Ikea has just launched Space10, an experimental design lab that gathers creatives from around the world to seek out and solve urban living problems. Equal parts design studio, skunkworks, exchange program and exhibition space, the forward-thinking venture is intended to let designers ideate freely, absent any bureaucracy or demands of return on investment. 

"IKEA already does a lot to improve the lives of many people, and with Space10 we hope to take this vision even further," explains Göran Nilsson, IKEA Concept Innovation Manager. "Whether or not the solutions are immediately relevant to our current business is not important. What matters is to look into new directions and be ready to make changes."

They've already made some changes, starting with the space itself: The site chosen for Space10 was an abandoned fish-processing facility in Copenhagen's meatpacking district, spacious enough at 1,000 square meters (10,763 square feet), but more suited to herring and cod than industrial designers and UI experts. To transform the space into the revolving-door design playground they envisioned, Ikea tapped Danish architecture/design firm Spacon & X. Here's how they tackled the challenge, creating a practical, flexible and functional space:

I want to see more details on some of those built-ins, but thus far there's only one such video posted. Before we get to that, let's have a look at the stills to see what they've done. The construction of the built-ins appears impressively frugal:

Here we see plenty of B/C plywood with exposed edges, and laminated only on the horizontals. I'll rely on the European and Scandinavian readers to educate me as to the size, but the thickness in the shot below appears to be more than the 3/4-inch/19mm common here in the 'States, and even seems a tad thicker than the 1-inch also available here, yet doesn't seem to be two doubled 3/4 sheets. Let me guess, you nutters have your own metric sizes.

They've certainly had a new floor poured, judging by the "before" seen in the video, and the "after" seen below. By the bye, something that surprised me is that this long tabletop, in the photo below at left, appears to be unfaced particle board. With plants atop it, I'd be scared of a water spill; perhaps they've sealed the top with something transparent?

As seen in this shot, I initially assumed the translucent light-admitting panels were Coroplast…

…but as revealed in this shot, they're a bit too transparent to be Coroplast. Am guessing they're polycarbonate.

As for the single fixtures video they've posted, here's a too-short look at that Mobile Workshop Pod:

I like the raw DIY feel of the functional Pod, which looks like it was designed quickly. That speed, as it turns out, is in fact a central tenet of Space10's modus operandi. "We have tried to create the optimal conditions for a fast-paced, visionary and bold environment to foster and conceptualise radical ideas that we can test fast," says Space10 CEO and founder Carla Cammilla Hjort.

And speaking of speed, Space10 has scarcely been open a week—but designers from around the world have already been producing presentation-ready projects from the space. Next we'll take a look at some of our faves.

After creating the built-ins for Space10, Ikea's experimental design lab, architecture firm Spacon & X still needed to source some furniture. They had the brilliant idea of asking Maaike Fransen, a Dutch artist and Eindhoven grad known for her incorporation of found objects into her work, to create some "extreme Ikea hacks" based on what's already inside your typical Ikea store.

Fransen is candid about her first attempt--involving inflatable balls sold in the Children's department--not quite working out: "I bought as many [of the balls] as I could find in IKEA Amsterdam, blew them all up and filled a whole room," she explains. "It looked cool, but was not really appealing to lay down on, because of the rubber feeling."

Undeterred, she raided Ikea's Transport/Tools department for black strapping, bound the balls together into a grid, and filled the gaps with plush soccer balls. Covering the surface with a white blanket from the Bedding section resulted in a "soft, bubbly Himalayan landscape," or a "pool you can sink into."

For the second hack, Fransen subverted the rules a bit: Her mandate was to use existing items found in Ikea, but no one said those items had to be for sale. Thus she stole some of the shopping carts—"it was an impulsive act," she says—and rigged them up into a "Workstation for lazy people:"

The carts are designed to combine solo work with relaxation and the ability to move around the room. Each cart has a light attached, itself a hack made by combining an IKEA mirror, wooden table-ring, plastic storage bowl and a little touch-light. You just have to hit it hard. The dark pink and red pillow-rolls in the carts are made by sewing together eight IKEA towels and filling the last one with an IKEA pillow. The green and gray tables are made of two IKEA Lack tables joined together with an IKEA shelf.

