It's currently 21 degrees below freezing in Detroit and everyone would rather be driving a convertible along the coast of anywhere else, which means it's high season for the city's biggest annual event. If you've never been to an executive-level convention for an industry you aren't a part of, I recommend it. It's an excellent opportunity to recalibrate your ego and you're almost guaranteed to find fun snacks. The key is to pick an event that has a glut of passionate people willing to talk to you for no reason, and enough conglomerated capital to make weird and interesting things happen. So when Ford invited me to tour this year's North American International Auto Show, I considered exactly how little I know about the car industry, forgot to consider the forecast, and accepted. These are a few highlights from my first North American International Auto Show.

NAIAS is by most yardsticks a big deal and an enormous hoopla. In practice it's like a week-long new car scented office party crossed with an Olympic event or beauty pageant, if all the contestants were vehicles. It's all crammed into a massive convention center, crushed full with on-edge designers, caffeinated reps, unveiling ceremonies, media "personalities" and their camera crews, investors, trillions of glossy cars, and feverishly impassioned auto-people of all types. 

This year the absurdity of it all greeted you right inside the foyer, where the Jalopnik dudes were living, working and sleeping in a couple of bro-ed out Ford vans. There was a lava lamp. There were a lot of harried laptopped laps.   

Living in vans indoors to cover the unveiling of new luxury cars. Nothing tone-deaf there. Photo via Jalopnik. 

Inside, the show ranged from aggressively understated to just aggressive. Ford's bright blue and white circus featured a truck you could climb into and be carried 25 feet in the air, where you could then try your hand at a backing-a-truck-up simulator. Below, a set of moving basketball hoops taught a nice fun lesson on the dangers of drunk driving... while playing basketball? Relieved they're taking a serious stand on this.

Truckavator going up. Photo by Kat Bauman.

While some of the Ford area's elements felt silly (like the booth shooting a baseball-sized ice ball at sheets of Gorilla GlassTM every 15 minutes), rad engineering still filled all the corners. 

According to most auto writers of note, Ford's insane GT supercar knocked the breath out of the whole show last year. While the shock has worn off, it was still easily one of the coolest things around, if not moreso now that it's ready for production. This year the brutal-looking thing arrived street legal, dressed in hard bright white and raw carbon fiber with a startling orange leather interior. 

Seriously aero exterior, carbon tub and sides, and a mid-engine twin-turbo V-6 giving 600hp. It's the inverse Batmobile.

Chatting with Color and Materials Manager Barbara Whalen, I learned that the interior colors were inspired by NASA's distinctive lightweight jumpsuits. They worked with a real suit while developing the design, and even considered using the same material, though it didn't pan out. Barb recalled, "When you touch it, it kind of...crunches," which is a reasonable thing to steer away from in something as focused a Le Mans-bound vehicle, as much as I love the idea of seats made from space suit.

Pretty sure the grappling hooks are activated from the steering wheel controls. Photo via Bloomberg.

When asked about the GT's Stormtrooper-y design lineage, all designers interviewed maintained that the project bore no connection with the recently renewed franchise. Entirely likely, but Disney could do way worse for future First Order ground transportation. 

Elsewhere in the show high points were less condensed. Unveilings promised "innovations," "disruptions," and odd combinations of user conveniences. The Kia Telluride teased a mysterious "health and wellness" interior. I'd hoped that meant next-level butt massage technology and an On-Board type link to WebMD so you could take your panicked self-diagnosis on the road, but no such luck. The most intriguing interior I found was in the Buick Avista concept. This thing's dash takes Buick's IntelliLink system and combines it with Tron styling with Star Trek data visualization. Along with a really slick exterior and launch pod-looking seats, it makes you feel a little like it should hover quietly when parked.

Buick Avista Concept interior 

Buick Avista's exterior: surprisingly sexy 

The best coffee at the show—a cortado—was made at the Volvo booth, which also featured bland animations of their extensive road hazard sensing systems. All of this surprised me but shouldn't have. If anybody knows about warm drinks and avoiding suicide by deer it's the Swedes. Hopefully having their S90 bring in the North American Truck/Utility of the Year trophy was sufficient appreciation for their efforts. 

Ford press event detailing the new FordPass concept

Ford's most interesting unveil was the announcement of the FordPass concept—a multi-platform program that could move the company into a supportive role for alternate modes of transportation. Identifying the changing transportation needs of urban populations, they're beginning to offer new options for joint ownership and leasing, ride-share programs, expanded rental options, and membership-based on-call assistance for directions, parking and more. So for us bike-riding, Uber-using, smart-phoning, non-car owners... the car giants know what we're up to and probably why. This is a big, interesting nod to the multifaceted future of transportation in the modern city.

Audi's H-Tron Quattro hydrogen/battery concept was one fun if fanciful gesture at future tech that hadn't already been well-covered at CES earlier this month. As much as everybody wants to talk about self-driving technologies, I'm pretty sure the hard facts of fuel efficiency and pollution are going to stay more immediately important for a good long while. This theoretical thing would theoretically roll 372.8 miles on a charge, and could be ready to produce within the next four years. 

Audi's Hydrogen-Solar-Battery hybrid

Overall, booth design at NAIAS is a big budget blend of tacky and impressive. Past the ubiquitous car-on-rotating-platform and an unimaginable amount of track lighting, designs were conservative, but a couple stuck out. The wrap around the VW setup was super clean, highly graphic, with nicely knolled bits and pieces.

Booths like Michelin got adventurous and anti-gravity. A nice break from the overwhelming projection screens used in most of the vehicle displays. Having a mix of live and sculptural Michelin Men was also a good move. Everybody loves that guy.

