Convertible Dining/Gaming Table

As his family continues to grow, it's time for Marc Spagnuolo to build a new dining table. Since both the Wood Whisperer and his wife are self-professed gaming geeks, he opted to build a convertible dining/gaming table. (It's not as elaborate as Geek Chic's gorgeous gaming tables, but Spagnuolo's version is meant to be more of a doable DIY project than a $13,000 masterpiece.) I loved watching this carefully-planned build come together:

Improvised Corner Joinery Method

Because I make so many screw-ups myself, one of my favorite things to watch is how people recover from making screw-ups in their own shop. Here Matthias Wandel has miscalculated and cut some pieces of plywood for a storage box too short; not wanting to waste the wood, he improvises a signature Wandel fix.

One Hell of a Bell

Holy cow. Frank Howarth makes what has to be one of the most complicated-to-fabricate Christmas ornaments I've ever seen, using a combination of segmented turning, CNC milling, and a variety of improvised solutions. As always, it is fascinating to watch architect Howarth when he tackles a project where he designs as he goes along, rather than sticking with a rigid plan.

Mobile Shop Cart

As April Wilkerson continues building out her shop, she needs to create more shop furniture to hold the influx of new tools. Here she whips up a mobile shop cart to hold her new thickness planer and spindle sander.

Things to Use an Ice Pick For

This week on Jimmy DiResta's channel we've got a surprise comedy video, courtesy of shopmate David Waelder. Together the two have been collaborating on these handsome, useful icepicks, and in the video they show some potential applications.

Handheld Beer Launching Device

Izzy Swan's got a show-and-tell video this week, demonstrating his crazy http://shop.jimmydiresta.com/ice-pick/ . Yep, it's just what it sounds like: A handheld device made to launch a six-pack--not all at once, of course--into the neighbor's yard.

Teaser For a Combination Samurai/Roubo Workbench

This week's video from The Samurai Carpenter is a bit of a tease. With his new shop starting to take shape, he gives us a clamped-up glimpse of the "Sam-bo" workbench he's developing--a hybrid between a "Samurai" bench and a Roubo workbench. We can't wait to see the finished product!

On a Mission to Hang Coats

Jay Bates gets to kick back and narrate while he puts his clone to work banging out a Mission-style coat rack. Along the way, he uses the convenient circle template that all of us have in our kitchens. And on the project page, he reveals how Sketchup is not only helping him work out his designs, but save on paper: "I rarely print anything anymore so with the completed design and material layout [done in Sketchup] sent to my phone I could start marking my material and preparing for the first few cuts."

Ana White Builds a House, Gets a Show

Ana White made a big announcement this week: She and husband Jacob have been quietly working on an amazing-looking remote lakeside cabin in Alaska--and the building process has been picked up by the DIY Network! The resultant show, Building Off the Grid - Alaska Range will premiere on Tuesday, December 15th at 10pm.

The Santa Claus that No One on Alderaan Wants to See

Christmas is coming up. So is the new Star Wars movie. Therefore this week Bob Clagett did the only reasonable thing, which is to build a Santa-themed Death Star to go onto the roof of his house.

One From the Archives

Custom Angle Shooting Plane

Hand tool maven Shannon Rogers, a/k/a The Renaissance Woodworker, shows you how to make a custom angle shooting board--by cleverly saving the offcut from the piece you're working. Sure, woodworking purists will insist you oughtn't use a hand plane on plywood; but the thing I love about Rogers is that he doesn't stand on ceremony and just gets the job done. Tools are tools, use 'em!

You have a BA in Industrial Design (or related) with 1-5 years professional experience and a proficiency in Adobe Suite, 3D CAD, and Microsoft Office Suite. You should have a hands-on approach to problem solving through prototyping and mock-ups, can contribute to early design phases, and assist in category research.

What do you do with a decommissioned airplane? As we saw here, after six 737s fell off of a freight train, Boeing had no choice but to recycle the massive crafts at the actual accident site. But when aeronautics enthusiast Bruce Campbell got his hands on an old, intact 727, he had the thing disassembled—and re-assembled in the forest outside of Portland, Oregon. Rather than have it recycled, he figured it'd make a perfect home.

Cleared for rake-off

Design decisions abounded: To live in an airplane, do you gut and re-shape the interior to mimic a proper house? Or do you try to maintain the original character while retrofitting domestic amenities like a shower and laundry facilities? Retired engineer Campbell, who's been living and working on the thing since acquiring it in 1999, opted for the latter:

In the video Campbell refers to occasionally leaving. I wonder if he still takes conventional airplane flights, and has to fight the urge to walk around the cabin in boxers and socks.

