2016 is the year of the intelligent sex toy. For our latest 1-Hour Design Challenge, we ask Core77 readers to design a sex toy concept for 2050, one that incorporates current or speculative technologies in order to imagine the future of product-enabled intimacy.
View the full content hereCore77's editors spend time combing through the news so you don't have to. Here's a weekly roundup of our favorite stories from the World Wide Web.
This week brought exciting news for architecture geeks and The Big Lebowski buffs—John Lautner's 1963 Sheats-Goldstein House has been promised to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, ensuring the angular gem will remain a part of LA's cultural fabric. Although the house is famous in its own right, its star turn came in the the Coen brothers' 1998 stoner masterpiece, where it was immortalized as Jackie Treehorn's sinister lair.
—Rebecca Veit, columnist, Designing Women
At virtual reality companies like Oculus and Microsoft, science fiction helps founders and employees imagine possible use cases for their technology. The fact that sci-fi writers like Neal Stephenson, author of Snow Crash, is employed at Magic Leap as its "chief futurist" is a compelling argument for how these tech companies envision their place in the cultural landscape.
—Linyee Yuan, managing editor
Caro gives some insight into the production — 7 years! — of his book on Robert Moses, *The Power Broker,* with many anecdotes of the old days/ ways to amuse and dishearten today's fine-journalism fetishists.
—Eric Ludlum, editorial director
Paul Bulteel's sweeping photographic series "Cycle & Recycle" documents recycling facilities across Western Europe, highlighting how different materials are taken apart—only to coalesce into an entirely new matter, a strangely evocative consumer-made landscape.
—Alexandra Alexa, editorial assistant
Social media affects our consciousness in many ways, but I'm sure the majority of us haven't considered how it changes the way we view and process art. The Atlantic discusses the curious phenomenon of immersive exhibitions popping up in museums and how it might just be a clever way for museums to capitalize on visitors' Instagram addictions...
—Allison Fonder, community manager
This week I'm reading Christopher Schwarz's seminal "Workbenches: From Design And Theory To Construction And Use," which was recently re-released in a slightly revised edition. The longtime woodworker and woodworking editor goes over French, English and Continental styles of workbench, with a chapter on the famous Roubo. He also covers all of the workbench principles, and potential building materials, for those looking to build their own bench. (Warning: Do NOT buy the digital edition being sold on some websites--all it is, is a straight PDF rip with no formatting considerations for e-readers.)
—Rain Noe, senior editor
Common Edge is a New Orleans–based nonprofit and website "dedicated to reconnecting architecture and design to the public." Since its launch last month, the site has published a number of interesting interviews and opinion pieces—including Eva Hagberg Fisher's "Design Patient's Bill of Rights: A What-If," a funny and provocative thought experiment in what it would mean if design recipients, i.e. all of us, could have some of the same expectations of the built environment as patients have of their health-care experience.
—Mason Currey, senior editor
Over the years, Design Indaba has strived for a careful balance between fresh perspectives from emerging designers and creatives who have built some of the most impressive careers in the last century. On Day Two, Indaba delivered a healthy dose of promising new thought from their 2016 'Global Graduates' class and was capped off by a presentation from a design icon—British typographer Margaret Calvert.
Pulling from top design schools around the world, the conference invites recent or soon-to-graduate designers to share their work to date in a series of rapid-fire 10-minute talks. The session has quickly become a favorite for Indaba-goers, so much so that the organizers this year expanded the class to 11 graduates and spread the talks out over three days.
Unencumbered by client briefs and the demands of running a studio, four of the global design graduates presented a range of work from adaptive architecture to performance art.
Spanish-born, US-based Lopez surveyed her recent work on international sites from Copenhagen to Boston. In the midst of finishing off a year at the Rhode Island School of Design with a focus on adaptive reuse, she showed a selection of projects that adapt urban structures to empower the memory of their city and context.
"We as architects can do something with these existing buildings—creating something special out of the ordinary" explains Lopez, describing her inspiration that these structures offer beyond the obvious benefits of sustainability.
Coming from Japan, Fashion and Speculative Designer Kazuya Kawasaki showed a brief look into his experiments in growing materials for fashion designs. He outlined a vision for the future of fashion that will undoubtedly be transformed by global issues including climate change and overpopulation.
Kawasaki's approach to growing materials and biohacking spanned industrial 3D printing to a DIY process involving a blow-up pool in which he grew material to create a zero-waste pattern for a shirt.
Ignoring the traditional talk format all together was Cape Town's own Francois Knoetze. Throughout the course of his talk, Knoetze's fantastic creatures from fictional 'Cape Mongo' lumbered, strolled and sashayed to the stage. Set against the white noise and jumbled imagery of modern pop culture, Knoetze revealed the story of each creature in turn and the cultural remnants and discarded materials of which they were born.
For a closer look, the creatures of Cape Mongo wandered the conference over the day, layering a certain wit and poignance to the often stale conversation about sustainability and implications of our culture.
Basia Dzaman rounded out the session with a look into her work designing machines to 3D print and weave carbon fiber. Drawing on her native Poland's lush history of embroidery, Dzaman's processes reimagine traditional textile construction in the 21st century.
Contrasting the personal work of the graduates poised at the beginnings of their careers was a designer with nearly 50 years in the industry. South-African Born, British Typographer Margaret Calvert took the stage showing work that is truly spectacular in scope.
Calvert's presentation at the conference marked a type of homecoming to Cape Town. Welcomed by Pentagram partner and perennial Design Indaba M.C. Michael Beirut, Calvert razor-sharp wit both creatively and personally made her a joy to watch. Her own youthful enthusiasm about design at nearly 80 was something of an inspiration in its own right.