All in all NAIAS is an exciting event for both car buffs and anyone invested in commonplace applications of new tech. If you're interested in the future of both drivable environments and the things that drive in them, this show is a big look at the design thinking and companies shaping that future. Just don't go outside or your snot will freeze.

Ford Motors would like me to let you know that they paid for my NAIAS airfare, but not my salient and hard-hitting opinions of the show and their work. All opinions are mine and freely given, because anything else would be unethical and they probably couldn't afford to change them anyway.

EGG6 is a packaging design for eggs. The spiral-shaped cuts on the board work like springs in a mattress, providing a soft and elastic support to the eggs inside of it. Both the lid and the tray have spiral buffers to alleviate the bumps and shakes that may happen in transport. A 1:1 model is made and tested viable.

Wristwatches are the only universally-accepted piece of wearable technology, and it's fascinating to see how far designers can push their boundaries. While the mere timetelling functionality was perfected long ago, modern-day watch designers vie to outdo each other with their "complications," i.e. the sophisticated supporting operations that are going on inside the watch. From a functional standpoint these could be deemed extraneous, but their mechanical prowess often delights.

One of the more interesting designs we've seen lately is French watch brand 4N's MVT01/D01. This transparent watch wears its guts on its sleeve, and feeds the numbers into a delineated rectangle in a rather wondrous fashion.

These discs intercept and overlap to display the time, perfectly centred in the watch. The size of the numbers is dramatically large (5.5 mm), contributing to the comfort and unmatched ease of readability.

Here's what you see when the time changes:

Here's a closer look from a few different angles:

What's not clear in the video is that the operation is apparently quite audible. "Its resolutely masculine spirit," the company writes, "with powerful mechanical sounds confirms the unapologetic high-technicality of this piece."

Is there anything worse than when people figure out how to do something clever, but no one bothers to write the process down? It drives me nuts that we'll never really know how they built the Pyramids, for instance. I mean we know it was built by aliens, sure, but we don't know how they did it.

A fellow named Kurt Nordwall, who works at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, also encountered something that no "How It's Made" YouTube video exists of. Not pyramids, but something more recent: Elaborate 18th-Century frames housing the Dutch paintings in the MIA collection. As the resident framing technician, Nordwall spent a lot of time studying the elaborate woodwork, and became consumed with how these could have possibly been constructed prior to the Industrial Revolution.

A little research led him to this diagram of a frame-carving machine.

With no CG animation showing him how it worked, Nordwall began sketching, trying to figure out how it did what it did.

Eventually, and with grant backing from the Roberta Mann Innovation Award, Nordwall was able to construct a hand-powered machine that he can feed the raw frames into to produce different carvings. Check this out:

Next step: Getting Nordwall to Egypt.

Under supervision of senior designers, you'll work with the Product Development team to produce concepts for color, material, and graphic applications on footwear in alignment with brand creative direction. You should have a Bachelor’s in Industrial, Graphic, Fashion Design or equivalent and knowledge of shoe construction and the manufacturing process.

Happy Monday! Jumpstart your week with our insider's guide to events in the design world. From must-see exhibitions to insightful lectures and the competitions you need to know about—here's the best of what's going on, right now.

Monday

Kung Caputo, Too Hard to be True Stools, 2014

A new collection from the refreshing Swiss designers

For their new exhibition at Etage Projects, Keung Caputo: ONOFF, Sarah Kueng and Lovis Caputo created a new series of objects based on playful juxtapositions and colorful material explorations such as hand-dyed leather and painted lightbulbs. 

Copenhagen, Denmark. On view through March 19th. 

Tuesday

An informative talk for those who love, or hate, the NYC grid

New York was an adhoc agglomeration of streets and houses around Manhattan's southern tip until 1811, when the Commissioners' Plan was put into action and a regular street grid was imposed on the island, heralding a new era for the city. Gerard Koeppel's talk at the Skyscraper Museum will be based on his book, City on a Grid: How New York Became New York, an in-depth look at one of the most transformative urban plans in history. 

New York, NY. January 26th at 6:30 PM. 

Wednesday

A behind-the-scenes look at the Google creatives who meld product innovation and marketing

AIGA/NY is hosting An Evening with Google Creative Lab—the fast-paced studio where designers, writers, programmers, film makers, producers and business thinkers unite to create the next project that might change our world, or at least how we interact with it. The tour will go through the Lab's latest projects. 

New York, NY. January 27th at 6:30 PM. 

Thursday

The annual materials event for creative professionals

The materials trade show Material Experience 2016 arrives in Rotterdam for three days. This year's theme, "The Future is Here," will be explored through the latest developments in the world of 3D printing, low-energy materials, and the latest innovations from the fields of energy generation and conservation.

Rotterdam, Netherlands. On view through January 29th. 

Friday

Artful typography—from an artist born without hands 

Matthias Buchinger was only 29 inches tall and born without hands or feet, yet he became known throughout Europe as a musician, magician and exceptional draftsman. In delicate, meticulously detailed drawings Buchinger built up lines of microscopic texts to create figures (often self-portraits) and complex scenes. 16 of his spectacular graphic works are gathered in Wordplay: Matthias Buchinger Drawings from the Collection of Ricky Jay at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

New York, NY. On view through April 11th. 

Saturday/Sunday

The work of art in our age of technology

Luminary artists, curators, researchers, and writers will convene at the New Museum for Open Score: Art and Technology 2016, a symposium exploring how technology is transforming art and culture. Complement this with a visit to Tauba Auerbach's most recent exhibition at Paula Cooper Gallery, Projective Instrument. The artist presents a new series of paintings inspired by architectural ornamentation and projective geometry as well as a new series of glass sculptures inspired by tools, measuring implements and fabric.