While Amazon is working on drones to deliver packages, Tokyo's Metropolitan Police Department needs drones that will capture packages. Specifically, other drones. Last April an unauthorized drone was found on the roof of the Japanese Prime Minister's residence, and because of its payload—radioactive soil from the Fukushima disaster—it was classified as a terrorist incident. Since then the MPD has been seeking ways to intercept unauthorized drones in-flight; now, according to Japan's Asahi Shimbun, they have it.

Artist's Rendering

Artist's Rendering

Artist's Rendering

Okay fine, so this is what it really looks like.

Perhaps I grew up watching too much anime, because I picture a Japanese Interceptor Drone having all sorts of wicked lasers, retractable claw arms or little missiles that leave cool, twisty smoke trails. But the MPD has the concern of not wanting an intercepted drone to tumble to earth, potentially injuring those below, so they've come up with something a bit more mundane:

This month they'll deploy the first unit, which will reportedly be tended by remote pilots working in shifts to provide 24-hour-a-day service. By February, having presumably worked out the kinks, the MPD will increase the fleet size to ten, according to the Nikkei Asian Review.

Watching the video above, it occurs to me that the future is never as cool as you think it's going to be. I guess it will be a while yet before we'll see flight interceptions like the ones from Robotech.

Newell Rubbermaid is already an American consumer products giant, with the brands under their umbrella including Irwin, Sharpie, X-Acto, Elmer's, Prismacolor, Paper Mate, Vise-Grip, Rubbermaid and more. (Some of you may have even applied for the Senior Industrial Design job opening in their Ignite division, which makes thermal mugs and hydration bottles.) 

Jarden Corporation is another huge American company bristling with brands, like Oster, Sunbeam, Breville, K2 Sports, Marmot, First Alert, Coleman and more; all told Jarden has some 120 brands, "making it one of the largest diversified consumer products makers in the United States," Reuters reports, "selling everything from firewood to condoms."

Now the question is whether Newell Rubbermaid and Jarden are two great tastes that taste great together. The company brass apparently thinks so, as it was announced this morning that the former is buying the latter for US $13.22 billion.

Once combined, the company will simply be called Newell Brands and is expected to do $16 billion in revenue annually. Current Newell Rubbermaid CEO Michael B. Polk will keep the same title over the new venture, while Jarden founder Martin E. Franklin will join the Board of Directors.

The deal is expected to be completed by Q2 of next year, and following that the company expects to see "$500 million in incremental cost synergies expected over the next four years," which we take to mean "Yeah, some folks are gettin' fired." 

We hope those of you with design jobs in either entity are safe, or at least have enough time over the next four years to come up with a transition plan. When the time comes, the Core77 Job Boards are always there for you.

Maybe I had carbs on my mind, but when I spotted Railing amidst the Design Miami coverage this year, it was love at first sight. Resembling something close to thick black spaghetti, the collection of furniture had me wanting to know more. A lot more.

Turns out, the contorted metal furniture is the work of Aranda\Lasch, a New York– and Tucson-based architecture studio helmed by Benjamin Aranda and Chris Lasch, whose website boasts complex projects ranging from a metallic geode in collaboration with Casey Reas to a proposal for a Palisade Glacier Mountain Hut. It's no surprise that Aranda\Lasch's latest work is another feat of geometric prowess. The two chairs and one stool are each composed from a single line curving through a lattice of fractal circles—more on that in a minute—which closes upon itself to form a continuous loop.

Aranda\Lasch's Railing stool

One of the two Railing chairs

Aranda and Lasch initially came up with the idea for Railing in response to a 2012 call for proposals to design a system of public furniture for Phoenix's Hance Park. Although their submission didn't make the cut, the two architects liked the idea so much that they decided to pursue it anyway. 

Similar to many of Aranda\Lasch's projects, Railing is created from a geometric system. Building out a polyhedral system in Rhino, the architects worked with polyhedral packing software to draw and scale fractal loops, creating a 3D lattice of circles. Unlike many of their projects, however, that system was not the end product; instead, it was an underlying framework that Aranda and Lasch used to create new forms. "It was developed as a system, so it leveraged a lot of our thinking that had gone into previous projects having to do with especially modular systems of design and construction," Lasch says. "But unlike other projects we've undertaken, this one had a different kind of expression in that the underlying geometry was not the thing that was expressed, but served as a way to guide the development of these arcs."

From polyhedra to fractal loops to some seriously loopy furniture

Using the 3D lattice as a guide, Aranda and Lasch would select various connecting arcs in Rhino, each split at the midpoint of a connecting circle on the edges of a polyhedron. "You pick your parts out and it creates this closed loop," Lasch says. Since the underlying system was a fractal, the arcs varied in scale but were continuous—allowing the final forms to maintain a bit of the initial modularity of the polyhedral systems that helped organize them.