Her presentation showcased the two hemispheres of her career—work and play. "Work is what I get paid to do—right up till now, and play is what I don't get paid to do—like coming to talk at Indaba" she quipped dryly at the outset of the talk before diving into her most famous project—the motorway signs for the UK.
Calvert breezed through images of the progression of the signs and their numerous appropriations, revivals and spin-offs sprinkling in anecdotes throughout her career. She discussed the original brief given to her in the 1950s when car ownership in Britain boomed. With the construction of the first motorways, Calvert and her colleagues were charged with designing adequate signage. The now-iconic signs were actually extremely controversial when first introduced as they used a mixture of both upper and lower case letters—unheard of to date.
Calvert also gave notable credit to her partner Jock Kinneir who actually was awarded the job initially. "I get credit for doing everything, and I didn't" she stated—with a humble sensibility refreshing from such an icon and a highlight of Day Two of Design Indaba.
New York has cold winters, but after watching The Revenant I decided I'd never complain about being cold ever again. And our neighbors to the north certainly have worse winters than we do.
In Quebec's Laurentian Mountains, for instance, earlier this week it was about -27 Celsius and worse with the windchill. What better time, Montrealite David Freiheit wondered, than to run outside with a pot of boiling water and throw it up into the air to see what would happen?
This is what happens:
I call Freiheit a maniac for throwing it into the wind, by the way. And you can see that he appears to get hit in the face with a bit of the water coming down as it freezes. "[I did get hit but the result was] a minor sting only," Freiheit writes. "Actually, the more painful part was the imminent frostbite that came with running back inside with water on my face on a windy day. It was something like the equivalent of -45 with the windchill. "
Well, let this be a reminder to you of how far we've come, as a society, since Hugh Glass walked the earth in 1823. Presented with the fact that we can now boil water at will, can spend it frivolously and can risk frostbite for shits and giggles, this likely would have been his reaction:
Just…wow. Here Izzy Swan shows you why he's Izzy Swan, presenting a supercut of some of his crazier projects. If you don't see at least three things here that blow your mind, particularly in the tool-hacking department, then we can't help you:
How does he think this stuff up? In addition to his compilation video, this week Izzy Swan combined a router sled with a shop-made, drill-powered turntable. It'll take you a minute to wrap your head around what he's doing, and we're very curious to see how this comes into play in future episodes.
Joinery madness here. Jesse de Geest works up a beefy, tricky-to-execute tapered dovetail to put together the sliding deadman for his workbench. There are a couple don't-try-this-at-home moments--if you're new to the craft, do not try to crosscut on a table saw without using a miter gauge or sled--but de Geest, as always, prevails:
This is a short one, and absent any verbal explanation, so you'll have to use your eyeballs if you'd like to duplicate this: Here Montreal-based fabricator Richard Leon shows us his jig for cutting perfect arches with a router.
It's always interesting to see what tricks people use to install drawer slides, drawers and drawer faces, and here we get to see Jay Bates' as he builds a storage unit for his new workbench. He also makes an interesting ergonomic decision for the placement of the drawers, considering that his bench can be approached from both sides.
Having finished framing the walls of their mobile tiny house, this week Ana and Jacob White move on to the roof. It's neat to see how do-able framing a roof this small looks, though I would've liked to see some more details; I'm curious, for instance, how they got the sheathing to clear the splice, and I wanted to see how they cut the bird mouths on the rafters. Nevertheless, interesting to watch.
Bob Clagett finishes up his awesome arcade machine cabinet build, this time tackling the electronics. He goes well beyond merely wiring up the monitor and lighting, installing an Arduino-based motion detector to create some very cool functionality:
This role leads a team of Industrial Designers to deliver legendary designs, integrating with other Product Development functions throughout the process. Successful candidates will have a Bachelor’s in Industrial Design and 10+ years experience in a product design field, with an emphasis on transportation or power sports related industries.
View the full design job hereJumpstart 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.
"What is the place of materiality in our visual age of rapidly changing materials and media? How is it fashioned in the arts or manifested in virtual forms?" Join Giuliana Bruno, professor at Harvard University, for Material Encounters: Surface Tension, Screen Space, a presentation of the research that went into her latest book, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media.
New York, NY. February 22, 2016 at 6:15 PM.
Opening today at the Museum of Art and Design, In Time (The Rhythm of the Workshop) examines the manufacturing process through the lens of three contemporary filmmakers. In meditative shots, they capture "the tempo of the workday, process as durational performance, and objects of labor as measures of time."
New York, NY. On view through May 22, 2016.
New York has a long history of attempting to find sustainable solutions for affordable housing, but in today's real estate market, what is the future of affordability in one of the world's most expensive city? Join community and urban policy leaders for The Politics of Affordable Housing, a panel discussion exploring how lessons from the city's past may be able to inform the housing market of the present/future.
New York, NY. February 24, 2016 at 6 PM.
Designers have a unique skill set that can pave a way forward for solving the world's impending food crisis. Join MOLD founder and Core77's own managing editor, LinYee Yuan and the School of Constructed Environments for How Design Can Feed a Hungry Planet, a wide-ranging discussion on the future of food, touching on topics like product design for entomophogy, 3D food printing, and reducing food waste.
New York, NY. February 25, 2016 at 6:30 PM.
Objection! opens today at the Vitra Design Museum—an exhibition that explores the act of civil disobedience through the objects such movements create, while foregrounding the potentials of design as an agent of change in politics, communication and social innovation.
