Inspired by the radical approach of Studio Alchimia in the 1970's, Singapore Design: The Alchemistspresents  the work of 15 young Singaporean designers who are leveraging technologies, processes and unusual materials to develop, as the co-curator Stefano Casciani posits, "a more contemporary attitude for designing in the global context."

Image by Franco Chimenti courtesy of The Alchemists. All other images courtesy of The Alchemists.

Drawing from the sights, smells and shapes that define a Singaporean landscape, these designers are performing modern alchemy, transforming the mundane into the exquisite. Here are five to watch:

"Fools' Gold" cabinets by Lanzavecchia + Wai

Corrugated steel sheets, found in makeshift constructions throughout Singapore, get chromed out with metallic car wrap in these cabinets by Lanzavecchia + Wai. Inspired by the laminates used by the Alchimia group in the late '70s, Lanzavecchia + Wai play with ideas of high and low without sacrificing functionality.

"Aura Tropicale" scent diffuser by Outofstock

Challenged with the idea of transforming an everyday object into one of wonder, the designers of Outofstock began a process of experimentation with the humble automotive filter. Designed to filter out particulates from car and motorcycle exhausts, these beautiful ceramic objects  are usually an unseen workhorse. Now shaped into a friendly and tactile convex form, Outofstock began playing with color and soon developed a process of applying a wash of green and purple hues through osmosis. The filters are placed in a color solution, "defying gravity," the designers explain and "soaking up colour like a straw." A drop of lemongrass essential oil, a scent associated with Singapore, is distributed down the shafts of the ceramic substrate creating a subtle and slow-release diffuser.

"Spotted Nyonya," by Hans Tan

Transforming Nyonya porcelain with sandblasting, Hans Tan creates a multi-dimensional surface on a traditional domestic ware native to Southeast Asia. The vessels are masked with a dot motif and then put through an industrial sandblasting process, erasing the colored glaze to expose the original unvarnished white porcelain underneath.

"Textile Transformations," by Tiffany Loy

Experimenting with digital craft, Tiffany Loy developed acrylic molds (that double as patterns) to create a unique texture on polyester fabrics. Pressing the material between the two molds forces the material to take on new forms. The resulting fashions are more wearable sculpture than clothing.

"Instruments of Beauty (Divine Tools)," by Olivia Lee

Highlighting man's eternal search for beauty and meaning in the world, designer Olivia Lee created a set of nine tools, "to aid in the use and discovery of the golden ratio in existing or new work." Lee's work also represents the convergence of traditional disciplines of inquiry like math, engineering and art, with spiritual and technological ideals.  As Lee explains, "these tools invoke the mysterious force that encodes the Universe with our sense of beauty and the ideal."

• Divine Sketchbook: A sketchbook with grids based on the golden ratio
• Divine Ruler: A ruler with a corresponding scale in golden ratio
• Divine Volumes: A set of wooden block representing the golden ratio spatially for exploring divine volumes
• Divine Roulette: A teethed stencil designed to draw hypotrochoids in multiples of five invoking Sacred Geometry
• Divine Looking Frame: A viewfinder use to investigate the presence of golden ratios in facades and objects from a distance
• Divine Kaleidoscope: An optical tool for creating pentagonal reflective geometry based on the 72odegree angle isosceles mirror inside
• Divine Protractor: A template of the golden angle used for replicating the distributive phenomena of phyllotaxis theory
• Divine Stencil: A pocket-sized drawing implement for creating golden ratio drawing guides with infinite scale
• Divine Calipers: A tribute to the original divine tool used for creating and checking for the golden ratio

Singapore Design: The Alchemists is on view now through April 19th at the Triennale di Milano, Viale Alemagna 6

Eric Ries is a household name in most startup micro-kitchens. The Silicon Valley entrepreneur and author is the poster child for "fail faster"—learning quickly from mistakes and forging ahead to found successful ventures, a process that he documents on his blog, Startup Lessons Learned. In 2011, Ries published a post titled "The Lean Startup," a phrase that quickly caught on and led to him to publish a book by the same name.

Four years later, Ries has been working with a myriad of clients looking to implement the principles of the Lean Startup in their companies and organizations. Finding himself answering the same questions over and over again, the author decided that it was time for another book. This time, however, he's taking his own medicine, implementing the methodologies of The Lean Startup to create a Minimum Viable Product (MVP—we'll dig into that later) through crowd-funding the book on Kickstarter.

With less than 48 hours before his Kickstarter deadline, we sat down with Ries and asked him a few questions about the campaign and the new book, titled The Leader's Guide.

Can you give us a bit of the backstory as to why you decided to write The Leader's Guide?

When I published The Lean Startup, I didn't know what exactly was going to happen. I hoped people would read it, I hoped it would enter the conversation, but I had no idea. I'm very grateful for the turnout, but I made a bunch of assertions in that book. They weren't pure speculation, but they were my ideas and beliefs, and I didn't really anticipate how seriously or specifically people would take them.

I have this idea that entrepreneurship is not just about being in a garage; it is a management discipline that deals with situations of high uncertainty. That means that the startup in the garage is "the startup," but it also means that these ideas and principles can be applied to everything from the new nonprofit to the big government agency. The challenge of being an entrepreneur is more than just how to get started but, ultimately, how you build a management system that allows your company to act in an entrepreneurial way.

How can you as a founder, as a leader, help people adopt these entrepreneurial ways of working like a startup? In the last four or five years, I have been very blessed that people all over the world people have adopted these ideas. It got to the point where they are starting ask more and more and more often about what I now call "the leader's perspective," which is not just what are the techniques and how to use them, but how to convince a team to adopt them. How do I get people who are set in the ways of an older work system to adopt it? How do I convince my boss to adopt it? How do I create an organization that can train people to think this way?

All of this really detailed management stuff has been my work for last three years. My rule is that when people start asking the same questions over and over again and I know the answers, maybe it's time to stop answering them one at a time. That's why I decided to write this book.

From what I understand, your Kickstarter takes an unconventional approach, one inspired by the thinking of your first book. Can you speak to that a bit?

I never thought I would be a business-book author, and there were two issues that always bothered me about it. One was: How can you, in the writing of a book like this, be true to the ideas that you are presenting?

The lean startup is all about rapid information, experimentation and getting closer to customers, but if you are doing a traditionally published business book, the normal process is quite internally focused. There's a lot of writing time by yourself. There's not a lot of iteration with customers. It's mostly with your editors and publishers. It's not really very lean. I didn't want to do that.

The second issue that has always bothered me is: How do you really know that the prescriptions you are offering in your book actually work for people? Most people ask that question to other business authors and they have a pretty simple answer: "Well, I'm sharing from my own personal experience."