"I have a weird mind," Fransen admits. "I'm also often a bit surprised at what comes out of it."

Meanwhile, I wonder if Ikea will begin selling those carts.

Interaktionsbyrån seeks an interaction designer, with the knowledge of how to achieve a great user experience for digital products, to help them stay at the fore-front of transforming the world´s automotive industry. Successful candidates will have 3+ years of experience and the ability to create, test and communicate interaction concepts.

In our homes and offices, there are at least two things we look at that are on vertical surfaces: Art and feedback displays. We hang paintings and photographs for pleasure and ambience, while we rely on thermostats, clocks and microwave oven readouts to provide some useful piece of data that changes. What if the art function could be combined with the data-providing function?

That's the idea proposed by Victoria Hammel and Gunes Kantaroglu of the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design. The duo recently participated in Space10's "Fresh Living Lab" workshop, which asks designers to explore "how we can live healthier lives and make better choices for both the planet and ourselves." Hammale and Kantaroglu's submission, "smART," turns art into a feedback device that lets the user know how much heat and water they've recently consumed:

Now obviously you're not going to hack up your Modigliani to tell you how many seconds are left until that burrito's ready, but Hammel and Kantaroglu's concept could surely be useful for a variety of other data applications:

- Running with their heat-and-water concept, it might be useful for a piece of art to indicate how much hot water was left for a shower for those living in a shared household, or if the thermostat was not keeping pace. 

- In my own situation, where my Wi-Fi connection is shared, I'd love for a painting to subtly indicate what the current data usage was, so I wouldn't try to upload a YouTube video when someone next door is streaming The Man in the High Castle. 

- I'd like a photograph I have to turn brown when the U.P.S. guy reaches my block. (That's what brown can do for me.)

The current wisdom is that all of this information will one day be sent to our smartphones, but if I could offload that to a local piece of art and have one less reason to be glued to my phone, I'd be a happy man.

The Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, by the way, is both a postgraduate school and a consultancy; as the name indicates, they focus on that other "I.D." Hammel and Kantaroglu being students, at a project length of two weeks they had a bit longer than the insane three days that the folks behind this clever standing desk had. But that's still fast, and I'm still impressed with Space10 living up to their promise of getting designers to quickly generate innovative concepts.

When Ikea rolled out their line of wireless charging furniture and objects, it essentially established that the technology is now mainstream. But as revolutionary as these affordable objects are, they still need to be plugged into the wall, drawing their power from the mains.

Interior designer Vihanga Gore and interaction designer Sergey Komardenkov, both students at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, think Ikea can do better. Their Heat Harvest concept, developed as part of the same Space10 workshop as the art-as-indicator project, aims to use thermoelectricity to generate the juice, by absorbing the heat given off by warmer objects.

"We imagine two possible products that use the technology", says Vihanga. "The first is table tops that extract heat from hot objects that are placed on top of them. These could be anything from a pot of soup to a frying pan straight from the kitchen stove. The second product is heat harvesting pads that you could place beneath TV set top boxes or heat-emitting power adapters anywhere in the home."

Here's what they envision:

Should the technology prove workable--the project page claims that "Recent developments in nanotechnology have…made the conversion of heat to electricity more efficient than ever"—it's not difficult to imagine Ikea starting out with something as simple as a Heat Harvest under-laptop pad. It'd be nice if, when my machine is burning up running Adobe Premiere, it was charging my phone at the same time.

Just a reminder that for those of you that would like to participate in a workshop, or even suggest one of your own, Space10 is actively seeking submissions and participants. You can learn more, sign up and submit here.

