Here's a photo of the ticket to the Powerball that I didn't win—I was so sure, this time—and some random pieces of paper that've been sitting on my desk. You'll notice they're all different sizes; if I had to file all of these into some kind of organized system, it would be a lot messier than filing standardized paper sheets.

So it was in the late 1800s, which antedated both standardized typewriters and the 8.5" x 11" (or A4, for those of you living in civilized nations) paper sizes that we know today. And what we think of today as a filing cabinet wouldn't even be invented until around 1900. So if you were a businessman in say, 1873, you might need to process, record and file countless little slips of paper, tickets, envelopes, catalogues, peroidicals, receipts, bills of sale, rolled-up documents and letters.

That's why a furniture builder named William Wooton designed a super organizing desk that would accommodate all manner of paper records, and began producing his patented design around 1874. Here's an ad for this beast of a furniture piece, officially called the Wooton Patent Cabinet Office Secretary Desk:

"One hundred and ten compartments, all under one lock and key," read a newspaper advertisement of the era. "A place for everything and everything in its place."

Order Reigns Supreme, Confusion Avoided. Time Saved. Vexation Spared. With this Desk one absolutely has no excuse for slovenly habits in the disposal of numerous papers, and a person of method may here realise that pleasure and comfort which is only to be attained in the verification of the maxim, 'A place for everything, and everything in its place.'

Every portion of the desk is immediately before the eye. Nothing in its line can exceed it in usefulness or beauty, and purchasers everywhere express themselves delighted with its manifold conveniences.

Here's an old Fine Woodworking cover showing what one might have looked like in use:

Image: Fine Woodworking

Whomever did Wooton's marketing certainly did a good job: John D. Rockefeller bought one of the desks, as did then-President Ulysses S. Grant. (Grant's model had an eagle featured on the cornice, according to the Smithsonian.) Joseph Pulitzer and Charles Scribner both owned one.

Wooton produced the desk in four different trim levels:

Prices ranged from $90 ($1,900 today) for the smallest Ordinary to $750 ($15,900 today) for the largest Superior. Quite the price differential.

Here's a shot of a surviving Standard Grade, with handsome green drawers:

As you can see in the "trim levels" image above, the wings on the desk fold shut. A lock on the front kept the contents secure. What might not be obvious to you is that of those two little racetrack shapes visible above the main panel of each face, the one on the left was a spring-loaded hinged door that allowed your officemates to drop mail off after you'd left for the day:

Image: Ange Bolton / Historic Indianapolis

This little glass door on the inside allowed you to see if there was anything in the bin:

Image: Ange Bolton / Historic Indianapolis

Here's a replica of the desk built by the very talented Mike Thompson showing it in both open and closed positions:

Photos and work by Mike Thompson

Photos and work by Mike Thompson

Photos and work by Mike Thompson

To give you a sense of the thing's scale, here's a couple photos of a Wooton desk with people in the frame:

Image: Easthampton City Arts

Image: Copake Auction Inc.

And here's a video of the desk in action, shot by Gannon's Antiques:

As far as how many man-hours one of these took to build, we can only guess; when Spencer Baird (Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution from 1878 to 1887) tried to order the desk with a custom compartment that could fit an oddly-sized paper type he favored, the company brushed him off, writing that "We should think the paper could be put in sideways & answer the same purpose." When Baird persisted, he got a second letter saying "Sorry we cannot accommodate you in this matter but we are so hurried in getting out our desks that we cannot at this time undertake any changes in interior arrangement of desks." (He eventually got what he wanted, though, and his desk is reportedly still in use at the Smithsonian.)

For those of you brave enough to attempt building one of these, within the issue of the Fine Woodworking magazine whose cover is shown above, they included a diagram showing all of the individual parts. While dimensions are only sparingly provided, it should give you an idea of the construction required:

Image: Fine Woodworking

I'd like to build one of these…someday.

Omni-Spoon is an adjustable measuring spoon. Utilizing a special plunger function, it combines a complete set of measuring spoons into one device. With a built in level, there will no longer be a need to reach for a knife to do the job.

After being diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in 2007, a Briton named Angelo Mastropietro was temporarily paralyzed. After recovering, Mastropietro began to get the most out of his newly-appreciated, fully-functioning body by throwing himself into a very physical project: Carving, largely by himself, a luxury home out of a cave outside of Worcestershire.

While the excavating labor might've come free, the subsequent interior detailing did not. Mastropietro, who formerly ran a successful recruiting business in Australia, set a budget of £100,000 (USD $143,000) for the build-out—or is that build-in?—and eventually spent £160,000 (USD $230,000). But the results seem well worth it:

I'm impressed by how light and airy it looks; perhaps it's the film crew's lighting, but the space does not register as subterranean. The detailing is excellent, like the trick of using recessed lighting in the kitchen and bedroom to give the impression of sunlight traveling down a shaft. And how cool is that shower?

Mastropietro is currently renting the space out as a vacation getaway. He calls it the Rockhouse Retreat.

It's been almost two years since Ikea discontinued their famous Expedit, and we know that some of you vinyl record owners are still down about it. That rational, perfectly-sized grid was the ideal way to store your LPs, wasn't it? So you were saving up to buy some more Expedits, only to find there weren't any left to buy.