That's the answer that I certainly would have given when I was writing The Lean Startup, but reading a book about something is not the same as hiring a consultant to tell you the same information, even if the approach is the same. The number of misconceptions from people who didn't read the book very carefully or misunderstood what I was trying to say and went in the wrong direction really bothers me and I feel a sense of responsibility to prevent that. Using the lean startup approach in the writing of a book requires testing these ideas to make sure that when customers actually read what you are telling them and put it into practice, you know what the result is.

That's what I was grappling with when I decided to do a Kickstarter. When I wrote The Lean Startup, crowd-funding was not nearly where it is today. I realized that I could use Kickstarter to help me make a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), and do an experiment that would help me solve those problems that I just mentioned.

I have all the material from every workshop, case study and exercise I use with my clients. I don't normally publish that material—it's my private curriculum—but I thought, "How about just this one-time experiment as a single-run volume to publish that work to give people access to it?" Through it, I also plan to create an online community where backers can give feedback on the material, see early drafts, but, most importantly, to use the ideas themselves and report back what happens as a way to source new case studies for the book. That's what the lean startup is all about.

With your first book, many of the principles you wrote about were focused on larger companies, but you quickly found that people were applying them to anything and everything. How do you see this new book and these techniques applying to a solo entrepreneur?

I remember when I was the young engineer and someone gave me a copy of Alan Cooper's The Inmates Are Running The Asylum, a classic book about technology and design. It's a fun read—although some of those examples are dated now—but it's basically trying to make the case that the designers are important in the building of technology products, which I think a lot of circles believe today. It seems totally obvious, but it's a relatively new phenomenon and was not always this way.

The flip side of this is that the way design is taught in academic and industrial settings is very traditional. Someone gathers the requirements, someone else does the design and somebody else builds the actual implementation; someone else does quality assurance, maybe somebody else does the deployment operations, supply chain distribution and so on—each stage is isolated in a silo.

That way of working, I think, is actually antithetical to good design. It's not even applicable as most design thinking ideas because they are supposed to work in an iterative, experimental, anthropological way and understand the overall system that you are embedded in as a designer. To me, there is a real opportunity for designers to reinvent the process of how design integrates with the rest of the world.

That could be as simple as running a code, so that you can implement your own designs and iterate on them rapidly; it might mean partnering with somebody who is as interested in design as you are interested in technology; or it might mean working in an organization that has a lean development process. Whichever of those it is, I think that the companies of the future that embrace that way of working are the ones that will succeed.

Eric Ries at his Lean Startup Conference

What will designers find when they open up your book?

Whether it's a design project or an artistic project—physical, virtual, film, music, woodwork, other media—if you want to have an impact, want to move people and change the world, these principles still apply. I feel that way about my own craft of writing. It's not just an abstract exercise. It's not an ego project. I care a lot about what happens to it in the real world.

How do we focus on impact rather than on our on own personal sense of aesthetics or our own personal sense of design? How do you help get feedback to calibrate it toward what really has most the impact? That's where this kind of testing and experimenting approach can be really useful.

I think a lot of people wish that they could find a way to make a living doing something that they feel passionately about. Very few of us have the luxury to really support ourselves doing work that we truly love and we feel that we were put on this earth to do. I think what is a shame is somebody who is trying to make money doing that, but they're embarrassed about it so they don't go about it in an effective way. That's a real waste of their talent.

If you're trying to make money using a skill or a craft and you have a startup, it can be made better. Bad things happen when you don't take ownership of your own career, your own process, your own business.

Can you give me an example of something that will be in this book?

These days, we just have so many more varied examples of people who have created a video demonstration of their product and posted it online, or someone who built a physical mock-up or used 3D printing to build an MVP and used that to test customer demand. A lot of examples of people who had to take shortcuts that would normally be absolutely unacceptable, using inferior materials over others that would have taken two years and three million dollars to get.

They're able to get an almost-as-good product to market a lot sooner and use that, not as the end state but as a way to test customer response. As soon as new materials are available, they can come and replace the first version of the product with the new version—at their own expense—so the customer's still getting this great thing eventually, but they also get this bonus benefit of something not as good but real.

How will someone get the book outside of backing your Kickstarter Campaign?

They can't. It is an unusual thing to do to advertise a product that is not for sale, but it is part of the deal with my publisher that The Leader's Guide can only be available at one time only though the campaign. It's not going to be available on Amazon. This is not a gimmick, not an "act now" infomercial that will be on again tomorrow. This is it.

What the motivation for that?

That is what makes a crowd-funding campaign effective. With Kickstarter, we're creating something that otherwise would not exist. We wouldn't have done it through the traditional publisher process. If the campaign failed, it would not get published. I don't want to keep writing and keep working on it. I just want to give it to people to tell me if it's useful, so I can keep improving for the next one.

What if the machines that manufacture our objects could feel? And what if those feelings would effect the final outcome of the objects created? At Spazio Rossana Orlandi, a bastion of experimental and emerging talent, an ongoing collaboration between Sander Wassink and Olivier van Herpt explores that territory with 3D printed ceramics. The project, Adaptive Manufacturing, builds on van Herpt's work designing and building a bespoke clay extruder for 3D printing ceramics.

van Herpt's 3D ceramics printer can build stable, large scale objects using a delta style, piston-based extruder and hard clay. Although the machine does not feel, it senses its environment through programmed scripts and the final object, as Wassink explained to Core77, is "designed by external phenomenon."

They decided to design scripts that distill shapes and textures from external phenomenon. The software then translates this external information measured by sensors into specific realtime behaviors of the printer. You could call it a sensory machine that feels it's environment, and all of it's output becomes a real-time document of a specific time, location or raw material.

The layered, primitive ceramics presented at Spazio Rossana Orlandi were created using information from the rings of a tree trunk. Each vessel is completely different, a fingerprint of the tree rings, the humidity and other factors of the natural environment.

Details from 3D printed ceramics.

As the process is still new, Wassink explained that each ceramic tests the boundaries of material technology—a contribution to the larger iterative process of designing sensory manufacturing. 

Adaptive Manufacturing is on view now through April 19th at Spazio Rossana Orlandi, via Matteo Bandello 14-16.

Sander Wassink and 3D printed ceramics from the Adaptive Manufacturing exhibition.

No one likes carrying a bulky bicycle helmet around. And as one designer after another tries to devise a way to make them collapse for storage, we're struck by how different everyone's approach is.

Julien Bergignat and Patrice Mouille's Tatoo Helmet is comprised of polypropylene strips lined with padded cells. Fastened at each end, the contraption rolls up like an armadillo. It's not terribly practical for carrying around, but assuming the connection points are strong enough, does seem it would withstand impact from the radial angles.

