It's not difficult to picture the style of cabins that American frontiersmen once lived in. But it's difficult to imagine one in the middle of Manhattan up on the rooftop of a building. And this one's occupied by a different sort of pioneer.

As Gothamist reports, aerial photographer George Steinmetz spotted this unlikely abode while flying over the West Village in a helicopter:

Image by George Steinmetz

Image by George Steinmetz

That was built by David Puchkoff, a developer who added the structure over his family's existing top-floor apartment. Thus it's not a standalone structure, but a sort of attic, accessible from the apartment via stairs.

But it's still got that awesome porch and green roof. Which is why we refer to Puchkoff as a pioneer: He first conceived of the idea in 2003 and started building it in 2005, well before green roofs became popular. And also in the pioneer spirit, he did much of the labor himself.

The following news segment shows you exactly how he did it:

In 2006 the Times ran an article on Puchkoff's place, and what's great about it is that they listed all of the elements required and broke out precisely what he spent. (Helpful as it is, you'll have to take it with a grain of salt as those are '06 prices.)

Lastly, the DailyBasics has some construction shots, details and photographs here.

Many of the projects this year not only allowed for a great user experience, but also promoted an element of social interaction. The added notion of inclusion to the design concept made the scope of those affected by the project considerably broader and offered the user a degree of communal intimacy. Here are some of the projects that explored the potentials of inclusion. 

IKO Creative Prosthetic System—Open Design Student Winner

"My idea was not to make a traditional prosthetic, but to propose a system that was flexible enough for kids to use, hack and create with by themselves and with their friends," explains Carlos Arturo Torres. 

"Using the LEGO system was part of this solution, not just because of its creative content, but most of it its social feature; this is a toy that gathers people around with a single goal: the pride of creation, but in this scenario I found that it transcends to a higher level."

Through a collaborative platform, Carlos Arturo Torres' IKO empowers disabled children to create their own prosthetics, turning a disadvantage into something fun. "It's all about kids being kids," he says. While developing the flexible system that would allow this participatory design, he was thinking of the transformative effect it could have on disabled children's psychological state. "What if 'normal' kids could understand disability in from a different perspective? Maybe they could empathize instead of being afraid of something they don't know. What if they could all share, learn and create all together using play as a means?" 

HugMatch—Strategy & Research Student Notable

HugMatch consists of baby dolls and mother dolls, all made out of different materials with varying textures. Players put the mother dolls around their neck and search for the matching baby doll while keeping their eyes—in this way, the toy caters to both visually impaired and non-visually impaired children and promotes the tactile sense. 

HugMatch is an interactive toy for both visually impaired and non-visually impaired young children to play together under the same terms. Without looking, children are asked to find a match for their doll by using their sense of touch and sound. Throughout the amicable game, children are encouraged to help each other our and collaborate to meet their goals. "This project looks at how play and a toy could be used to build empathy with two kids. It was nice to see that as the research unfolded and multiple visits were had with the children, the insights gleaned were nicely incorporated into the design iterations of the toy," remarked our jury. 

The Unhappiness Repairer—Speculative Concepts Student Runner-Up

Silvia Neretti's first case study, Ingrid, was seeking a renewed connection with her surroundings after going through a divorce. "I feel like I am part of the storage, I am collecting dead memories instead of having the courage to change," she said. 

After careful observations of Ingrid's home environment, Neretti created a series of "artifacts" that would encourage Ingrid to modify her behavioral patterns. One of them, the iPhone Chastity Belt (pictured above) is a case for Ingrid's phone that prevents her from using the phone and instead provides a day's schedule of "real interactions." 

Silvia Neretti—the self-proclaimed "Unhappiness Repairer"—embarked on a journey to transform people's lives by creating disruptive alterations to their environment that provoke a different perspective and ultimately instill more positive behaviors and habits. "Happiness to me lies in the intention of knowing your self purposes, desires and needs, being aware and independent from external conditions," she says. "To design happiness to me means to push people to get back the agency of modifying their "unhappy" context, creating a space to understand the problem and develop a new and personal meaning of happiness as suggestions to follow. I delegate this actions to the artifacts already present in the context, by modifying their script of action."

goTenna—Consumer Products Professional Notable

There are a variety of use cases for goTenna, including: camping, hiking, skiing; emergency situations; music festivals; international travel—essentially any time you might be outside of a reliable network or trying to avoid hefty roaming charges.

The goTenna has an extendable antenna for larger range and a flexible strap for easy fastening to a variety of objects.

goTenna is a new means of off-grid communication that pairs wirelessly with your smartphone and allows users to text and share their location with anyone who also has the device, even in areas of no reception. "This is a game changing device. A typical two-way radio is a limited tool designed for a select group of outdoor enthusiast users. All conversations are verbal, and not private. goTenna is designed and engineered to appeal to enthusiast groups as well as a wider audience...meant to live at the intersection of performance and lifestyle," explains the designers. They are currently working on developing the project with international relief agencies, such as Doctors Without Borders and UNICEF. 

