latest high-end road and mountain bikes to transportation oriented bikes and unique utilitarian designs. James has staged a couple of different design competitions on the Bicycle Design site, and has served on the jury of several other competitions including the "Cycling out of Poverty" African Bicycle Design Contest, GrabCAD's Velodroom Bike Accessory Challenge and the ExtraEnergy France eBikeTec Design Contest. In addition to the Bicycle Design site, James can be found online at JCTdesign.net and on Twitter at @JCTdesign and @BicycleDesign.

The Transportation Jury Team is completed by Torgny Fjeldskaar, Design Director at BMC Switzerland, Melissa Bruntlett, Co-Founder of Modacity, Rob Cotter, Chief Designer and CEO at Organic Transit and Eric Stoddard, Design Manager at Ford Motor Company.

Strategy & Research

Captain: Dr. Melis Senova, Founder & Director of Strategy & Design at Huddle Design.

As Founder and Director at Huddle, Melis is the main provocateur when it comes to encouraging creative and pragmatic solutions. She is passionate about driving change within organizations with a natural focus on human centricity, design and what it takes to thrive in the 21st century. Melis has deep academic qualifications and vast business experience, underpinned by a PhD in Human Factors (user-centered design). Her areas of expertise covers service strategy, strategic service design, experience design, concept prototyping, systems engineering, program management and human factors research.

Melis is a contributing author to This is Service Design Thinking, the very first textbook on Service Design published in 2011. She sits on the advisory board for the Department of Architecture and Industrial Design at RMIT and is a Senior Research Fellow at the School of Medicine at Monash University. Melis is also co-founder of London-based Enterprise Design consultancy FromHereOn.

The Strategy & Research Jury Team is completed by Marcel Zwiers, Co-Founder and Creative Director at 31Volts, Harold G. Nelson, Visiting Scholar, University of Montana, School of Computer Science, Hugh Evans, CEO and Co-Founder of FromHereOn and Dr. Yoko Akama, Senior Lecturer in Communication Design, RMIT University.

The last time we looked at an over-engineered Japanese product design of dubious utility, it was this highlighter with a see-through tip. I vowed not to fall into this trap again but I can't help myself. So today I'm staring at the order page for the Kadomaru Pro Corner Cutter, which has just one function: To cut rounded corners into sheets of paper.

Well hang on, one function, but in three different sizes! Sure the object is made from three different types of plastic, contains multiple metal blades and a spring mechanism, which seems like a bit of overkill, but we're talking 3mm, 5mm and 8mm radii! I mean you can choose, just by inserting the paper into the correct mouth, clearly indicated by the "S, M, L" molded right into the handle! Because someone paid to have those letters and indentations milled into the steel before they started injection molding these bad boys, yet it only costs $14.99!

It's got "Pro" right in the title, meaning this thing isn't for amateurs. And in my own defense, Amazon reviewers love it—five-star product, baby. "Surprisingly strong and versatile," "Will cut heavy photographic paper and card stock up to 120 pound thickness with ease," and "Finally, I've found the rounder to change my life." (I swear I didn't make that up, read it yourself.)

Lastly, Mark Frauenfelder over at Cool Tools loves his.

Photo by Mark Frauenfelder

Photo by Mark Frauenfelder

Photo by Mark Frauenfelder

So I'm not crazy. I just have to find a use for it. 

Not all coin banks are piggy banks intended to encourage children to save. As a professional organizer, I became interested in these products when I saw clients with coins spilling all over the nightstand or dresser top. Sure, they could just put those coins in a simple jar, but they might enjoy using a well-designed coin bank more. 

Les Gloutons ceramic banks, designed by Atelier Peekaboo, have a top slot for inserting the coins and a spout for pouring them out. It's a simple, functional design that would work for many users.

The coin storage dish from Ideaco has wide slot, making it very easy for people to insert their coins. The wood bottom twists off, making it easy to get the coins out (except, perhaps, for a user with arthritis). With its resting place for keys, this coin dish would work especially well for users who like to empty both coins and keys from their pockets at the same time.