Weil am Rhein, Germany. On view through May 29, 2016.
Treat your eyes to a visual feast this weekend with Misha Kahn's humorous and surreal installation at Friedman Benda, a survey of the varied sources the 27 year old designer draws inspiration from. Among the eclectic works on view is a 12-foot wide hand-woven mohair tapestry depicting a landscape inspired by Jell-O-molds, a China-cabinet made of woven basketry and a UFO-chandelier of spun copper.
New York, NY. On view through April 9, 2016.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute will present Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology this spring (opening on May 5, 2016). Through 120 examples, dating back to 1880 and running through the present, the show will re-examine the idea that the hand and the machine are discordant tools in the creative process by juxtaposing the traditional handiwork of haute couture (think: embroidery, featherwork, artificial flowers, pleating, lacework, and leatherwork) alongside innovative technological processes, such as 3D printing, circular knitting, computer modeling, bonding and laminating, laser cutting and ultrasonic welding. With the show's emphasis on process, the galleries will be outfitted to resemble a traditional maison de couture with ateliers of tailoring and dressmaking. OMA New York's Shohei Shigematsu will lead the exhibition design in collaboration with the Met's Design Department.
What Design Can Do (WDCD), the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the IKEA Foundation invite designers and creative thinkers from all countries and disciplines to take part in The Refugee Challenge—a call for entries focused on accommodating, connecting, integrating and helping the personal development of refugees. The challenge specifically focuses on refugees in urban areas, as nearly 60 per cent of the world's 20 million refugees now live in urban areas. Submissions remain open through May 1, 2016.
Ending on a high-note, Design Indaba wrapped the three-day conference with a hybrid talk/performance from musician, composer, hardware innovator and music industry activist Imogen Heap.
A good example of Design Indaba's aspirations to not only bring incredible creativity to the stage, but creativity with a mission—Heap was a perfect selection for closing speaker. In just an hour talk, she discussed her 20-year career of highs and lows in the music industry peppered with tracks from each of her studio albums.
Prior to each song, Heap shared insight on what she referred to as 'data' behind each song—including the incredible number of collaborators, publishers, rights holders, instruments and more. Providing the informational context of each song began to build a case for the incredible amount on data that actual makes up the creation of music. Likewise, it becomes obvious to the audience when confronted with so many different stake holders involved—that the method for distributing revenue to said parties is ineffectual (at best), often leaving the artist with almost nothing.
As the talk progressed the audience witnessed the unfolding of a career built on incredible talent as a musician that evolved rapidly into a sweeping creative practice encompassing performance, technology, hardware and design. As Heap performed single 'Me and the Machine' we saw for the first time her Mi.Mu gloves, an open-source music hardware project on which she has been working with a team for the last two years.
The gloves, created with a team in the UK, include eight bend sensors in each hand, a gyroscope and accelerometer to sense the movement and gesture of the wearer. The software is open source allowing users to create their own program and map inputs to outputs as they see fit—creating a community of glove-users generating uses that can be incorporated back into the Mi.Mu team's research.
The gesture language is not something that we can prescribe. It’s actually a movement that we’re seeing with the Kinect, Leap Motion, [Thalmic Labs'] Myo and loads of gestural interfaces. I have a young daughter now and in ten years - it will be very natural for her to have a gestural language to interface with her computer. It just becomes normal in the way we have gotten used to going 'command C' 'command V'
The evolution of Heap's practice to create her own instruments is inspiring. However with her newest single 'Tiny Human' she translates that creativity to solving industry-wide problems. She ended her talk explaining her new tech-savvy approach to solving issues of rights ownership and acknowledgment for musicians with her newest project Mycelia.
Mycelia is a platform for information about music that is open to all and built on blockchain technology (best known for the underlying tech for bitcoin transactions). The decentralized database will both provide acknowledgment and storing of information related to each song - and has the potential to build in smart contracts and micro-payments. Blockchain has the potential to seamlessly allow artists to receive appropriate compensation for their work sooner as well as create a formalized way to credit sampling, remixing and more.
The very real issues Heap has encountered in her 20 years set against her shear charisma and power as a performer was a subtle balance that spoke volumes to her greater mission of working to fix a broken industry. An excellent ending to the 21st Design Indaba, we look forward to seeing what they come up with next year.
Close your eyes. Imagine that you’re on a boat, floating somewhere off in the South China Sea. The feeling is calming, and probably not too far from the sensation of soaking in a bathtub, letting the water lap around your ankles and toes. It’s that image that inspired Otaku, a bathtub by the Israeli designer Tal Engel that takes traditional boat-building techniques from Asia and reverses their purpose—using them to hold water within instead of keep it outside.
“By crossing the two disciplines [boats and bathing], I have discovered a certain analogy between the idea of sitting in a bath and sailing on a boat, both practically and emotionally,” Engel says. Wanting to emphasize that parallel, Engel began the project last summer by researching traditional boat-building techniques, turning to Asia for its rich history in the craft. In particular, the designer focused his attention on coracles, woven baskets made from bamboo, found in India, Vietnam, Iraq and Tibet. Typically waterproofed in resin and coconut oil, these boats continue to be made by craftspeople in those countries, in sizes that accommodate from one to several people, along with all their fishing gear.
Translating the process for a residential bathtub, Engel traded bamboo for white ash and maple veneer, selected for their impact strength, durability and ability to be steam-bent. “White ash is a common boatbuilding material which has a fairly good rot resistance, strength and excellent bending properties,” Engel says. “Maple has a good strength properties, is highly resistant to wear and has good bending ability. The combination of the two provides a light, flexible surface which can bear heavy weight and resist humidity.”
