Project Manager / Visual Merchandiser / Designer
Design Compendium
Brooklyn, NY

We are a multidisciplinary design/build firm located in Park Slope, Brooklyn, specializing in custom fabrication, production, and installation for the hospitality, retail, and high-end commercial markets.

The candidate will use their design/industrial design knowledge to assess projects with a strong focus on the design, aesthetic elements, and manufacturing process. Key responsibilities include client interfacing, scheduling, quality control, budget development and cost control, adhering to aggressive deadlines, and interacting with multiple vendors.

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The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.

It's called Autodesk University, and a large part of the experience are the classes. Once you register for the conference, you gain access to an online catalog of dozens of courses all designed to help you create more effectively.

The sheer breadth of classes is bananas, as Autodesk offers so many different products across so many industries. I met engineers, CAD guys, architects, materials experts, German people--I realize that's not a profession, I just forgot to ask them what they do--as well as construction-industry folks and one guy who introduced himself as "a gold mine designer. As in, I design gold mines." (I only spoke with him briefly, and afterwards regretted not asking him "Why do people always get trapped in coal mines and never gold mines?")

The broad range of attendees can admittedly make smalltalk tough; at one lunch I shared a table with an extremely cute female who told me she worked for a uranium mining company. I spent most of the meal moving my salad around while trying to think of polite questions to ask about uranium.

Anyways, back to the classes. I tried to locate every class I could that pertained to industrial designers and stuck my head in as many as I could.

Some were lectures, like the one run by Germany-based Creative Solutions expert Michal Jelinek, who showed how to use Alias, Showcase, and Mudbox to quickly generate concept drawings and reduce what he called "mouseclick kilometers;" others were hands-on labs run by guys like Autodesk's SketchBook Senior Product Manager Christopher Cheung (more on him later) and industrial designer Kyle Runciman, inviting you to follow along with them while they deftly executed drawings in SketchBook Designer and showed you shortcuts and tricks. Others were hands-on tutorials like the ones run by Tech Evangelist Shaan Hurley, who showed how to run AutoCAD on a Mac. Hurley offered these classes in two flavors: For those with AutoCAD experience but no Mac experience, and vice versa.

The hands-on labs and tutorials were pretty wicked because the classrooms come loaded with top-of-the-line machines. The Mac classes I sat in on had G5 towers, iMacs and 17-inch MacBook Pros you could choose from, all with high-end Wacom tablets and Magic Trackpads. Pretty bad-ass. (From what I understand, the PC-based labs come with high-end Dell and HP machines.)

The classes also come with printed handouts and downloadable PDFs that you'll save as valuable references for later. As a registered conference attendee I had access to all of these online, and I'm sorry I can't make them available for download here--a lot of the packets had proprietary information in them, for example excerpts from professional training manuals and "Learn Autodesk"-style books, sometimes with the authors even popping up in the classes.

Despite the broad range of attendees, I found plenty of classes beyond the drawing/rendering ones to interest the ID'er, for those of you who are weighing whether to attend next year. Some examples:

- Using Autodesk Inventor to Create Precision Sheet Metal Parts
- Digital Prototyping: A Case Study of Plastic Parts Design
- Injection Molding Warpage Prediction and Mold Correction
- Photo-Based Reality Capture: Turn Photographs into 3D Models
- Cross-Product Workflow for Industrial and Product Design
- Mudbox: Textures for Architecture and Design
- Brave New Mobile World: Creativity and Design on the Go
- Sustainable Design Techniques in Digital Prototyping

The list goes on and on.

The only minor gripe I had with the class set-up is that some of the descriptions were less than clear; for example I had to ask Hurley in person which Mac-AutoCAD class was which, as he was teaching two variants that had identical descriptions in the catalog.

Of five people I randomly asked--I know, I'm not winning a Pulitzer Prize for journalism here--only one reported similar confusion, an Australian engineer who said something like "the class descriptions were a bit confusing, mate." (It's possible I added the "mate" part in a subconscious Australianization of my memory of him, but I do clearly remember that he rode in on a kangaroo, then caught a boomerang he had hurled seconds earlier to incapacitate a wombat.)