For users with no patience for feeding multiple coins through a slot, there's the Coink bank from Mint. Coins get dumped out through the same opening.

Bankabank lets users shove coins through the slot in the large front plug, which is removable when they want to get to those coins.  Since the Bankabank is made from soft PVC, there's no worry about it getting broken as there could be with a ceramic (or glass) product. It's also a bank that users could grab and take with them if they expected to need a lot of coins. 

The hand-blown glass banks from Roost would work well for users who enjoy seeing their coins accumulate. There's a slot on the top for adding coins; the large cork would be easy to remove to get at them. 

The Maraca coin bank designed by João Gonçalves is a neat idea: a bank that becomes a maraca as the user adds coins. Gonçalves provides some capacity information, which is welcome; the Maraca holds about 250€ in 1€ coins.

However, this is a design where the bank must be broken to get to the coins. That's OK for users who are using a coin bank as a savings device and need some encouragement to not raid the bank, but it's not good for those who are simply using a bank to hold coins for future use.

The VIMB plywood money box from Praktrik is also a puzzle, although supposedly not a very difficult one. The flat-pack design allows the user to easily store the money box away if it's not needed for a while. But I don't know any user who really wants the assembly of a useful product to also be a puzzle. 

The New York Times calls the NOLA money box from Internoitaliano an "adult piggy bank" since it's designed to hold bills rather than coins. However, I have yet to see anyone really struggling with a place to put extra banknotes; coins are the problem for the adults I know. So this is a lovely product that doesn't seem to address any real need, at least for those in the U.S. It's also unclear whether or not there's any way to remove the bills without breaking the money box.

The Duell from Konstantin Slawinski, designed by Ding300, is intended for dueling purposes: two people competing on savings, one person working toward two different savings goals, etc. But it doesn't have to be used that way; the two slots could be used for two different denominations (the most commonly used coin vs. everything else, perhaps) or for two different household members with no duel implied. The red silicone wrapper is removable, exposing larger slots that allow the coins to be shaken out. 

Some users may have limited space for a coin bank on a nightstand, dresser or other flat surface; such users might appreciate a design like the hanging vertical coin banks from Revol Design, available in three sizes to meet varying storage needs and space limitations. The coins are emptied out by removing the magnetic latch on the bottom.

The banks were designed for U.S. coins, with "two sheets of clear acrylic spaced precisely apart to allow the thickest coins, nickels, to fit while preventing the thinnest coins, dimes, from overlapping." However, there is also a euro-compatible version, and the bank will work some other currencies, too. This is a good reminder of how international differences need to be accounted for in product designs intended for a global audience.

Truly bespoke furniture is expensive, as it should be. If an experienced master craftsperson is going to put in the days of labor, not to mention the back-and-forth with you to settle upon a custom solution you're happy with, the cost creeping into four and five figures is understandable.

However, the folks out of Nashville-based Arrister are betting that there's a market above the big-box stores and below true bespoke: Someone who needs, for instance, a simple rectilinear table of custom dimensions—precisely sized in length and width to fit into a nook particular to their house, for instance, or of a particular height to properly suit tall or short people.

Thus they've launched a Kickstarter for their Parsonal project, which aims to provide furniture of predetermined designs, but made-to-measure.

I should point out that while the campaign states that "Each furniture piece is hand crafted in Nashville, Tennessee using Appalachian timber" and "you won't find MDF or particle board here," which is commendable, that doesn't mean there is no engineered wood involved; the woodniks among you are probably wondering how they could pull off a captured frame for the top, given that there aren't breadboard ends to compensate for wood movement, and the team told us that the tops are made of "a high quality hardwood ply (B/BB Baltic birch)."

I think the concept is sound and that the web interface shown in the video, with the adjustable sliders and such, is well-conceived; additionally, the team is looking for a relatively small amount—just $36,000—so I was surprised to see that at press time, they were underfunded by more than 50%, with less than $14,000 pledged and a mere 16 days to go.