Listen man, it's time to move on. I mean the Expedit was okay, but it took up a buttload of space, and more importantly, it's just gone. So why not give a new design a try? How about something made in America and with a more compact form factor? So check out Hi Phile Record Cabinets, produced in good ol' rainy Portland, Oregon by Axiom Custom Products.

The Hi Philes take up less space than the Expedits and, I'll say it, from a UX perspective the design is just better. First off there's two little nooks in the sides that are sized to hold 45s. Secondly you can choose to have your most-loved records loaded in a forward-facing, staircased configuration for easy browsing. You can tuck your more lamentable purchases down below.

Oh yeah, and the whole thing goes together without any tools:

At $625 they're a damn sight pricier than the Expedit was, but let's face it, you didn't start collecting records to save money.

In some ways, MDF is lousy stuff: You can ruin it with a single spilled cup of coffee, it doesn't take fasteners well, it has virtually no structural properties and machining it kicks up a horrific amount of dust. However, those of you with shops likely have some MDF lying around. It can't be beat for flatness, and while it swells slightly during summer and shrinks a bit during winter, it's still plenty stable enough to yield a reliable jig. Or throw some veneer on top of it, support it properly and you can sneak it into low-cost furniture, as many do.

The main reason some folks avoid MDF is because of what's used to bind together the wood fibers it's made up of: Urea-formaldehyde (as are many plywoods). Over time this urea-formaldehyde off-gases formaldehyde into the air, where we breathe it in. The International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies formaldehyde as a Class 1 carcinogen, stating that "There is sufficient evidence in humans for the carcinogenicity of formaldehyde." (I suggest interested parties read the full IARC paper on formaldehyde [PDF], but the bottom line is, it seems you need to breathe in a goodly amount of the stuff before it becomes a problem.)

Which brings us to SDF, or Sustainable Design Fiberboard. SDF is an MDF alternative produced by a variety of companies and advertised as using a "formaldehyde-free adhesive system" or as having "no added formaldehyde." What, then, are the recycled fibers glued together with? We noticed none of the companies mentioned what the alternative glue was, at least not on the top level of their brochures and websites. What's to say the replacement glue isn't just as bad or worse than formaldehyde? By now most of us are familiar with the old corporate trick of eliminating one harmful material that people know about, and replacing it with another harmful material that no one knows about. So we dug down a bit to see.

As it turns out, SDF is laminated together with MDI, or Methylene-diphenyl-diisocyanate. This friendly-sounding chemical is produced by giants like Bayer, Dow, BASF and others. MDI is produced via a reaction between aniline and formaldehyde (oh, hello again) though it is not clear whether this new substance created from formaldehyde has the capability to off-gas formaldehyde. In fact, the Environmental Protection Agency states that while MDI can cause sensitization and asthma at high concentrations, "No adequate information is available on the reproductive, developmental, or carcinogenic effects of MDI in humans."

What the heck? In other words, there's no data on whether MDI is a carcinogen. So maybe it's better than urea-formaldehyde—or maybe it's worse. No one knows. So if no one knows, why make the switch? Wouldn't it make sense that you would replace a known bad thing with a known good thing, instead of just throwing a different, untested chemical in the mix?

We did a little more digging, and it seems MDI has been known to have some ill effects—the aforementioned asthma and sensitivity—for over 15 years. First off I should point out that these effects are only suffered by those who handle the material in its liquid form, i.e., the poor grunts in the factory who make the laminated wood products. According to a 2000 study called "Asthma-Like Symptoms in Wood Product Plant Workers Exposed to Methylene Diphenyl Diisocyanate" and printed in the American College of Chest Physicians's Chest Journal,

We evaluated respiratory health in workers at a new wood products manufacturing plant that uses methylene diphenyl diisocyanate (MDI), and was designed and operated with a goal of minimizing worker exposures.

…The development of asthma-like symptoms was reported in a relatively high proportion of the employees who worked with liquid MDI.

…New-onset asthma-like symptoms (NAS) were reported by 15 of 56 workers (27%) in areas with the highest potential for exposures to liquid MDI monomer and prepolymer, vs 0 of 43 workers in the lowest potential exposure areas (p = 0.001). In the areas with high potential exposure, NAS developed in 47% of workers who had noted MDI skin staining, vs 19% without skin stains (p = 0.07).

Twenty-seven percent sounds like rather a lot. The study is from 2000 so I hope that manufacturers have upgraded their worker protection in the past 16 years.

That wish aside, statistically speaking, few of you reading this are working in a factory and handling liquid MDI. So you may be wondering what the risk is to you using SDF in your own shop and projects. The study goes on to state:

Working around and cleaning up liquid MDI represented a significant risk for asthma-like symptoms in both current smokers and nonsmokers; work with finished wood products did not.

And on the plus side...SDF reportedly takes a screw better than MDF does. So there's that.

It really is a shame that there's so little transparency in the chemistry of some of the materials we use as designers and builders. While informational transparency is certainly better now than it was 20 years ago, how many architects who've spec'd SDF, or how many builders who've eagerly purchased the stuff, are aware that more than 1 out of 4 workers in the study above developed NAS while handling the chemical used to make it?

Perhaps we're being naïve; perhaps it's beyond the reach of the complexities of modern chemistry and business, but we'd love to work with materials that we knew, for a fact, were not harmful either for us, our clients, or the people who produce it.