After pulling out specific arcs to create continuous loops, Aranda\Lasch made 3D prints of the forms to create the first round of prototypes. "The initial physical prototypes are 3D prints, and then slowly it moves into other media as we get closer to the real, actual furniture scale of this stuff," Lasch says. "Initially, we were playing around with PVC pipe that we bought at Home Depot and testing out different types of upholstery."

While PVC pipe helped the team understand the scale of their collection, they soon looked for ways to fabricate the final designs out of metal, stumbling upon a catalog for standard steel railing in the process. That catalog of off-the-shelf steel tubing gave the furniture its name, and Arada and Lasch flipped through page after page of functional metal railings intended for use in buildings and stairwells. "The kit of parts that we were working with in Rhino is pretty elemental," Lasch says. "It's just arcs. So, in a way, once we found a material solution to embody an arc, the design could come to life."

The architects were able to scale their underlying lattice to align with the standard sizing of the railing, effectively creating a ready-made kit of parts for their design. "We used a subset of those polyhedra and matched them up with this metal kit of parts," Lasch says. "We ordered a bunch of these elbows and then reconfigured the same set of modular parts into three different chair configurations—two chairs and a stool." While the underlying lattice had to be scaled to match the railing catalog, Lasch says that their design remained the same. "As we played around with it, it was more about the translation from digital to physical," Lasch says. "We didn't have to make too many compromises. It was really more about making these designs into usable pieces of furniture. There are only so many ways that you can guess at the materiality and comfort level for how a person is going to interact with a three-dimensional object until you start building it."

The second Railing chair

As Aranda and Lasch built out their pieces, some of them were simplified—by removing a few extraneous arcs, say, or creating a more defined seat. "It's a process that we're still going through as we build out the collection," Lasch says. Metal parts were cut down to the proper number of degrees, varying between 180º and 60º, before being tack-welded together. "It's like it's own jig," Lasch says. "Because it's continuous, it guides itself around through space to connect back up with itself at the end, like a snake eating its tail."

While the railing catalog proved to be a delightful solution to their complex system, upholstery was an uphill battle for the architects. After reaching out to a slew of local upholsterers in Arizona, Lasch came back empty-handed. "It was surprising," Lasch says. "I thought it would be a no-brainer, but I guess it just wasn't something they had seen before."

The secret ingredient is baby powder.

Aranda and Lasch ended up testing materials themselves, trying out swatches of leather, rubber and neoprene, as well as different kinds of padding and various fabrics to enclose the padding. "We tried everything, but nothing was as seamless, as pure, as the system itself," Lasch says. The continuous loops of the pieces posed a host of challenges for upholstery. "A curve in one direction is easy to upholster, but a doughnut is a lot harder and a piece that is just a bunch of doughnuts connected together is really tough," Lasch says. "Basically, if you look at a torus, it doesn't flatten out readily into a seamless, flat pattern. So, we spent a lot of time negotiating the stretchiness of different materials along with two-dimensional tailoring patterns for those materials that would allow us to wrap them around our curly tubes."

Eventually, the duo discovered silicone foam and, with it, an industrial factory willing to work with them to create entirely custom colors and thicknesses, all within the timeline they needed. "So we essentially took a 12-foot tube where the padding, color and skin were all integrated into one another," Lasch says. "Then it was just a matter of putting a tube inside a tube, pulling the foam tubes around the metal tubes."

Their secret? "Lots of baby powder," Lasch says. "The studio smelled like a nursery for two weeks." The duo also used an air compressor to help nudge the silicone along. "We would put an air compressor into the end of the tube and blow it up like a big balloon animal, to get it to expand just enough so that we could pull it another few inches across our metal tubes," Lasch says.

With three finished pieces under their belt, Aranda and Lasch are now looking to complete the collection with new designs, and to streamline the production process. "Now that we have a process, we can use the prototype to achieve a more automated solution via a CNC bender," Lasch says. I'm crossing my fingers for a spaghetti table in the coming year.

This week's Projects section will feature works coming from Art Center's brand new Interaction Design Department. The students featured are part of the department's very first graduating class. Each project explores through interactive tech solutions how people think, feel and behave when they encounter a product, place or ecosystem.

Coinciding with the annual Art Basel show, Design Miami packed just as much energy and hype as the vibrant art event itself. With over 30 galleries from around the world, fair highlights included mid-century classics, offbeat design-art explorations, and design star project debuts.