New York, NY. On view through February 13th. 

Upcoming Deadlines

January 29 - AIANY Design Awards

The annual awards program recognizes AIA New York Chapter members in four categories: Architecture, Interiors, Urban Design, and Projects. The final deadline for submissions has been extended to February 5th, but you need to start the application on or before January 29th to prevent being charged a late fee. 

January 29 - James Beard Foundation Restaurant Design Awards 

If you're in the field of restaurant design, you'll definitely want to submit your work to this coveted award series. Any project that was completed or redone in North America since January 2013 is eligible. 

Plan Ahead

The annual hub of inspiration for the latest and greatest Scandinavian design, Stockholm Furniture & Light Fair opens its doors in early February. Beyond the extensive exhibitors list, other programming will include the concurrent Stockholm Design Talks exploring the theme of "Scandinavia Now" and a tribute to the 2016 guests of honor, designers Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby. 

Organized around the impact that Pritzker Prize winning architects Toyo Ito and SANAA have had on the current generation of Japanese designers, MoMA's new exhibition, A Japanese Constellation: Toyo Ito, SANAA, and Beyond, will feature the work of 44 firms that embody the lineage of innovation coming out of Japan.

Check out the Core77 Calendar for more design world events, competitions and exhibitions, or submit your own to be considered for our next Week in Design.

When you think of problems plaguing the urban nomad, lackluster lighting might not be the first thing to come to mind. But for Matthew Lim it was a pain point in need of remedy.

“I was moving into a new apartment, when I realized I was missing a task light,” Lim says. And finding a suitable one proved more difficult that you might expect. “The problem with existing task lights is that they are usually point-sourced and one-directional—sharp shadows at weird angles—and they take up desk space,” Lim says. “Ceiling lights provide uniform, even lighting but they are usually in the center of the room, and don’t light up your desk well unless it is right in the middle. There was nothing in between.”

Tack is a lightweight, portable task light that attaches to the wall with 3M Command adhesive strips.

At the time, Lim was in his senior year studying industrial design at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and was doing an independent-study project focused on bringing a product to a specific market. So the student set his sights on the lighting problem right in front of him, with a wall-mounted LED lamp he named Tack.

“Tack was based on a very simple, almost silly premise: What if there was a light that you could easily mount on the wall?” Lim says. And he meant really easily—no mounting hardware to mess up the wall or anger the landlord (more on that in a minute). To test his premise, Lim went straight into prototyping. “The very first step I took was to create a proof-of-concept model of the idea,” he says. “I headed to the shop, quickly bent some sheet aluminum, threw in some LEDs and slotted in a polycarbonate diffuser lens, all of which were excess materials from previous projects.” This first prototype was met with a mostly positive response from friends and family, which spurred Lim toward making the concept a reality.

Tack sketches

Next, Lim tapped into the expertise of local manufacturing partners to determine the best way to bring his rough prototype to mass production. Through these talks, he decided to produce Tack in aluminum, both for its ability to quickly disperse heat and its favorable strength-to-weight ratio. “Since the light will be mounted on the wall, it needed to be sufficiently light to prevent weight from being an issue,” he says. Bent sheet aluminum was ruled out due to labor costs, leading Lim to settle on aluminum extrusions, which turned out to be a good fit in terms of production quantity and tooling costs. One of Lim’s professors suggested that he check out Silver City Aluminum, based in Taunton, Massachusetts, a quick drive away from RISD’s campus. The final extrusion is cut to the correct lengths by Silver City and then sent to a metal finishing facility to be anodized.

Talking to manufacturers also gave Lim a new set of constraints. By narrowing down the processes that would be used to create his design, Lim was able to determine the tooling and production costs, as well as the minimum order quantity needed to not break the bank. Conversations with Silver City Aluminum quickly revealed that to create Tack cost-effectively, Lim would have to bump up the minimum order from 500 to 1,000 pieces. “That meant that the product had to be relevant and useful to twice as many people,” Lim says.

From first to last prototype in six seconds

Those limitations led the designer to Kickstarter, where he could place the fate of Tack in the hands of potential customers from around the globe. “I’ve always been interested in crowdfunded platforms as a way to democratically validate a design, and that became an important guiding constraint in the design of Tack,” Lim says. “I’ve been following Kickstarter for a while, and it seems to me that getting at least 500 backers is feasible.”

As for his initial premise for the product—that Tack be easily mounted and removed from any location—that proved easier said than done. Lim decided to use 3M Command adhesive strips for their ubiquity and promise of easy removability. “I once mounted one of my prototypes wrongly on the wall and ended up ripping out an entire chunk of wallpaper,” he says. “And, no, I haven’t told my landlord about that yet.” In one of his earlier prototypes, Lim designed a facet that hid the adhesive strip and yet made it accessible for removal. “At the same time, the facets opened up possibilities for mounting Tack in different positions to achieve different lighting conditions,” Lim says. “I prototyped many different versions that afforded the same functionality, from ones that were angular to more curved ones.”

Multiple iterations of facets led Lim to settle on two flat edges and one curve for Tack. This final profile also allowed the power supply plug to always remain close to the wall no matter which position the user chooses. “With each iteration, I was making sure that the amount of light coming out of Tack is optimal while maintaining a petite and pleasing profile,” Lim says.