I asked the Australian if he knows Core77's own Glen Jackson Taylor, since they are both Australian. He assured me he grew up across the street from Glen, but in retrospect I think he was patronizing me.

As sophisticated software is increasingly used in hi-tech filmmaking for rendering, pre-visualization and so on, an interesting side effect has emerged from the special effects: Autodesk has enough juice, and fans of their stuff in positions of Hollywood power, that they can often finagle exclusive screenings.

You may remember from our coverage of Autodesk U. 2009 that we got to see Avatar footage (and tons of it) wayyyy before anything was floating around the interwebs. This year Cliff Plumer, CEO of digital production studio Digital Domain, showed up at the conference with exclusive Tron Legacy footage.

One of the things I really appreciate about AU is perks like this. While sci-fi clips are often screened at Comic-Con to take the audience's temperature--indeed, Comic-Con audience response to the initial Tron Legacy pitch clip reportedly helped the film get green-lit--AU has a different agenda: They show you unseen and finished product for no reason other than that it's freaking cool. In other words they're not asking "Hey, would you pay to see more of this?" It's more like "We have this stuff, we made it using Autodesk products, and we already know it's awesome. Check it out!"

By the way, Buena Vista/Disney security is no joke. At last year's Avatar screening, 20th Century Fox had guards there scanning the crowd with night-vision scopes to nail would-be YouTube leakers. Buena Vista cranked security up a notch: To even get in to the presentation, we attendees first had to queue up in a separate area across the convention hall to hand in our cell phones, cameras and even laptops, to prevent any sort of recording. A phalanx of employees sealed our precious electronics in paper bags that were stapled shut and squirreled away, and you got a color-coded, numbered ticket that corresponded with your bag. (All of the images you see here are stock shots culled from the web.)

Then we marched back across the convention center to the gi-normous presentation room, using our tickets to gain access. At the door, another phalanx of guards performed bag searches, in case anyone pulled a Michael Corleone in the bathroom and pulled something to shoot with out from behind a toilet. Finally we were allowed into the huge room with 3D glasses on every chair.

After sitting through some initial presenting, we were asked to put the glasses on, the lights went down, and we were shown what felt like at least 15 minutes of awesome footage. I won't release any spoilers, and you've only got two weeks to wait before you can see it in theaters. Suck-ers!

Okay, I will mention spoilers. Hit the jump.

Held October 8-10, 2010, at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, the AIGA Design Educators Conference "New Contexts/New Practices" offered a panoramic view of a transforming profession. By investigating how developments in technology, business, social priorities and even the very definition of design have roiled the field, the event sought to map a new, relevant landscape for design education and practice in the 21st century.

This mission was supported by a unique format. The conference, which was organized by NC State graphic design faculty, was divided into six topics: changing conditions, shifting paradigms, social economies, design research, interdisciplinarity and designing for experience. Each topic was introduced to the entire body of attendees by a provocateur, who raised questions intended to set conversations in motion. Such discussions focused on the trends, dilemmas and opportunities inherent in each subject area and involved the provocateur along with a group of scholars, or co-authors, selected by the conference organizers based on prospectuses submitted before the event. Each co-authoring session was led by a moderator and recorded by a writer. Conference attendees rotated among the different authoring sessions and were given opportunities to participate as well. At the event's conclusion, the moderator/author pairs presented summaries of the six sessions.

A crucial aspect of this format was that ideas generated during the three-day colloquy find a life and audience beyond it. Final presentations are posted on the conference website. In addition, the writers, employing their unique perspectives and voices, have synthesized their observations into the six reports that follow. Taken together, these essays provide a detailed overview, and their impact is being proliferated through simultaneous publication on Design Observer, Core77 and AIGA Voice.

Thanks to the conference organizing committee — Denise Gonzales Crisp, Meredith Davis, Amber Howard, KT Meaney, Matthew Peterson, Santiago Piedrafita, Alberto Rigau and Martha Scotford — for raising these important topics and extending the ripples.

Speaking of Tron, an unusual collaboration between Disney and Cappellini has yielded the Tron Armchair, designed by NYC-based Dror Benshetrit. The chair will make its official public debut in just a few hours, at Design Miami/Art Basel.