The Swiss type foundry Grilli Type likes to do as much as it can to bring its letterforms to life. “For us, it's always important to also create this visual world around our typefaces, to make them more than just those black-and-white shapes that we know nobody will ever care about as much as we do,” says Thierry Blancpain, who co-founded Grilli Type with Noël Leu in 2009. “So, during the process of designing a typeface, we are always trying to find images and archive material that speak to us.” Those found materials are then used to create posters, books or memorabilia—including, most recently, a charming replica of a Cold War–era toy.

The original toy was discovered during Grilli Type’s collaboration with the Swiss designers Reto Moser and Tobi Rechsteiner on GT Eesti, a new typeface with roots in 1940s Soviet Russia. Moser and Rechsteiner began working on the typeface after leafing through some Estonian children’s books given to them by a professor. In the books, they stumbled upon the geometric sans serif Zhurnalnaya Roublennaya, designed in 1947 by Anatoly Schukin and used by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The designers immediately began scanning pages from the book and digitizing the type, laying the groundwork for what would become GT Eesti—and together with Grilli Type, the designers also began building out the world around the typeface, collecting images of other Estonian children’s books and toys of the time.

The photo that started it all; the original toy is in the upper right corner.

One of the images the team found was a photograph of a series of vintage toys laid out on a plain white surface. Among the assortment of toys was a set of geometric blocks with smiling faces, which struck the designers as being the same sentiment they wanted to convey through this typeface. “At some point, I made a joke that we could actually remake this toy and release it alongside the typeface,” Blancpain says. But what started as a joke began to seem like a worthwhile project, as Blancpain found himself itching to learn more about the toy and its history. “I thought it would be fun to make that world real again,” he says. “[The toy] was super-cute and spoke to us strongly, which is how we usually decide to do something.”

“At some point, I made a joke that we could actually remake this toy and release it alongside the typeface.”

Using Google’s reverse image search tool, Blancpain dropped in the image of the toys and found other similar versions, but none including the packaging or any other information to lead him to the original manufacturer. He scoured wooden-toy collecting forums for geometric-block aficionados, even shooting a few tweets out into the universe, but came back empty-handed. Finally, in his darkest hour, like any good citizen of the Internet, Blancpain turned to Reddit. “There was a subreddit called WhatIsThisThing and it just made sense to post it there,” Blancpain says. “And it took about three hours before someone came back with exactly what it was and the manufacturer.”

Reddit to the rescue

The manufacturer turned out to be TOFA, a national company in Czechoslovakia formed in the 1950s. (The name TOFA comes from the first letters of the English words TOys FActory. Although the company was based in Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia, it also exported to the Western market, hence in the Western-influenced name.) Through TOFA, Blancpain was able to determine that the toy producer is still in business today, and reach out to get a quote for what it would take to make a modern interpretation of the discontinued toy.

At the same time, Blancpain reached out to a few friends at refurnished+, a Swiss company specializing in new products, furniture and home accessories. Blancpain shared his findings with refurnished+ co-founders Friedrich-Wilhelm Graf and Roland Jaggi, who agreed to work with Grilli Type to sketch up new versions of the vintage toy. “We’ve never seen the toy itself,” Blancpain says, “and it didn’t make much sense to us to try to recreate that directly.” Instead, the team came up with a half-centimeter grid, and Graf and Jaggi drew new shapes and faces inspired by the original toy that followed their own built-in logic, arriving at 18 different types of blocks, with the smallest pieces at ten millimeters (0.4 inches) in diameter. “I’ve never seen the actual toy set, so it’s hard to say how similar it ended up being [to the original],” Blancpain says. “From looking at the pictures, the original toy seems like it might have been much bigger, probably to make it playable by younger kids.”

Each set of Lelu comes with 72 wooden pieces, a jute bag and a double-sided risograph-printed A3 poster.

Speaking with TOFA, the team discovered that the minimum number they could produce would be 250 sets, so they created 1,000 pieces of each of the 18 blocks; four of each block were then included in every set, for a total of 72 parts per set. They dubbed the final product Lelu, or “toy” in Estonian. Edges of the blocks were softened for safe play, and each set comes in a screenprinted cardboard box with a jute bag, for easy organizing.

“The packaging was actually designed this way because I went to speak to a friend, Tina Roth Eisenberg [aka swiss-miss], who gave me this tip for designing children’s toys,” Blancpain says. “She said that a toy box needs to be big enough so you can just shuffle everything in at the end. It can never be super-close to the size that you actually need, otherwise that box gets tossed.” So Blancpain and his collaborators made a huge box—but then, upon finding that Swiss shipping is “really expensive,” they trimmed it back to just under two centimeters in height, offering enough room for a child or parent to easily store the toys while still allowing the designers to ship the package as a letter instead of a more expensive parcel.

The final packaging

While Blancpain was excited to breathe life into the world of GT Eesti and into the old Estonian toy, he had another incentive as well. “At the end of the day, we just wanted to create enough to do a limited run to share with our friends and those who would really appreciate the story behind GT Eesti,” he says. “It’s definitely not a money maker for us. Secretly, being able to give it to my niece was sort of in the end why I did it.”

Lelu is available through Grilli Type’s shop for $38, alongside Apfel, Ball, und Cha-Cha-Cha, a riso-printed children’s alphabet book in eight colors, designed by Moser and written by Regina Dürig. The typeface itself, GT Eesti, can be purchased through Grilli Type and is available in two subfamilies, in Latin and Cyrillic.