There was also the issue of the lens and how it would it be attached to the aluminum body. Lim started with polypropylene but later switched to high-density polyethylene (HDPE), which is more recyclable and was available in the correct finish, color and thickness. Natural uncolored HDPE comes with a frosted, translucent white appearance, which helped to diffuse the LEDs evenly. Finding a suitable supplier was another challenge given that Lim needed the HDPE in an unusual thickness, but after many e-mails he was introduced to Formflex, a die-cutter manufacturer based in Indiana.

The HDPE diffuser lens and magnetic mounting strip both use a similar die-cutting process. The magnetic mounting strip is made from a huge coil of mild steel and die-cut to the right length and profile. The electronics and the power supply are sourced from Shenzhen, China. “It is very difficult to find local manufacturers who produce electronics cost-effectively, especially at such a relatively small scale,” Lim says.

Above and below: the components, material specs and measurements for Lim’s Tack Lighting System

Lim also struggled with pricing the product, a skill set that, unfortunately, isn’t always included in the design-school curriculum. “[There were] a lot of spreadsheets to make sure that the numbers work out,” Lim says. “This involved knowing beforehand every single cost that will be incurred: the cost of import freight of the parts from China, the cost of shipping to backers, et cetera. Everything has to be considered.” After asking multiple people about the perceived value of Tack and balancing that with the all of the costs, Lim decided on $60 for one Tack Lighting System in matte silver. (Lim will do one color, matte silver, if he raises $60,000. If he can raise substantially more funds, he will add gold and rose gold finishes; backers can get one set in any available color for $70.) “I have been joking with friends that at the minimum funding goal of $60,000, I will not be earning a living wage,” Lim says. “Unfortunately, that is the truth. However, I view the entire experience as a learning process and I think it is worth all the time and effort that I’ve put into it.”

As for what he’ll do if the project doesn’t succeed? “I think failures teach you a lot more than successes. . . . If Tack doesn’t work out in the end, I will find something else that perks my curiosity and explore it. I know that no matter what happens, I will come out of this experience more knowledgeable and better equipped, which would in turn increase the likelihood of success for my next endeavor. The most important thing is to keep learning and never stop trying.”

A few thousand people get struck by lightning every year. About 96% of those killed and injured are people out in the open. The majority of victims are people participating in outdoor activities such as hiking and camping. Many accidents in the mountains can be ascribed to the panic brought about by spectacular lightning that generates extreme fear among tourists. It is estimated that injuries as a result of indirect charge are three times more likely than a direct lightning strike. The project aims at increasing the safety of people caught out in the open during a thunderstorm. The tents are made of ultralight materials and thus meet the needs of those partaking in many different kinds of outdoor recreation. The tent can be put up fast and is easy to carry around. It also protects against unfavorable weather conditions accompanying thunderstorms, for example rain and wind.

"The concept was born out of necessity" is what both Lore and Stefan tell me independently when asked about how their projects came about. Not surprisingly, necessity is often a great basis for good design. 

Tucked away in the basement of the AIT Architektursalon in Ehrenfeld, the two students who were selected for the AIT Interior Scholarship presented their work in a temporary showroom flat, which is served as both as exhibition space and their actual home during Cologne Design Week.

Travelbox Olot by Stefan Prattes

Stefan Prattes had the idea for Travelbox Olot when facing the challenge of taking his beloved bike along to an internship in Spain. Having been informed by the shipping company that he needed to provide a bespoke container, he decided to take the task to the next level. Instead of going for the usual shipping crates made of plywood, he opted for giving the structure he needed both added purpose and appeal.

The 70 kg box contains a shelf, a bed and a large table

Travelbox Olot cosists of a frame structure that doubles as a shelf, plus a fold-out bed and a large table. When collapsed, it still provides enough room for the bike and other accessories.

When folded up, the box is 1 cubic meter in volume and 209x124,5x38,5 cm

The oak frame is coated with a 1.5 mm aluminium sheet which not only gives a high quality appearance, but also guarantees longevity. The idea is that the patina that is collected in different places over time will serve as a collection of memories, encapsulated in the furniture.

Oak and aluminium give the furniture/ container longevity

Lore Hauck's project Mobile Küche was created during an experimental month-long stay at an abandoned brickyard. The aim of the project Rutopia was to come up with new strategies for the design of cultural and social spaces in industrial wasteland.

Mobile Küche was created as a tool for both research and communication. The kitchen unit is based on a wheelbarrow-like structure to enable it to be moved around the area to find the best location. Aimed to be fully independent, Mobile Küche comes with a gas bottle for cooking and a hung water canister for the washing up. Different levels provide an inclusive island of communication for the cook and their guests of all ages.

Gravity provides for water flow

Basic utensils on a copper tube rail

My favourite bit of the design was a small hidden music box attached to the wheels, playing "Here Comes The Sun" as the kitchen unit was moved around to announce its arrival.

A music box attached to the wheel provides the soundtrack to this moveable living space

Bit Storage Drawer

Sandra Powell, a/k/a Sawdust Girl, shows us how she put together her functional, organized, multilevel drill-and-driver-bit storage drawer:

LED Bicycle Wheels

Back in that sweet Parisian workshop, the La Fabrique DIY channel shows you how to add some highly-visible, waterproof LED lighting to your bike wheels, for better nighttime safety:

DIY Block Plane

Talk about eyeballing skills: Matthias Wandel makes a wooden-body block plane, without taking a single measurement that we could see, basing the design on his tiny modelmaker's plane. He ergonomicizes the form and even makes the freaking blade:

DIY Gantry Crane

Frank Howarth has an easy way of lifting extraordinarily heavy items and machines in his shop and moving them around: His DIY gantry crane. You've undoubtedly seen it in the background, or in use in the foreground, in his other videos. Here he explains how it's put together, and why he designed it the way he did.