So, feedback time: As we've all seen Kickstarters asking more hit the goal much faster than this, what do you fellow designers feel is the culprit? I suspect that the individual price points may be too high for objects with a relatively Ikea-esque aesthetic, see photos and numbers below:

Do you think the market's not ready for something like this, or is it something else? Very curious to get the readership's feedback here.

Maps are not disinterested portrayals of physical realities. They are the products and depictions of power. The Mercator projection world map emphasizes the size of the Americas relative to Africa. This isn't a reality; it is a cartographic decision that emphasizes geopolitical dynamics. (This dynamic is reversed on the Peters Projection map.) Maps also impose realities onto physical space. The British Empire's mapping and division of the Middle East, for instance, created borders that disrupted the lives of nomadic tribes. Maps are powerful objects and, as Voltaire and Spiderman's Uncle Ben both said, "with great power comes great responsibility."

Errors in maps can have serious consequences. In 1904, Siam (Thailand) and Cambodia, which was then a French colony, jointly set out to establish their mutual border. They agreed that the border would follow a watershed line, which left most of the Preah Vihear temple on the Thai side. When the French set out to draw the map in 1907, however, they deviated from the watershed to place the entirety of the temple on the Cambodian side. This decision is still a point of contention. Thailand occupied the temple in 1954 as an act of protest. Cambodia then took Thailand to the International Court of Justice, securing a 9-3 verdict in favour of the existing boundary in 1963. This did little to appease Thailand. The most recent Cambodian-Thai border skirmish, which lasted from 2008 to 2011, resulted in the deaths of 36 soldiers. This is but one example of how disputes over maps can be costly

ERRORS IN MAPS ARE COSTLY.

Mistakes in maps for robots can be even costlier. Whereas humans can interpret the differences between maps and their environments, robots see maps as the world. Their margin for error is virtually nonexistent. Thus, self-driving cars, such as those currently being developed by Google, cannot operate on the basis of normal street maps.

As Emily Badger notes in The Washington Post, "The Google map on your smart phone is a map made for human consumption. It resembles, in simplistic strokes, the world right before your eyes." There are streets and intersections—all the tools you need to navigate the built environment—but you have to figure out how to do so. "You can supplement what Google Maps tells you with your own judgment and eyesight," Badger writes. "A ballpark direction—"turn right in 200 feet"—is enough information for you to work with"

Not so for self-driving cars. Ogi Redzic, of the mapping company HERE tells Badger: "When we say 'turn right,' that decision needs to be made much more precisely. It's likely going to be 201 feet, 199 feet." This granularity is what stands between your driverless car and crashing. This may seem at odds with all the sensors on self-driving car prototypes—isn't a car that strictly follows a map a streetcar—but sensors can only get you so far. "A bad snow day," Redzic says, is "going to make sensor-based decision-making much more challenging."

The maps produced by companies like HERE are not for human consumption. "The ultimate consumer of the experience is the human, but the ultimate consumer of the data is the car," Redzic tells Badger. But there is a positive externality to the production of these maps: they are visually striking. There is no world outside of the roads on HERE's maps. It is not, after all, an option for a car to drive on anything but the road. On the road, however, HERE's maps offer incredible details, mapping lanes, dividers, and turning radiuses: the kind of things a car's literal-minded brain would need.

HERE's map, then, allows us to see the world through the eyes of a car, where the road is a series of bright lines and the world outside of it is plunged into pitch blackness. It is not unlike historical maps and projections, which can be used as tools to understand the thinking of now-deceased cartographers. A map—even an incredibly precise map made for a robot brain—can tell us about the world from which it comes. It can also just be fun to look at.

Story by David Rudin.

Automotive sketchers among you (we're looking at you, DiTullo) will often travel to classic car shows and either break out the sketchbook on the spot, or memorize what you can and draw them afterwards. Seeing a car from all sides really locks the car's form into your brain in a way that 2D photos cannot, and exposure to classic styles is like vitamins for your design brain.