The venue was impressive in terms of the quality of the booth sets ups, which highlighted the beauty of each piece. Keeping with the commercial purpose of art and design fairs, Design Miami is geared towards pushing sales and less about the designs and designers. Galleries did not always have the answers to specific processes used in creating the work, and at times I felt a disconnect to the spirit of the work (not to mention amenities were extremely expensive— $16-24 for a sandwich!).

Despite some of its faults, there were several noteworthy furniture debuts and gallery displays to look forward to. Here is a breakdown of some of the fair's best:

Best Use of Space

Body Building: the theme for this booth, which featured works from Atelier Biagetti, was inviting and gave me to the urge to use the workout equipment. The thick court lines were a nice framing detail to carry out the sports theme on the metallic floor. The beaver fur covered medicine balls reminded me of a modern bean bag. Although the equipment might not be optimal for performance, the hand crafted pieces exuded quality while perfectly hugging the line between art and design. 

Best Line Up

Carpenters Workshop Gallery: I was impressed with the work found at CWG. There was a high level of design that ranged from playful art geared towards luxury collectors to objects experimenting with innovative materials and technology. Drift Studios FF3 light was impressive with its use of real dandelion seeds that surround LEDs on a 3D bronze open circuit. The FF3 light sparks an interesting conversation about the symbiosis between technology and nature and how they intersect with our lives.

Booth with the Best Story

The Future Perfect: Lex Pott uses a rare Belgian blue marble to create luxurious tables. The designer was able to use the wasted rough chunks left behind during mining large slabs of marble. The table top surfaces are polished to reveal a beautiful smooth surface speckled with small fossils. The booth was draped in Calico Wallpaper (the company was inspired by Pott's use of the Belgian Bluestone and developed a paint using the pigment created from the pulverized stone). During the event, the gallery staged a live demonstration of the wallpaper being painted on site with the custom paint.

Most Captivating Booth

The Afreaks collection, a collaboration between the Haas Brothers and Haas sister felt like a page out of a perfectly twisted fairy tale. While I stood underneath the canopy of a 6 ft tall mushroom, it was not difficult to feel immersed into the make believe world the Haas brothers were able to produce. The pink booth was filled with playful critters and furniture covered in vibrant and detailed beadwork.

Most Innovative

Paul Cocksedge's Freeze Table: Cocksedge is able to build precision metal furniture without the use of any welds. His process is raw, and simple. With the use of freezing the metal before fitting the pieces the parts together, Cocksedge utilized the shrinkage that occurs during the contraction of the frozen metal. Once the metal is warmed up, the metal expands to create a very strong tension fit. 

[Read more about the process in our In the Details story dedicated to the Freeze Table.]

Metsidian by Jane Kyttanen for Gallery ALL

Photo credit: Kevin Do

Brass, Split Chair (SQN3-A) by Zhoujie Zhang

Photo credit: Kevin Do

Sculpture by Guy Corriero

Represented by Patrick Parrish Gallery

Photo credit: Kevin Do

Belgium Blue Stone Table by Lex Pott

For Future Perfect's "Fragments" display

Photo credit: Kevin Do

Belgium Blue Stone Table by Lex Pott

For Future Perfect's "Fragments" display

Photo credit: Kevin Do

Hand Carved Vessels by Ernest Gamperl

for Sarah Myercoucgh Gallery.

Photo credit: Kevin Do

Bowl Coupe and Elegant Bowl by Ursula & Karl Scheid

for Jason Jacques Inc

Photo credit: Kevin Do

Hand Built Object by Bente Skjottgaard

Photo credit: Kevin Do

Acrylic, Dawn Lights by Sabine Marcelis

for Victor Hunt

Photo credit: Kevin Do

Black Gold by Quintus Kropholler

commissioned for Chamber NYC

Photo credit: Kevin Do

This candidate will be responsible for full compliance with design standards, timelines, manufacturing, quality assurance, and gemstone acquisition requirements. S/he will plan, create, and develop 2D Concept art (pencil, marker, gouache, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.) as well as 3D Finished Goods/CAD models for new and existing products using several software packages.

In the last entry we looked at your standard valet trays, which sit horizontal. But lately on Etsy there's been a rash of designs going vertical, either to provide better visibility or take up less tabletop real estate. They presumably evolved from simple phone holders like this one or that one…

…into models like this that could hold the phone, plus keys and a watch:

Some of them get a bit busier, like this one:

This design offers similar capacity but gets a little cutesy with the charging cord:

While the one above at least uses nice-looking lumber-core plywood, this model below has gone with the cheaper stuff, to ill effect; for the hero shot, I'd not have gone with a visible void in the plywood. But this piece also adds the capability to charge an Apple Watch.