We Flotspotted/Trendletted Mike Rose's polypropylene Collapsible Helmet, which is considerably more elegant in terms of how it shrinks. The helmet compresses laterally, just about halving in size. However, while Rose has conducted drop tests for the helmet taking an impact from the top, we don't see any provision for providing the side-to-side structure you'd need for a lateral impact.

Inventor Jeff Woolf's successfully-crowdfunded Morpher helmet design also compresses laterally, and has won Popular Science's Safety Invention of the year for 2014/15. The helmet locks into the closed position via neodymium magnets. I'd like to see some explanation on the website as to how rigid this makes the helmet, but there is no technical description, just a statement that "Morpher has been designed to surpass all relevant safety standards."

The most recent design we've seen is Closca's Fuga helmet. Though they describe it as "folding," it doesn't fold at all, but rather telescopes down to roughly half-height. As with many of the other designs, there is no discussion on their website as to what provides rigidity from an impact along the axis it collapses along.

BioLogic's Pango folding helmet is made to fold in on itself from three angles. Because the folding design is hinge-based rather than compression-based, and when snapped together you have parts bracing each other in place, it seems it would be the most structurally sound:

It's subjective, but after looking at all of these, it seems the best solution to a folding helmet may not be a helmet at all.

We first spotted the Hövding "airbag for cyclists" a while ago, and it was first conceived of in 2005. By now the product's been around long enough that they've racked up both customer testimonials and praise from the insurance industry. And they really put their money where their mouth is, by showing crash-test footage and video demonstrations aplenty of the system deploying:

The only downside we can see is that there is a battery one must keep track of. But looking at the impressive protection statistics shown in the video, one does have to wonder if, compared to the Hövding, helmets really stand a chance.

The Lexus Design Award 2015 centered around the theme 'Senses,' showcasing an array of projects related to sight, smell, touch, taste and hearing this week in Milan. The award—developed to encourage broard thinking around the topic—never fails to yield an impressive group of projects and diverse thought from fashion to furniture tech. 2015 was no exception with the exhibition of the twelve finalists. Among the twelve, four were selected to continue with a prototype with the help of a mentor and to exhibit during Milan Design Week. 

Senses are intrinsic to life: they are what allow us to perceive the world. Taking this purposefully broad theme, considering seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling and tasting, we open ourselves up to a wide range of possibilities.

Lexus Space at the Milan Design Week

This year's mentors included Max Lamb, Robin Hunicke, Arthur Huang and Lyndon Neri & Rossana Hu. Mentors were paired with the finalists to carry out the development of the project currently on display in Zona Tortona.

Of the final four, one was selected as the Grand Prix Winner from a panel of judges who are notable names in their own right. The 2015 judging panel consisting of Toyo Ito, Paola Antonelli, Birgit Lohmann, Alice Rawsthorn, Aric Chen and Tokuo Fukuichi selected project Sense-Wear as the winner, the work of Emanuela Corti and Ivan Parati with mentorship from Robin Hunicke.

Here is a selection of the three finalists and Grand Prix Winner:

LUZ by Marina Mellado Mendieta with Mentor Max Lam

Finalist LUZ addresses the need for daylight regardless of location. Designed in Northern Europe, the design of LUZ takes into account current weather conditions  and temperature to adapt to its surroundings and provide light to the user. 

Diomedeidae by Adriano Alfaro, Daiki Nakamori and Gaetano Mirko Vatiero with Mentor Arthur Huang

Finalist Project Diomedeidae is a lighting installation that uses its own kinetic movement to generate electricity to power itself. With the linkage that humans make between movement and life, the subtle 'flapping' motion of Diomedeidae taps into a deep rooted understanding of energy transference artificially and biologically. 

Animal Masks by Keita Ebidzuka with Mentors Lyndon Neri & Rossana Hu

Finalist Project Animal Masks allows users to visualize the world as an animal would by taking out the visual distractions of modern society. The project addresses global mythologies about symbolic representations of animals and blends modern technology with symbolism. 

Sense-Wear Emanuela Corti and Ivan Parati with Mentor Robin Hunicke

The Grand Prix Winner Sense-Wear is a fashion line to morph the wearer's understanding of the senses. Garments and accessories heighten physical sensations or mute them lending greater awareness to the user. 

The Lexus – A journey of the Senses is on view now through April 19th at Spazio Lexus, Via Tortona 33, Milano.

How do furniture designers develop their style? As we saw in Jory Brigham's story, there are many long hours to be put in at the studio or shop, experimenting. But equally important is finding inspiration, understanding what came before, and letting these things marinate in your head.

To do that, it would be helpful to have a detailed catalog of furniture designs from over the centuries. Not just the Eameses and Le Corbusiers of the world, but lesser or completely unknown works that exceed the range of your average museum book or design history course. And a great place to find that stuff is at the furniture section of an auction site like LiveAuctioneers.

Because LiveAuctioneers spans 47 countries and "offers access to some items that have been in private collections for decades," you're guaranteed to find some stuff you've never seen before. You'll have to wade through some boring stuff, but finding the gems is worth it; most of the items you'll see are either expensive enough that they've been well-preserved for centuries, durable enough that they've survived long years of hard use, or recent and weird enough that people hung onto them.

In that latter category, check out these French wingback chairs from the '70s, designer unknown.

When was the last time you saw subway-tiled leather strips?

"[These] chairs represent the playful embellishment and radical experimentation of form in 1970s design," writes the site.

Since the website is trying to sell these puppies to discerning collectors, the photos are often of fantastic quality and from multiple angles. Take this walnut dressing table, of the sort (if not style) that you'd see Lady Mary sitting at on Downton Abbey while Anna puts her necklaces on.

Accurately-curved surfaces were of course difficult to execute in the 1800s via hand tools, and between that and the careful grain symmetry you can tell someone (or someones) slaved over this thing.

The detailed photos are great. Here you can see, judging by the reveals, that the edges of the bottom base were veneered. (Perhaps the unknown 19th-Century craftsman who executed this steamed the parts in a plastic bag.)

The upholstered silk footrest isn't exactly something you'd find on an Ikea desk.

I was also surprised to see that the base was cut from a single piece (judging by the grain) and hollowed out—perhaps to reduce weight, or provide relief for wood movement.

Half-blind dovetails on the drawers. Given that the fronts are curved, I wonder how the guy clamped them securely and still got a comfortable angle to chisel them at.

And here's a great example of an early piece of modular storage furniture: One of the very first American card catalogs.

The individual layers could be stacked, allowing the original buyer to purchase as many units as needed to achieve the desired capacity.

Even without reading the date, we can see this piece predates the invention of plywood; the sides are frame-and-panel, with the floating panels designed to counter wood movement.

Floating panels aside, the thing must be absurdly heavy, made as it is out of oak. That the stout legs have supported this nine-unit stack for at least 125 years is a testament to their build quality.

As for how we arrived at that time span: While Globe-Wernicke was a well-known pioneer of card catalogs, they didn't gain that name until 1893; prior to that they were just the Globe Files Company out of Cincinnati. Here we can see the piece is simply badged "Globe," indicating this was a pre-merger design.

At press time, the furniture section of LiveAuctioneers featured over 1,500 chairs, 1,300 tables, 500 cabinets, and another 1,000 sundry furniture items: Beds, dressers, desks, chests, sideboards, et cetera. Happy surfing.

frog opened the doors to their studio last night to celebrate ten years in Milan and ten years of Milan Design Week. The "Future Fact or Fiction" panel discussion—and later party—featured Björn Block (Lighting Range Manager at IKEA), Simone Tognetti (Co-founder of Empatica) and Gianluca Brugnoli (Executive Creative Director, frog) speculating about a number of topics facing design and furniture in the next ten years and what Milan Design Week 2025 might look like.

The panel was moderated by frog's own head of marketing Todd Taylor in three sections covering the topics 'Furnishing the Future,' 'Invisible // Visible' and 'Mediating Technology and Humanity.' Each topic was directed at one member of the multidisciplinary panel and included input and perspective from the audience. 

Possible future headlines lined the walls at frog for guests to vote - Fact or Fiction. 

First up was "Furnishing the Future" a discussion that centered on Björn Block of IKEA. With the launch of their new line of wireless charging furniture, many of the questions touched on how far IKEA plans to go with embedded tech in their products. Block confirmed that sometime in the next decade an expansion of the charging line (and other similarly tech-y products) would be in the works, however with a timeline that long, it appears almost obvious. Taylor pushed further to ask if Block believed that by 2025 the majority of IKEA's line would include technology to which he responded: 

" I think its whether you think it's smart for the user or for the producer. It needs to be a win-win situation. If we expose the technology in the furniture, I don't see a purpose for that. People don't buy furniture because they want technology, they want a piece of furniture that can be smart with you—give you a hint that you need to tighten the screws, maybe that you've gotten too heavy for the bed."

Björn Block responds to questions about the embedded technology products from IKEA.

The panel switched into the "Invisible // Visible" section turning the conversation over to Simone Tognetti, co-founder of Milan-based Empatica. Empatica produces the Embrace Smart Watch for monitoring personal data and alerting you or loved ones, giving personalized feedback if there is a potential problem. As CTO of Empatica, Tognetti knows a lot about bringing data that is generally invisible into the view and urged the audience to not only tackle problems of controlling light and sound through their connected device (as shown in the frog project Room-E), but also the 'boring' or mundane tasks such as cleaning your home. 

To conclude the panel, frog's own Gianluca Brugnoli hit on the key theme of "Mediating Technology and Humanity" through discussion of the future of interface design, cross-platform experience and the inclusion of Artificial Intelligence in the design process. 

"Artificial Intelligence is already here. Most of the tools that we use as designers are based on very simple AI software and algorithms. In the future, we will have more tools, smarter tools that are based on artificial intelligence. We will have bots who will provide different alternatives on a design that has been sketched. It will change the way we do design because it will change the way we use objects. There will be a lot of changes because we won't interact with basic interfaces, we will interact with invisible, intelligent systems that control the way we use objects." 

Gianluca Brugnoli, Executive Creative Director, frog discusses the future of tools and AI in design. 

To conclude the panel, the question was posed to the audience of whether or not a bot would be the chosen design tool of 2025. To which the audience was split, suggesting that humans will always be at the center of design, and the counterpoint that designers will take on the role of providing empathy to the design but will be aided by bots. The session finished with a toast to the future of frog and particularly the emerging creatives that will shape design in the coming decade. 

Frog guests display their mixed feelings on the future of AI in design. 

Thanks again to frog for their thought-provoking panel. We can't wait to see what Core77 looks like in 2025. More work from frog can be seen on their website. 

Have the terrorists won? Now that your favorite sporting arena has installed metal detectors, you can no longer smuggle your own hooch in using your trusty metal flask. Are you going to settle for watery, overpriced beer at the concession stand?

Of course not. You can sneak that Jim Beam into the stadium inside a Flask2Go, a foldable, flexible, reusable Doypack that won't set the detectors off.

Maybe it would be better if they didn't come in bright red with the word "Flask" right on it, but for the "on the go drinker who needs a light and easy option that won't weigh you down," these seem like the only game in town.

They're just $7.95 for two, and each will hold 7.5 ounces.

The bad news: 15 ounces of bourbon won't make the Knicks suck any less.

We're always a sucker for a workshop so when Emeco debuted their new chair designed by Jasper Morrison with a metalsmith, we were curious. Inspired by the woven cane brasserie chairs that dot the sidewalks of Paris, the Alfi collection includes a high back chair, a three-seater bench and low back counter stool.

Metal craftsman Josh Fisher.

Walking into the pop-up workshop, the waft of something cooking greets visitors, along with a warm welcome from the gregarious and tattooed Josh Fisher, metal craftsman and "Emeco's craft star." Traveling from Hanover, Pennsylvania to Milan, Fisher has the unique distinction of being the first craftsman to make the trip to the Salone del Mobile on behalf of Emeco in the company's 70-year history. At the Emeco workshop, Fisher was busy at work panel-beating sheets of aluminum. He explained that typically, he would work with a wood support but in Milan, he was using a sandbag to shape the seat.

The simplicity of the chair is typical of Morrison's Super Normal style—a flat seat and rounded back is reminiscent of the shape and support of the bistro chair and the an elliptical hole in the back for easy transport. The production version of the collection is created with 100% reclaimed post-industrial waste—92.5% polypropylene combined with 7.5% wood fiber. Amish craftsmen create the bases made of locally-sourced ash wood. Morrison gave his stamp of approval, saying, "It's one of the most comfortable chairs I have designed."

The rounded back of the special aluminum Alfi chair is stretched and shaped by hand.

In Milan, Fisher was creating a handmade aluminum version of the chair to show the company's commitment to craftsmanship and detail. And what was cooking? As part of theme of "Eat me! Drink me! Tell me that you love me!"  Wallpaper* brought out chef Fergus Henderson of St John, Morrison's favorite restaurant, to provide nourishment for Fisher and other hard-working Salone attendees (including design journalists). Henderson was busy assembling pizzas featuring his signature ingredient, bone marrow, a spin on an Italian classic.

Chef Fergus Henderson prepares a bone marrow pizza for guests.

Emeco Workshop in the Wallpaper* Arcade is on view now through April 18th at via San Gregorio 43.

Mechanical robot grippers are designed to grasp specific shapes. This is perfect for assembly lines, where every object is the same. But what if a more flexible solution were required? Think of a conveyor belt covered with random junk that needed to be sorted for recycling: Imagine a robot hand that needs to pick up a can, a glass dish, a plastic bottle cap, a paper clip, et cetera, all on the fly.

Enter the FlexShapeGripper, which eschews metal claws for a silicone bag filled with fluid:

Fitted with this novel extremity, a robot arm could pick up everything from ball bearings to credit cards to even a set of keys:

This was developed by engineering services company Festo (not to be confused with power tool company Festool, which was spun off from its parent 15 years ago), in conjunction with the University of Oslo. Festo's Bionic Learning Network partners with universities and research centers, and looks to nature for biomimetic inspiration for industrial applications. Fascinatingly, the FlexShapeGripper was inspired by a lizard:

The chameleon is able to catch a variety of different insects by putting its tongue over the respective prey and securely enclosing it. The FlexShapeGripper uses this principle to grip the widest range of objects in a form-fitting manner. Using its elastic silicone cap, it can even pick up several objects in a single gripping process and put them down together, without the need for a manual conversion [of the gripping mechanism].

Potential use in the factory of the future: Once it has been put into operation, the gripper is able to do various tasks. This functional integration is a possible way of how systems and components can in future adapt to various products and scenarios themselves.

The "living hinge" you see molded into clamshell packaging has always been the domain of plastic; metal and wood don't like the repetitive stress of bending. But Bavarian fabrication firm Ackermann has worked out a way to do a living hinge in plywood. The trick is to laminate a sheet of synthetic leather into the center of the veneer stack.

With miters precisely cut just shy of the leather layer, it yields a tough, hardware-free hinge.

The leather can also be laminated to the outside of a material like MDF. Larger corner radii can be achieved by inserting a tube.

As for what the practical applications are, Ackermann isn't saying; the techniques were either developed as contract work for a client—"We provide services for craftsmen, trade fair and interior construction industries [ranging] from the simple milling of an individual component to the serial production of entire objects," they write—or out of pure experimentation. The company has some 120 employees and 14 apprentices, with traditional carpenters, designers, CNC operators and fabrication technicians all working side by side to master various materials.

"I enjoy nothing more than the discovery of new techniques," says Manfred Weid, Manager of Technical Operations. "With permanent development we stay in proximity to the pulse of the times."

Are we being watched?

Well this year in the Ventura Lambrate District of Milan—we actually are. This detour into technology-derived anxiety is the result of the exhibition of Koncern, a Prague-based studio founded by the design pair Jirí Pribyl and Martin Imrich. In their show aptly titled "Embracing Paranoia" the studio explores the uneasiness we inherently feel with technology. Guests of the exhibit are invited in to observe the objects which are in turn—observing them.

"We are monitored everywhere. They watch us on cameras, at tollgates; they eavesdrop on us using our own phones, computers and televisions. The society has accepted this condition where almost everyone knows everything about everyone" - Studio Koncern

Studio Koncern in Ventura Lambrate

Casting the viewers of the Youtube channel as voyeurs looking into the world of the Milan Design Week Guests creates a unique experience both for the watched and the watchers. Exhibitions guests ebb and flow through the Youtube livestream frame, regarding the objects as they would any of the exhibits this week. When guests of the show asked the designers to comment on which of the pieces were representations of surveillance and whether or not any of them had full recording features they were met with a smile and coy response of "some of them may some— some of them may not."

Series of surveillance cameras film visitors to the exhibition. 

The collection includes two large chandeliers for recording conversations around the exhibit, a number of wall-mounted surveillance cameras livestreaming to YouTube and a series of tabletop sarcophagi which create a dead zone for wifi and telecommunication when your phone is placed inside.

The Chandeliers are the centerpiece of the Embracing Paranoia show, playing not only on our fears about privacy but also employing traditional Czech glass work and 3D printing to achieve a hybrid aesthetic that lies somewhere between bohemian glass and crystal of the last few centuries and the flying hover cars of Sci-Fi movies. 

Embracing Paranoia Chandeliers with embedded microphones. 

Scattered around the showroom are a number of futuristic sarcophagi perfectly dimensioned to fit the smart phone the majority of the guests to Milan are using to take photos of the overwhelming number of exhibitions. The boxes are inscribed with the words 'Silence' or 'Methods of Silence'—a clear call to action for visitors to lay their phone to rest in a miniaturized cell service deadzone. 

Sarcophagi of telecommunication technology

Additionally, the series is completed with a number of miniature wiretaps placed by the designers around the venues in the Salone del Mobile. The taps can be access through calling the numbers +39 33 49 14 50 97 or +39 33 89 63 59 03, allowing guests to become big brother just for a moment themselves. 

Embracing Paranoia is on display until the 19th of April at Minini Gallery at Via Massimiano 25. More Studio Koncern work can be seen on their website. 

From both personal and professional experience, I know how hard it can be for users to keep track of their medications. And when something goes wrong, it can be a major problem. So I'm always pleased to see designs that make medication management easier. None of these are foolproof solutions to ensuring medications are taken properly, but they can certainly help.

There are many weekly pill boxes, but the 7Pack from Borin-Halbich is the one I used with my mom, and I'm a fan. Wisely, there are designs with two, three and four compartments for each day, so users can find the one that fits their medication schedule. And users can easily take one container along when leaving home during the day. My mom didn't find it hard to open the compartments, although some other buyers have reported problems. The nice big labels with the days are helpful, too.

Sabi makes some interesting products, as we've noted before. For users whose primary concern is having an effective on-the-go pill container, the Holster is a nice option; the ability to clip it to a pocket or a bag helps keep it from getting lost among all the other things users carry. 

One buyer noted that unlike some other pillboxes, this one won't open and spill the pills if you drop it. Another buyer noted it's not airtight; it lets in moisture which deteriorates the pills. But the Holster was never intended for long-term storage of just-in-case medicines; it's really meant for daily usage, and it serves that function well. 

Users with severe allergies who need to carry an EpiPen, an Auvi-Q or an Allerject might appreciate the wallets from CarryNine. They allow someone to carry these lifesaving tools with minimal bulk—and they look good, too. As someone who carries an Auvi-Q, I'm delighted to see designers considering the needs of people who need these medications. 

Since I'm always on the lookout for easy tools—ones that will work for people with poor eyesight, memory issues, and other such hinderances—I'm delighted to see that users can now get medicine packages which bundle all the pills that they need take at a given time. This one is from PillPack.

And this one is from Parata. I'm intrigued by the different designs of these packages; I find the PillPack easier to read. I like how the day and time jump out, and I'm guessing that Nov. 21 would be easier to absorb when the user is fuzzy than 05/04 would be. The Parata version provides more information right on the pack; PillPack sends a separate medication list with images and instructions for each medication.