Rotating 3D Printer Workstation

Bob Clagett comes up with a great way to make changing filaments on his 3D printer, which requires getting around to the back of it, quicker and easier:

Bathroom-Based DIY, 1

April Wilkerson spruces up her bathroom counter and sink with some unconventional design techniques, adding countertop storage and dividing a large single mirror into two smaller ones, without having to cut any glass:

Bathroom-Based DIY, 2

Steve Ramsey tackles the problem of not being able to access under-sink storage in a tight bathroom space:

Installing Kitchen Cabinets

Homebuilder Ron Paulk shows you his tricks of the trade for hanging and installing kitchen cabinets. Here we see how decades of experience pays off with careful forethought, smart preparation and gathering the right (sometimes surprising, in the case of the bucket) tools:

Multipurpose Tiny House Project

It looks like Ana White's TV deal may have gotten extended. She reveals the surprise that while she and husband Jacob were building a cabin in the Alaskan wilderness and being recorded by HGTV, they weren't going back to a hotel at night; they were living out of a tent, with their two kids! To remedy that living challenge, they're working on a tiny house they can live in, and feed crews out of, during future in-the-wild builds.

Build Your Own Workbench On the Cheap:

You can't get a lot of building done without some sort of workbench. It's common for beginners to start off with something as humble as a door across sawhorses, but when you're ready to build your own, check out Jay Bates' demo:

Now that sustainable forestry practices are widely understood and pursued, wood is a very smart raw material for us to use. It's renewable, it's relatively easy to work with, and it requires less processing to get into a useful form than, say, turning petroleum into high-density polyethylene or processing ore into steel sheets. On top of that, we humans have been working with wood for millenia, and our experience with the material has led to vast production efficiencies.

But working with wood of course produces sawdust, and on an industrial scale, tons of it. The traditional way for sawmills to get rid of the stuff was simply to dump it. After all, it's a totally natural material that can't do any harm, right? Er, depends. It seems that dumping this natural material onto the ground, in decidedly unnatural volumes, may do harm to the environment after all.

University of British Columbia professor Dr. Sheldon Duff (Faculty of Applied Science, Dept. of Chemical and Biological Engineering) sees a strong downside to dumping sawdust. According to an article in Canadian Geographic called "Toxic Solution: Sawyers lumber under new environmental policies,"

Duff says the decomposition of a tree in a forest is similar to the impact of sawdust, but the difference is of scale. Sawmills may be storing thousands of cubic metres of wood residues in one place, "so essentially it's a concentration issue," says Duff.

Duff explains that water-borne bacteria digest organic material in leachate, but use up much of the available oxygen. This high "biological oxygen demand" can suffocate fish and other organisms.

But of larger concern, says Duff, are substances such as lignins and fatty acids that protect trees from predators while they are alive, but can leach into water and poison wildlife. "Those types of things remain in the tree and, as the tree decays, they slowly get broken down," says Duff. "But when you're processing a whole large volume of wood and large concentrations of these materials get out into the runoff, they cause toxicity and are toxic to a broad range of organisms."

To be clear, the jury's still out on this. But assuming that dumping sawdust is harmful, what other, more intelligent uses can we put the stuff to? Compressing it into MDF and particleboard is one use, but as we've seen, that raises an issue with the toxicity of the glues used to bind them together. Tomorrow we'll look at some alternatives.

Almost a design festival in its own right by now, Design Parcours Ehrenfeld spreads through the northwest of the city, and has streams of people coming out to play on the Thursday night of Cologne Design Week. Clad in down jackets and holding on to a hot drink visitors meander through the many exhibition spaces while enjoying the mix of design, live music and DJs.

Istanbul'Dan, a collaborative exhibition in an unused bunker is an "hommage to Istanbul, its craft and its people." A group of designers set out to find inspiration in the bi-continental city, and more specifically in its historic craft district Shishane.

Bakmak pendant lamp

Bakmak pendant lamp by Florian Saul was inspired by the intricate sheet metal moulding and wood carving he witnessed in Shishane. The spherical spots are held by magnets and can be adjusted to any position.

Mühür/ Imprint  jewellery

Architect, designer and lecturer Asli Kiyak Ingin was inspired to this 'Jewellery that leaves a mark' by a street in Shishane that is dedicated to artisanal stamp and puncheon making. On the hunt for a new application of this dying craft, she has created a collection of stamp-rings with different messages and patterns.

Kül ashtray

Beautifully simple and seemingly accidental is the design of this ashtray by Piere Kracht.  Pierre is exploring human error as a means of design out of the ordinary, inspired by the often necessary improvisation in artisanal production.

Atomteller

K-18, another well-loved creative space in a derelict residential house this year showed Atomteller by Mia Grau and Andree Weissert, a collection of delicate porcelain plates. The watercolour decorations show a nostalgic view of nuclear power plants as the "Cathedrals of a technological world-view," a soon to be vanished icon of the German landscape.

Samimi carpets made from safety belts

Utensil showcased a new product on sale in their shop, handwoven carpets made from safety belts by Samimi.

Waterworks hydration system

Waterworks by Dutch design studio House of Thol is a natural hydration system made from partly glazed terracotta cones and glass water containers. Different cones for different plants allow you to be all set for beautiful growth, even if you don't have green fingers.

Der Tisch dining table surface

Einszueins is a collaboration of carpenter Dirk Wiesemann and artist miegL. The beautifully smooth surface of dining table Der Tischis the result of a bold but carefully planned combination of different industrial varnishes, chemical reactions, chalk, burning and sanding.