This model is for people who really love California. It also provides space for storage behind the vertical plane, which seems a bit ergonomically awkward:

In general, I think this odd category of object tends to look better in natural wood, like this one below:

You'll notice none of the designs above leave any place for coins. These solid wood models provide a small depression for them, as well as pegs for wedding rings:

While I'm not a fan of the aesthetics of any of these, the sheer proliferation of them on Etsy seems to indicate there's demand. (Click here, you'll see there's dozens of sellers producing a wide variety of designs.) It's not often that we get to see a new type of object populate our "product landscape." The question is whether the somewhat clunky designs will remain firmly rooted in the craft sector, or if the more snobbish design world will jump on board.

Attendees of last October’s Core77 Conference will no doubt remember Matthew Manos’s presentation—as the founder of the Los Angeles–based design-strategy consultancy verynice, Manos is on a mission to get more designers to donate work to pro-bono causes, and he makes a persuasive case for why giving work away doesn’t necessarily mean losing something.

His latest initiative is Models of Impact, a toolkit that aims to get educators, entrepreneurs, designers and nonprofits thinking about how to create “disruptive” business models—and to have fun while doing it. The idea is that you get your team together and go through the various game-based exercises and brainstorming activities in the toolkit, which can act as a catalyst for a new product, service or program.

The toolkit gets participants to mix and match impact models (left) and revenue models (right), in an effort to spur ideas for new programs and services. (Click to enlarge the image.)

One of the key exercises involves a glossary of “revenue models” and “impact models”—i.e. ways to make money and ways to do good (see the icons above). Participants are directed to roll dice to match up random combinations of revenue and impact models; then they’re tasked with inventing scenarios for how those combinations could work in the real world, and in combination with other factors relevant to their own businesses.

The Models of Impact toolkit is now available to download on a pay-what-you-want basis (even if you want to pay zero dollars). To help people get into the disruptive spirit, we asked Manos to select ten businesses that he thinks are doing an exceptional job combining revenue and impact models. His list, and his rationale for each choice, is below.

1. Homeboy Industries

Retail commerce + jobs for transitional communities

Homeboy Industries is the leading gang-intervention organization in the United States, but what makes it stand out as a nonprofit is not just its incredible impact. Homeboy’s unique approach to meaningful earned revenue has paved the way for many nonprofits that integrate business acumen enterprise into the social sector. Its various entrepreneurial endeavors (like a silkscreen company, a tattoo removal service and a suite of delicious foods) provide a diverse range of sales funnels for the organization to fund its services AND provide jobs to its clients. A true win-win.

2. Inward Bound Mindfulness Education

Sliding scale rates + social awareness

Inward Bound Mindfulness Education (iBme) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the lives of teens, parents and professionals. Through mindfulness retreats, iBme helps participants cultivate awareness, compassion and kindness for themselves, others and the natural world. The retreats are offered on a sliding-scale basis, and no one is turned away due to a lack of funds. The suggested sliding-scale rate is a total amount of 1% of a family’s household income.

3. Processing

Sliding scale rates + open source

Processing is an open-source software language that allows artists and designers to experiment with programming. Libraries and initiatives that enhance the Processing framework are made available for anyone and everyone to use and build upon. The product itself is available on a pay-what-you-want basis, which makes the software accessible to students and artists.

4. BOGO Bowl

Animal welfare + one for one

BOGO Bowl is a premium pet-food brand that allows customers to give back to animals in need with every purchase they make. For every bag of food that a customer buys, an additional bag of food is donated to an animal in need. By marketing the brand as a premium solution for pet food needs, BOGO Bowl is able to create a model of impact that leaves it with the appropriate margins to ensure the feasibility of matching donations.

5. DIGDEEP

Environment/water conservation + 100% model

DIGDEEP is a nonprofit organization that believes access to water is a human right. The organization works domestically, and has also worked extensively outside of the United States, to build wells and provide solutions for sustainable, ongoing access to water in communities in need. What is so unique about this model of impact is that every public donation is guaranteed to fund work in the field, as opposed to administrative costs. To fund administrative costs, DIGDEEP leverages the 100% model through its innovative “Water Council”—a board of successful individuals who agree to underwrite the annual costs of operating the organization. By leveraging this model, DIGDEEP inspires more donations from people who want to ensure that every dime they donate goes to the cause itself.

6. Impact Hub

Civic/social incubator + membership/subscription

Impact Hub is a global network of social-impact entrepreneurs who convene in a series of local coworking spaces. These spaces have a range of initiatives and cultures, but they are all driven by the concept that business and social/civic/environmental impact can coexist. The organization operates like a franchise, and members can join each space on a monthly basis by signing up for various tiers and benefits at varying monthly costs.