Employing a similar weaving technique to that used for coracles, Engel wove thin strips of white ash and maple veneer together into a large sheet, a meticulous task spanning more than eight hours. (The name Otaku speaks to this process—it’s a Japanese term for people with obsessive interests, such as anime or manga fandom.) Then he had to shape it into the elongated form of the tub. “The goal was reaching an optimized combination between the weaving method, wood type and three-dimensional shape,” Engel says. “Although the production method was based on existing technology, I had to create my own production scene.”
Engel’s production scene included a large mold and a steam bender, infusing modern manufacturing methods with traditional boat-building techniques. After weaving a large sheet, the designer pressed the material into a form using steam to bend it into its final shape. “Since there was no direct or easy access to [basket] weaving manufacturers in Europe, the woven surface had to be done independently,” Engel says. “This was a real time-consumer, which slowed down the development process. However, the intensity of each forming attempt produced a long list of conclusions for further improvements. This means that there was a huge step between each forming experiment, while the ability or disability of the material to take shape have helped to define the design.”
Starting with few small models, the designer gradually scaled up until he had enough confidence to test a 1:1 version. “The first two tests failed during the molding process, whereas the third was quite successful,” he says. From his experiments (recounted in detail over on his blog), Engel learned to appreciate the character of the material by paying careful attention to its behavior and reaction at each step of the process.
Once the steam-bent sheet was dry, Engel coated the vessel with layers of resin, another modern improvement on the coconut oil used in the coracles. In addition to making Otaku watertight (a pretty important step for any bathtub), resin added to the tub’s strength and durability.
The final sealed tub, weighing just under 15 kilograms (or about 33 pounds), is mounted to a powder-coated steel frame, and the fixtures are attached. “The steel wire-frame design attempts to create an iconic shape which is light yet strong,” Engel says. “The linear silhouette poetically refers to the fundamental part of the production process and closes a circle by telling the complete narrative—from the actual production to the final outcome.”
While Otaku currently exists only as a prototype, Engel is in the process of reaching out to possible manufacturers to bring the design to mass production. With the current amount of manual labor required for each tub, Engel recognizes that the design might need to be streamlined to translate for machine production. “There are already machines that can produce sheets [of woven veneer] in less then 30 minutes,” he says. “Normally, a translation of such a woven bathtub to mass production would probably need to include a session of product development preformed by the producer; however, the actual production should not be too complicated or expensive for a big company in the field.” Engel says to stay tuned for more updates later this year.
The manipulation of a single curve is used in this project to create a piece of multi-functional furniture occupying a space somewhere between a coffee table and bench. The curves allow for varying surface heights that can accommodate a variety of uses, as well a pocketed storage area. The design's ambition is to balance a sense of grounded sturdiness with an elegant lightness.
We first saw this in Germany where it's been out for years, and now Festool is finally bringing to the 'States: On March 1st they're releasing their Vac-Sys vacuum-clamping system here, which will allow North American craftspeople to firmly hold their work in place without using clamps, holdfasts, or that gangly new kid in the shop whose name is either Tommy or Timmy (you'll remember once he starts producing work that's worth remembering).
The benefits of a vacuum-clamping system over traditional hold-down methods are manifold; clamps get in the way and prevent operations like routing a profile around the entire perimeter of a workpiece, for instance. And if you daisy-chain two of the vacuum pods together, you can hold big-ass things like doors, as you'll see in the demo video below:
For those of you who'd prefer to see the system without the Dude-listen-to-this-awesome-demo-by-my-brother's-band soundtrack, here's the older international video running through the operations:
Come to think of it, I'm not sure that music's any better; I bet that's what Tommy, or is it Timmy, listens to in his crappy Hyundai Elantra while he's driving home from the shop. Anyways the vacuum unit in that second video appears to be an older version of what's shown in the first video, but we believe the clamping-end features are all the same.
Like all things Festool, the Vac-Sys ain't cheap; buy-in starts at $1,300 for the pump and one clamping module. An additional $500 will get you a second clamping module, and then you can set TommyTimmy to sweeping the floor as your large workpieces can now be held without the pleasure of his company.
This is the latest installment of our Core77 Questionnaire. Previously, we talked to Yves Béhar.
Name: Pamela Shamshiri
Occupation: I’m a designer and one of the founders of Commune. At Commune we really design for the experience, whether it’s graphic or architectural or interior design. Whatever contributes to the overall experience and vibe of a project is what we focus on. We’re very experience-oriented, but primarily it’s interior design.
Location: Los Angeles
Current projects: We have a lot of hotel projects in the works in Japan and in the States. We have a handful of residences in both California and New York—we tend to do more historical residences that require some restoration. We also have a few restaurants and retail projects coming up.
Mission: We take a holistic approach to design, and we blur the lines between disciplines. Internally, I think our process is a little bit different than at other design companies. We assemble the right team for the job, and sometimes that means you’re a graphic designer but you’re asked to contribute on architecture, sometimes you’re an interior designer but you’re looking at identity and branding. We really just ask people to think holistically—to look at a project from all sides, not just from their area of expertise.
When did you decide that you wanted to be a designer? I was nine years old. My dad had a furniture business and was an industrial designer. He had a six-story furniture showroom that we always played in: one floor was kitchens, one floor was dining rooms, and another floor was all living rooms. My brother and I grew up playing there every day after school. I didn’t know what kind of designer I wanted to be, but I knew very early on that I wanted to be in some kind of design.