As ID students at Pratt, my buddy and I were drinking beers one night in his dorm room. Maybe we were old enough to drink, maybe we weren't, maybe you should mind your own business. In any case, after he finished his beer he opened the window and threw the can out of it. It fell six stories and landed on the lawn.

"The hell are you doing?" I asked.

"Recycling," he said, cracking open another beer.

We'd previously seen a local man, whom we assumed was homeless, carefully collecting cans and bottles from garbage cans in the neighborhood. My buddy's rationale was that he may as well let that guy have the nickel, rather than recycling himself, and that throwing cans on the lawn made it easier for the man to retrieve them versus digging through bins. I couldn't fault his logic, however perverse the delivery system.

Those of us that do not live in poverty can recycle because it is the right thing to do; it is practically a privilege. But for those who live in poverty, recycling can be less about right/wrong and more about hungry/not hungry. Which leads us to the question: If recycled goods have value to the impoverished, how does all of that recyclable plastic trash currently floating around the ocean get there in the first place?

It's easy to imagine us garbage-producing Americans kicking empty Doritos bags off the decks of our yachts. But in fact, according to an eye-opening article by Boston-based independent news organization GlobalPost, there are five countries that "spew more plastic into the oceans than the rest of the world together"—some 60% of the global total—and those countries are all in Asia.

The countries are China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, and it's tough for us to fault them because the problem appears to be poverty. Without ample funding, within these countries "only about 40 percent of garbage is properly collected," leading citizens to organically create their own communal dumps. Both these and the official dumps are often intentionally sited close to riverbanks or shores, where the wind will cast it into the ocean, creating more room on land.

Enter the legion of ultra-poor recyclers, and we begin to see part of the solution and where it needs to be shored up:

Asia's garbage pickers are the unsung heroes of conservation. They brave filth and disease to root through trash and extract plastic that can be sold to recyclers for a little cash. This ensures that lots of junk is recycled rather than abandoned in landfills.

"A scavenger collects plastic for recycling in a river covered with rubbish in Jakarta, Indonesia, April 20, 2009." (Image and caption via GlobalPost)

But these pickers tend to focus on high-value items — like plastic bottles — in lieu of plastic bags, which fetch very little from recyclers.

"A woman washes plastic in a river in Tianjin, China, Sept. 13, 2007." (Image and caption via GlobalPost)

According to Ocean Conservancy, a scavenger might spend 10 hours gathering plastic bags and take home a mere 50 cents. Devoting that day to picking up only plastic bottles, however, would rack up $3.70.

"Indonesian fishermen on a polluted beach in Cilincing, North Jakarta, June 5, 2013." (Image and caption via GlobalPost)

That means that scavengers skip over much of the waste, which can later end up in the sea.

"A boy collects plastic near a polluted coastline to sell in Manila, April 9, 2008." (Image and caption via GlobalPost)

The images are heartbreaking, and I suddenly realize my dorm story from above is neither funny nor cute. Surely fellow human beings should not have to subject themselves to this in order to eat, but that is the current global reality. So the question is, while this situation exists and the dumping will continue, what ought we do? How can we create economic incentives to get all of the garbage out? And more relevant to our readership, what can individual designers do?

The answer to the latter question might be nothing, but that doesn't mean we oughtn't try. Next we'll look at an ID student aiming to make more of a difference than my buddy and I ever did by throwing beer cans out of a window.

Are you ready? More importantly, is your work ready?

The 2016 Core77 Design Awards is officially open for entries so choose your best design projects from last year and enter them today! 2016 marks the sixth year student and professional designers from all over the globe will submit their most inspired, innovative and thought-provoking work to be critiqued and honored by our internationally distributed panel of jurors. We're proud to host a celebration of design enterprise that consistently surfaces fresh perspectives, daring approaches to traditional challenges and projects that simply delight. But none of this is possible without adding your work to the conversation about where design is heading.

2015 Interaction Professional Winner - Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum by Local Projects

Whether you're a returning honoree looking to add to your legacy, or a new designer looking to make your first mark, the Core77 Design Awards are an excellent way to broadcast your work, showcase your talent, and receive recognition for your design efforts. It's also among the most inclusive awards programs worldwide, offering 14 diverse categories for designers across all disciplines- with separate Professional and Student sub-sections in all but one- to ensure parity and impartiality.

2015 Consumer Products Student Winner - Miito by Nils Chundy and Jasmina Grase

The next few months will slip by before you know it, so make note of the following dates to ensure you don't miss a chance to save on your entry:

• Tuesday, February 9th, 9pm Eastern: Early Bird pricing ends.
• Tuesday, March 8th, 9pm Eastern: Regular pricing ends.
• Wednesday, March 23rd, 9pm Eastern: Late pricing ends.
• Wednesday, April 6th, 9pm Eastern: Final Deadline, submissions close.

2015 Packaging Professional Winner - Clifton Engagement Ring Case by Andrew Zo

We can't wait to see what you have been working on and what you will contribute to the global design community. Start your entry today and stay tuned for more updates on your jury teams, approaching deadlines and tips on submitting the perfect entry. Good luck everyone!

Mark your calendars! Save the date! Core77 is excited to announce our very first Twitter chat with Eastman Innovation Lab and SHiFT Design Camp. Join the conversation on Twitter using the hashtag #EILConvos

Thursday, January 21st at 1PM EST

The current topic of discussion? Shifting design education.