7. The Grameen Bank

Microlending + jobs

The Grameen Bank is a microfinance organization and community-development bank that was founded in Bangladesh by the world-renowned social entrepreneur Muhammad Yunus. The organization makes it simple for local business owners and individuals living in impoverished communities to receive small loans for their endeavors without requiring any collateral.

8. Jerry the Bear

Product for health/medical benefit + product

Jerry the Bear is a product by Sproutel that makes it easy (and fun!) for children with food allergies or type-2 diabetes to learn how to cope with their condition. Each bear acts as both an educational platform and a friend that these users can relate to. By putting the needs of these niche communities at the forefront of the company’s mission, Sproutel has been able to create a significant model of impact.

9. LSTN

Product for service/access + partnerships

LSTN crafts beautiful headphones from reclaimed wood in order to fulfill a greater mission of helping people hear for the first time. By partnering with the nonprofit organization Starkey Hearing Foundation, LSTN is able to maximize its impact through a trusted relationship with an international expert in the cause they seek to support. The best part? Customers make this happen. With every pair of headphones that are sold, LSTN uses a percentage of the revenue to fund these hearing projects for communities in need.

10. 826 National

Retail commerce + access to education

826 National is an umbrella organization for many local 826 organizations based across the United States. Each local organization serves the children in a community through access to tutoring services that support creativity and literacy. Each local organization also operates behind a magical storefront full of inspirational products that are picked straight out of a unique narrative. For example, in Los Angeles, before getting to the tutoring center, you walk through a Time Travel Mart... a store where you can grab all of the necessities for your travels through time. This isn’t just a funny gimmick, though—the storefronts serve as a point of inspiration for the students AND they generate revenue for the organization so that it doesn’t have to rely only on donations and traditional grants.

While it's easy to think of creative work as living in the studio or shop, not so! Inspiring, well-made tools for the home are important too. We rounded up some tough, interesting, and good-looking home good in our guide for the Curated Home. Here are some favorites for fun or fastidious home-havers!

Twemco's Flip Clock pairs fun form and vintage number-flipper technology, with a precision German clockwork. They look demure but the alarm on this clock will help you out of bed, pronto.

Areaware's Blockitecture series by James Paulius is a wholly un-serious way to explore the Garden City era of city planning and architecture. Modular and modern, with idealistic topiary included.

Ad Manum hands won't help with the dishes, but they'll add visual interest and a little design tool throwback to any desk or shelf. Based on traditional glove-maker's models and available in two sizes. Felt-bottomed for grip, just like real hands.

For more gift picks for the home, check out the rest of the Guests vs. The Curated Home list and the full holiday collection here! 

What's the modern-day equivalent to beating swords into ploughshares? Perhaps it's turning .50-caliber bullets into pieces for a chess set, as Etsy seller OldeWorldCC does.

I'm digging how the pieces tuck away:

Made from used/spent .50 caliber BMG bullet shells, the light side is wire brushed brass, and the dark side is weathered/black painted brass. Cuts, bends and curls give each piece their proper designation. All pieces are then clear coated.

If you look closer, you'll see that the set is not strictly ballistic-themed; antique watch gears, old typewriter parts and custom-made hasps also adorn the red oak board, which has been artificially weathered using modelmaking techniques.

That's a quarter you see in the photo for scale. The board has apparently been sized to meet the large diameter of the shell casings, yielding a 16 x 16 square that's a chunky 2 1/2" thick.

The sets sell for $825, and the unnamed creator points out that the photos here are just the display model, as each one s/he crafts will be slightly different.

Check out more pieces by this seller here.

Hermit crabs are the hobo recyclers of the crustacean world. Because they are born with soft, long abdomens, they must wander around and find a discarded seashell to stick it into for protection, then they wear the shell around and essentially live out of it.

Japanese artist Aki Inomata started 3D-printing shells for hermit crabs around five years ago. It would've been fine with me if she was just trying to help the crabs out, like those folks who 3D-printed a titanium jaw to allow a mangled turtle to survive; but instead Inomata has printed the shells with cutesy architectural features on the back of them, like Japanese houses, Parisian apartment buildings, Dutch windmills, et cetera in order to, uh, "explore whether we really can choose the place or country where we live."

I dislike it when humans do things to animals, even seemingly harmless things, for their own amusement or in the name of artistic exploration. But her project has continued, and for some reason has just now begun to get traction on social media. Here's Inomata's trite explanation of its latest phase:

That last part of the video was what caught my attention!