Education: In college I studied art history, architectural history, and theory at Smith College in Massachusetts. Then I went on to NYU for graduate school to study production design. I did set design for a while, which is what trained me to think about design more holistically. Because you really learn how to tell a story—whether you’re using period flatware or makeup or hair to tell it, you’re communicating a character and a narrative. That really was the basis for Commune.
First design job: My friend Dewey Nicks is a fashion photographer. He hired me to be a prop stylist for a Tommy Hilfiger shoot right after I graduated.
What was your big break? Ace Palm Springs. That was the first hotel project that we ever did, and it was one of the earlier Ace Hotels as well. I think both companies grew up together on that job. We were doing things outside of the norm, taking a very urban brand and coming up with the Palm Springs experience. We did something somewhat original that really affected other hotels after that. We had a very tight budget and a motel that we converted. How do you create a campus that is about community and about celebrating the desert somehow? That’s what we set out to do and it was one of my favorite milestones at Commune for sure. Alex Calderwood was one of the Ace Hotel founders and was good friends with my partner Roman. He sort of believed in us before we believed in us. We just went for it and he backed us all the way. It was pretty incredible.
We started Commune about 12 years ago now. The four of us were old friends and we got together over sushi. I wanted to settle down and have a family, Roman wanted to get out of PR and branding to start a whole new career, Steven was getting out of retail, and my brother and I had worked together—he was always the person that made everything happen. The four of us got together and said, Hey, we’re all sort of due for new lives. Let’s pull together all our resources and put teams together that are very project-based, that utilize all the artisans we know and all the incredible people we each knew from our paths in life. We were called Commune because it was about coming together for one mission.
Describe your workspace: We are around 50 people in an old Mason building. We’re sort of like sardines in there. When you walk in, every wall is covered in visuals and pin-ups, with material everywhere. The interior designers sit next to architects, who sit next to graphic designers—everyone’s all mixed up. I think it feels really creative and energetic. You never know what you’re going to be working on at Commune: one day you’re working on a hotel, the next day you’re working on a tiny cabin, and then you’re working on a rug. It may not be the most efficient setup, but it’s very creative, good brain food.
I do have an office with a great old Victorian Chesterfield sofa and a lot of things I love in there. It tends to be a smaller meeting room more than anything. I’m pretty mobile and tend to flow from desk to desk, so we use my office to have smaller meetings. I’m not a sit-at-a-computer kind of person.
“The four of us got together and said, Hey, we’re all sort of due for new lives. Let’s pull together all our resources and utilize all the incredible people we each knew from our paths in life.”
What is your most important tool? I know how to collaborate, and I know how to bring the best out of people. More and more that seems to be my role.
What is the best part of your job? Dreaming big in the beginning. I feel like doing the concepts for projects is the best part for me.
What is the worst part of your job? When I misjudge a client and it’s sort of a mismatch. And then you still have to carry it through because you have to be professional.
What time do you get up and go to bed? I get up at 5:30 a.m. every day and I go to bed around 11:00.
How do you procrastinate? I read cookbooks. I used to cook a lot and I fantasize about cooking again.
What is your favorite productivity tip or trick? I plan all my outfits for the week ahead of time. I actually have hangers mounted on a long wall, and then I literally lay them out like in a store. It helps the mornings go by quicker when you travel a lot and have kids.
“I know how to collaborate, and I know how to bring the best out of people. More and more that seems to be my role.”
What is the best-designed object in your home? My whole house is a beautiful object. I live in a Schindler house and I think that the great room is the best designed. Schindler described it as a spatial cave for viewing nature. He designed the room after he went to the Anasazi cave dwellings, and so you’re sitting in a room that’s more solid at the back—the shape is very similar to a cave. It’s all glass in front of you and he planted every tree off the point of the fireplace. So you’re in this beautiful treescape. One of my favorite things is to sit in that room when it rains. It’s a room that gives back; it’s very healing. I feel very lucky to live there.
Who is your design hero? I have so many! Donald Judd is one of them. Also Corbusier, and Charlotte Perriand. With Judd, I know it’s minimalism, but he had such an appreciation for beauty, whether it was Shaker or modern. He sort of spans all eras, and I like that about his interiors. Corbusier is very sculptural and involved color; his work is about texture and materiality, and I respond to that in his spaces. For Perriand, I think you can also see all the different influences—how they filter through into a very clean aesthetic. I would say proportion and scale are my favorite things about her.
What is the most important quality in a designer? Now that I’m a little older and looking back with more experience, I feel like listening is really important. There’s pure aesthetic design, but to be a successful working designer with clients who are happy, you have to learn how to listen to people. To get inside their heads and hear what they want in order to deliver it. I’ve always been a pretty good listener, but when I was younger I would just sort of push my will on people more than I do now. I really, really try to listen, because I do know that a client can bring you to a refreshingly new place, and that’s good for everybody. I embrace that process and I’m less scared of it now.
What is the most widespread misunderstanding about design or designers? I don’t immediately walk into a room and know the answer to it. For me it is about problem solving, and it is a combination of architecture, the neighborhood, the room, the period you’re in, but also your client. Who they are, what they want, what they’re trying to communicate. That doesn’t all come together when you walk into a room for the first time. It’s a whole process with a lot of research and thinking.
What is exciting you in design right now? Travel is always exciting. Travel is changing, and there are these smaller, specialized hotels that are popping up, like Ett Hem in Sweden or the Chiltern Firehouse in London. Places like that that are eclectic but really precise in communicating a feeling. That’s exciting to me and I want to go and experience them. Those two are sort of outside your typical business model. I don’t quite understand how they work as a business, and I love that people do that regardless. I always enjoy traveling, and I think it’s really important for a designer to travel. Oscar Wilde once said, “To live is to travel, to travel is to live.” You can’t figure out one without the other.