It is a matter of fact that when we purchase a piece of furniture, we are often inevitably forced to deal with issues of assembly and transportation. These "problematic" aspects of furniture production and anatomy is where my project started and how the idea behind the Plug Table came to fruition. This table features alternative joinery and assembly/disassembly solutions that make moving and storing furniture a light and effortless process.

Furniture dimensions don't come out of the air. They come out of heavy research that, thankfully, a lot of people have already done for us and written books on; if you're a designer, you ought have a copy of one of these books (see bottom of this entry). While these reference bibles of human dimensions haven't yet been updated to account for us supersized Americans, they still provide a good jumping-off point for determining rough dimensions, angles and heights.

But maybe you're designing something at the studio and the book is back in your dorm, or maybe you're at your office desk and the book is sitting on a shelf in the room occupied by that creepy new intern you're trying to avoid. Well, have no fear, we've gathered some basic reference info here that you can bookmark and refer to in a pinch.

Basic Chair

For those designing a basic chair, Wood Magazine has a great article called "Must-have measurements for comfortable seating" that draws on furniture industry guidelines to provide ideal figures. (Well, ideal if you're a 5'10" male.)

Image by Wood Magazine

Image by Wood Magazine

To read the details behind those letters called out on the drawings, read the original article here.

Sofa/Couch/Easy Chair

Maybe you're designing something a little loungier, like a sofa or easy chair. A feature story in Futon Life (wow, there really is a magazine for everything) provides some basic figures for both level-bottom and tilted-bottom reclining.

Image by Futon Life

Along these lines there is also this frustratingly unattributed image floating around the interwebs, which I assume was ripped off of Dreyfuss or perhaps Niels Diffrient's now-unaffordable Humanscale books.

Image source

Office Chair & Workstation

Office solutions provider Allsteel has combed through data from BIFMA (the trade association for Business and Institutional Furniture Manufacturers) to produce Ergonomics and Design: A Reference Guide [PDF]. In it you'll find images like the following:

"Hmm. Every time I try typing without a keyboard, the screen just stays blank."

For a more coherent set of workstation dimensions including the numbers for seating/worksurface on the same page, you may want to refer to the drawings below, from Ernest Irving Freese's Architectural Record. However, be aware: There are no measurements for computer monitors in these drawings—because they were developed way back in 1932. (While it's not indicated on the drawing, all of these figures in the illustrations are starving because it was the Great Depression.)

Image source

Bar/Restaurant Seating

If you've scored your first commission to design a bar or restaurant, or if you're looking to design a similar set-up for a domestic or office situation, these images from an Americans with Disabilities Act pamphlet may prove useful:

"Please manicure my fingernails"

"I just saw you manicure that other guy's fingernails. Can you manicure mine too?"

Custom Furniture

If you're designing a bespoke piece of furniture for a single client, their body is the only one you need to worry about, never mind the 95th percentile. In that case, here are the measurements you'll need to take. (The image is from a 1962 U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare pamphlet called Weight, Height, and Selected Body Dimensions of Adults [PDF]. It contains figures that are probably outdated, but this diagram will remind you what to measure.)

Rough Overall Dimensions

If you only need the rough dimensions of a chair--for example, if you're just banging out some quick mock-ups to populate a CAD environment and you'd like the scale to be close--you might find the following image helpful. (Again, the image is recirculating on Tumblr with no attribution.)

Image source

Books

If you look hard enough, you'll find some websites are blatantly posting scans of the books mentioned below. For those of you that would rather legally purchase them, here you go:

Human Dimension & Interior Space

The Measure of Man and Woman: Human Factors in Design

Architectural Graphic Standards: Student Edition

Most of us would love to design an object that people were still using after our deaths. But would you work on a project that could only be experienced after you, your children and your grandchildren had all left this earth?

Actor John Malkovich and director Robert Rodriguez were paid what I assume was a lot of money to make a film that no one alive today will ever see. That's because even though it was already shot and produced, it's not going to be released for 100 years. This month, they claim, they locked the finished cut up in a time-activated vault that won't pop open until the year 2115.