Candidates will be required to execute a percentage of each season’s designs from concept to finish detailing, create full technical packages following strict guidelines, and create new body silhouettes and styling details. A working knowledge of fabrics and construction is a must as they'll develop fits, fabric and finishes.

In the last entry we looked at the potentially negative effects of industrial-scale sawdust disposal. If Dr. Sheldon Duff is correct and it's bad for the environment, what's a large-scale producer of sawdust to do? In small batches it can be safely mixed with compost, but what can you do when you're producing amounts like in this photo here?

One intelligent solution to disposing of sawdust may be, believe it or not, to burn it. Now I know what you're thinking: Doesn't burning wood release CO2? Yes, but so does most organic matter when burned. So if we're looking at a situation where something is going to get burned anyway, the benefit of burning sawdust versus burning something else is that we've already got sawdust, and don't need to go dig that something else out of the ground.

If there's one industry that is going to be burning something no matter what, it's the lumber industry. That's because most commercial timber needs to be kiln-dried (in order to get the wood down to a manageable moisture content of 6-8%, as air drying can only get it down to 18% or so), and kilns require heat. It hardly makes sense for a lumberyard to purchase and burn coal or more wood when their own waste product is a source of essentially free energy, and that's why a lot of lumber producers use sawdust to fire their kilns.

Lumber company J. Gibson Mcilvain, one of America's oldest lumber suppliers and currently the country's largest importer of teak, does exactly that. "At any given moment we've got seven million board-feet of wood on site, and six 40-foot container trucks leaving each week with 15,000 to 20,000 board-feet inside each," says Shannon Rogers, JGM's Director of Marketing. 

To process all of that wood produces a massive amount of sawdust. "All of our dust collectors funnel into 40-foot trailers, and we probably fill one or two of those each week," Rogers explains. Thus, "All of our kilns are powered by boilers burning atomized sawdust. The sawdust gets dumped into its own room where an auger turns and feeds it into the combustion chamber. We've got a guy whose job it is to monitor the temperatures, but other than that it's pretty set-it-and-forget-it."

Even with the kilns going, JGM can't discard of all the sawdust they produce. "We probably end up going through about half of it," Rogers says. "The other half we sell to a company that turns it into pellets."

Turning sawdust into pellets brings several advantages. The first is that compressing dust into pellets reduces its overall volume to just 1/10th the size, making it vastly easier to store and transport. The second is that pellets are a lot easier to feed into a boiler, for those that don't have a fancy auger-feeding system. Here's an example of how Ontario-based Gildale Farms turns sawdust into pellets, and doesn't use any glue or binders to do it:

Pellet Pros is a company that produces machines that allow you to transform your own sawdust into your own pellets. They're not quiet, but they're neat:

Following—or perhaps spurring—the growth in popularity of pellets, a company called Pellet Pro (not to be confused with Pellet Pros) produces a line of barbecue grills and smokers that run on pellets.

Next we'll look at another potentially delicious way that sawdust can be used in food production.

This is the latest installment of our Designing Women series. Previously, we profiled the Cuban-born furniture and interior designer Clara Porset.

Maria Pergay. Photo by Philippe Pons; all images courtesy Demisch Danant

“Everybody is scared of stainless steel, but we have a link—there is something deep inside between me and stainless steel,” Maria Pergay told the New York Times in 2010. “This material which looks so strong, hard and cold is sweet and not sharp, and it matches with everything.” Although stainless steel is commonplace today (good luck buying a new appliance that isn’t finished in it), when Pergay began her devotion to the alloy in 1967 it was a profoundly unorthodox endeavor. Up until that point the Parisian designer had been known for her small-scale silver objects, which she produced for fashion houses like Hermès and Christian Dior, but when the stainless steel manufacturer Ugine-Gueugnon approached her about experimenting in the material she jumped at the chance to design larger forms.

Excited by the new possibilities in scale, Pergay’s first piece of furniture in stainless steel was the massive Flying Carpet Daybed—a curvaceous form that would be introduced to the world by the equally curvaceous Brigitte Bardot, who was photographed on the bed during a movie shoot. Pergay followed it with the Ring chair, a seat made of three concentric circles of bent stainless steel that has been her calling card ever since. A line of stainless steel furniture followed, and was exhibited in 1968 at the Galerie Maison et Jardin in Paris, just a year after her first foray in the material. Her sinuous lines and luxurious treatment of an otherwise industrial material created a sensation, and the entire exhibition was snapped up on opening night by fashion designer Pierre Cardin.

An archival photo of Pergay's 1967 Lit Tapis Volant (Flying Carpet Daybed), her first furniture design in stainless steel

Brigitte Bardot reclining on Pergay’s fur-covered Flying Carpet Daybed in 1970. Pergay’s Ring Chair can also be seen in the background. 

Pergay’s Chaise Anneaux (Ring Chair), made of three concentric circles of bent stainless steel, 1968 

Following the exhibition’s success, Pergay continued to design in steel and also took private commissions for custom furniture pieces and interior designs for wealthy patrons in Europe. But as the decadence of the ’70s began to give way, Pergay sought new clients in the Middle East, moving to Saudi Arabia in 1977 and working on interior commissions for the royal family for the next eight years. In 2004 Pergay returned to her stainless steel roots, designing a collection of furniture that was exhibited at Lehmann Maupin and Demisch Danant galleries in New York.

