This is sure to send a wave through the design community: Moss, the influential design store and gallery located in New York's SoHo, has been seized by the State of New York for nonpayment of taxes—foreshadowed in Murray Moss's essay Design Hates a Depression, as pointed out by the Architect's Newspaper early this morning, who discovered the shop closed with a tax compliance notice on the door. They've done their due diligence and canvassed a few sources, including Moss hiimself, who, on the prospect that the store will go bankrupt, has to say: "100% NOT TRUE! Will send letter to you shortly...but we're not going anywhere...!"
Read the full article at the Architect's Newspaper, where they've promised to post the letter from Moss as soon as they receive it.
As part of iGEM Championship Jamboree, the Internationally Genetically Engineered Machine competition run annually for undergraduate students to experiment with a kit of biological parts, the Synthetic Aesthetics research project will be running a seminar today at MIT Media Lab to discuss the collaboration between synthetic biology, art and design.
Synthetic Aesthetics is an ongoing interdisciplinary research project run by the University of Edinburgh and Stanford University that brings together scientists, engineers, artists and designers in collaborative projects to explore shared territory in the process, interaction and directions for future work with biological design. Follow their activities via @synthaes
In response to the impending water crisis, design firm Teague set out to help visualize domestic water use in an effort to identify opportunities to use less. Water bills may contain statistics on how much is used, but not where it is being overused. To make this apparent, they designed a meter that is integrated with points of use throughout the home—faucets— that provides this information via WiFi.
In the first trial run, the meter was hooked up the the studio kitchen faucet and usage was monitored from computers at the studio desks, which resulted in very slight improvements. Upon moving the data onto an iPad on display by the sink, however, reductions were extreme— 1.5 gallons were saved in a single task like handwashing.
Visualizing all the water that could be saved spurred Teague to start a campaign to help with water crises thousands of miles away—not by shipping gallons of water, but by sending money, with $20 enugh to provide one person 20 years worth of clean water. Teague is working with the nonprofit Charity: Water on a 3 month campaign to raise $10,000 for clean water projects; they'll match every dollar donated with a dollar from Teague.
After breaking a series of coatracks, a Virginia-based tinkerer who goes by the handle Whamodyne needed to make some stronger wall hooks to hang his heavy winter gear from. His mounting solution was to use lag screws driven into wall studs, but he still needed a form factor for the protruding end. Whamodyne's solution: Concrete light bulbs.
By hollowing out a cheapie light bulb, filling it with mortar mix concrete and breaking the glass off, Whamodyne was able to create some seriously heavy-duty hooks with enough bulbousness to hang a heavy coat without having to fumble with hanging loops and hooks. Having perfected the process, he's posted an Instructable of how to do it.
Want one, but don't feel like getting your hands dirty? He also sells them on Etsy.
The MIT School of Architecture and Planning is embarking on a vigorous path of expansion and assertion of excellence in the field of Urbanism. We seek one full-time tenured appointment at the associate or full professor level, commensurate with the candidate's qualifications, in the Department of Architecture with the leadership ability, character and energy to contribute to building the studio program and the design curriculum of the discipline, and to participate dynamically in the intellectual life of the School.
Presenting a cross-section of innovators working in the creative industries, the sentiment behind the Influx: Meet the Makers Conference is close to our hearts. The one day event will take place at Milk Studios in New York, December 3rd, with talks from nine speakers and break-out sessions to celebrate the resurgence of making. The line-up includes:
Ashley Alsup—Remaking Corporate America
Mark Barden—Building a Brand
Scott Belsky—How to Write a Bestseller
Thomas Callahan—Making and Selling Crafted Bikes
Gary Hirsch—Creating an Instant Character
Josh Quittner—Making Time for the iPad
Sarah Rich—Making a Magazine in 48 Hours
Frank Rose—Storytelling in the C21st
Jim Wexler—Making Games
We wanted to make sure you didn't miss T Magazine's Design and Living Winter 2010 issue, especially "If They Can Make it Here," Monica Khemsurov's cover story "singling out half a dozen young designers who are making it in the Big Apple." These include RISD grads Rich, Brilliant and Willing (right), who have just released a series of lamps for Artecnica (among other things), and Jonas Damon, an industrial designer that's mostly worked behind the scenes, once for Tom Dixon and now as Creative Director of Frog Design.
The others are Leon Ransmeier of dba, Roanne Adams of Refinery29, Commonwealth, and Rafael de Cárdenas. Read more here.
Tokyo-based architect Daisuke Motogi acknowledges that things often get lost in couches, and allows sitters to take ownership of the phenomenon with his Lost in Sofa:
Holds books, magazines, your cell phone, the remote, and might even make a good place to store cash for the delivery guy. Pretty sweet, and a damn sight easier than my idea, which was to have a couch with a built-in X-ray machine.
UK product development firm Special Agent introduces their own branded line of performance travel bags titled BodyKit. The series of bags offer transformational wearing styles allowing you to keep your personal items close while actively making your way around the busy city. Take their chest-strapped bulletproof looking bodygrip for example. Imagine you're on your way to that top-secret meeting on the 30th floor of a high rise building, leaping parkour-style from ledge to ledge, with your iPad strapped to your chest. Without breaking a sweat, you unfold your pack into a stylish shoulder bag, assuming your casual identity upon arrival. Relax.