But what if you can't make it out to the shows, and are chained to a desk like the rest of us? Well, we just stumbled across this awesome YouTube channel, RK Motors Charlotte. This North-Carolina-based classic car dealership brands themselves as "one of the most innovative collector car dealers in the United States," and each of their fully-restored wares gets rolled onto a huge turntable in their 60,000-square-foot facility to have a 360-degree video shot of it.

Those videos are then posted to YouTube, and they leave them up well after the cars are sold—meaning you've got a massive, free, online repository of wraparound videos that you can freeze-frame at will, allowing you to find the precise lines you're looking for.

1970 Barracuda? Check. '63 Corvette split-window? Check. '67 Chevelle Super Sport? Got it. '59 Ford Galaxie Skyliner Drop-top? Roger. Plus midway through the videos, they fire up the engines so you can hear those sweet exhaust notes. (I wish they had a better mic, but overall I can't complain.)

They have twelve freaking videos of different Dodge Super Bees alone and they all make me want to cry. Sorry to ruin your Thursday with this time-sink, but I like to think you'll thank me someday.

If you're having a bike race with a sibling and you lose, you know what to do: Blame the bike. That's what Yutaka Kondo did when older brother Nobuo beat him in an endurance race six years ago.

Thing is, the Kondo brothers aren't little kids: They run Kondo Machine Corporation, an ultraprecision machining company that cranks out everything from aviation parts to manufacturing machines to bicycles. So after their race, the younger Kondo brother took his bike apart and discovered that, yep, the rear axle had sustained damage during the four-hour contest.

If the axle's not perfectly straight, or if the wheel isn't perfectly round, then the user is fighting not only inertia, but the bike itself. Realizing this, Yutaka became obsessed with how to minimize power loss and spent six months literally reinventing the wheel. This being a passion project, manufacturing costs were not considered, only functionality.

This resulted in Yutaka's Gokiso Hub, a fiendishly complicated piece of engineering containing an internal suspension system that protects the bearings from impacts sustained by the wheel, allowing the milled shaft—already rendered five times stronger than average in terms of ridigity—to spin unmolested by external irregularities. The Gokiso Wheel consists of a carbon-fiber rim precisely engineered to balance light weight with having enough mass to provide flywheel-like inertia.

This wasn't an ego project, by the way, where Yutaka would feel that he had to manufacture every last part; for spokes he opted to go with ones manufactured by Belgium's Sapim, finding that they already offered superior rigidity. Thus the Gokiso Wheel and Gokiso Hub were, if not exactly designed around Sapim's spokes, at least designed to perfectly accommodate them.

With all of this put together, the no-compromise wheel provides "the sensation of gliding on ice" and delivers startling performance. When a competitor's wheel is spun at 18 miles per hour on a test rack, they run out of momentum and come to a stop in about 90 seconds. In contrast, Yutaka's wheel keeps spinning for six minutes. (This fan-made video on YouTube shows someone spinning the wheel by hand, and it doesn't stop for ten minutes.) And there's more:

Using a test bike rigged with rollers and sensors, Yutaka ran the wheels at speeds of up to 300 kph (186 mph), close to the top speed of Japan's bullet train. Then a durability test: 100 kph, 10 hours a day, for 100 days, a distance twice the earth's circumference. After all that, Nobuo says, the wheels still spun like new. The Gokiso has one-third less mechanical resistance than the next-smoothest wheel on the market, the brothers say, which means speeds 1 mph to 2 mph faster for most riders and crucial seconds shaved off pros' race times.

Those statistics were reported by Bloomberg, in an article pointing out the central issue of the Gokiso: They cost US $7,900 per pair. Since their invention, they've only sold 30 pairs.

Which is a shame. We now live in a time where our manufacturing technologies are so sophisticated that we are well capable of making the best things in human history to date, things that are an order of magnitude beyond any incremental improvements we've made throughout most of our time on this Earth. Yet few folks, it seems, are willing or able to fork over to buy the best.

For those interested in the science and engineering behind the hub, or for any cyclist who's interested in what happens to your hub when you ride your bike—or even install it to the fork—peep this: