In the post on tool van organization systems, you saw how the traveling craftsperson can transport all of their equipment. But once they arrive on site, they need to set up some sort of station where they can execute the work. Once upon a time a dusty pair of beat-up sawhorses, a board and some banged-up toolboxes would do, but in modern-day Germany, appearances are as important as function. Hence Sortimo has intelligently designed a neater-looking system called WorkMo (for "work mobility") that enables a craftsperson to efficiently set up a multifunctional workstation, one that incorporates the storage cases we looked at here.

In its folded-up mobile state it's got a compact footprint that makes it easy to get into an elevator.

On location the worksurface, which can be something as simple as a sheet of plywood, is detached. There are only legs on one side; in the interest of minimalism, the unit holding the stack of storage containers serves as the other support.

That's the kit in its most basic form. But for greater functionality, one can use a perforated top like what you'd see on Festool's MFT (multi-function table).

This provides a variety of clamping options for working on pieces of various shapes.

A vise can be affixed to the side, providing the functionality of the traditional face vise you'd see on a proper workbench.

The aluminum extrusions used for the side rails are sized so that clamps can slide into them, for holding taller workpieces at the appropriate height.

The base cabinet features a powerstrip and storage on one side. On the other side is a slotted rack on which to hang tool holders.

And talk about loyalty—you've gotta love how the tool selection in the promo shots is all-German. In the shots above and below we see gear from Bessey, Bosch, ECE and Wera.

I can't place the brand of the unusual handplane you see in the photo directly above, but I know the type and spotted one at the show. We'll have an entry on that shortly.

Lastly, here's a video look at the system:

More from Core77's coverage of this year's Holz-Handwerk Show!

This is exactly the kind of unsung, unseen product design that I get excited about. The engineering eggheads at Schulte Electrotechnik have taken the design of a standard plug—whose traditional form factor hasn't changed in decades—and made it soooper flat, meaning you can literally put a piece of furniture right up against it.

It's called the EVOline Plug, and beyond the engineering, thought went into the design. The plug is slightly hinged, allowing the elderly or folks with grip issues to easily get the flat head away from the wall and use its leverage to pull it out. 

It also releases from the wall easily if you trip over it, as you can see in the video below:

They sell it in three versions: A simple extension cord, a powerstrip, and the head by itself, which the handy among you can then wire into an existing appliance.

I'm digging this thing even more than that sideways Apple power adapter accessory. The flat body of the plug is just five freaking millimeters thick:

As you can see, there's a good amount of bulk at the prong end, as it's designed to go into a recessed European socket. I guess that's why we don't have it over here. I guess that's why we can't have nice things.

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

During "Pioneering Design: The Global Village", the International Interior Design Association's (IIDA) New York Chapter and the Clinton Global Initiative will discuss the ways in which design is creating positive global impact and developing sustainable business models for artisans in countries like the Philippines and Haiti.

New York, NY. April 1, 2016 at 6 PM. 

Tuesday

One of the largest events of its kind in the world, the Inside 3D Printing Conference and Expo will be in New York this week. Over 70 exhibitors, a full day of workshops and two days of conference sessions and demos led by industry experts will cover the latest developments in 3D printing aross manufacturing, metal, medical, business, and art applications. 

New York, NY. On view through April 12, 2016. 

Wednesday

Stewart Hicks and Allison Newmeyer of Design With Company will lead the latest From the Vault discussion at the Museum of Modern Art. Working with the museum's curators, the designers were invited to select objects from the 30,000 works in the Architecture and Design collection and use them to lead a discussion about the state of design today. 

New York, NY. April 13, 2016 at 6 PM.

Thursday

The definition of design is rapidly transforming, how can designers develop new ways of working and collaborating in response to our contemporary world? The Museum of Arts and Design is hosting We Used to _____, Now We _____, a series of discussions with design practitioners on a variety of pressing topics. This week's edition will look at changes within design education.

New York, NY. April 14, 2016 at 6:30 PM. 

Friday

This year, Design Week Portland is expanding to include a two-day Main Stage event with speakers from a variety of disciplines, including Craig Dykers of Snøhetta, Mike Thelin of Feast and Genevieve Bell of Intel. The festival will also include 125 open houses with creatives throughout the city. 

Portland, OR. On view through April 15, 2016. 

Saturday/Sunday

IDSA's South District Design Conference will revolve around the provocation that in design, experience is everything: "Design today is all about delivering fantastic experiences across many touchpoints—moments of surprise and delight that connect people to the objects they own, spaces they inhabit and services they use...If a great experience is the culmination of several elements, then what does it mean if industrial designers are focusing only on 'how it looks' or 'how it feels'? It's time to explore a wider approach and set a course for a new future design, where experience is everything."

Auburn, AL. On view through April 16, 2016. 

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.

Rarely do we sit down for a meal these days that isn't interrupted by the flickering of phones, as meal-goers look down to check various notifications and status updates. Sure, there's the phone stack or this handkerchief, but those solutions don't address the root of the problem: that constant interruption of phone notifications.

Founded on the principle of putting your phone away and your mind at ease, Ringly has become a familiar name in the wearable tech game, and allows users to prioritize notifications through a set of discreet alerts. (We covered their first product in this column back in 2014.) Through assigned colors and vibration frequencies, Ringly's collection of rings set with semi-precious stones would subtly alert the wearer so that they can, let's say, excuse themselves from the room and return an important call.

The smart-ring maker has come a long way since then. Led by founder and CEO Christina Mercando d'Avignon, the company recently announced the launch of their Aries Collection, a series of four smart bracelets. The new collection integrates upgrades of the original Ringly technology and is embedded in an 18 karat gold-plated bangle. "We learned a lot in the past year and decided to start from the beginning to really make the technology more powerful," Mercando d'Avignon says. "And, of course, we are always trying to get things smaller."

The Aries Collection marks the startup's first foray into bracelets and a step away from their namesake of rings. "I know our name is Ringly, but it has always been my vision to go beyond rings," says the founder. "We started with rings because it was the hardest form factor to do. I knew once we got the technology small enough to fit into a ring, we'd be able to extend that to a lot of different designs and a lot of different styles. Bracelets were just the next step for us."

Through new updates in technology, the Ringly team was able to reduce the size of certain elements to introduce a bigger, more powerful chip, netting out even on the size but dramatically increasing the amount of storage — and therefore features — that can be handled by the device at any given moment. The introduction of the new chip allows the device to work with more applications, meaning smarter filtering.

"One of the things we found out that women love about Ringly is that you can really filter down to the things that mean the most to you," Mercando d'Avignon says. "So we wanted to give women more options to be able to select the app or the people or the emails that are most important to them and be able to filter down to those." Ringly now works with over 100 different applications across iOS and Android. Applications that users already have installed will show up in their Ringly interface, offering the option for them to set alerts or ignore altogether. "For example, if you want to know whenever your Uber or Lyft car is arriving, you can turn those on," Mercando d'Avignon says. "Or, if you want to know when someone sends you a Snapchat, you can turn that on, too."

With more power and space, the chip can store more of the settings on the ring itself, as opposed to sending communications back and forth from a phone to the device — helping with another tricky issue. "One of the things that we found with the ring collections was that you had to have the app running in the background," Mercando d'Avignon says. "Even though it doesn't kill battery life, people still think it does, so they'd go in and kill all their apps and then their ring wouldn't work. Now you're able to use Ringly whether the app is open or not." The new chip can also handle step-tracking, one of the most requested features from their users.

Inside the bracelet is a battery, motor, LED light, accelerometer, antenna and circuit board. "We call it our 'circuit board burrito' because it's using a flexible circuit board," Mercando d'Avignon says. "We lay it flat, then put the motor and the battery in the middle, then you fold it up like a burrito." With a range of 20 to 30 feet, the antenna can reach a phone from a short distance away.

With the goal of designing a wearable piece of technology that doesn't look like technology at all, the Ringly team was faced with the additional challenge of creating a hardware interface devoid of buttons, switches, screws or screens. "And if you don't have those things, how does it function like an electronic product?" Mercando d'Avignon says. "So, how do you turn it on or off?" One of the team's solutions was an accelerometer, which puts the device into a low-power mode, eventually turning off, if it's set down on a surface and stationary for a period of time. "Then when you pick it up, it turns back on," she says.

And then how do you reset it? Anyone who has an iPhone knows the classic hold-down-the-home-button-with-the-top-button trick, but for a piece of technology with no buttons? "We added a temperature sensor so that if something does go really wrong, like if the firmware breaks, you can just put it in the freezer, and it will reset," Mercando d'Avignon says. "Of course, we don't expect anyone to need to use that."

For the bracelets, Mercando d'Avignon wanted to keep the Ringly look and aesthetic — translating that to a different item of jewelry. "We are using all semi precious gemstones and 18 karat gold plating, so the collection really looks like jewelry," she says. "The idea is to have the technology embedded into the design so that it disappears." It still includes the familiar settings—four different vibrations and five different colors to assign to various notifications—as its ring-predecessor. "It's really up to the user on how they set up their device," Mercando d'Avignon says. "But what we found out is that a lot of people use it to filter out the noise, so they'll stay connected to only the things that are important to them and that varies between user to user."

While the Aries Collection is now available for pre-order (The first 1,000 bracelet pre-orders will receive a real diamond on the side — ooh, la la!), Mercando d'Avignon and her team are already hard at work on new designs. "We are prototyping and working on new designs, and new form factors and new collections, as well," Mercando d'Avignon says. "We believe that women like wearing lots of different styles and don't want to wear the same things everyday. We should have options. That's what we're excited about." The bracelets preorder at an early bird rate for $195, but expect to retail around $279.

The Personal Holodeck is a corner-of-the-room-sized riff on the Star Trek technology of the same name. Starting with simple, everyday objects including PC fans, essential oils, and a bundle of 1x1 lumber, Kenney was able to create a world-class VR experience for less than $100.

The OMATA One is a cycling computer without a screen, and with more OG style than the Schwinn Varsity in your parents' basement. With a modern GPS interior and seriously simple mechanical dials, it does a lot more than reproduce the (awful) bike speedometers of yore. 

Because bikes are a blend of vintage and modern technologies, it's always satisfying when the accessories we use share that simple (yet complicated) ethos. OMATA does its part to bring the best of both analog and digital with a fist-sized touch of class.

The intriguing heart of this design is its ability to visually represent your vital trip data without any of the visual clutter, poor day/night/low battery visibility, or cramped multi-screen clickthrough of a standard computer. The OMATA One provides a clearer and less distracting (hands-free!) display, using mechanical dials and the four most important data points in your ride: speed, distance, ascent, and time. With its large face and bold hands, it can give you your stats quickly and clearly, even while you're cruising fast over crappy asphalt.

But in order to offer that at a modern capacity, we'd also want super accurate measurement, careful GPS tracking, and you know dang well it has to integrate with Strava.

So... good news. OMATA One takes all that on and then some. The GPS is fully moderne and self-powered, and the digital-to-analog dials are controlled by a custom sub-assembly, developed with Seiko Precision Inc. You can upload data and charge via USB, and the battery holds around a 24 life.

Serious care has been taken around weather resistance and material strength, nothing looks likely to be overtorqued or destroyered through user-error, and the mount looks both solid and inconspicuous. The face is quite large, but when mounted next to the stem it can be set inboard from where your hands and lights need to be.

The OMATA One unit twists to lock in or out with just a quarter turn, making it quick to pocket during rest stops and for recharge and sync post-ride. Without having touched it, the security of the interface is the single concern I'd have–how tight is that lock really? But if this has been tested by serious riders (and it appears to be true) I'm betting they thrashed it right.

Nerd points: Fabian Cancellara is willing to put his name near this thing as a brand ambassador. I know pro riders are basically very very lightweight NASCAR vehicles, but I'll admit I'm a little impressed.

If this type of vintage reboot gets your pedals turning, check out their already well-funded campaign over on Kickstarter, running through May 4, 2016.

During the late 1920s, Finnish architect and designer Alvar Aalto started to experiment with bending wood and collaborated with the furniture manufacturer Otto Korhonen on developing a number of innovative techniques. One piece in particular emerged out of this collaboration, the "L-Leg." Though it was initially designed with the iconic Stool 60 in mind, its structural properties—Aalto called it "the little sister of the architectural column"—made it ideal for a wide variety of products and it soon became a standard element of Aalto's Artek collection. 