Dror's mission is to articulate the complex meaning of objects in the simplest of ways. Their uses become a part of their narratives, expressed in transformations that are both metaphorical and literal. Raw Data forms a jagged and angular landscape, serving as a muse for a chair that is comprised of intersecting layers and textures of 'digital' rock. Constructed of composite material consisting of impregnated fiberglass with polyester resin processed with manual layering, these Special Production Walt Disney Signature TRON Armchairs invite you to "sit off the grid."

Hit the jump to see some of the funky limited-edition paintjobs the chair will get.

"Blinput" is a concept intended to make the lives of the visually impaired that little bit easier.

Bearing something of a resemblance to Gordon Bell's legendary, lifelog pendant-cam, this concept harnesses the capabilities of the smartphone to allow the user to engage with an increasingly networked world. Blinput uses the phone camera to interpret the user's surroundings—as well as certain hand gestures, providing something of a navigation interface.

Developer Erik Hals, a recent Edinburgh College of Art graduate, had originally envisioned a new smart product to address the needs of the blind, but soon found that the network and camera technologies in the already widely available, and relatively cheap, smartphone were more than enough to build a solution around.

Blinput, still at a conceptual level, may need some work and testing—we're wondering, for example, how comfortable a visually impaired user would be in impairing an otherwise healthy sense of hearing with headphones—but you've got to give credit to Erik for an undergraduate project well presented with the video below.

Staff Designer
Lenovo
Beijing, China

As part of the team, you'll explore different scenarios and innovative themes to support the company design strategy and roadmap. You develop and/or manage concepts within your competency (product design) for all relevant touchpoints and the subsequent multi-touchpoint prototypes, in order to support consistent articulation of the value proposition.

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The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.

Core77's Hand-Eye Curiosity Club is coming to New York next week with special guest Zach Lieberman presenting new work, and works in progress at the Dunderdon store on December 9th.

Zach Lieberman is a Brooklyn-based interactive artist, hacker and researcher. His installations and performance use custom hardware and open source software to create new playful modes of expression — and always with an element of surprise! Drawing is central theme running through his work, his projects use various means to capture interaction with the body, eyes or voice, and it's this intersection of gesture, physical interaction and computation that he's most passionate about.

Many Core readers will be familiar with Zach's work on the EyeWriter project, a low-cost, open source eye-tracking system originally made for legendary LA graffiti writer Tony Quan, aka TEMPTONE who was diagnosed with ALS in 2003. And the iQ Font for Toyota, Zach collaborated with typographers Pierre & Damiena and pro racer Stef van Campenhoudt to make a typeface from tracking the movements of a car.

Zach is the co-founder of openframeworks, a c++ library for creative coding, he's one of the developers behind rhonda, a 3D drawing tool, and it's musical sister project sonic wire sculptor. His work has been exhibited around the world including Ars Electronica, Futuresonic, CeBIT, and the Offf Festival, and he's a professor at Parsons teaching classes in animation and audiovisual expression in code.

Join us next Thursday to watch Zach perform and demo new works including a sneak peak at version 2.0 of EyeWriter, soon to be released. Special thanks to our good friends Dunderdon for hosting the event and our drinks sponsor Sixpoint!

Core77's Hand-Eye Curiosity Club
Thursday, December 9th, 7 - 10pm
Presentation: 7:30
Dunderdon
25 Howard St
New York NY, 10013
RSVP: curiosityclub.eventbrite.com

When we heard about The Incredible Shrinking Man we thought this would reveal a little brother of The Incredible Hulk. We were almost right... Arne Hendriks, one of the crew members of our favorite Platform21, explains that The Incredible Shrinking Man is about anything but being big and strong.

"The Incredible Shrinking Man is a research into the consequences of downsizing the human species. If we decide to shrink the human species to 2 feet, this will have huge consequences for the way we will live, work and play."

Crazy or not, you can join the discussion of a future with smaller people at The Incredible Shrinking Man blog that features opportunities: "Just imagine the amount of space and resources that will become available!" - threats: "What do we do with cats and dogs?" - and compelling facts such as the picture below.

"The head size of The Incredible Shrinking Man will be around 7 x 4 cm."

Andy Cruz and Rick Roat from House Industries were in town today to present their Holiday Pop-Up Show at Partners & Spade with live screen printing by Awesome Dudes. It's no secret we're huge fans, our logo uses their blaktur typeface designed by Ken Barber, and Ken if you're reading, there's Core77 t-shirt headed your way!

Unfortunately this was just a one day event. If you're in LA next weekend you can catch the show at Heath Ceramics opening December 11th, and for the folks in Portland, we carry a selection of House Industries wares at Hand-Eye Supply. It was hard to resist the opportunity to pick up a custom screen printed t-shirt—I ended up getting 3 made—and can highly recommend the Awesome Dudes if you're looking for a good short run t-shirt printer.

Fashioned from a single sheet of aluminium, architect Didier Fiuza Faustino's "Hermaphrodite" is a stool concept that reflects the shape of the pelvis. Drawing heavily on saddle making tradition, "Hermaphrodite" is designed to be straddled, rather than merely sat on.

As the name may indeed suggest, this concept is intended to confront the user with their own anatomy and gendered identity—something that, many a gentleman out there may argue, a fair number of poorly designed chairs succeed in doing already.

Take the jump for a sneak (ever so slightly NSFW) peek at how one might actually sit on such a thing.

It was 1997, I was 20 years old, wandering around random Milan back streets when I stumbled into a little architecture bookstore and picked up the only book on the front table in english, "Aircraft" by Le Corbusier. Written in 1935, I'd argue there hasn't been a better book written on design since. It masquerades as a book on emerging aircraft technology but in actuality it is a call to arms for all creatives. Corbu' is at his quotable best with lines like:

"Reform is in the very essence of things. It lies at the heart of craftsmanship. Revolution is accomplished by the cumulative effect of details."

"No door is closed. Life goes forward... make nothing academic, never say: that is the end!"

"The schools are run by "professors" (the very definition of a school). The professors teach according to the prescribed programme. The programme is prescribed by authority. Is this authority in touch with life? Occasional only. As life a programme? No, life is explosive."

"Teaching is only possible in the workshop. Arithmetic and handwriting can be taught in schools. But invention originates in the workshop."

If that wasn't enough, it has over 100 beautiful pictures of mid 1930's aircraft. This is the only item you need to put on your holiday wish list. It's out of print, so you will pay a premium, but it is worth it. Birch Books has a few copies as does Amazon.

Model Maker
KMCA
New Haven, CT

We are looking for an individual(s) to fulfill an advanced model making position. If you are the type of person who is eager to learn, is a problem solver, able to work independently and within a team, has knowledge of CAD/CAM or is willing to learn, then we would like to have you join our team.

Minimum 1-2 years experience building Architectural / I.D. models.

Our facility is equipped with the latest CAD/CAM technology, advanced laser cutting equipment, CNC machining centers as well as traditional shop tools.
Visit our web site KMCA.com to learn more.

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The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.

A glimpse inside the Autodesk skunkworks: Here Senior Manager Jason Medal-Katz demonstrates an experimental interface design, the MRI (Mixed Reality Interface). As he explains, the technology used for the actual interface is pretty simple--it's two Lucite rods with printouts stuck to the bottom, which a camera reads through the tabletop--but we love the way they've put the invisible technology behind it to innovative use.

Here Autodesk's Matt Ratliff, Applications Engineer, demonstrates the industrial designer's dream software/hardware set-up: Alias Sketch on a Wacom Cintiq monitor. Imagine being able to draw sketches/renderings directly on-screen, then output the art to Photoshop and the actual hard data from the drawings to DWG and a CAD package. It's WYSIWYG for industrial design.

Chris Cheung is the man responsible for Autodesk's entire Sketch line of products: SketchBook Mobile (cell phones), SketchBook Pro (tablets and desktops) and the new SketchBook Designer 2011 (desktops), which combines both raster and vector technologies and replaces Alias Sketch. Cheung's job is tough: How do you design drawing software in a way that can make people more creative across a variety of platforms?