With specially designed laser cut steel fittings, Bodykit promises to allow limitless adaptability and play thanks to Special Agent's use of high quality materials and years of experience designing gear for the UK's elite military forces. Check out the full line of products, and become inspired to think of what your design firm could develop on the side.
Much has been made of improving the design of the travel experience, typically focusing on the actual transportation part; but when it comes to the planning phase of a leisure trip, user experience design has been notably absent.
A new website called Wanderfly aims to change that with a well-designed interface that considers the way people plan trips. Equal parts travel agent, ticket-seller, world-traveling friend and source of travel inspiration, Wanderfly seeks to get you and your suitcase out of the house with minimal hassle.
Sometimes you want to go away, but don't know where you want to go. Wanderfly makes you aware of the possibilities with a simple welcome screen that lets you punch in what you do know: Where you're leaving from and a budget range, letting you set bookends anywhere between $200 and $5,000. Then you enter a rough time window of travel, i.e. mid-November for two days, or next January for 3 weeks.
In this sixth and final entry in our series Dogs on Design, writer Sarah F. Cox visited Connecticut this summer to meet the two viszlas lucky enough to run around Winterhouse with Bill Drenttel and Jessica Helfand.
Maude and Ruby lent their likenesses to the label of last year's Winterhouse maple syrup.
I first wrote to Bill Drenttel over the summer asking to meet the Winterhouse dogs—two vizslas named Maude and Ruby. Despite the fact that I could only visit on a holiday weekend, he invited me out to Winterhouse headquarters in Connecticut to meet him, his wife Jessica Helfand, and the two beloved family pets. "Like Winterhouse, [your visit] will be a family affair," he wrote in an email. This was an understatement. After more than an hour on the back porch on a hot July day, I'd met Jessica's visiting parents, Bill and Jessica's children—Malcolm and Fiona—the two dogs and two rabbits. The family dressed the dogs in Halloween costumes, demonstrated a dog conga line, and sent me off with homemade maple syrup bearing Maude and Ruby's images on the bottles.
Looks like we're getting spoiled for choice when it comes to replacements for the venerable incandescent lightbulb, which is due to be phased out in America by 2012. Following in the footsteps of curly-fry CFLs and Philips' steampunk-looking LEDs, the latest bulb tech to pass UL certification is the ESL.
The Electron Stimulated Luminescence bulb, by Seattle-based Vu1 Corporation (whose CEO is ironically named Philip Styles) uses "accelerated electrons to stimulate phosphor to create light, making the surface of the bulb 'glow.'" Vu1 claims their ESL is as energy-efficient and long-lived as CFLs and LEDs, but boasts superior light quality (see photo above) and is dimmable, unlike its cousins. Far as price, the bulbs will go for less than LEDs but about the same as CFLs: Twenty bucks a pop.
Can you describe how Electronics bubbled up as the next theme to prioritize in the Story of Stuff series? Why this topic, why now?
The Story of Stuff series is all about consuming—all the stuff we buy—and what the real costs are (even if we aren't paying these costs). So the team at Story of Stuff (SOS) was interested in the electronics issue from the beginning, since we are purchasing (and disposing of) electronics at an unbelievable rate. Why now? We are about to enter the holiday buying frenzy that starts around Thanksgiving, when a huge amount of the year's electronics purchases are made.
So the goal is to bring awareness, thereby changing behavior. What is process for creating a piece with that kind of aspiration?
Right. That's a primary goal with all the Story of Stuff (SOS) films: to make people aware of the invisible impacts, so they'll think and act differently. We, the Electronics Takeback Coalition (ETBC), sat down with Annie Leonard, SOS, and the Free Range team to talk through core themes and primary messages, and how they fit with the SOS storyline on product lifecycles. (This is where Free Range is such an important partner in this project—they don't just take a script and animate it. They are part of the development of the whole project.) We brainstormed on some of the key elements, examples, important facts, possible visual images. Really, the hard part is paring it all down to fit in a short film. From there, Annie, her team, and Free Range developed the script, which went through several drafts. Once the script was finalized, and Annie was filmed, the illustration started. To me, this is the magical part—the storytelling is good, but it really comes alive after the animations are added. All the SOS films are viewed online, and there are great resources on the actual site to take action after viewing.
My favorite pasta is rigatoni, because I like the texture; it's ribbed for my pleasure, I like to say. The striations tend to hold the eggplant sauce I make for it far better than slippery penne.
Foodies and/or industrial designers should intuitively know that pastas are intentionally designed with different shapes and textures to capture different types of sauces. This is, and has become, such an art (or is it science?) that designer Caz Hildebrand has produced The Geometry of Pasta, a 288-page tome on "pasta morphology." As "Fox Foodie" Elena Ferretti describes in her review of the book,
Fish flavors go with smooth-textured pasta like linguine or pacchieri - huge, hollow, tubes that unlike manicotti are never stuffed. Ridged pastas like rigatoni grasp hearty sauces well. Chunky sauces are good with tightly-spiraled, torpedo-shaped trofie. Soup requires pastinas - small pastas, like quadrettini or riso. Heavy, thick sauces go perfectly with a filled-pasta like angolott - veal, pork and sage-stuffed semi-circles. Think: delicate pasta, light sauce; heavier pasta, thicker sauce.