We have a history of posting OK Go's music videos, because they have a history of putting out insanely creative visual spectacles. This last one is no exception: The fellas shot it inside an airplane while it was performing those "vomit comet"-style zero-gravity moves, a/k/a parabolic flight, which renders everything weightless in roughly 30-second bursts. Wrap your eyeballs around this:
Er, how many takes do you think that took? Why do they appear to be weightless for far longer than the 27-second zero-gravity cycles? Was there any editing trickery involved? And did anyone puke? Well, we're glad you asked:
It was interesting to see that they opted for Russian cosmonaut training rather than contacting NASA; I'm guessing the latter isn't keen on having the interior of their training craft splattered with paint.
Passionate about shoes? Help bring to market the next generation of Bontrager cycling shoes! You'll be responsible for crafting, articulating, and executing creative vision and for delivering compelling, innovative designs that meet specific performance and fit requirements. Ideal applicants have 5+ years experience with footwear design, construction, and materials.
View the full design job hereLego has got the interlocking toy brick market locked down, and in the half-century since launching their signature product, they've gone from mere toymaker to outright cultural force. We tend to think of them as the toy brick company. So I was surprised to learn that they were not the first to market interlocking bricks for children, nor the second, nor the third. They were the seventh.
In the following video, the Lego enthusiast and reviewer known as JangBricks breaks down the history of interlocking toy bricks:
I found the second half of the video interesting, as you really get to see how poorly the instructions were presented by Lego's predecessors.
It makes you realize that Lego has really triumphed from an information design perspective; while I couldn't locate instructions from early days of Legos, by at least the 1970s they were presenting things almost completely visually, eliminating any language barrier:
That Lego copied their initial design is not in question. It's also undeniable that in subsequent years they added their own innovations, eventually building the empire and market dominance that they enjoy today. Which makes me wonder: Do you think that any of the modern-day knockoff companies that we typically associate with China will be able to follow the same path? And in your opinion, at what point does an outright copy have enough innovation added to it that it gains legitimacy in the popular consciousness?
Also, question for those of you that majored in Toy Design: Did your school offer a History of Toy Design 101 class, similar to straight ID majors' History of Industrial Design or History of Furniture Design, where they covered Lego?
Lastly, something I found ironic in JangBricks' video was some of the copy visible in American Bricks' instruction booklet: "It's more fun to create a new model," it reads, "than it is to copy."
Jaun van Wyk, a young architect based in Cape Town defies his job description as simply an architect by exploring his evolving insight into art, architecture and creativity.
According to his website: "Jaun aims not to alter architecture as such, but to reinstate his role as the creative individual by undermining and exploding tedious positions and notions in the creative field of architecture."
For van Wyk, the field of architecture is a rigorous process filled with old school methodology. He says, "Architecture today merely mimics the formulas of textbook design." He believes this archaic attitude towards the construction of buildings and spaces that define our daily movements inhibits the progression of architecture.
Van Wyk's attitude towards architecture as an art form relies heavily on the perspective that "architecture must acknowledge notions of history and theory, criticism of architecture and urbanism..."
Van Wyk wants to restore the architect as an artist and save the field from crystalizing into a the "monotonous standardized industry it is transforming into," reads his website.
Chiselling his way up the totem pole as a distinguished and authoritative voice on creativity, even at such a young age, comes with hard work and dedication. Van Wyk immerses himself in all fields related to creativity, including photography, visual art and design. He built himself a solid educational foundation by obtaining an Honours Degree in architecture with Cum Laude from the University of the Free State.
Van Wyk has worked with practices across the globe including, Studio Odile Decq, Gallery Polaris in France and the Institute for Architecture in Southern California, which helped shaped his global view on architecture. Van Wyk was also instrumental in the development and transformation of the now very popular Maboneng Precinct in Johannesburg.
Van Wyk has held numerous exhibitions to showcase his art and design, reaching beyond architecture to exhibit work ranging from photography to industrial design and light installations. These include a unique spatial experience installation at the Southern Californian Institute of Architecture, a conceptual photographic exhibition called 'The aesthetics of violence" which expressed the violent realities faced in South Africa.
His industrial and lighting designs include the Javelot series, which is a two-part light design concept. Firstly, as the light source for interior use and secondly, as landscape light for exterior use. It was designed for MACRO (Rome's Museum of Contemporary Art) and created by Studio ODBC in Paris.
His research and viewpoints go beyond the visual aesthetic. Van Wyk has established himself as a creative writer within the field of architecture. He has published various pieces on architecture including a collaborative piece with Russian architect, Inara Nevskaya titled, Reconfiguring and reconstructing lost urban spaces by means of extrapolation. It was published in the esteemed architectural magazine Volume.
Learn more about Design Indaba's Emerging Creatives program showcasing the work of young South African designers from the fields of architecture, industrial design, communication, accessories, furniture and more.
This is the latest installment of our Designing Women series. Previously, we profiled the 1930s socialite-turned-designer Helen Hughes Dulany.