Malkovich and Rodriguez were approached by booze company Rémy Martin, whose Louis XIII Cognac can be up to 100 years old. Thus the company cooked up this idea to make a film—called 100 Years, naturally—that would undergo the fate described above. All they'll say about the film is that it's set in present day.

As for how the eventual viewers will get tickets, io9 reports that "The team at Louis XIII…are sending out metal movie tickets to about 1,000 influential people inviting them to invite their descendants to a screening exactly one century from today. At that time, they'll grab an old projector (the movie will be preserved on film stock) and press play."

I'm actually more interested in seeing what these metal tickets look like than I am in seeing the movie.

The Clampersand is back! The first physical pun of pure Core77 origin was originally designed by Tony Ruth in a Lunchbreath Coretoon, and it's now available in solid glittering brass. This limited edition is sand cast at the historic Batavia Foundry outside of Chicago, and hand finished for a glinting matte surface. 

When it left the digital page, the Clampersand was imagined as a great way to make visual jokes or keep a bookshelf grammatically interesting. Clamp books together as a physically punctuated list of favorites, or leave it standing proud to accompany paired objects. Your salt & pepper, perhaps?

The Brass Clampersand makes a great gift for that brassy, type-obsessed friend whose feelings about kerning go well past the point of function or good taste. That letter-lover with a list of preferred typefaces as ardently specific as a high schooler's list of favorite bands. This cool clamp isn't just a fun pun, it's a serifed trophy for folks with a serious love of words. 

In now at Hand-Eye Supply for $85.

Even in the 19th Century, people had a need for adjustable shelving. A retailer might need to change shelf heights to display new wares; and on the domestic front, if you purchased a Sega Genesis and then upgraded to the Dreamcast, the boxes were different sizes.

An unknown craftsperson solved this problem by creating what's colloquially referred to as "sawtooth shelving:"

Image and construction by Colin Spicer

Image and construction by Hummingbird Woodworks

If it's not obvious to you how it works, these shots should make it clear:

Sorry for the grainy resolution, but this rendering is from the 1800s

Image and construction by The Wood Mechanic

Image and construction by The Wood Mechanic

By creating a cleat that fits between the "sawteeth," then cutting a shelf with notches in the four corners, one has a handy, pin-free way to quickly change the shelf's height.

Some of you might wonder why they didn't simply use dadoes that shelves could be slid in and out of. The answer appears to be aesthetic: Dadoes would break the lines of the verticals when viewed from the front, and covering them with a face frame would of course make it impossible to slide shelves in and out, thus defeating the purpose.

These days it's tough to imagine going to the trouble of building such a system, when one can simply whip out a drill or router and a shelf-pin jig. But that hasn't stopped modern-day companies like Woodcraft from trying to bring it back:

Ditto for Lee Valley, which sells kits:

For those of you looking to make your own, without all of that detailed sawing or (shudder) chiseling, this woman has constructed what she refers to as a variant used by Victorian-era builders:

I'm guessing she used a Forstner bit and then ripped the pieces in half, which seems might be faster than setting up a jig.

We Love Cycling put together this awesome video of the 2015 European Bike Stealing Championships, whereby hidden cameras are placed in three cities where bike theft is a major problem. Bait bikes are laid--and rigged up with explosive (but harmless) powder bombs, and a music surprise for each thief:

While the footage is real, the event is obviously not an actual competition; WLC put it together as part of their bike theft awareness coverage for this month.

…There are lot of things you can do to make the thief's life as hard as possible – buying a good lock, registering your bike, paying attention when buying from the second hand shops [that might be trafficking in stolen bikes] and much more…. Every little thing counts when fighting the evil.

For those of you who have ever had your bicycles stolen—I've lost two myself—it's pretty satisfying watching hidden camera footage of thieves getting pranked, tackled, captured, and even stealing a bike that's been rigged up so that their nuts crash into the handlebars. WLC has assembled nine such videos here—but be aware that some involve violence and are NSFW! 