We've seen people make clothing out of dog fur before, and showed you a video of the process, too. Harmless enough as the stuff is already off of the dog. And while I probably wouldn't wear a sweater made out of my dogs' cast-off fur, if there were some way to efficiently turn it into a useful material, like that wool felt they use to dampen vibrations in industrial settings, I'd happily contribute all of the fur I vacuum up.

But back to the dog-fur-jacket thing. So yeah, not only has Inomata worn a coat made from her dog's fur—as part of an art installation, naturally—she's also made the dog wear a "cape" made out of Inomata's own hair:

For those curious to wade through Inomata's project description, it's here.

This position is responsible for creatively solving design issues affecting aesthetics and/or manufacturing goals for products by working in CAD (PTC Creo). You'll be required to investigate simultaneous alternative designs for feasible solutions to problems from an engineering POV. You have 10-15 years experience and an expertise in surfacing techniques.

One of our favorite things about working at Core77 is trying to provide you with real-world design inspiration. It's always our dream that you'll catch a spark here that leads to your own brilliant Kickstarter campaign, or that you'll spot some clever solution that you can integrate into your design day job, or that you'll simply become motivated to try a creative technique you're unfamiliar with.

Despite that, we know there's times when you have to peel yourself away from the computer, put your coat on and find your design inspiration outside the house or office. There's only so many things you can learn while sitting at your desk. So here with some great pieces of advice for finding non-desk-related inspiration is Todd Clippinger, the artist and ex-contractor behind the American Craftsman Workshop. Though Clippinger's advice is loosely based around four main tips, there are enough sub-tips and tangential principles within each to make for a good offering:

Those of you who have gone through design school might find some of Clippinger's four main points familiar. In my own design education, they briefly touched on #1, skipped #2 altogether (a shame, as that might be the most important one), assumed everyone was already doing #3, and went a little too heavy on #4. How did yours stack up?

By the way, you'll notice we referred to Clippinger as an ex-contractor. That's because after turning 50 last month, he decided to hang up his longtime remodeling career and transition into his true passion: "I really love sharing the knowledge and experience I have gained as a contractor, designer, and craftsman with the woodworking community," Todd writes. Thus he's in the process of launching the online American Craftsman Shop Class. Watch that link for updates!

Just a couple days to go until Star Wars: Episode VII airs! In the meantime, tide yourself over by watching Spencer Nugent crank out the Millennium Falcon, ID-sketching-style, then digest the hard-hitting facts below:

Trivia question: Where in the movie timeline does the version of the Falcon that Nugent drew fall? And what gives it away in the drawing?

Random observation #1: Han Solo and Chewbacca are like the K-9 Unit of the galaxy.

Random observation #2: The ship is called the Millenium Falcon. The Star Wars universe is filled with weird animals that have names like "gundark" and "taun-taun." But somehow there are also falcons, enough of them that a smuggler sees one and names a ship after it. And since the movies are set "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away," that means that falcons have not only existed for a very long time, but they've also somehow mastered the interplanetary travel necessary to make it to Earth. Yet all they do here is sit around on people's gloves wearing little hoods.

This week's Projects section will feature works coming from Art Center's brand new Interaction Design Department. The students featured are part of the department's very first graduating class. Each project explores through interactive tech solutions how people think, feel and behave when they encounter a product, place or ecosystem.

Monument is a project designed as a system to improve the quality of life for Alzheimer's patients, their families, and their caregivers.

For some reason my house is full of stuff. Not even cool or useful things, just redundant stuff that I don't need or ever use. And yet for some reason I hold on to it. It's easier in the moment to just quickly stash things in a box and then squeeze those boxes into a closet—the perfect place to forget about their existence. At some point I realized that if I didn't do something about it, I'd end up carrying all this stuff around for...the rest of my life?! And so I set out to clean up my life and made a short film of the process. Since I never, ever want to do this again, I created a Buying Guide to help me make better decisions the next time I want to purchase something new. If you could use some help with it as well, download and print one for yourself!

I'd love to hear from you—have any of you embarked on a similar purging mission lately? 

This story originally appeared on Story Hopper, a collection of design stories worth sharing squeezed into short videos.

"I think of a design project as an exploration that involves both the mind and the senses. In order to understand something fully, I must test it and investigate it thoroughly, just as children do, when they touch and taste everything around them." 