How can design education prepare designers for a uncertain future? How can material knowledge enhance the way designers think about the world? Along with Eastman Innovation Lab's Bryan Shackelford, we'll be chatting with the founders of SHiFT, a weeklong camp and workshop in the woods meant to foster interesting discussions around design.

Have burning questions about design in the wild? How about opinions on what matters in design education? Tweet us your questions using the #EILConvos hashtag between now (and even during) the tweet and we'll pick our favorites

You can get food everywhere these days, at the bookshop, at train stations, at airports, etc. It seems like anywhere you go, someone is trying to sell you food. Even if you aren't hungry at all, the irresistible smells of fresh baked bread, fries, pizza...(I could go on and on!) trick you into all of a sudden wanting to eat something. I started wondering what it would be like to be hungry. Really, really hungry. Could I get myself to say no to food?  To simply walk by all that delicious food, pretending like I haven't smelled it...

I was hearing about this pretty popular thing called a "juice reboot," which basically means you only drink juices for a certain period of time. This is usually done to lose weight, but my friends and I were curious to try it out and see what it would mean to not chew for an entire month (its tough!)...

Editor's Note: This story is not a recommendation to try this or any other "juice reboot." As noted in the comments below, any sort of extreme diet can adversely affect your health so please consult a medical professional.

Have any of you tried a juice cleanse? Share your stories below. 

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

Whenever people say we'll one day upload our consciousnesses into the cloud, I point out that I can't even get my podcasts to sync. Although my consciousness is probably not more than a gig or two, I have little faith such a data transfer would go off without a hitch.

I have little faith in technology in general. So this new, highly technology-based form of transportation proposed by a company called Ehang scares the living crap out of me:

Look, I get that English is a second language for the company and the narrator, but they couldn't spend a couple bucks to run a grammar check on the copy? And we're supposed to believe these folks are detail-oriented enough to create a perfectly safe autonomous Uber drone? Yeah, I'm not buying it. And what's with the guy having to climb into the vehicle backwards, then turn around? Not exactly human-centered design.

Beyond that it's the reliance on tech that scares me. What happens when the tablet crashes, or if one of those eight motors goes out? 

Fun for programmers: Alter the code so that immediately after takeoff, two of the propellors on the display begin furiously flashing red while a klaxon sounds

In the video the narrator keeps hitting the safety point, including that motivated-to-be-safe origin story that I don't quite buy, but not a single specific safety feature is mentioned--not even collision avoidance or bird detection.

The video closes with the tagline "Once we begin, we will never give up." I dunno, people give up all the time. But you know what never gives "up," literally? Gravity.

Ideal candidates will be able to provide design visuals to communicate creative concepts to client, account executive, estimating and production. They should have a bachelor’s degree in Design, and a minimum of 2-5 years of experience in designing tradeshow exhibits, environments and events. Advanced experience in 3D Studio Max required.

In 2013, Sheffield, UK-based Mike Hudson quit his job and started giving his possessions away. "I put things outside onto the street with notes saying 'free'. I gave away the sofas, the bed, chairs, and tables. I gave away my shirts, trousers and shoes to the charity shop on Ecclesall Road, sold my car and packed a bag to go back to my parents house to work on the van."

The van was a beater he'd purchased on eBay, using the money he earned working on an offshore oil rig on the North Sea. Here's what he did to it:

Hudson set off in 2014 for an epic roadtrip across Europe while living out of the van. How long do you think he'd last, six months, a year? As of January 2016, he's still at it and is now somewhere in Morocco, blogging all the while.

Speaking of blogging, he's extensively documented how he converted the van in the first place—and impressively, he designed most of it in his head and did it on the cheap: "No plans/layouts were drawn up or measured," Hudson writes. "Months of daydreaming allowed me to get a pretty clear image of how I wanted the van to be. It was pretty much built on-the-fly…. I used common materials found in DIY and home shops rather than using the specialized (and expensive) materials from motorhome/camper van shops." You can read all the details here.

The two main ways to organize papers are files and binders; either can work fine, so it's largely a matter of personal preference. Fortunately, end users who prefer binders have a number of choices beyond the basic binders found at every office supply store.

The binders from Bindertek have steel-rimmed finger holes to make it easy to pull one out of a shelf—something I've never seen the need for, but which might be helpful if the binders were tightly packed on that shelf. The vinyl cover is glued on rather than heat-sealed, to keep the covers from cracking and splitting.

The covers also have steel-reinforced bottom edges for extra durability. The rings, which have a lifetime guarantee, have a ball-and-socket design rather than the common zigzag design.  

The BestBuilt binders have finger grips for removing one from a crowded shelf. There are large, easy-to-use label pockets; I'm happy to see this, since many end users won't take the time to fuss with unwieldy label designs. The binders are also deep enough that interior tabs won't extend beyond the cover.

These binders are also designed for durability, with one-piece injection-molded spines and welded covers. There's also a three-position elliptical ring system; the rings completely overlap when closed, so papers can't fall out even if the binder is dropped. 

Saunders provides a durable binder by making it from recycled aluminum. The aluminum does get scratched, but that's just a cosmetic problem; the binder doesn't fall apart as some cardboard-and-vinyl binders will. One complaint from a purchaser (echoed by another): "The edges are sharp and prone to causing injury to hands, damage to bags, and scratches on furniture. A little bit of sand paper will take the edge off, but ... I expected this to have been done at the factory."

Not all designs are focused on durability. The Bex binder from Pina Zangaro caught my eye just because of its nice label holders.