As a professional organizer, I've seen clients open boxes of fragile ornaments only to find a number of them were broken. End users with precious delicate ornaments  are going to be well served by using some sort of protective ornament box. I'm going to (mostly) skip over the hard-plastic boxes; these can trap moisture and they sometimes contain chemicals which can damage the ornaments. But there are plenty of other boxes out there, and some of them have notable features.

I've had some hands-on experience with the boxes from Ultimate Christmas Storage, and I was impressed. They're made from acid-free heavy-duty chipboard, which combined with acid-free tissue provides a level of protection some end users will appreciate. The trays were easy to remove and replace; I've seen boxes with layered dividers with no edges, and they were much harder to use. As with many ornament boxes, the dividers are removable so the end user can create spaces for larger ornaments. 

The Keepsake Ornament Storage Chest from Sterling Pear doesn't have the archival properties of the prior box, but the trays are padded on the bottom and lined in a black velveteen, providing protection even if the end user prefers to not use tissue paper for further nesting. The box has two 3.5" tall trays and one 4.5" tall tray.

While many boxes at least one layer intended for larger ornaments, those boxes often aren't properly sized for the largest of ornaments. So it's nice that someone designed a box which will hold oversized ornaments with a 6" diameter.

The most flexible ornament storage solution may be these single-layer acid-free boxes which come in a range of sizes (3" to 6" deep) and can be stacked. End users can get exactly the sizes they need, it's easier to see quickly what's where (because there are no hidden layers), and the boxes will fit into more storage places since each box isn't all that tall. But some end users will find it more convenient to have a single decorative box rather than a set of boxes.

While most ornament boxes use trays, some use drawers—another way to make it easy to see what's where.

End users who don't like to carry a bulky ornament box (because they have physical limitations or because they fear dropping it) may appreciate Balsam Hill's Deluxe Rolling Ornament Chest, available in two sizes. However, this chest won't work well for those who store ornaments on a different level of the home than where the tree will be. This chest also has a front pocket designed to store a tree skirt, which some end users will find helpful.

The telescoping ornament keeper from TreeKeeper is another rolling option—this one designed to take a minimum amount of storage space.

All the trays are velour-lined, creating protective nests for the ornaments.

While boxes and chests are the normal tools for organizing ornaments, there's one design I've seen which takes a very different approach. The Ornament Safe stores the ornaments by hanging them from removable rods, all within a foam-lined crate. This won't work for oversized ornaments, and fragile ornaments will need proper separation from neighboring ones (which may mea using the safe to less than its full capacity). But for the end user with the right ornaments, this is a quick and easy way to store them.

Those designing packaging for ornaments can also help the end user by selling those ornaments in sturdy boxes that are easy to reuse. These small boxes will still need to be placed along with others in a larger box for storage, but that larger box wouldn't have to be an ornament box. I've had ornaments that came in boxes like the one housing this Orca ornament, and they work very nicely.

This holiday, share your Ultimate Gift Guide with Core77 for a chance to gift yourself some fun prizes. We're on the lookout for your Top 5 gift ideas for the holidays and will reward the best gift guides with awesome prizes like Hand-Eye Supply gift certificates, SONOS speakers and the Apple Watch!

Continuing the showdown, we've picked our three favorite gift guides from this week (plus a bonus!)—we wanted to include an extra guide because one of last week's winners is a contributor to Core77. Each winner will be receiving a Hand-Eye Supply gift certificate and are in the running for the big enchilada on December 8: an Apple Watch or SONOS speakers.

Aspiring designers and newbies, fear not. Rebekah Winegarner's "Designer Starter Kit" has a few basics to get you started on the right foot. Notes on establishing a signature style to flashcards for the fundamentals of design (thinking) will have you fitting right in at that next design charrette. 

Chris Santone's "Brass Barware" gift guide has elegant ideas for an elevated, designer-ly night of drinking. Just add the bar cart and booze. 