When not designing in steel, Pergay’s taste tended toward the surreal; here, she poses with Pierre Cardin and her Canapé Tortue (Turtle Sofa) in 1977. A custom piece commissioned by Cardin, the sofa’s upper-half of tortoiseshells opened and closed to reveal a brown leather cushion for lounging. 

Not happy with the term designer, Pergay instead prefers to call herself a “laborer of ideas,” and at age 85 she has certainly earned the title. Still at work, Pergay most recently collaborated with Fendi on a new collection of furnishings for the Fendi Casa Icons series, raucously combining leopard print with her beloved stainless steel. As she told gallerist Suzanne Demisch in the book Maria Pergay: Between Ideas and Design, “Copper is too fragile, aluminum too light, gold too symbolic, silver too weak, bronze is out of fashion, and platinum inaccessible. . . . Nothing is more beautiful than steel.”

Pergay’s 2013 collaboration with Fendi Casa Icons included an ornate chair called the Chaise Lion.

Pouf Ruban (Ribbon Pouf), made from enameled stainless steel, 2007

Much of Pergay’s career has been devoted to treating stainless steel as a precious material. Her 2005 Meuble Nacre (Mother-of-Pearl Cabinet) combined steel, inlaid mother-of-pearl, tinted sycamore and a silk tassel and was produced in a limited edition of eight.

Stainless steel Enveloppe magazine holder, circa 1968

Pergay combined stainless steel and acrylic for her 1969 Acier chairs

Pergay’s 1970s cocktail table combined brushed and mirror-polished stainless steel.

A custom stainless steel chest of drawers commissioned in 1972

1970 stainless steel lounge chair

If you're studying, say, fashion design, it makes sense to go to New York, Paris or London, where there are plenty of places to apply for internships. Of course, you'll find you're a dime a dozen, as thousands of other students have the same idea.

But imagine studying design in a place surrounded by a thousand companies that can't find enough people like you, and are part of a $646 billion industry. If that sounds appealing and you like the great outdoors, you may want to head to Utah.

That's because Utah State University has launched the first-ever degree program in Outdoor Product Design and Development. 

The four-year, Board-of-Regents-approved Bachelor's program was spearheaded by professor Lindsey Shirley, who noticed a dearth of properly trained designers in the industry. As reported in USA Today'sCollege section,

According to Shirley, there are over 1,000 outdoor product companies that are based in Utah. One of these companies is Blackpine Sports and after talking to an executive at the company, Shirley was inspired to fill a void in the industry through education.

"At that time, one of their executives invited me down for a tour just to have a conversation and he kept saying that it was really hard for him to find a trained workforce. They had to do a lot of on-the-job training," Shirley says. "So I said, 'Well, that's what I specialize in—preparing a workforce. We can create a degree program at Utah State because we have a lot of the infrastructure already in place.'"

USU bills the 120-credit course as "the first step to a high skill, high wage, high demand career opportunity" and stresses "an active and hands-on education approach to product research, development and testing."

Going over the curriculum, at first it can seem more FD than ID: Courses cover sewing, clothing production, textile science and tailoring. But there are also required courses in design thinking, general chemistry, biodiversity and sustainability, as well as "Digital Design Technologies for Outdoor Products." For those of you who are more ID than FD, bear in mind that there's an opportunity to design gear; the first-year History of the Outdoor Product Industry course had students studying everything from snowshoes to primitive boats, according to Gear Junkie, and the first sewing course had students cranking out backpacks, messenger bags and duffel bags. And unlike traditional fashion design, the design of outdoor apparel demands more rigorous functionality, which ought appeal to the ID-minded among you.

Another cool thing about the degree is that you're not cooped up in the studio all the time, but will be out in the field testing gear or visiting the local outdoor goods companies. If breathing subway smells and bus exhaust isn't for you, this might be the move.

Thus far demand has been strong, with 100 students enrolled in the first class, which just launched this semester. And if you've already got an ID degree, or part of one, you may not need to pay for all four years: "We have many students who are pursuing a second bachelor's degree," Lindsey said in the GJ Q&A, "and have already completed some of the coursework that falls into the general education requirements at USU. There is a possibility that we will have students complete the program in as little as 2.5 years."

Check it out here.

We know that lumberyards can burn their sawdust to run the drying kilns. But let's say someone invents an efficient large-scale solar kiln in the future and the boilers are no longer needed. What else could we use all of that sawdust for?

In addition to firing barbecue grills, another food-based way to use sawdust is, interestingly enough, in the production of mushrooms. Including the gourmet variety. Shiitake mushrooms typically grow on dead, fallen trees, and the traditional Japanese way to cultivate them was to cut a fresh tree down, find a log that was already growing shiitake, and place the new log next to it in hopes that the spores would spread. Not exactly efficient.

In modern times it's been discovered that shiitake mushrooms can be grown on DIY substrates made by combining sawdust and straw. One proponent of this method is Kirsten Bradley, who runs Gourmet Mushroom Cultivation courses on a farm in Mudgee and a rooftop garden in Sydney, Australia. "One of the easiest and cheapest ways to grow [shiitake or oyster mushrooms] is on sawdust spawn that you can make yourself," she writes. Bradley, who demonstrates in her classes how you can "clone" store-bought mushrooms, started the classes in 2012; four years later they're still going strong. The photos and captions below are hers:

Straw and sawdust all mixed together, now all ready to bag up (Image/text by Kirsten Bradley / Milkwood)

Students fill the mushroom bags with the substrate mix (Image/text by Kirsten Bradley / Milkwood)

Bag packing and sealing time… (Image/text by Kirsten Bradley / Milkwood)