The Signature Binders from Russell+Hazel have metal-reinforced corners for durability. They also have a dry-erase surface on the interior, which could be handy—assuming the end user always has an appropriate marker close at hand.  (There's no pocket on the binder to store one.) Some end users will appreciate the rubber band to help keep things secure; others will just find it annoying as it interferes with getting to the binder contents.

End users keeping some papers for archival purposes—old tax returns, for example—might appreciate the Find It gapless binders from IdeaStream. The one-piece loop rings keep the papers secure, even if the binder is dropped, but make it difficult to add or remove papers from anywhere except one end. 

Another nice feature of the Find It binders: The rings can lay flat when not in use, making it easy to store spares.

Some end users may find it easier to store their binders in a file cabinet due to storage space constraints or the need to lock things up overnight in a locking cabinet. These Wilson Jones hanging binders have hooks that pull out and retract, so they can be used either in a file cabinet or on a shelf or desktop. 

Storing a bunch of binders can be a challenge; binder carousels provide an interesting option. Multi-tier ones can fit in an unused corner, and smaller ones can even sit on a desktop.

One problem with storing binders on a shelf is that unless the shelf is full, the binders don't tend to stay upright. The no-longer-available Shelf Shark was designed to help with that, for both binders and other materials such as small brochures. They were simple to use, slipping over the edge of any solid square-front (not rounded) shelving. But I must admit that the free samples I got sat in my garage for years before I finally gave them away. Many end users are fine with their binders leaning a bit!

It's time for our first ever Core77 Twitter chat and we want you to be part of the conversation! Login to Twitter and follow along using the hashtag #EILConvos. It's easy! 

Beginning at 1PM EST, we'll be chatting with Eastman Innovation Lab's Bryan Shackelford (@Eastman_EIL),  SHiFT Design Camp's John McCabe (@mcc4b3) and Owen Foster (@Uncle_0) about transforming design education—even if it takes an axe or a bonfire in the woods. For the past few years, SHiFT has been hosting designers for a weeklong retreat and design workshop in the wild where they do awesome projects like this:

Feel free to ask questions yourself or answer the ones we ask with your thoughts using the hashtag #EILConvos and we'll be tracking and retweeting your ideas. 

Follow us on Twitter @Core77 now!

The Apex Camping Shelter is a versatile, high quality weather shelter that will protect you and your gear from rain, wind, sun, and even snow. This tarp was designed for hammock camping and as an all-purpose camping tarp, or shade canopy, even when you're not using a hammock.Startup, GO! Outfitters, has launched a Kickstarter campaign for the shelter and the project has already raised over $20,000. The company has committed to donating a portions of the proceeds to sustainable clean water initiatives, so each tarp sold will provide clean water for one person for one year.

In 2005, space nerds everywhere were disappointed when Pluto was ruled a non-planet. Scientific bodies deemed it too small to qualify; you can see its scale versus Earth below, in this exclusive image obtained by Core77.

In his most audacious escape attempt yet, notorious drug lord El Chapo Guzman engineered a tractor beam to pull Pluto and one of its moons into low-Earth orbit above the Mexican prison where he was being held. Guzman was in the process of building a tunnel to Pluto when he was foiled by British actor Sean Bean.

Now, however, researchers at the California Institute of Technology have deduced that we do in fact have a ninth planet in our solar system, and it's about ten times the mass of Earth. (Or, as schoolchildren will delight in repeating, roughly the size of Uranus.) The reason "Planet Nine," as they've cleverly named it, took so long to discover is partly because astronomers are lazy and primarily because this previously-unknown planet occupies "a bizarre, highly elongated orbit in the outer solar system" that is not co-planar with the orbits of the other eight planets.

As you can see by the rendering, the newly-discovered planet is...round

The thing is, no one's actually seen this drunkenly-orbiting planet yet. The Caltech researchers deduced its existence by studying six objects in the Kuiper Belt, a gathering of non-planetary bodies spinning around beyond Neptune; unable to explain their trajectories, they began figuring out what types of nearby bodies would or wouldn't cause them to move that way. According to Phys.org,

That left them with the idea of a planet. Their first instinct was to run simulations involving a planet in a distant orbit that encircled the orbits of the six Kuiper Belt objects, acting like a giant lasso to wrangle them into their alignment. [Researcher Konstantin] Batygin says that almost works but does not provide the observed eccentricities precisely. "Close, but no cigar," he says.

Then, effectively by accident, Batygin and [fellow researcher Mike] Brown noticed that if they ran their simulations with a massive planet in an anti-aligned orbit—an orbit in which the planet's closest approach to the sun, or perihelion, is 180 degrees across from the perihelion of all the other objects and known planets—the distant Kuiper Belt objects in the simulation assumed the alignment that is actually observed.

Planet Nine being orbited by a bunch of passwords (and an unidentified, misspelled sedan)

"Your natural response is 'This orbital geometry can't be right. This can't be stable over the long term because, after all, this would cause the planet and these objects to meet and eventually collide,'" says Batygin. But through a mechanism known as mean-motion resonance, the anti-aligned orbit of the ninth planet actually prevents the Kuiper Belt objects from colliding with it and keeps them aligned.

Batygin and Brown have released their findings in an Astronomical Journal article entitled "Evidence for a Distant Giant Planet in the Solar System." Their hope is that they, or others who read the paper and have access to telescopes, will eventually spot Planet Nine, as they've cleverly named it.