PillPack notes that if a user has a medication with frequent dose changes, the company may put that medication in a separate packet or send a standard pill bottle for that one item. Users with environmental concerns might balk at the extra packaging involved with these products—but for those with a confusing medication regime, such tools could be invaluable. 

For users who prefer to take their medications directly from the bottles they came in, there are still designs that help ensure they remember whether or not they've taken today's pills. The Take-n-Slide attaches to a standard pill bottle with 3M adhesive backing; it can be removed when the bottle is empty and attached to a new one. Users just move the slider when they take the day's pill; if they are uncertain later in the day about whether or not they took the pill, they can readily check. For medications taken more than once/day, though, this would be cumbersome, requiring multiple Take-n-Slides (which would be confusing).

Another way of tracking when a medication was last taken would be with a timer on the pill bottle cap. TimeSince has the simplest one I've seen. The user just takes the medication and presses the reset button, and the display starts counting up the minutes and hours. TimeSince has a bright LCD display and is fine to use with medications that require refrigeration. Some other products of this nature have alarms, which might be helpful for some users—but for other users they will just provide unnecessary complexity and might require more manual dexterity than they have, since the timer buttons are pretty small. 

Anther simple but useful tool is a pill bottle magnifier, since it's hard to use a regular magnifying glass on a small round bottle. Carson wisely has one that's lighted and one that's not. For users who just take their medications with their meals and at bedtime, the illuminated version is probably not necessary. That means the user won't need to worry about replacing batteries, either. But if the user has medications taken under emergency conditions, the lighted version is probably worthwhile. 

Yet another medication-related concern is keeping those medications away from children (and perhaps keeping them out of sight from those who snoop in other people's medicine cabinets). The MedSafe provides a locked place to keep those medications; it's designed to fit within a medicine cabinet, although it can also be installed elsewhere. 

For those who want something bigger and stronger, Steelmaster provides medical security cabinets. Although these were designed with clinics, rehab centers, schools and similar facilities in mind, some buyers are installing them in homes, too. Unlike the MedSafe, this product was designed to accommodate bottled medicines, too. One drawback a buyer mentioned is that the shelves are not adjustable and that small half-shelf can't be removed. Also, there's no option for a door that opens to the left. 

Designjunction, the London-based design tradeshow exhibited for the third year during Milan design week. Presenting a broad range of furniture, interior products and personal accessories spread over two floors in the San Babila Design Quarter. Tom Dixon's presentation anchored this year's show, taking over the Theatre/Cinema space of the Casa dell'Opera in a dramatic presentation of new products that were available immediately for sale (alongside smaller accessories and homewares). 

Here's our picks for the best products from designjunction Milan 2015:

Halo Carbon Fiber Chair at Hypetex

The developers of the world's first colored carbon fiber come from the world of F1 racing worked with designer Michael Sodeau to create the Halo. Although not the first carbon fiber chair we've covered—read our interview with Coalesse's design director about their chair—the Halo chair won a Red Dot design award this year and is the first product from Hypetex.

The Life Space UX projector (at left) sits almost flush with the wall. 

Sony's Life Space UX Laser Projector at Tom Dixon

What might be overlooked as a Tom Dixon vignette is actually a Sony installation for their newest home projector, targeted at consumers who enjoy the home theater experience but could do without all of the gadgets. Designed by Yusuke Tsujita, the Life Space UX is an ultra short throw projector hidden into what looks like a standard entertainment console. The built-in projector can cast a 4K Ultra HD image up to 147-inches when situated only inches from the projecting wall. 

Desk Accessories at Beyond Object

The London-based design team of Beyond Object showed their minimal desk accessories including a letter opener (above), tape dispenser, pencil sharpener and desktop organizer in dramatic fashion, befitting of a chromed-out collection. Our favorite had to be the handmade steel Lino, a letter knife that maintains its functionality in a striking silhouette.

Ki-Ra edible containers at Pan is Artos

With food as the theme of this year's World Fair hosted in Milan, it's no surprise that there has been a considerable number of food design projects. The Pan Is Artos show collected four bread-related projects—decorative olive wood bread stamps, a stackable dish for preparing, cooking and serving a traditional Italian crisp bread, and a highly designed loaf of low-gluten sourdough loaf, and a terracotta pot for making a bread bowl. The latter, Ki-Ra, is the work of Kostantia Manthou. The terracotta pot and lid, accompanying recipe and utensil are all multifunctional tools for preparing edible containers. The pot and lid become the molds for the containers, the recipe doubles as a label for a cloth that can transport food, and the utensil both makes perforations in the edible container lid and acts as a fork.

Nomad Chair at We Do Wood

The Roorkhee Chair, originally made for British military officers stationed in India, has had an endless string of admirers—from Breuer to Le Corbusier. Danish wood furniture company We Do Wood is releasing their homage to the classic in bamboo—a lightweight, strong and sustainable material—with leather and canvas fabric for the seat and back. Launching on Kickstarter in the next month, designer Sebastian Jorgensen's version has wonderfully considered details in its construction, using traditional wood-working joinery technique.

Melt pendant at Tom Dixon

The glowing balls of lava bubbling at the entryway for Tom Dixon's Cinema space could, understandably, be mistaken for hand-blown glass. Instead, the globes are constructed with a lightweight polycarbonate shell and a thin layer of chrome, copper or gold metal applied on the interior using a vacuum metalization process. Designed by Front, the pendant lights are translucent when on and have a mirror finish when off.

Designjunction is open now through April 19th at Casa dell'Opera, via Pietro Mascagni, 6.

We all know what Formula One cars sound like. That aggressive, angry, adrenaline-stirring roar is unmistakable, and children playing with toy cars can easily mimic the noise. But most folks have no idea what a Formula E car sounds like. 

That may be because the noise doesn't have the sonorous consistency of an internal combustion engine, and the pitches sound different depending on whether you're in the car, outside of the car, further away, and again depends on whether the car's accelerating or not. So we assembled some quick clips to give you an idea.

Amusingly, as a Formula E race begins, it sounds like a bunch of RC cars:

At speed the noise changes. In this clip the car sounds like one of the Viper starfighters in Battlestar Galactica:

The guy who posted this video said the cars "sound like X-wing fighters:"

Here it starts off sounding like you're driving a regular car in reverse—just super-fast—and then it sounds like background noise on the bridge in Star Trek:

This one sounds like a cross between a boiling tea kettle and an air-raid siren:

In this clip you can faintly hear what sounds like the noise made by regenerative braking:

Despite its relatively low profile, Formula E is rapidly growing in popularity. (Those interested should read The Verge's "Lighting on wheels: the insane electric racing of Formula E.") I am glad the sport is progressing, because the technical advances achieved there will trickle down to the consumer sector and ultimately create cars that are better for the environment. But I must admit that the noises these cars make will never send chills up my spine like this:

Or this:

Or this.