Delving into Enrico Morteo's sweeping monograph Mario Bellini: Furniture Machines & Objects was one of the most engrossing reads I've experienced lately—that might be because the Italian polymath's work was entirely new to me, but even for the most rarefied connoisseurs among us, the book is a significant contribution to design history (or a nice addition for your coffee table, if you prefer). Despite having worked with some of the most iconic design companies—he was the chief design consultant at Olivetti from 1963-1991—Bellini's influential work remains less familiar than some of his contemporaries in the design mainstream. Yet somehow this book has arrived at the right moment. As the line between man and machine is growing more and more blurry, resurfacing Bellini's intuitive approach to industrial design is more timely than ever before. Traced through 500 images in this definitive book—including sketches and photographs from Bellini's personal archives published here for the first time—Bellini emerges as a key figure, still very much influential in the future directions of design.

An example of Bellini's juxtaposition of the rational and the playful, the Olivetti A4 Electronic Accounting Machine (1975) features a whimsical rear appendage that looks almost like a dinosaur's spine. In his hands, emerging technologies were transformed by a sense of the fantastic. 

The monograph contains a beautiful portfolio of diptychs showing Bellini's designs alongside the cultural references he drew inspiration from. 

"Questioning existing models is what I'm naturally best at. Not being a specialist is the ideal condition for me."

Bellini is perhaps best known as a designer of machines, through his work at Olivetti and Brionvega. Whether he was designing typewriters, TV's, calculators or audio devices, he was uniquely adept at translating the functions of technology into forms that were approachable and surprisingly joyful. At a time when new material innovations—in synthetic resins and polyurethanes—were taking hold of the industry in parallel to technological advances like the increased presence of microelectronics, Bellini faced these new challenges with flexibility. Rather than be daunted by having to answer questions that had never been asked before, he cherished the opportunities they brought forth. In fact, he was wholly against determining a fixed way of doing things, choosing instead to respond to each task with fresh eyes. His projects stand out because they are all so carefully considered, almost as if you could feel each typewriter have a distinctive personality. If there is a single lesson to draw from his work, it is the constant search for new ways in which design can draw meaningful connections between man and his environment. 

The Olivetti Divisumma 18 Electronic Calculator (1973) is molded after the shape of the human hand. For Bellini, creating a sensual connection between man and machine is paramount. 

Bellini conducted experiments with stretch membranes when designing the Olivetti TVC 250 Video Terminal to solve the issue of how a screen and keyboard could be held together. 

His approach, characterized by skepticism and curiosity, led to a distinctly playful aesthetic—though its impossible to characterize his work as pertaining to any one style. As he watched the design world undergo critical changes, he developed an incisive view that was ahead of his time. For example, in 1982, Bellini observed that "the future task of design will be to design ever smaller and thinner instruments…keyboards the size of a sheet of paper and screens so flat they fit inside a drawer." Pretty prescient, no? One can easily see the correlations between Bellini's close attention to surface, material and color crop up as inspiration for the work of Jonathan Ive or Yves Behar, among others.  

"I am increasingly interested in the semantic value of objects, more than in their techno-ergonomic performance. It is the meaning of forms, colors and materials that really interests me.

Commissioned for MoMA's 1972 exhibition, Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, Bellini's Kar-A-Sutra is one of his most seminal works and perfectly embodies his playful spirit. 

The Kar-A-Sutra featured a flexible interior with seats that could be positioned in a variety of configurations, as seen in the sketches above. This car-as-living-room concept might be a worthy example to look to as we consider the future of autonomous cars. 

The book gives an equal amount of weight to Bellini's other work: as an architect in the early part of his career; designing furniture for brands like B&B Italia, Cassina and Vitra; designing lighting for Artemide, Erco and Flos; consulting on automobile design for Renault, Fiat and Lancia; serving as the editor-in-chief of Domus from 1986-1991 and teaching at various universities throughout his career. The monograph is organized around these occupations in thematic chunks and includes a chronological timeline at the end, where readers can quickly see his varied body of work side-by-side. Alongside the extensive visuals, four reflective essays interspersed throughout the book give greater context to the work and its social/cultural setting. The monograph culminates with an intimate interview with Bellini (who, by the way, is currently 80 and still working!) shedding some light on his process and definitive moments of his career. 

"My process follows a pattern shaped rather like a tree: each hypothesis is a branch, each possibility a fork in it. It's a process that expands until I intuitively feel that things are beginning to fall into place."

"For almost twenty years I did not have the courage to design a chair, until I came to the conclusion that a 'new chair' could be designed simply 'as a chair', as it always has been, with a seat, a back and four legs." The result of this was the iconic Cassina CAB 412 Chair of 1977. 

"We are all part of the river of history and our designs are no more than the latest link in a chain that goes back through the mists of time."

The Bruco 1 Lounge Chair (1965) prototype for Cassina is an example of Bellini's experimentation with organic forms. 

In 1986, Bellini created a collection of gold jewelry for Cleto Munari, focused on creating dynamic objects that change unpredictably with their wearer's movements.