To call the Hungarian-born artist and designer Ilonka Karasz “multi-talented” would be a serious understatement. By the time of her death in 1981 at age 84, she had helped to modernize American textile design; challenged the male-dominated worlds of both furniture and industrial design; created the first modern nursery in America; earned her description as “the country’s leading wallpaper artist”; and, oh yeah, also found time to illustrate 186 eye-catching New Yorker covers published between 1925 and 1973. Karasz did all of this while staying true to her European roots—infusing her designs with a modernist sensibility that referenced Vienna’s Wiener Werkstätte movement (in her floral motifs and geometric patterns), the Bauhaus school (in her minimalist metal work), and the Dutch De Stijl movement (in her rectilinear wood furniture).
Karasz was one of the first women admitted to the Royal School of Arts and Crafts in her native Budapest, where she studied before immigrating to New York City’s Greenwich Village in 1913. Upon her arrival in New York, she found work as a graphic designer and illustrator and also taught textile design at the Modern Art School. With a handful of other European émigrés, she founded the Society of Modern Art in 1914 with the goal of promoting European modernism in America. This was achieved through a short-lived publication and also a “service bureau” that advised American companies on how to best use modern art and design in their promotional materials. From 1915 to 1935, Karasz was also busy designing a large range of fashionable textiles, helping spread her modern aesthetic to the mass market with designs in silk for dress fabrics, early experiments in rayon for DuPont, woven rugs and wall hanging for residential interiors, and some of the earliest designs for automobile and airplane upholstery.
In addition to her textile commissions, Karasz was hired by the silver manufacturer Paye & Baker to design a line of hollowware in 1928. Her resulting creations owe a huge debt to the radically simple designs of the Bauhaus metalsmith Marianne Brandt; the book Modernism in American Silver calls Karasz’s first design for a silver-plated coffee and tea service “the most severely minimal service to have been produced industrially in America in the 1920s.” Karasz’s best-remembered objects from this period are an equally severe group of conical vessels supported on cruciform bases, including a vase, a teapot, a candlestick, a bowl and a tea ball and stand, all of which eschewed any sort of decoration in favor of simple geometry.
Her furniture from this period took an equally austere form, almost plank-like in its construction. These monumental wood furnishings—made when few women were active in the field—were featured in a number of exhibitions, including one in 1928 at Macy’s department store in New York, where the room featuring her furniture was described by the New York Times Magazine as “the most iconoclastic of any in the exhibition.” That same year she was the only woman invited to design rooms—a studio apartment and a nursery—for an exhibition at the American Designers’ Gallery. Her uncluttered spaces with rectilinear furniture were hailed as groundbreaking, especially her nursery, which is credited with modernizing design for children in America. Karasz’s 1928 nursery and additional designs in the early ’30s replaced the frilliness of a typical child’s room with basic geometric shapes, primary colors and convertible furniture that grew with the child. As Karasz scholar Ashley Brown relates, Karasz “asserted that using simple geometric units in various sizes would teach children proportions, help them to relate objects in their nurseries to objects in the outside world, and encourage them to discover that all of nature consisted of such units.”
In the ’40s and ’50s, Karasz shifted her focus to wallpaper, working with the firm Katzenbach and Warren in New York to produce contemporary designs and develop new techniques for printing. As in her previous endeavors, her work was highly praised for its innovative new styles. Portfolio magazine called her “Miró on the Wall,” while a search of the New York Times archive reveals multiple articles written during the era that celebrated her pioneering approach with headlines like “New Wallpapers Odd in Technique“ and “Blueprinting Used in New Wallpaper.” (Apparently the news cycle was a bit slower back in the day.) Karasz also collaborated with ALCOA’s research program to produce an unprecedented radiant-heating wallpaper made of heavy-gauge aluminum foil.
As if her own design duties didn’t keep her busy enough, Karasz was also the founder and director of Design Group, Inc., a cooperative of designers and craftspeople (many of whom were her former students) that she mentored and helped introduce to larger audiences through exhibitions and a small retail store in New York. Over the decades her versatile career also extended into book cover design, illustrations for children’s books, ceramic dishware and tiles, architectural murals, toys, lamps—and let’s not forget those 186 New Yorker covers published over five decades. Each of these accomplishments is extraordinary in its own right; taken together, they are simply astounding.
Jeffrey R. Elliot's life has really been dedicated to one thing: the classical guitar. He learned to play at 16. He went on to apprentice with Richard Schneider for six years. And then he moved to Portland, where he has been restoring guitars, writing, teaching, and making since 1976 .
Elliott joins us tonight at 6 pm PST to discuss his work, specifically the restoration of two important guitars: an 1869 Francisco Gonzalez and an 1888 Antonio de Torres.
Elliot finds time for some Curiosity Club discussion in his busy schedule of magazine writing, lecturing for the Guild of American Luthiers, and working on his long list of commissions.
If you can't make it tonight, tune into the Curiosity Club homepage at 6PM PST for the live stream!
Last week you were introduced to one of our judges for the Sex-tacular 1-Hour Design Challenge, Industrial Designer and Professor Judith Glover. Glover's practice is unique in that it is dedicated to one purpose: to enhance people's sexual pleasure and confidence through the design of sex toys. As she has spent over 10 years on the subject (and even purportedly earned the world's first PhD in sex toy design!), she has gained a deep understanding of the technicalities associated with designing a intimate product and hurdles designers face in this rapidly evolving industry.
We caught up with Glover to learn a little bit more about a class she recently conducted at RMIT in Melbourne on the design of future sex toys, why there is such an unfathomably narrow selection of quality products out there, and how the sex toy industry needs an Apple-esque powerhouse.
Glover: What needs to be distinguished is whether a sex toy company is a design-led company or an "old school" adult industry company. It very much goes to the heart of the type of values and practices the people running the company and commissioning the products have. They are vastly different industries.