Easy substrate sterilization technique #1 – 44 gallon drum with boiling water beneath bags – steam technique (Image/text by Kirsten Bradley / Milkwood)

Easy substrate sterilization technique #2 – the good ol' pressure cooker (much quicker, good for small batches) (Image/text by Kirsten Bradley / Milkwood)

Loading up the pressure cooker. Once the substrate (sawdust and straw mix) is sterilized then it's ready to be inoculated with mycelium, which can then colonize (ie eat) the substrate without having to compete with all the resident incidental spores in there… (Image/text by Kirsten Bradley / Milkwood)

One week later… mycelium running… (Image/text by Kirsten Bradley / Milkwood)

Ta da! First flush of shiitake mushrooms from sawdust spawn (Image/text by Kirsten Bradley / Milkwood)

Mass-produced mushrooms are typically grown in compost—a labor-intensive process as the compost must be regularly turned and aerated prior to being seeded with the spawn. If the sawdust method is as easy as Bradley teaches and could be scaled up, it would be awesome to see lumberyards selling tasty shiitakes out of the back. Heck, they've already got the fuel to run the pressure cookers.

Chances are you've seen, sometime in the past few years, this video going around on social media:

I never could figure out how they did it. But now Dave Hax, the guy who showed you how to draw a perfect circle, reveals how it's done:

Is it me, or is it always a little disappointing when you learn how a magic trick is actually done? I struggled with whether or not to post this one, but decided I am ultimately okay with removing magic from your lives. Don't say you never learn anything here!

In 2007 in America, no matter what kind of car you drove, someone else had died in that exact model. With over 200 million licensed drivers in the U.S. driving everything under the sun, that's to be expected.

But what the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found last year was staggering: The data showed there were nine car models that not a single person had died in (we assume they're using U.S.-only data). Tracking all new-model cars from 2011, by 2015 the following models had zero fatalities:

The data contains some surprises, as you'd imagine that only the most expensive cars would contain the best safety features. But it's also possible, of course, that drivers attracted to the lower-cost Kia Sorento are not the type who are liable to wrap it around a telephone pole while doing cocaine and Instagramming at 95 miles per hour.

One non-surprise is that Volvo made the list, as they've been leading the safety charge for decades. (They were the first to ditch plate glass way back in 1944 for a laminated windshield, introduced the three-point seatbelt in 1959, added side airbags in 1994; there's a laundry list of their firsts here.) And this week it's all over the news that Volvo has announced a "death-proof" car by 2020, stating that ""By 2020, nobody shall be seriously injured or killed in a new Volvo."

Volvo actually made this claim way back in 2008, as part of their Vision 2020 initiative; good on them for sticking to it. The initiative appears to be back in the news now because with autonomous cars a sure thing, their claim sounds less like optimism and more like certain truth. Volvo has announced, after all, that they'll be selling autonomous cars in just four years' time. "With the development of full autonomy we are going to push the limits of automotive safety," Volvo safety engineer Erik Coelingh told CNN Money, "because if you make a fully autonomous vehicle you have to think through everything that potentially can happen with a car."

Speaking of which, I have always wondered how auto designers planned to handle, from a UI perspective, the changeover between the car driving and the driver driving. Here we get a glimpse of how Volvo thinks it should work, embodied in their Concept 26 car:

I might need those two paddles to first provide a shot of espresso, but the interface seems doable.

Lastly, congratulations to Audi, Honda, Kia, Lexus, Mercedes-Benz, Subaru, Toyota and Volvo for making the list. With any luck the list will be shown to have expanded when the new data becomes available.

When it comes to product design, you've got your standalone items that provide great utility: Think flashlights, cutting boards or washing machines. But there's another class of product that we could call, for lack of a better term, holistic. These objects are meant to be part of a larger system that becomes embedded into your life in some meaningful way.

The original iPod is a great example of this, and its brilliance wasn't just in the compact form factor. Sure, the click wheel was clever, but Apple's real gamechanger was create the iTunes ecosystem the device was tied to. All of the technology already existed, but Apple's genius was in tying it all together. By making it easy to get music onto the device—and later, to sell music—Apple created a useful and profitable object that became part of people's lives.

Let's take a look at a new product design that's got nothing to do with music, but is aiming to become similarly lifestyle-embedded:

My first thought was "Well, this seems silly—it's just a fancy bento box." The lid that unrolls to form an eating platform is a nice touch, if you've got the table space (I don't because I eat at my desk, since I am essentially your content-producing slave, and my laptop would be in the way). You could argue there isn't much to this design.

Mercedes Bento

But looking at it big-picture, it becomes obvious that these guys aren't selling a simple bento box any more than Apple was selling you a portable hard drive. Instead they're aiming to deliver a lifestyle that the user can more easily achieve via their object and technology platform. They've carefully thought through all of the steps required to make your own lunch—a seemingly simple task that we increasingly do not have the time to execute. You can find recipes online and make your own shopping lists without this, but the developers figure that wrapping everything up and making it easier renders the Prepd system more attractive.

Bon App-ettit (Oh I am patting myself on the back for that one)

So far, it looks like they're right. At press time their tiny $25,000 funding goal had been dwarfed by nearly $300,000 in pledges; between the time I looked at this last night and this morning, it had gone up by $50,000. And there are still 30 days left in the campaign.

Sur La Table-t (Another zinger! I'm on fire)

There are still plenty of obstacles to overcome before the Prepd system becomes truly embedded in its users' lives: The app will have to run smoothly, recipes will have to be updated, users will have to be kept motivated to continue cooking. The developers' work didn't end with the design of the physical object. For product designers, that may increasingly become the case.