Trying to spend less time on screens? For those going on a digital diet, Anders Klitgaard's "Analog Gifts for Digital People," has great ideas for holiday hangs IRL. From puzzles to boardgames, catalogs to LEGOS, these gifts promise hours of offline fun without any of the silly nostalgia.

For those designers who know that camera phones just aren't enough, Eric Meltzer's "Cameras Which Remain Actually Useful in the Age of Smartphones"  guide will inspire you to carry around some extra gear for capturing crazy Uncle Charlie's epic holiday moments this season.

Thanks to all of those who submitted, and congratulations to our winners! You'll be receiving a $25 Hand-Eye Supply gift certificate— check out all the potential items you could snag with your prize here!

Want in on the fun? MAKE YOUR OWN ULTIMATE GIFT GUIDE HERE and you could win a $25 GIFT CERTIFICATE TO HAND-EYE SUPPLY (you'll also be in the running for our envy-inducing grand prize, an Apple Watch).

For those that haven't seen it, take a look at the elliptical, Philip-Johnson-designed "Lipstick Buiding" in midtown Manhattan:

In design school, one of our professors told us that when the building was designed in the '80s, the structural engineers weren't sure where the stresses would go; elliptical buildings were not a known entity. So they allegedly built a huge ellipse out of Plexiglas first, then applied different stresses to it to see where it would crack. My professor's point was that when you're wandering into unknown design territory, sometimes "making it and breaking it" is the only way to figure out how to proceed.

Along similar lines, skate legend Tony Hawk recently came up with the crazy idea to make a horizontal skate loop. (You'd think he'd have sworn off of trying to skate the unskateable after fracturing his skull on the then-undoable vertical loop in 2003, but this is Hawk we're talking about here.) 

As with the Johnson building, there was no way to know how to proceed; with no predecessors Hawk had no idea what speed, angle of approach and weight distribution to take to navigate it. The only way to find out was to build it, apply forces and see where the failures are:

Magnetic, No-Math Hexagonal Coasters

Bob Clagett shows a cool project you can make out of pieces of scrap wood: Hexagonal coasters that stick together magnetically. He reveals how to quickly draw a hexagon using a compass, rather than using angles and head-scratching math, and also whips up a simple jig to help drill for the magnets. Excellent problem solving here:

Five Handy Tool Hacks

This week Izzy Swan offers up a bunch of useful shop hacks. After twenty years of recycling pallet wood and barn wood, he's come up with some quicker ways to remove those nails and staples and make the holes virtually disappear. He's also come up with a clever way to vacuum up the mess on your shop floor--without sucking any nails and screws into the hose!

Make Your Clone Reorganize Your Shop

The first or even second time you set up your shop, you take your best guess as to how to arrange it. Over time you discover your workflow isn't as efficient, and then you have to make sometimes tough decisions to sacrifice one object for another as you shuffle things around. Here Jay Bates uses a clever video editing trick to show you how he's getting his shop ready for a new workbench.

DIY Strip Sander

Is there a power tool Matthias Wandelhasn't built? Dissatisfied with his store-bought strip sander, this week Wandel reveals how he built his own with old rollerblade wheels and DIY plywood pulleys. He's even worked out a dust port!

Experiments in Embossing

For those of you working in busy production shops, one of the best things you can do with your downtime is to run tests with new tools that may speed your workflow; that will pay off when client work comes in with tight deadlines. Here Jimmy DiResta experiments with his new X-Carve machine to create embossing stamps for book covers, seeing what works and what doesn't.

Getting Large-Scale Things On the Level

Making things isn't just about executing your design; it's about figuring out what to do when things go wrong in the middle of your process. Here Frank Howarth problem-solves on the fly as he discovers his welded CNC base has gone bowed. Without a perfectly level table, a CNC mill's not much good; here's his fix.

Storage Bench from One Sheet of Plywood

Ana White shows you how to build a simple storage bench out of a single sheet plywood, and pretties it up with some trim, coving and a coat of paint. Despite the fact that it looks like she's using humble B/C plywood, the end result looks like something you'd find in Pottery Barn. Also check out the variants her followers have made.