Cheung was in high demand at Autodesk University, but we managed to chase him down for an interview. Here he discusses the different merits of the three Sketch variants and some of the thinking behind each product.

(With the exception of the cell phone footage, the sketch action shown in the videos is the work of Kyle Runciman. We'll get to him in a minute, so stay tuned.)

You've gotta have some good hands to get your work on the cover of an Autodesk product, and Kyle Runciman's got good hands. You might recognize his art, above, from the box that Alias Sketch comes in.

Kyle taught one of the Autodesk University Sketch classes we sat in on, and was kind enough to forward Core77 some footage of three beginning-to-end sketches he did on Alias Sketch, SketchBook Pro and SketchBook Designer (the latter being Alias Sketch in shiny, re-branded form). The actual drawing process took him from 37 minutes to an hour, and we've crunched the footage down to about three minutes each because the internet has destroyed your span of attention:

The 26-year-old Runciman is an industrial designer based out of Toronto, and in addition to doing contracting work for Autodesk, he runs the eponymous design and illustration firm Runciman Concepts. You can also check out his stuff on Coroflot.

Perhaps best known for the critical dismantling and reassembling of transistor radios in the early 80's, Daniel Weil has rediscovered his fascination for reducing objects to their component parts, whilst working on this private commission to create a gift for an architect.

Broken up into five distinct elements, the object demonstrates Weil's desire to explore the workings of the timepiece, as much as its appearance. Charming details fulfill both these objectives; the mechanism "housing"; the functioning rubber belt and even contrasting cross-head and flat-head screws at the feet of the battery stand to denote positive and negative charge.

Where his carrier bag radios of times gone-by sought to question the "packaging" of technology by "the market", Weil's clock attempts to deconstruct time itself:

"Objects like clocks are both prosaic and profound. Prosaic because of their ubiquity in everyday life, profound because of the mysterious nature of time itself. Time can be reduced to hours, minutes and seconds, just as a clock can be reduced to its component parts. This doesn't explain time, but in a way simply exposes its mysterious essence."

More photos and sketches on the Pentagram site.

Perhaps best known for the critical dismantling and reassembling of transistor radios in the early 80's, Daniel Weil has rediscovered his fascination for reducing objects to their component parts, whilst working on this private commission to create a gift for an architect.

Broken up into five distinct elements, the object demonstrates Weil's desire to explore the workings of the timepiece, as much as its appearance. Charming details fulfill both these objectives; the mechanism "housing"; the functioning rubber belt and even contrasting cross-head and flat-head screws at the feet of the battery stand to denote positive and negative charge.

Where his carrier bag radios of times gone-by sought to question the "packaging" of technology by "the market", Weil's clock attempts to deconstruct time itself:

"Objects like clocks are both prosaic and profound. Prosaic because of their ubiquity in everyday life, profound because of the mysterious nature of time itself. Time can be reduced to hours, minutes and seconds, just as a clock can be reduced to its component parts. This doesn't explain time, but in a way simply exposes its mysterious essence."

More photos and sketches on the Pentagram site.

If you have even semi-regular access to a computer, you've likely seen an influx of pseudo-art filtered images on Facebook, Flickr and the like. You know which ones I mean - the pictures of children or bicycles with high contrast and curious saturation levels that somehow remind us of our childhoods, but without the big hair, shoulder pads, and (hopefully) fewer jump suits. While filters are fun and have their uses, once the nostalgia wears off they're still reliant on the original image to actually be interesting. But with the proliferation of camera phones, more and more of those images are being created through a tiny stock lens with digital zoom and focus at best.

Enter: Photojojo's Fisheye, Macro, and Wide Angle Camera Phone Lenses! These powerful little lenses attach to any phone via detachable magnetic rings and can let you focus on your subject from only 10mm away, or get 180° in a single shot, making your images stand out - not the apps you use. Grab both lenses for only $40 at Photojojo's online store, plus the product pages are full of great little animations to keep the interaction designer in you happy & smiling (make sure to pull the lever!).

Check out more great gift ideas in Core77's Ultimate Holiday Gift Guide 2010.