I'm not sure if this is relevant to the discovery or just an image of a Mac screensaver

Getting eyes on Planet Nine will be of supreme importance, and I hope Earth's governments will collaborate to find it. As we all learned last month, having unobserved planets floating around out there can be one of the greatest dangers to the galaxy.

R.I.P. Hosnian System

The Slow-Mo Guys are at it again with their fancy six-figure camera that shoots 2,500 frames per second. This time they're taking a drill bit (a 3/8" by the looks of it), rolling it in wet paint and recording what happens when they pull the trigger. In this "experiment" we learn that Dan doesn't know how to work a chuck, and we also hear some NSFW language—if you consider silly British euphemisms like "knob" a proper curse word.

I want to believe that Jackson Pollack's eyes worked at 2,500 blinks per second, and that this is what he saw while he was creating his paintings.

This local Malaysian candidate will be responsible for conceptualizing & designing new consumer products, focusing on home appliances. They'll be in charge of the entire design development process from design proposal to manufacturing. Applicant must possess at least a Advanced/Higher/Graduate Diploma, or Bachelor's Degree in Industrial Design.

Everyone knows that print is dead, but anyone who visits the newsstand regularly has probably noticed that there are an awful lot of good-looking independent magazines that seem to be flourishing in these digital times—titles like Pin-Up (architecture), Apartamento (interiors), and Fantastic Man and The Gentlewoman (men’s and women’s fashion, respectively). Now industrial design enthusiasts have their own idiosyncratic indie publication in the London-based Modern Design Review, which has published two issues so far and is working on its third for March. MDR is the brainchild of Laura Houseley, who started her career as an editor at Wallpaper* and has since worked as a freelance design journalist and consultant for a variety of publications and brands. Last month, we spoke to Houseley about the enduring allure of print, the delicate art of advertorials, and why eBay is a design editor’s best friend.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The first issue of MDR came out in 2014. The cover integrates elements of several stories inside, with parts of products by Martino Gamper, Yrjö Kukkapuro and Muller Van Severen arranged in a foam brick—a reference to a story on the Japanese art of ikebana.

What led you to create a print design magazine and not, say, a blog or a website?

Well, I’ve been at this for a long time. I started out my career at Wallpaper* magazine, and that must be 18 or 19 years ago now. So I’ve always been involved in print media—that’s my craft, in a way. And I’d just become increasingly frustrated at not having platforms to write the kind of design stories that I wanted to write. That really was the nucleus of the idea.

Can you define these stories that you felt you weren’t able to write online?

I felt that design as a discipline was growing and getting ever more creative. I was, and I am, constantly inspired by the discipline itself, and I felt that design media had perhaps not sought to keep up with that evolution. I felt that there was plenty of opportunity to explore stories in a more creative way, to not be encumbered by the news aspect of design—that was something that I wanted to rid myself of, the pressure of keeping up with the latest and newest. I was quite interested in spending a lot of time on more obscure stories and exploring them visually as well as through written essays—basically, approaching the subject in a different and perhaps more surprising way.

I noticed that the magazine doesn’t even have a news section.

That was a decision really early on. As you know very well, so much design journalism has gone online, and people do it very well. There’s no reason, I felt, to try and compete with it. If people want news-led stories, they will go online; I really can’t see the point in a paper publication even attempting to match that, whereas there’s so much you can do on paper that you can do better than online. So I felt it was only sensible to focus on those aspects. And to me, making a magazine, no matter what the subject, has a level of skill to it, and exploring those kinds of possibilities is exciting.

Above and below: spreads from MDR issue one

What magazines did you look to for inspiration?

Not many, surprisingly. I’m very edited in what I read and look at myself, and I didn’t sit down with a whole host of publications, to be really honest. I think my inspiration was gleaned over years of looking at what’s out there and making a choice edit of what I look at. But I didn’t do that kind of structured market research where I picked and chose inspiration from different places, because for one thing I think you can see it in publications; I see a lot of new magazines now which are inspired and influenced by other magazines, and I really wanted Modern Design Review to be like nothing else. I wanted it to be something that was constructed from the bottom up, and for people to feel that when they looked at it.

How long was the gestation process leading to the first issue?

It was a long time. In all honesty, it was an idea that I first had when I left Wallpaper*, which was quite a long time ago. I’d always had the ambition to make my own publication. But from first speaking to Graphic Thought Facility, who are my art directors—and that began the real creative process—it was maybe a year and a half to the first issue hitting the newsstand.

And is the financial situation for a print magazine as dire as I imagine it is?

Yes! You can just put that. [Laughs]

But Modern Design Review is able to support itself through advertising?

Just about, but it’s a struggle. We are produced on a shoestring, effectively. As many other independent magazines of our type do, we kind of beg, borrow and steal in order to get it published and on the newsstand—it is very difficult. But then I always saw Modern Design Review as a flagship product for other projects as well, and I think a lot of people that publish at the moment have a similar attitude.

You mean for exhibitions and that kind of thing?

For exhibitions, for other future publishing projects, for consultation, for any number of things. I think the old model of a magazine purely being paid for by subscriptions or advertising is very hard to achieve now.

Each issue has a series of stories devoted to a material. In issue one it was wood; in issue two, textiles.

With MDR, Houseley largely did away with magazine sections—there is only the feature well and a small collection of “Endmatter” in the back.