From the Archives

Bentwood Laminations Explained & Demonstrated

Marc Spagnuolo shows you one of his favorite techniques: Bentwoodlaminations. It's labor-intensive for sure, but if you don't want to mess with steaming, this is the way to go. Helpfully, he also touches on the different types of glue you could use and what their pluses and minuses are.

Sprucing Up a Nasty-Looking Built-In, Fast

When to rip out, and when to re-use? Here Jesse de Geest takes a decidedly ugly built-in shelving/cabinet unit from the 1970s, and shows you how he spiffed it up in just a few hours with some simple techniques. Re-use FTW!

Tool Gems at a Low-Cost Retailer

At the notoriously low-cost tool retailer Harbor Freight, it seems like every day is Black Friday. The company's quality reputation seems to match their prices, with many writing them off as purveyors of junk; but here David Picciuto shows you the "Five Best Harbor Freight Tool Gems" that'll make a visit worthwhile.

One way to design a chair is to start with the hard measurements, using handy reference guides like these. But some of you may prefer to "feel" your way around the problem, setting up planes at different angles and sitting in them to see how they feel, then tweaking until you find the desired fit.

For those of you in the latter camp, the quickest way to do this while generating measureable data is to build a "chair rig." Most of you that went through a furniture design program have seen (or built) one of these, but for those that haven't, here's a pretty standard one built by Jonathan Panichella during his days as an ID student at the University of Cincinnati:

With a rig like this, it's easy to quickly reset the angles--and of course, have folks of different sizes try out your configurations. Panichella used this to work out a desireable position, enlisting the help of classmates. "They all found it quite comfortable!" he writes. "From the shortest girl:"

"To the tallest guy:"

(By the bye, the rig two of my furniture design professors showed me had sides made from metal grids comprised of one-inch squares. This made it easy to stick pipes in and out of, and didn't require any drilling.)

Lastly, here's some shots of Panichella's finished product:

Nice work!

To land this position, you should be able to merge the technical issues associated with complex engineering with the simplicity and elegance of "good" design to look for ways to streamline the user experience. You'll work throughout the entire production cycle & should have 8 years of product/transportation design experience.

I'm not surprised that Amazon is pressing ahead with their drone delivery initiative, and I even think they stand a chance of winning the regulatory approval they seek. I was not surprised when they released another video this weekend depicting their drone delivery vision. But I was surprised at how freaking huge the thing is! First off, take a look at the video and watch out for scale-spotting moments:

It's not obvious at a glance, but compared to the rinky-dink drone Amazon showed in their first video, just two years ago, the new Prime Air drone prototype is enormous. While the hero shot below doesn't provide any scale…

…in the video we see it dropping off a shoebox:

For scale's sake, here's the drone hovering above the shoebox:

To be clear, in the photo above the drone is not closer to the camera lens, it is directly above the box it just dropped off. Even accounting for the fact that these are "size 3" shoes, according to the video narrator, that drone's got to be at least a meter* square, no? Call me paranoid, but I don't want delivery drones that are large enough to support an M60 machinegun, should one happen to be bolted on.

Of course, it's also possible that the shoebox is simply a tiny mock-up for demonstration's sake. But I'm looking at that fencepost in the background and thinking it's accurate.

Do you all think this will become a reality, or is it wishful thinking on Bezos' part? I think that if anyone has the power to make delivery drones mainstream, it's a major retailer like Amazon. And, heads up—Walmart is looking into them too.

*(I went with meters rather than feet in case I'm way off. That way I can claim American ignorance and hide behind our unfamiliarity with the metric system.)

This 3D printed model is based on a flat two-cylinder internal combustion engine. Engines using this geometry are commonly found in motorcycles and small aircraft. The design is intended for the specific process and materials used in 3D printing and the model is not based on any specific engine design.