And since YouTube is silly, here are a bunch of Formula One drivers imitating (badly, I might add) the noises their cars make:

When we think of NASA-designed vehicles, the Mars Rover comes to mind. We picture the eggheads at Johnson Space Center developing buggy-like vehicles capable of navigating alien terrain. So it was a surprise to find out that NASA has been working on an urban vehicle, which they released video of this week (see below).

NASA's Modular Robotic Vehicle, or MRV, is a golf-cart-sized two-seater "designed to meet the growing challenges and demands of urban transportation," says NASA Mechanical Engineer Mason Markee. "The MRV would be ideal for daily transportation in an urban environment with a designed top speed of 70 km/hr and range of 100 km of city driving on a single charge of the battery. The size and maneuverability of MRV gives it an advantage in navigating and parking in tight quarters."

Look at what the thing can do:

The big question is, why has the space agency been working on an earthbound vehicle? Turns out it's for essentially the same reason that auto manufacturers delve into Formula One: "This work allowed us to develop some technologies we felt were needed for our future rovers," says Justin Ridley, an International Space Station Flight Controller. "These include redundant by-wire systems, liquid cooling, motor technology, advanced vehicle control algorithms. We were able to learn a lot about these and other technologies by building this vehicle."

Here's how those funky wheels work:

MRV is driven by four independent wheel modules called e-corners. Each e-corner consists of a redundant steering actuator, a passive trailing arm suspension, an in-wheel pro- pulsion motor, and a motor-driven friction braking system.

Each e-corner can be controlled independently and rotated ±180 degrees about its axis. This allows for a suite of driving modes allowing MRV to maneuver unlike any traditional vehicle on the road. In addition to conventional front two wheel steering, the back wheels can also articulate allowing for turning radiuses as tight as zero. The driving mode can be switched so that all four wheels point and move in the same direction achieving an omni-directional, crab- like motion. This makes a maneuver such as parallel parking as easy as driving next to an available spot, stopping, and then operating sideways to slip directly in between two cars.

We were most interested in what the interface was: How could a driver pull off those lateral moves with a steering wheel alone? They can't, of course:

The driver controls MRV with a conventional looking steering wheel and accelerator/brake pedal assembly. [Additionally] a multi-axis joystick is available to allow additional control in some of the more advanced drive modes. A configurable display allows for changing of drive modes and gives the user critical vehicle information and health and status indicators.

There's no word on what the development costs were. But if NASA can figure out how to make the MRV affordable for Earthlings, it's not difficult to imagine civilian uptake. And the MRV is something that we do not typically think of NASA creations being: Fun. "It's like driving on ice but having complete control," says Ridley. "It's a blast to ride in and even more fun to drive. We've talked about it being like an amusement park ride.

"The 'fun' of driving was not something we tried to design for, just something that came out of the design. Once we got it running many of us commented that we had no idea it was going to be able to do the things it does."

Of the number of designers who claim the title designer/maker or even designer/maker/artist, few compare to the work of London-based Max Lamb. On view at the Garage San Remo in Milan, visitors are welcome to explore the breadth of Lamb's material inquiry through the lens of design's favorite archetype—the chair. In the industrial space, viewers are presented with "Exercises in Seating" comprised of 40 of Lamb's chairs arranged in a monumental circle that fills the garage and acts as a nearly religious tribute to seating and material.

Entering Garage San Remo in Milan

Visitors to the exhibit are invited into the circle to try a few of the chairs (gently) and examine ways in which the chair as a form unfolds from each of the raw materials. The designer himself engages in small anecdotes about each of the pieces—discussing openly his deep-seated (no pun intended) curiosity about the material world. 

Exhibition view from Exercises in Seating 

We asked Lamb to elaborate on the study and shed some light on his practice. 

Teshia Treuhaft: Can you tell us where in the timeline of your career has this project fallen—is it an exploration that you regularly return to? 

Max Lamb: It's a project that began in 2006 for my RCA thesis. That was the first time that I adopted the idea of exercises in seating—and since then it's been continuous. There haven't been any breaks in the study.  I use the format of the seat as a vehicle to channel my explorations and my investigations into materials and processes—whether I'm making a bar or a dining table or a shop interior I'm using seating as a method of practicing. So it's the true definition of a design practice— I'm practicing, practicing practicing—always evolving my understanding of materials and processes, building on my library of information and knowledge and that information then continuously gets translated back into other projects. 

Whether it is seating or not is kind of irrelevant—I use seating as the vehicle.

View from Exercises in Seating. 

The archetype of the chair is the quintessential challenge for designers and design students—why is seating so fascinating and will we reach a point where we have exhausted it as a line of inquiry? 

No we definitely haven't exhausted the possibilities in seating but for me its not the seating. So much of my work is produced by me—it's the relationship between myself, my hands and the object which is immersive and very intimate. The chair itself is an object that is also very intimate. Perhaps one of the most intimate objects or artifacts that relates to the human form. 

The chair also has to perform in a certain way—in quite a particular way—structurally it has to perform, physiologically it has to perform in terms of ergonomics and proportion, and emotionally it has to perform. The third one that is most significant to my work—it is fact that many of my pieces of furniture are not the most comfortable or lightest. They are also not the most functional and practical in the way they can be produced and reproduced. 

But that isn't the point of my work. You can sit on everything that I make—on all of my chairs—but perhaps not as long as someone else's chair. The emotional connection that you can have with one of my pieces of furniture ideally transcends function or at least the emotional connection is part of that function. These things become characters and they have personality and you develop a relationship with them.

Where is the beginning of each chairc—in the material exploration or the emotional connection? How do you blend the two into a design? 

To be honest what comes first is always the material. Yes, I may have an idea that I want to create a chair or a stool or an object for sitting but the design evolves as a result of physical process or investigation into the material—understanding its capabilities and limitations and sometimes stretching those one way or the other according to the process I'm adopting to manipulate the material. So the beginning is always the medium and the idea evolves throughout that process and eventually it turns into a design. 

But the design does not come first—the material does.

How do you structure these material inquiries when you work in such a broad range of media? 

They're all context specific—some of them are more ideas that I have conceived. I don't know why the ideas evolve or where they begin, but many of them are ideas I want to explore just to satisfy my curiosity. 

Others are context specific because I am working for a particular person or in a particular environment, culture or country—so a brief is still something that is integral to my work. It's also something that distinguishes me from an artist. Many people often ask 'Do you consider yourself more an artist or a designer?' I would say I am a designer because I work to a brief and I aim to make objects for people that serve a purpose. 