Are you open to sponsored “advertorial” sorts of arrangements? I’ve noticed a bit of that in other independent magazines, and I think sometimes it works quite well and other times . . .

Yeah. I think you’re right; it can be successful or not. And it depends on the type of magazine. But I think it’s a good thing if a brand is open to some sort of creative interpretation. Producing an independent title is all about the freedom and being choice about the people that you work with and the people that you represent, and I think that puts you in a good position to be picky about projects. I hope that we could produce things with equally quality-driven brands, and that would make a good result. But I agree that sometimes those things don’t work.

So what kind of a team do you have? You said it’s a pretty shoestring operation.

So shoestring. It is mainly myself and the art directors, Graphic Thought Facility. And then it’s a merry band of collaborators and contributors, really. It changes from issue to issue. I have editorial assistants and interns, but other than that the editorial staff is me.

I have the second issue in front of me, and I noticed that it has quite a bit of uncredited writing—I’m assuming that all of that is by you?

That’s me, yes.

It feels like it’s about 60 or 70 percent your voice. That must be a challenge, to have it feel like a magazine and not just you.

Yes. I think that percentage will go down as we go along. We’re putting together issue three at the moment and already there’s more contribution. It was a decision for issue one especially, because I was very keen that Modern Design Review establish its own tone of voice, and for the time being that had to come from me, until it was something that I could pass on to other writers. So I was fine with it being largely me to begin with, but as we evolve obviously we’ll seek out more people to come and write for it.

The cover of MDR issue two, from spring/summer 2015, references its stories on textiles, Andrea Branzi’s neo-primitivism, hardness in design, and buttons in consumer products.

A story from issue two on a series of birthday gifts given to Ettore Sottsass by his friend and colleague Johanna Grawunder

Also in issue two, a short essay by Ronan Bouroullec about creating comfort in design

What are your other ambitions for the Review moving forward?

Well, I’d like to keep it going. [Laughs] I think that’s the number one ambition. And I’d just like to see it grow, in influence, in size—and to achieve some of these extracurricular projects as well. I’d like to do more exhibitions. We did one exhibition in September at the Ace Hotel in London. It was great, really satisfying, and I’d like to do more of that. And I’d love to do more publishing, whether it’s with newsstand titles or some book ideas I’m considering at the moment.

Can you tell us anything about what will be in issue three?

I don’t know if I can—we’re very secretive. This is something that print magazines have to grapple with all the time, how much to reveal online before the issue comes out, versus how much you want to push people toward the print publication by holding back information. We purposely didn’t do a whole lot of promotion for issue one; I really wanted people just to discover it and wonder where this had come from. And we don’t put a lot online for the same reason, because I want people who part with their hard-earned money to really feel like they’re getting something that they’re not going to be able to find elsewhere for free.

So we don’t give much away. But I can say that issue three is definitely bigger—we’re growing, we’ve got more stories in there. We keep the same editorial principle where we daisy-chain stories. It’s very much a thought process, how we format the magazine—so one story inspires or flows into another one, which has a knock-on effect to the one after. It’s a representation of how I see design at the moment.

Issue two includes an 18-page feature on “the subtleties of the button and the simple pleasure in can evoke,” with photos of the buttons on a Braun alarm clock, a Muji remote control, a Ronson Rio hairdryer and several other consumer products.

From the feature on buttons, photos of Braun’s Regie 308 control unit by Dieter Rams (1973) and Kodak’s Instamatic 300 pocket camera by Kenneth Grange (1983)

Between issue one and issue three, have you changed much about the magazine? Or do you feel like with the first issue you hit on a formula that works?

The formula is pretty much the same. But it’s such a simple formula; it can adapt to different content. It is essentially two sections in the magazine. I was really keen to do away with the idea of sections. As somebody who’s worked for a lot of magazines, I’ve been a slave to sections for a while, so it was quite freeing. We basically have the main well, which you go straight into, and then a section called “Endmatter” at the end, which is for smaller, more immediate stories. So the format has stayed the same, and it's really about those daisy-chained themes and ideas that make up the bulk.

I think one of the things about Modern Design Review that a lot of people don’t understand, and maybe we don’t say it blatantly enough, is that we shoot the vast majority of the content ourselves, and that is quite an unusual thing for a publication of our size to do, because it is expensive. And, you know, getting a marble chair from A to B isn’t the easiest thing. And so that is one of the more extraordinary things about what we do, and I think when people understand that, they have a different appreciation of the magazine.

Yeah, I loved the photo essay on buttons in issue two. Was it difficult to get your hands on all of these objects?

Oh, it so was. We joked that we should have classifieds to sell the stuff that we had to buy for issue two. Yeah, we had a huge—well, not difficulty, but it’s interesting how awkward it is to find objects like that. We ended up buying most of it on eBay, to be honest. Objects like that are quite difficult to borrow from museums; they weren’t too keen to lend them to us, so we ended up purchasing a lot of it. So I now own that typewriter and that hairdryer and that camera. It’s quite amusing how cheap some of those design classics are; I was amazed at what you can buy. But that shoot was great fun to do, and it was a story that we really liked and felt quite strongly about—and I think that’s a typical Modern Design Review story, actually, to take what is essentially a quite small subject that is perhaps in design consciousness but isn’t directly related to a particular designer’s work or a particular item, and turn it into an extensive story, something that we can really investigate and enjoy exploring.