...Later pastas reflected Italy's love of design, and have a decidedly industrial esthetic: eliche ("screws") and fusilli ("spindles"); gomiti ("crank shafts"); lancette ("clock hands"); trivelli ("drills") and radiatore ("radiators.")
Marloes ten Bhömer is an experimental shoemaker who is exploring new possibilities in fabrication and fitting provided by 3D-printing. Rapidprototypedshoe, shown here, is breated through sintered plastic plumer, into the shape of one's foot. A fantastic solution if, like many, you're two feet aren't exactly the same size.
If 3D shoe printing takes off, we wonder other materials could be used to create a shoe that can stretch, bend, and be repaired? Bhömer has just started to address that by designing a shoe that comes apart in layers, allowing for different material properties and easy replacement of worn-out parts.
A rectangle with a hole in it. It's hard to believe someone's designed those, isn't it?
What isn't hard to believe is that boaters don't often wear lifejackets, largely, research indicates, because they're uncomfortable. And 80% of people who drown don't have a lifejacket on.
So, here's your chance to break out the design skills to solve this. The BoatUS Foundation is holding a lifejacket design competition, with one blue-sky aspect and one reality-grounded aspect: You can use whatever type of material or design you envision, no matter how radical--but you must build a working prototype.
The BoatUS Foundation believes that innovation and the application of new technology might entice more boaters to wear life jackets. If you are a creative thinker and have an idea for a new and innovative life jacket your ingenuity may help save lives. We don't have any rules as to what types of materials or designs are allowable. The Foundation wants you to come up with as many new, imaginative and out-of-the-box ideas as you can.
The Winning prize for the most innovative new design is $5,000. Best of all, your design is not required to meet US Coast Guard requirements to qualify or to win!
Core77's Hand-Eye Curiosity Club is pleased to host an evening with Chance Walte of Fearless Guitars. Chance is a seeker, questioner and tireless experimenter: for more than twenty years he has utilized guitars and basses as the tools to study organized sound. During this process he recorded modifications to the tuning, setup and construction of the instruments at his disposal, using the same three songs for control. In this way, he became very familiar with the variables involved in sculpting a tone.
Chance Walte will go over how the different systems and components work together to create the final feel and sound. This will touch on all the major aspects of set up, evaluation of a guitar and why one guitar feels/functions so differently from the next even when they are ostensibly the same thing.
One of the things I neglected to mention in my banquette-building post was how to cut the foam. Having no money, I cut through five-inch-thick foam sections by making repeated swipes with a cheapie utility knife like the one above. It was time-consuming, messy, far from accurate, and doing the curves was a real pain. It's the dumb way to cut foam.
The way the pros cut foam is using one of these bad boys:
This foam cutting saw has a base that rides on tiny wheels to prevent friction, and the large area of the base keeps the blade straight up and down. Here's a similar one in action:
They're also fairly expensive, ranging from about $160 to over $400 for high-end one. Bosch makes a nice-looking one for about $322.
If you don't have that kinda cash but have some building skills, check out this awesome DIY foam saw by YouTube user Designsbyg. You'll kick yourself when you see, midway through the video, what he actually used for the cutting device.
The U.S. Navy is reportedly experimenting with replacing their bristling shipside antennae arrays with another material: Salt water, shot up into a fountain. The Electrolytic Fluid Antenna, as it's called, is apparently workable and the Navy is even seeking to commercialize it.
Sea water is pumped from the ocean into a stream and the width and length of the stream determine the frequency capabilities. An 80-foot-high stream could transmit and receive from 2 to 400 mHz with a relatively small footprint. The Sea Water Antenna is capable of transmitting and receiving VHF signals and has been tested at a receiving range of over 30 miles.
The antennae needs of a typical Navy vessel with 80 metallic antennas could theoretically be replaced with only 10 Sea Water Antennas of varying heights and streams to cover the same frequencies. The technology could potentially be used on land with salt-supplemented water, replacing large unsightly antenna towers with fountains. Another use could be as a solar- or battery-powered emergency antenna system for watercraft.
Pretty wild. If this takes off, it could turn The Bellagio into a major broadcasting center. It would also be awesome if they could adapt the technology to replace cell phone towers in those towns where nobody wants the ugly tower in their backyard, and they instead replaced them with picturesque geysers.
The clever people at Blast Radius, in collaboration with UK illustrator and facial hair connoisseur Simon Cook of Made In England, have put together Stachetag.com (or alternatively Tachetag for the Brits/Aussies)—a brilliant little live feed of Movember mug-shots uploaded to Twitter to show their support of this year's Movember men's health month.
Apparently, the inspiration for the site came from a chance stuttering mix-up of the words "hash tag".
Maude and Ruby lent their likenesses to the label of last year's Winterhouse maple syrup.