Designer Max Lamb

In terms of how I channel my ideas or why I begin working with a certain material or a certain process, it depends—I can't say to be honest. The seed of my reasoning comes down to a curiosity and living in this world. I am curious to understand the material landscape and see what's around me and think—'Could I use this? How could I use this.' Whenever I have a question I have to try and find an answer.

Thanks to Max Lamb for speaking with us, Exercises in Seating is on view at Spazio Sanremo, Via Zecca Vecchia, 3, 5vie district from April 12-19th. 

Automotive design is probably the most capital-intensive field an industrial designer can work in; developing a new car model can literally cost more than a billion dollars.

It seems amazing, then, that a very crucial phase of the design process is entrusted not to brainiac scientists, but talented sculptors wielding centuries-old hand tools. If you dropped Michelangelo or Donatello in front of an auto design studio computer running CAD, they'd have no idea what the hell was going on; but if you dropped them into the clay modeling studio, they would not only be able to grasp it, but would be able to immediately participate in the process.

The automotive design field's crucial clay modelers produce not only scale models based on the designers' sketches and renderings, but also full-size clay models that are subsequently laser-scanned to become the de facto latest iteration of the design.

Take a look inside Ford's European Design Centre to see the type of work they do:

So how do you get a gig like this, and what kind of personality do you need? Here Ford clay modeler Denise Kasper explains the ins and outs of the position:

And in this video, clay modeler Damian Lottner discusses the tools used:

"Many people are amazed when I explain my job to them, because there is a perception that designing vehicles today is a computerised process and that traditional skills like clay modelling are no longer needed," says Lottner. "In my opinion there is no replacement for what we do, both in terms of the speed that we can progress designs and the ability to see, touch and truly experience a design in the flesh."

Sandpaper has to be the number one consumable in the modern-day furniture shop. But a subset of craftspeople, like Toshio Tokunaga and his four apprentices, don't use any of the stuff—yet are still able to achieve a glass-like finish on their furniture pieces, even absent varnish.

Anti-sandpaper furniture builders achieve this with handplanes and spokeshaves, or what are collectively called kanna in Japanese. While Western planes are made with cast-iron or bronze bodies, kanna are made with wooden bodies supporting the iron cutter.

While sandpaper and kanna might seem to produce the same results to the untrained eye—or hand rubbing the surface—it's simply not true, particularly when seen at a microscopic level, or touched with sensitive fingertips.

As you can see, blades cut. Sandpaper tears. Thus, as Tokunaga Furniture Studio explains,

We use no sandpaper at all when crafting our furniture. Sandpaper rubs away the natural pattern of the wood, leaving behind a smoothness that is artificial and which obscures the tree's innate characteristics. In contrast to this, the kanna cuts away successive layers of wood in a way that preserves the wood's natural appearance.

Tokunaga, by the way, makes his own kanna, from the ones that do the roughing work to the ones that take the final fine shavings.

As you can see, he's designed a staggering range of shapes. Collectively these tools can cope with every type of contour required in his work, whether flat, concave or convex.

Here's the team putting in the elbow grease:

And here's Tokunaga discussing the benefits of the kanna finish:

The blades of course require regular maintenance. Here an apprentice sharpens an iron on a waterstone.

Speaking of the irons, take a closer look:

Those look store-bought to you? Nope, Tokunaga has them made locally. And while I hate to write this hacky, clickbaitey sentence, you really won't believe where they came from! Stay tuned.

When two women dressed in matching workwear approach and tell you to, "eat shit," it gets your attention. Armed with caulking guns and a giant plastic backpack in the shape of a perfect poo—think turd emoji, only bigger—these angels of good will serve up a crostini topped with a swirl of chocolate ganache to unsuspecting visitors. The stunt, happening in the Ventura Lambrate design district, is in support of  Eat Shit—this year's Design Academy Eindhoven exhibition of student work.

Eat Shit, an exhibition on—you guessed it—poop, explores the taboos and processes surrounding feces, material waste and political name-calling in a dynamic show of graduate student projects and undergraduate works in progress. Timed with the launch of DAE's undergraduate food design program and the upcoming Milan Expo—next month's food-themed World's Fair hosted in Milan—Eat Shit is the school's first official foray into the murky waters of food design.

Curated by Marije Vogelzang, head of the Food Non Food department, the exhibition is drawn together by a timeline of over 400 food-related projects from the DAE archive (1976-2014) that occupies the walls of the two rooms of the exhibition. The work on display is as varied as Olivier van Herpt's 3D ceramics printed (which we covered earlier) to Tomm Velthuis' set of wood blocks to teach children about factory farming. 

Dealing with the subject at hand, Pim van Baarsen's "Holy Crap" is a system for recycling waste in Kathmandu, Nepal. van Baarsen displayed a prototype for an app that could engage citizens in responsibly disposing of waste and a branded tricycle that would transport recyclable waste. 

Speaking of waste, Arne Hendriks' Pigeon Poo Tower was recreated on site. Hand shredding newspapers to create paper bricks, Hendriks proposes to redefine our relationship with the humble pigeon by building a tower to house the birds, collecting their valuable poop for natural fertilizer.

Work on food and food production was also on display—Femke Mosch served a banana bread made entirely of freeze-dried and powdered ingredients while Lucas Mullie served guests a meal from his "Infinite Sausage" machine, a contraption that presses and extrudes ingredients to make a block of food, perfect for portioning. On today's lunch menu: cous cous with apple and raisins, bulgur with roast vegetables and rice with red cabbage. Jolene Carlier's "Popcorn Monsoon" is a playful appliance that upped the ante for the beloved homemade snack.

The works in progress from the inaugural Food Non Food program give the exhibition a dynamic energy that is atypical for DAE's Milan presentation. Outside, one student was baking bread and subsisting on a bread-only diet for the week. Her project connected the process of digestion with the process of transforming ingredients into bread.

Another student's project "The Invisible Visible," was taking swabs from people's hands or objects (like mobile phones) and growing cultures to determine what types of bacteria we carry around. 

Work in Progress from the Mummy Shit Lab

But perhaps the strangest project was the "Mummy Shit Lab" where the three students involved in the project have basically created an industrial process where the human body is a material supplier. Working on ways to "mummify" poop in order to create an intimacy between people and their waste, one team member is the producer, meticulously cataloging her food intake and eating specific things in order to produce texture and color in her feces. Another is the refiner, collecting and mummifying the feces by drying it out. And the final team member is the enhancer, working on ways to present the poop to a wider audience. The presentation included a number of different samples encased in resin. The reaction from visitors alternated between disgust and intrigue, which was precisely the point.

Eat Shit is on view now through April 19th at via Crespi in the Ventura Lambrate district.