Of all the silly web games out there, this one is actually fun for Pantone-familiar designers. iGame's Eye Test presents a grid of colors, giving you 15 seconds to click the one tile that's off by a few shades. Click it and it presents a new grid with new colors. This starts off pretty simple…

…then gets a bit harder…

…and harder…

…until it gets damn near impossible.

I've played it numerous times and usually score in the mid-20s before my eyeballs break; the highest score I got last night was off-the-charts at 34, "Robot" level, even though I had a beer in me.

If one of you tops that, let me know…so that I can call you a damn liar.

Try it here!

Have you seen all the amazing designs and ideas that were honored in the 2015 Core77 Design Awards yet? If not, take a moment to browse the honorees and appreciate all the thought, innovation and energy that went into each design. After all, the designers behind them are depending on you to make them a winner of the inaugural Community Choice prize! 

2015 Consumer Products Student Runner Up, "Aura Water Pipe" by Mauricio Romano

This isn't just about what the honorees can win—it's about being an active member of the global design community. You love great design and have a unique perspective on what does or doesn't qualify as such. Perhaps you agree with the decisions made by the Core77 Design Awards juries. Perhaps you think they should have given a Winning honor to a Notable...or vice versa. 

2015 Strategy & Research Student Notable, "HugMatch" by Chloe Koo

No matter your point of view, it's important that you share it! Log in to your Core77 account and head over to the Honorees page to explore and vote for your favorite projects. There are 14 categories of designs to vote on, so don't forget to look at them all. Help make the Community Choice prize a demonstration of the broader design community—Vote today! 

As part of NYCxDesign, the students of the MFA in Products of Design at the School of Visual Arts presented—or more appropriately, performed—Engender, a roving band of design interventions that were at once provocative, daring, and, well, very entertaining. 

Participants were invited to modify their body shape using a simple push-and-pull app.

Strolling the streets of SoHo, about to enter the Flos Showroom

Marcel Wanders posing for a photo with a "free the nipple" appliqué.

The argument of the work is that gender and our ideas about gender are absolutely constructed and "designed," and that shining a light on how this takes place is ripe for exploration. (The work is also the result of a 10­-week class called Design Performance taught by Sinclair Smith—a course that argues that design needs to be more than objects of pedestals, and one that focuses on interaction, participation, and staging new behaviors.

It's amazing how quickly we "gender-up" people. When you hear about someone's pregnancy, you immediately ask, 'boy or girl?' And as soon as you have your answer, you already see it all clearly—the design of the baby shower invitation, the room paint colors, the bed linens. It's like we're pre-branded...before we're even born!

The work took the form of seven different interventions, each looking at different aspects of gender and inviting participants to engage and play along. Here's the run-down of the various work.

RESHAPER

Reshaper came in two forms, both using the vernacular of the "carnival vendor" hoisting up toys and cotton candy in the air. Instead, the poles contained body parts—some stuffed, some in the form of shaped wires—but each representing a stereotypically 'desirable' or 'undesirable' feature (think big biceps or flabby butts). People tried on these parts, taking selfies and posting them on social media. The body parts were clearly a hit, especially in the evening when the drinks were flowing an inhibitions were low.

Students were invited into the BluDot showroom in SoHo.

Participants at Wanted Design.

REBRANDER

Rebrander let participants design and brand themselves with custom rubber stamps in 16 iconic shapes and variations. Students used the metaphor of the syringe for the applicator—which was also very consistent with their choice of silicone for the custom-made branded vests they all wore—giving the devices a medical quality that referenced oppressive histories of tattooing individuals who identify outside of binary gender norms. Here, guest could mark themselves in any way they chose to invent their own graphic identity...and then wear it for a few days.

OLFACTOR

Olfactor was one of the most curious of the design pieces, essentially asking people to "guess the gender" of the neutrally-dressed baby dolls. It turned out the caps of each of the 4 babies was scented using gendered and branded deodorant products. The students knew which was which, and it was pretty easy to guess wrong. (You can try this yourself next time you're shopping in a drug store.)

Students remarked that it's amazing how quickly we "gender-up" people. When you hear about someone's pregnancy, you immediately ask, 'boy or girl?' And as soon as you have your answer, you already see it all clearly—the design of the baby shower invitation, the room paint colors, the bed linens. It's like we're pre-branded...before we're even born!

TRANSLATOR

Translator featured a roaming student drawing portraits "with a twist"—caricatures, really—for unsuspecting guests. The trick here is that their portrait was drawn in a way that flipped their gender or was completely neutral. The surprise and delight on people's faces when they "saw themselves as a woman" or otherwise was very delightful to watch. People loved them.

Beth Dickstein and her reverse-gendered portrait!

RENDERER

Renderer used a very intuitive tablet app to digitally augment visitors' physiognomies. Some wanted broader shoulders or longer legs; others wanted to try the opposite—adding weight in stereotypically "bad" places. People were quick to take control themselves, pushing and pulling on different body parts or facial features, and many grabbed their phones to snap pictures of the results and share them to their networks. 

At the Flos Showroom in SoHo

This participant wanted to see what she'd look like with slightly longer legs.

DECONSTRUCTOR

Deconstructor was a set of stickers and appliqués that abstracted and accentuated some of our most physical manifestations of gender. From eyebrows and mustaches to lips and pasties—participant chose what facial and body features they wanted to amplify or mask— quickly subverting the most obvious ways that people interpret and judge their gender. Again, particularly at nighttime, these were a hit.

Jill Fehrenbacher trying on some decals.

DISPENSER

Dispenser was perhaps the most verbally-engaging of the interventions, really insisting on a conversation about gender with the students. Guests were offered confections labeled with negative, gendered characteristics, loading an ordinarily, mundane choice with stereotypical implication and meaning. Through the provocation of hesitance—"wait, these are candies with the word promiscuous on them? Huh?" Dispenser highlighted how "harmless" stereotypes might not be so harmless after all.

Finally, all visitors were given a sticker pack consisting of fragmented shapes taken from the astrological symbols for man and woman—Mars and Venus. Guests were encouraged to apply the stickers to their skin, their phones—really anything—to construct their own personal gender symbol, and to explore the alchemical design process of gender construction.

The truth isn't always what it's cracked up to be, but even bad facts can crack you up. Today, Monday June 22, the Hand-Eye Supply takes over Portland's Hollywood Theatre to spill our honest guts on bad "facts" we've loved and hated, at our first ever off-site Curiosity Club. Our odd and talented power panel of Curiosity Club alumni will share the best and worst facts that they've ever come across! Join us as we make the best of these malingering misconceptions, prove that these Truths are actually False(s), and share how we really feel about living lies!

Our talented panelists include:

-Mike Merrill, Publicly Traded Person

-Ethan Siegel, Theoretical Astrophysicist & Professor at Lewis & Clark

-Charles Boardman, Children's Book Deconstructivist

-Coleman Stevenson, Poet & Faculty Art Institute of Portland

-Nora Wendl, Architect & Professor of Architecture at PSU

-Nial McGaughey, Lead Wingnut at Hovercraft Amplifiers, and

-Chris Higgins, Author of "The Blogger Abides"

As the Curiosity Club slogan goes, "We admit that it is impossible to know everything about anything and thus we remain perpetually curious and perpetually novice." Part of good noviceship is asking dumb questions to get good answers, and we're taking our questions to the stage! Talk is cheap and tickets are cheaper, so order yours, tell your friends and come get quizzical, 7pm 6/22 at the Hollywood Theatre.

When seeking out materials to build furniture, the first items that come to mind are probably not ice-cream sprinkles, coffee grounds and salt. For Fernando Mastrangelo, however, those materials—along with sugar, sand, porcelain, silica, BB pellets and more—are fertile ground for his MMATERIAL line of furniture, which blends a wide range of materials with casting techniques to create minimal forms with complex structures.

The co-founder of AMMA Studio, Mastrangelo has been practicing as a sculptor for over a decade. He first began dabbling in design in 2013, after he was commissioned to translate his artistic style to a piece of furniture. He continued working on more pieces, eventually building out an entire collection that debuted at the Collective Design fair in New York last month; he branded it as MMATERIAL to separate it from his artistic practice. "The idea making furniture and using natural materials came from my sculpture practice," Mastrangelo says. "I've been casting unique materials for about eight years now, so it was a pretty fluid translation. My sculptures were always highly engineered objects and all the technical knowledge was carried over to the furniture."

MMATERIAL's 350-pound indoor-outdoor chaise longue, made of crushed porcelain and cement

An indoor-outdoor console table

For his first few pieces, Mastrangelo didn't do many sketches, instead opting to dive right in, building and casting into wood and silicone molds. With extensive experience casting a variety materials, he knew exactly which pieces would work the best, pouring them into fine-art cement, which was then hand-dyed to create a more utilitarian effect. "I have notebooks filled with formulas from the last eight years of casting materials," he says. "There's almost nothing that's dry and able to be cast that I haven't tried at this point. I just knew which ones were going to work for furniture due to the amount of wear and tear certain materials can handle."

These days, Mastrangelo begins each piece by doing a few simple drawings—"nothing too elaborate," he says, just enough to remember his concept and be able to realize it in the studio. There, he works with a team of five sculptors to take the more complex designs into CAD, rendering them in 3D to figure out details for fabrication or to show collectors what they will be receiving for custom commissions. Next, Mastrangelo spends time thinking about the actual process of making the object, taking his thoughts to his lead fabricator to discuss the engineering of the piece. Then they begin mold-making, using either wood or foam to create the form.

Mold-making for the chaise longue

Once the molds are complete, aggregates are cast with resin to assure a strong archival result. Depending on the piece, sometimes the team will begin with a steel armature surfaced with lightweight but structural core material. Once that underlying structure is in place, the team will cast the cement in such a way to make the cement appear to be an organic stone formation. "We usually blend these techniques and learn from them to push the forms and combinations as far as possible," Mastrangelo says. "It's basically a back and forth of casting aggregates or cement in different combinations or different formats to achieve a variety of outcomes." For MMATERIAL, Mastrangelo focuses on a combination of natural materials mixed with cement to create the language for each collection. After completing the casting, the team sands, grinds, finishes and polishes the final pieces to the desired look. Between each project, Mastrangelo and his team test new techniques, and they are always on the hunt for new materials to cast. "As with most creative endeavors, you learn from work to work what is possible," he says. "Thinking about how I can push the processes of what we do at the studio becomes the main source of inspiration."

More MMATERIAL works in progress

Casting from BBs

Mastrangelo and his team recently finished their first indoor-outdoor chaise longue , weighing in at 350 pounds. To build the large piece of furniture, which looks something like an oversized rubber band, 150 pounds of crushed porcelain were mixed with resin and set for 16 hours. Then 120 pounds of cement were poured into a wooden mold around a steel armature, which provides structural support to the form.

So is the final seat comfortable? "I think about form and beauty first, then comes function, so that's why I haven't made too many seating pieces yet," Mastrangelo says. "The chaise longue is actually very comfortable and forms to the body pretty well. Most of the collection is ergonomic and I spend a good amount of time thinking about how people will live with them. I also primarily think about these pieces as sculpture and although they are furniture, I won't sacrifice an amazing form if it's not the most ergonomic." As with other sculptural furniture, MMATERIAL pieces do not come cheap—its standard furnishings begin at $4,500 and go up to about $25,000; custom works go up from there, depending on the scale, engineering, materials and time to fabricate.

With this initial foray into outdoor furniture now completed, Mastrangelo will be tackling architectural interiors next, with plans to create cast walls and floor installations. "I want MMATERIAL to be a studio where anything is possible," Mastrangelo says. "Furniture is our gateway to educate architects, interior designers and collectors as to what is possible with the materials we use and the infinite amount of possibilities they present. That is the most exciting part for us."

Prototype Engineer Avery Louie tore down a pair of Beats headphones to see what makes them tick (or thump) and what he found inside is pretty sad. Amidst "generic drivers" and the cost-reducing tricks of the trade many of you ID'ers are familiar with—designing plastic parts that snap together rather than use screws, etc.—Louie found this gem:

A little bit of weight makes the product feel solid, durable, and valuable. One way to do this cheaply is to make some components out of metal in order to add weight. In these headphones, 30% of the weight comes from four tiny metal parts that are there for the sole purpose of adding weight.

I've got no experience with the industrial design of consumer electronics (my specialty was structural package design, where we're trying to make everything stronger but lighter). Louie mentions that adding metal weights to a product is "a somewhat common trick," although he doesn't list other examples. 

But if any readership would know, it would be you guys and gals. So, ID'ers among you working in the consumer electronics space, have you seen—or god forbid, had to do—the adding-weights thing before? Anything you can tell us without violating an NDA?

Via Medium

It may or may not be practical, but Sebastian Errazuriz's work re-thinks how storage furniture permits us access to their insides. Earlier we showed you his Samurai Cabinet, which brought a bit of ceremony to the act of retrieving clothing, and the visual surprise of the opening mechanism for his Explosion Cabinet, perhaps the most extreme in his line.

Now the NYC-based artist/designer has done it again, with a form more subdued than the Samurai and Explosion but every bit as exciting. Check out his fanciful Wave credenza:

For his part, the NYC-based Errazuriz doesn't care if it's practical or not; as the artist-designer-activist states, "I love the idea of creating beautiful furniture; nevertheless I am much more interested in using the medium as an excuse to trigger people's curiosity and create a connection with them."

"I don't know where the line is between art and design," Errazuriz states in his bio. "It's important to me that a project consist of just a little twist, because I ultimately want people to see the obvious, the everyday differently."

Check out more of his transformative work here.

Since the days of the disposable razor, more than a few companies have taken a system-based approach to product design. In other words they create a product whose accessories are proprietary. Whereas the original driving motive behind this approach may have been profit, today products are complex enough that consumers can actually benefit from a system-based design.

Cynics will say that system-based design approaches are meant to lock consumers into a particular manufacturer's ecosystem; advocates will point out that those ecosystems—think of Apple's or Festool's—make things more convenient for the end user.

Last Friday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture released a biannual report about coffee, which maybe seems it wouldn't have anything to do with this website. But in fact it has everything to do with industrial design, and now we are seeing the environmental impacts—both positive and negative—of a particular system-based product design.

Reuters nutshells what the USDA report discovered:

Americans are spending more money on coffee than ever before, but for the first time in six years, they will be [consuming] less of it as the single-serve revolution transforms the brewing habits of the world's largest coffee-drinking nation.

To be clear, that doesn't mean that we Americans are putting less coffee in our bodies. It means that we are no longer brewing full pots of coffee at the office and dumping out what people don't drink. The rise of single-serve coffee makers designed to use individual pods, rather than drip filters and user-poured coffee grinds, allows end users to avoid overestimating how much coffee to make. And we are apparently willing to pay more for the convenience.

The increased efficiency enabled by product designs like Keurig's K-Cup and Nestle's Nespresso line of single-serve machines means we are wasting less coffee—and crucially, less water. It also means that as the dip in demand reaches the coffee cultivating industry, less resources will be used at the farm level. And circling back to the consumer, single-serve coffee machines do not have hotplates they need to feed electricity to, keeping warm a pot that no one will finish drinking.

Sounds like a win, right? Brilliant product design that aligns the amount we actually consume with the amount that is actually produced, and reduces resource consumption from farm to table?

Well, not quite. The problem is in the pods. As has been known for several years, Keurig's plastic K-Cups are not biodegradable nor practically recycleable, as explained in articles from Mother Jones and The Atlantic. Nespresso aluminum pods are recycleable, but require specialized machines and processes to separate the coffee from the metal prior to recycling; because of that, the company has set up collection points at retail partners and even a mail-in service for consumers to return the pods, so they can be shunted to a suitable facility.

Nestle's recycling program is laudable, but how many Nespresso users are taking the trouble to actually return the pods? This article from several years ago points out that Nestle trumpets their pod recycling capacitybut not the actual rate at which it's being done. So they deserve praise for having had the foresight to set up a recycling system, but it's not clear that that system has taken user behavior into account. If they were to release some concrete figures, it would go a long way towards assuaging skepticism.

Keurig, meanwhile, really has egg on their face. They say they'll have a sustainable solution in place for their pods in five years' time, in 2020. But Rogers Family Company's OneCup—which is compatible with Keurig's K-Cup machines—is on the market now and 97% biodegradable, as it's made with bioplastics.

I purchased a Nespresso machine last month and I love it, using it at least twice daily. But prior to reading the above-linked articles, I had been heedlessly throwing the aluminum pods into my regular recycling, unaware that they fall through the collection grates at regular recycling facilities.

Henceforth I'll be collecting my pods and trekking them to the Nespresso facility in my neighborhood. But that is easy for me, as it's only six blocks away. I wonder what other Nespresso users do.

This is the fourth installment of our new Designing Women series. Previously, we profiled Marianne Brandt, Belle Kogan and Nanda Vigo.

The 1950s were a good time to be a Swiss graphic designer in Italy. The country was booming, and progressive manufacturers like Olivetti and Pirelli were interested in humanizing their products in an era of rapid postwar industrialization. But Italy had few formal design schools of its own, creating an opportunity for graduates from neighboring countries. Lora Lamm was one of these enterprising immigrants, moving in 1953 from Zurich to Milan, where she set about creating a pitch-perfect hybrid of Swiss rationalism and Italian exuberance.

A 2015 portrait of Lora Lamm with her work, by Gina Folly

Lamm landed first at the legendary Studio Boggeri, where she designed wrapping paper, but soon moved on to designing chocolate wrappers for confectioner Angelo Motta. In 1954, she joined fellow expat Max Huber in the creative offices of the high-end department store La Rinascente. Working diligently, she took on designs for the store's catalogs, posters, advertisements, packaging and new product promotions. When Huber left the store four years later, Lamm took over his role as director of the graphics department, where she oversaw advertising campaigns that were defined by her cheerful illustrations and energetic lettering.

Lamm also lent her charming graphic style to independent clients like Elizabeth Arden, Pirelli and Olivetti, imbuing their advertisements with her signature effervescence. While her earlier fashion work at La Rinascente was based on her playful drawings, Lamm's advertising work for others often employed witty photographs or collages to grab the viewer's attention, such as in her humorous "rolle" advertisement for Pirelli tires. Beyond attention-grabbing graphics, she was keen to employ an array of production techniques for the best creative output—for instance, she liked using photograms (images made without a camera, by placing objects directly on photographic paper) for the way they elegantly reproduced shadows during the printing process.

Poster advertisement for Pirelli (photo by Serge Libiszewski), 1961

Poster advertisement for Pirelli, 1960

Many of Lamm's biographies trail off around 1963, when she returned to Zurich in hopes of securing a visa to work in America. When the visa didn't come through, she joined the advertising office of Frank Thiessing, becoming his business partner (and eventually his wife) but refusing to continue in her trademark Swiss-Italian style. "When I came back from Milan everyone expected a certain style from me. However, I did not want to answer to those expectations," Lamm explained in a recent interview with Apartamento magazine. "What I had done in Milan could not simply be repeated in Zurich. I believe that you risk copying yourself when you follow a certain style. It did not seem sincere. That does not mean that I was not as busy as a bee—I was closely collaborating with clients and partners, ranging from fighter jet producers to printers."

Poster advertisement for La Rinascente, 1957

Despite her long and varied post-Milan career, Lamm is best remembered for her midcentury work—the focus of an exhibition of her posters opening tomorrow at the Museum für Gestaltung in Zurich. The 87-year-old is also being honored this month as a recipient of the Swiss Grand Award for Design for her dedication to advancing Swiss design nationally and internationally—a fitting tribute to a woman whose work has crossed both boundaries and borders.

Invitation card from La Rinascente's 1956 exhibition and sale of Japanese products, part of Lamm's larger il Giappone campaign for the store

Wrapping paper from the il Giappone campaign, 1956

Advertisement and price ticket from the il Giappone campaign, 1956

Poster advertisement for La Rinascente, 1956

Poster advertisement for La Rinascente, 1956

Poster advertisement for La Rinascente, 1956

Poster advertisement for La Rinascente (photogram by Serge Libiszewski), 1958

Poster advertisement for La Rinascente (photo by Serge Libiszewski), 1960

Poster advertisement for La Rinascente (photo by Serge Libiszewski), 1962

Assuming design schools today still have you making models with your hands, the 3D Simo Mini seems like the perfect tool for the industrial design student. We used to constantly be cutting foam with knives or hotwires and soldering wireframes together; this tool can do both of those, as well as let you 3D draw (which come to think of it, might obviate the need to solder wireframes at all). Take a look:

As for the burning functionality, I have to admit the only use I can project on it based on my own experiences isn't acceptable in today's world. Not only did I and some fellow ID buddies smoke back then, we were actually allowed to smoke in the studio. (Hell, one of our teachers chain-smoked in class.) So had I had one of these, yeah, I'd probably have been using it on the side to fire up some Camel Lights. Between that, inhaling plastic fumes off of a hotwire, inhaling solder fumes and handling solder with our bare hands, I'm really not sure which was worse.

In any case, the 3D Simo Mini has about a month left to pledge on Kickstarter, and it looks like it may need it: At press time it was only at $10,000 of a $70,000 target. Buy-in starts at $79, which isn't bad considering the device is expected to retial for $129. If you're an ID student, buy yours today! And don't smoke cigarettes!

Being a New Yorker, the year I spent living in Japan was a shock because the country is so spotlessly clean. It's as clean as it is for three reasons, the first two being that average citizens pick up after themselves, and they also pick up after un-average citizens. You'll probably recall that during last year's World Cup, Tweeted photos of Japanese fans cleaning their side of the stadium in Brazil went viral. As per Japanese sporting venue tradition, they had arrived to the match armed with garbage bags.

The third reason Japan is so clean is because when the first two reasons aren't enough, they have crack cleaning squads operating with military precision. Consider the hundreds of Shinkansen (bullet trains) the country runs every day. They adhere to strict 12-minute turnaround times, with two minutes alloted for passengers to get off and another two minutes for new passengers to get on. That leaves the employees of Tessei, the company hired to clean the trains, just seven minutes to turn the trains around. Here's how they do it:

Asian news network Rocket News 24 provides a detailed breakdown of their timetable: "1.5 minutes spent picking up trash, 30 seconds rotating the seats, four minutes sweeping and cleaning, and a one-minute check."

Also interesting is that the efficacy of the Tessei cleaning crews, which are 50/50 men/women with an average age of 52, only recently attained their legendary status.

TESSEI was reformed into the company it is today nine years ago. At the time the workers were treated as mere dispatch cleaners, and had low morale and dedication to their job. This led to the cleanliness of the shinkansen suffering and not living up to the expectations held by its millions of passengers.

One of the main changes involved in the overhaul was redefining the work as 'service' rather than 'cleaning', and endeavoring to create a sense of pride in the job. Another major factor is the importance of teamwork, with input coming not just from the supervisors but from everyone in the team. Every day they will hold a team meeting to thoroughly discuss any issues no matter how trivial, and every member gets a say. Furthermore, the teams are not fixed, and will be shuffled around so that everyone gets a chance to work with and learn from lots of different people....

TESSEI's incredible service has garnered admiration and praise around the world. Upon visiting TESSEI, the French national rail president commented that he wanted to import the idea to France. And last month a group of professors from Harvard University visited TESSEI and discussed including the company in teaching materials at the graduate school of business.

On the occasion of their 90th anniversary, German power tool manufacturer Festool invited a small group of journalists to a weeklong media event at their headquarters in southern Germany. As the sole design publication in attendance (the rest were from the trades), Core77 made it a point to learn about what sets the innovative company's designs apart—and how they do it. The following series of articles is a result of the trip.

Part 1: Introduction

An introduction to the company, and Festool's growing base of American power tool users.

Part 2: A History of Power Tool Innovation

In this rare look inside Festool's private museum, we see that creating innovative tools has been baked into the organization from the start.

Part 3: The Thinking that Drives the Company

Festool develops products by starting at the end, with what comes out of a customer's mouth. Here we learn the five points that guide the company's decisions.

Part 4: Festool's Design Process

Here we take a closer look at how Festool brought a new power tool, the Conturo, into existence. We also see that they're not afraid to start over from scratch in order to get the design right.

Part 5: Q&A with Festool Industrial Designer Timo Kuhls

Festool works with just two(!) industrial designers, only one of them in-house. Here we get to chat with in-house ID'er Timo Kuhls on what it's like to design for Festool—and we get to see the cool project that got him the job!

Part 6: Behind the Scenes with Festool's Testing & Quality Control

It's one thing to design and build innovative tools, but how can you be sure they'll stand up to jobsite abuse? Where does durability come from? Here we see Festool's intensive testing and quality control taking the crucial, unsung steps in maintaining the company's reputation.

Part 7: Ten Modern-Day Innovations

In Part 2 we looked at the inventions that got Festool onto the map. Here we look at the more recent innovations that have kept them there. It was tough narrowing this list down to just ten.

Part 8: The Wrap-Up

Fun Festool facts like where the Systainer came from, why they won't make a laser, the role of professional tool users vs. hobbyists, and more.

It's around this time of year that we catch the first glimpses of the next batch of remarkable design talent soon to be unleashed on to the world. It's also a time—reminiscing whilst pouring over graduation projects—that we're reminded of our own college-day optimistic naivety.  I mean, just look at all these wonderful if wildly impractical design solutions!

If I had a penny for every peddle-powered sustainable power project...I could probably have paid an olympic athlete to demonstrate how unrealistic these propositions can be. Fortunately, students at Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Arts have done that for us.

There's a common misconception that our bodies—if tasked with doing so—could produce the power that our increasingly consuming lives demand. Any engineer worth their salt will tell you that this is pure fallacy—the conversion from human to appliance being absolutely abysmal. Sure we can wind up a radio or keep those mini-screens on those gym bikes going but we quickly hit our limit when the energy demands get higher—anything involving heating for example.

By means of demonstrating this inconvenient truth, Robert Förstemann took on the challenge of heating a single slice of toast in a 700 Watt toaster with the incredible strength of his 74cm diameter thighs. Setting out at a steady 50km/h Förstemann battles with maintaining pace to keep the toaster going—the power required equivalent to climbing a 40 degree incline.

Managing to keep the toaster going for just long enough to give the bread a slight golden brown, Förstemann crashed out exhausted from the excursion —an important lesson in energy usage (I'll never look at my toaster the same way again!). If Förstemann's meaty limbs can't cook a slice of bread what chance do the rest of us have!

Design students: beware the human-powered fallacy!

Third brake lights and SUVs were not common when I learned to drive in the '80s. That meant two things: People stopping short wasn't as easy to quickly spot, and for the most part, all cars were on similar levels, height-wise.

After a close call or two with people stopping short in front of me, I formed a habit of looking through the cars in front of me to see what was up ahead that might cause someone to late-brake. The greenhouse-like design of most '70s and '80s cars, and the fact that we were all sitting on the same level, made it easy to look straight through even multiple cars in traffic. But when the popularity of trucks soared in the '90s, hatchback-drivers like me found ourselves staring at tailgates, too low to see anything except the back of an SUV.

That's part of why I'm digging Samsung's Safety Truck design. The trailer is kitted out with four gi-normous flatscreens on the back of them, connected wirelessly to a camera mounted to the front of the truck. Hence the driver directly behind can see "through" the truck.

In addition to helping out with what I'll call brake forecasting, the concept was designed primarily to help drivers decide when to safely overtake. A prototype of the truck underwent trials in Argentina, a country full of the two-lane two-way roads that engender frequent overtaking.

The main reason I love this design, in addition to its utility, is that it's selfless. The monitors help protect the vehicle behind it more than the truck itself. Most automotive safety features are designed to protect their own vehicles' occupants, but if every automaker focused on both internal and external safety, it could pave the way for a lot of imaginative designs.

Samsung has deemed the Argentinian trial of the Safety Truck successful, but is vague about the future of the project. "The next step," they write, "is to perform the corresponding tests in order to comply with the existing national protocols and obtain the necessary permits and approvals. For this, Samsung is working together with safe driving NGOs and the government."

In addition to Taglio Laser's square steel pipe bending method, France's HandBend Furniture is giving the method a go. The latter company aims to ship you their products flatpack, and have you bend them into their final form by hand before fastening the pieces together. Let's take a quick look at what they do, before getting to the question I'd like to ask you:

HandBend Furniture

HandBend Furniture

HandBend Furniture

HandBend Furniture

There are a couple differences between the two: While Taglio Laser is more of a job shop that one can subcontract, HandBend is a full-on design brand producing finished furniture pieces, which can be ordered in custom sizes.

HandBend Furniture

But there's another key difference, this one kind of ironic. One of Taglio Laser's target market is manufacturers of chassis. Those are not meant to be seen by the end-user of whatever they're integrated within. Nevertheless, Taglio's joints are visually beautiful and seam-to-seam (see below).

Taglio Laser

In contrast, the furniture constructed by HandBend leaves the joinery (or perhaps more properly, "transitions") well visible, wearing its production method on its sleeve, so to speak; the cutouts leave no mystery as to the forming method, and even draw the eye with their graphic noticeability.

HandBend Furniture

My question is, do you like this, do you find it pleasing as an effect? It's subjective, but I don't. And I realize this may make me a metal-vs.-wood hypocrite. I've got no problem with visible dovetails and box joints like the following...

Image/work by Matthias Wandel

...even though I know these are rarely hand-cut these days, but are in fact created with machines, just as HandBend's stuff is. Yet something about the latter's aesthetic bugs me. There's something pleasing about the perceived tactility of a dovetail or boxtail that's been sanded flush, and that seems absent in the starkly mechanical voids of these laser joints/transitions.

HandBend Furniture

HandBend Furniture

Your thoughts?

(h/t to Adam T. for pointing us towards HandBend.)

For the latest installment of his tips-'n-tricks-in-the-shop series, master maker Jimmy DiResta kicks it off with a bang: He directly addresses the people who design cordless drills, tells them what not to do, then shows you the simple hack he and shopmate David Welder came up with that greatly increases the utility of the tool. There's also a dozen other drilling tips you're bound to find useful:

Seriously, why hasn't any manufacturer thought of that? It should be a simple add-on, particularly for the folks who have the CAD files and can nail the exact axis of the shaft, no?

When thinking of mechanical objects, we don't often consider their beauty as much as their basic utility; bulldozers are rarely described as elegant and table saws are prized more for their ability to effectively cut wood than their grace. Despite this underappreciation, there have been a number of designers who make a true effort to engineer objects that are not only beautiful, but also honor the elegance of the relationship between design form and mechanical movement. Take for example, Theo Jansen's ethereal beach walking 'beasts' or Bruno Munari's 'useless machines,' some of the first physics-based mobiles to be invented. 

Francois Chambard, the Brooklyn-based designer and founder of UM Project, carries on in a similar spirit in the Print Shop print studio installation currently on view at The Museum of Art and Design in New York City.

UM Project's interpretation of a manual printing press for 'The Print Shop'

Known for projects that involve a hybridization between art and design like his Constructivist theremins, Francois Chambard's involvement with the Print Shop exhibit is what gives the installation a unique angle. When invited to collaborate with MAD on an exhibit surrounding printmaking, Chambard started to brainstorm how to emphasize the act of printing itself while also encouraging interactivity. "When they approached me they wanted something that worked really well functionally but was also really cool to look at," says Chambard. "Print presses are, I guess, not [visually] interesting enough and they wanted a way to have some kind of machine that's a perfect hybrid of art and design or craft and industry."

The printing press in action.

Initial ideation as well as some advice from printmaker Karl LaRocca of Kayrock Studios brought him to his final design — a reinterpretation of more industrial German parallel lift tables. The printing press is meant to be used by those visiting the exhibit, and not only incorporates beautiful graphic form, but also considers the potential for tactile pleasure when using a manual screen printing press. While industrial parallel lift tables often incorporate complex hydraulics, Chambard's design operates using a simple disk system that counterweights the action of bringing down the screen to the table. The carefully considered mechanics of the design make for easy and satisfying movement, resulting in an effortless feeling of weightlessness when the screen is lifted from the table.

Chambard notes that his design work is, "always about finding this kind of third way, which is not industry or craft but instead something in between. So basically, it transcends both the quality of the handmade and the quality of the mass-produced." Based on the reactions of both professional screenprinters and less educated visitors who all interacted with the printing press, its utility does indeed transcend the simple joy of printmaking; the machine is in its own way a form of visual poetry, a graphically bold celebration of printmaking's rich history and overall process.

'The Print Shop' will be on display at the Museum of Art and Design until October 11th.

After a flurry  of tweets and Facebook posts (plus an untold number of emails/phone calls/favors called in we may never know about) the results of the very first Core77 Design Awards Community Choice are in! 

Before we get to the honorees, remember that the Grand Prize winner gets a free ticket, round trip airfare, and two nights accommodations to attend the 2015 Core77 Conference in Los Angeles on October 23rd. It's a daylong exploration of the relationships, technologies, ideas, and forces that are driving contemporary design into the future. There will be engaging speakers and inspiring conversations, plus a variety of pre- and post-conference activities only available to attendees.

Even if you didn't win a ticket, you can sign up to get invited to a ticket pre-sale on July 15th. Only 50 tickets will be sold at the significantly discounted pre-sale price, so sign up as quickly as possible.

Now, without further ado, the winner of the inaugural Community Choice Grand Prize is...

"P I G E O N" by Ignas Survila, Transportation Student Runner-Up

This streamlined, compact, visually compelling scooter received the most votes out of all 200+ honorees. When informed of the news, Ignas, from the Vilnius Academy of Arts in Lithuania, was elated.

"Thank you very very very much for supporting the Pigeon. It is a huge motivation when you realize that somebody believes in the things you believe! And when I realize that all the efforts we've put in the process was not in vain and now I just can smile widely :) You cannot imagine how thankful I am and at this moment I just want to run an give the biggest hugs to all the people who supported us. Thank you thank you thank you and it will never be too much!!"

Congratulations Ignas! We look forward to shaking your hand at the conference and congratulating you in person for both your Design Awards Runner-Up honor and Community Choice Grand Prize.

Ignas isn't the only one who raked in the votes for their designs. We'd also like to congratulate the following designers who received the highest total number of votes within their respective category. Each of these Community Choice Prize winners will also receive a free ticket to the conference.

Congratulations to all the Community Choice honorees in the 2015 Core77 Design Awards!