If you are a designer, you have been taught a certain set of principles and practices. Every project you do tries to get at the most objective understanding of your potential user as possible...You try and map out something objective. The adult industry, on the other hand, takes another approach based on the longstanding belief systems of their industry. They now know women spend more than men on sex toys but are having trouble reconciling their old brand's historical consumer base (men who like pornography)...with the way women actually like to get marketed to. I'm not being moralistic here—I'm just trying to be objective.
So my first suggestion is to become a design-led company and embed design thinking and design strategy at the core of your business if you want highly innovative results...The adult industry needs to stop patting itself on the back about apparently being 'innovative' because they are constantly changing technologies. Yes, they change technologies but [all they do is] saddle the same content and the same beliefs to a new technology...That's not innovation! There is a socio-cultural dimension to innovation that they are just not getting.
The Future Sex [course] was part of our suite of studio subjects at RMIT that students can choose from. We opened it up to look at all sexual health and well-being issues.
You have to think about your sexual practice across your whole life time. And what may not be an issue in your 20s (like a fully functioning penis) may become one in your 50s. Women don't realize how much their bodies change as they get towards menopause; you become drier and less sensitive. How do you sustain good sexual intimacy in a long term relationship? The goalposts are always changing for us...how we practice sex and how we feel about our sexuality is so integral to our happiness and sustaining our relationships.
Designing a good looking and high quality sex toy is not hard (although it still amazes me how many bad ones are out there) so the students were encouraged to tackle more difficult issues that may result in sex toys or other types of products. The topics included erectile dysfunction, vaginismus, pregnancy and perineums, sexual trauma, porn addiction, condom usage, aging and sex and revitalising sex in long-term relationships amongst others. Some of these problems have the most difficult ergonomic or psychological components to them. Students were sometimes coming up with whole new product genres because nobody had designed into that area.
A lot of the time there were no obvious product design solutions in topics like sexual trauma and porn addiction, so students were really stretched and challenged. If you want to get Industrial Design students to learn product design but really make them think about designing for users then it's a really good area for that.
They were all interesting topics and outcomes, even the ones that were more like traditional sex toys had a twist because of the underlying research into the problem or target market. If you take a vibrator designed for older post-menopausal women it may look like a beautiful vibrator but it has careful considerations around sensation, handleability and interface because you change a lot as you get older. One of the more challenging projects was about sexual trauma. The female student was highly engaged but the topic is difficult because of the things you have to read. And it had no obvious outcomes or precedents. In the end she did this package called the 'wishbone', which has lovely poetic connotations and visual analogies. The package came with guided meditation that the user listened to when attempting private sexual intimacy (i.e. masturbation) and the vibration device looked something like the shape of a wishbone...that sat on the vulva and around the legs and create very gentle sensations. It was a beautiful response to a difficult problem. Don't underestimate the power of beauty to be used for good. It honors someone's sexuality.
One of my colleagues in the UK is John Hewson (Hewson Group) and John is the only business analyst of the sex toy industry globally. And we both agree it is an industry like no other. There is no equivalent of Apple, Tesla or Braun. It has been cut off from mainstream commerce for so long and resided mostly in the Adult Industry which means it attracts very little mainstream venture capital, entrepreneurs or designers; [this is] due to on-going and sexual taboos and longstanding morality wars against pornography. Prior to the design companies starting to come into the market in the early-mid 2000s, sex toys were solely made by the adult industry with no competition and nothing resembling normal manufacturing standards common in every other industry.
What we need in the market is a company like Agent Provocateur, Acne Jeans, or dare I say H&M, to bring it into the mainstream—company with deep pockets that can create their own retail and product eco-system. The more smaller design-led companies and studios there are slowly transforming the industry with better products and better values until hopefully one day somebody with a lot of commercial clout will take it on.
The adult industry companies will rush towards the next technological fix and keep the same content and scripts and dubious attitudes towards contemporary women. So for design led companies there are big gaps in the market to capture 'real' female consumers and couples...And anybody that actually wants to focus on the 'older' woman, go nuts, because that's where the money is globally—women over 50.
Even the better companies with higher manufacturing standards still create products that make you shake your head as a woman. I have never heard of a company doing any in depth research into type of sensations woman actually like to feel on their clitorises for instance (correct me if I'm wrong). Interfaces tend to be poorly designed as well. The industry needs much more R&D, much more design-led research and a much more user-centered approach. Finally, the industry needs more industrial designers and more female industrial designers.
This article is part of the Core77 Sex-tacular, an editorial series exploring the myriad ways that technology and design are shaping the future of intimacy and sex.
Beauty, the fifth installment of the Cooper Hewitt's design triennial series evolves around a central question: "Why beauty now?" While we've grown accustomed to seeking out design work that answers our society's most demanding questions with big-picture answers, the 63 designers exhibited in the show present an alternative take—one that pursues the sensual side of design.
The exhibition progresses through seven core themes—extravagant, intricate, ethereal, transgressive, emergent, elemental and transformative—with more than 250 works that range from fashion ensembles, to experimental prototypes, interactive digital media and architectural structures. The global mix of designers present an eclectic take on tradition and forward-thinking processes in compelling works that construct narratives about the very essence of making. The concept of beauty emerges as far more than an unwelcome taboo in the design world, but rather as a vital force that stimulates society on a deep, fundamental level. As the show curators Ellen Lupton and Andrea Lipps elaborate, the true magic of beauty is that it's experience, "is visceral and embodied, not just visual. Beauty strikes the senses. It erupts from sensual invention, and adds endless value to the world we inhabit."
Beauty is on view now through August 21, 2016 at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City