This year during Milan Design Week, Artek is refocusing attention on Aalto's innovative wood-bending process as they prepare to expand on the 36 products in his L-Leg collection with a series of new finishes—wood stains, lacquers, linoleum, fabrics and leathers—that will bring a contemporary spin to the classic designs. 

Artek produces each L-Leg according to the patented process that Aalto devised in the early 1930s. First, multiple vertical saw cuts are made in the end of a piece of wood a few millimeters apart. The slits extend just below the level of the planned bend. Thin strips of wood veneer are then inserted into these slits and glued. This simplifies the actual bending process but also increases the dimensional stability and stiffness of the finished component. 

The company still uses Finnish birch for most of its designs. Forests cover nearly two-thirds of the country's total surface area and because of the attention they pay to cultivation practices, the stock of trees is increasing rather than decreasing. The primarily high growing trees have a very regular grain and a light tone which is cultivated by the particular mineral content and condition of the Nordic soil, and is further enhanced by a slow drying process of fallen timber in the open air. 

Artek will showcase a number of Aalto's wood-bending experiments alongside new releases from Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec and Ilmari Tapiovaara during Salone del Mobile in Milan, April 12-17, 2016.

More from Core77's coverage of Milan Design Week 2016!

Held every two years in Germany, Holz-Handwerk is a massive European trade show for woodworking and wood processing. Focusing on all kinds of tools, technology and techniques related to wood crafts, you'll find everything there from the most primitive hand tool all the way to the NASA-level CNC machines. Here is a glimpse of what was on show. 

More from Core77's coverage of this year's Holz-Handwerk Show!

Each day of Holz-Handwerk, I tried to get there early enough to beat the crowds.

Photo credit: Rain Noe

But there really is no beating the crowds, because…

Photo credit: Rain Noe

…by the end of the show some 110,000 people will have walked these halls.

Photo credit: Rain Noe

Speaking of crowds, in the power tool pavilion Festool's massive booth was routinely mobbed. Impossible to shoot in there unless I came back during lulls.

Photo credit: Rain Noe

Here's their newest work lamp, the Duo, which offers a 180-degree field of 5000K daylight.

Photo credit: Rain Noe

It's not yet available in the 'States. If you're an American fan of Festool, get used to this acronym: NAINA. (Not Availabe In North America)

Photo credit: Rain Noe

Here's their demo area, which was usually blocked from view by camera crews and German folks too big for me to see over.

Photo credit: Rain Noe

Speaking of things to big to see over, check out this jobsite radio.

Photo credit: Rain Noe

I thought it was just a gag, but it's actually in production.

Photo credit: Rain Noe

It's called the Sys-Rock and it'll take any of their cordless batteries.

Photo credit: Rain Noe

Each day our editors will roundup our favorite sights and projects from Salone Milan Design Week.

Formfantasma Visualizes Lexus's Latest Concept Car in an Analog 3D Rendering Installation

Inspired by Lexus's early roots in mechanized textile manufacturing, Formafantasma's installation of the Lexus LF-FC concept car is essentially a waterfall of string strategically painted in blue to resemble the automobile's likeness.

Lexus: An Encounter with Anticipation is on view April 12-17 at Spazio Lexus-Torneria, Via Tortuna 32.

Sculptural Self-Watering Vases by Chris Kabel for Valerie Objects

Developed for the Spanish publication The Plant, the jewel-toned glass centerpiece of Chris Kabel's vases give the illusion of functioning as a vessel when in fact, they are drip feeding water into the base of the vase. The wire frames create a silhouette of an archetypal vase while providing support for the stems of the flowers.

Hidden Vases by Chris Kabel for Valerie Objects is on view April 12-17 at A Matter of Perception, Palazzo Litta, Corso Magenta 24. 

Consumer Electronics, Simplified

Terkel Skou Steffensen's Internet Radio for ECAL x Punkt

The students at ECAL produced a series consumer electronic prototypes in collaboration with Swiss technology brand Punkt. Our senior editor Rain recently wrote up their retro MP 01 phone designed by Jasper Morrison to do just two things: calls and text messages. This brand ethos of functional simplicity is explored  through the eight projects on show here: a wall clock, digital camera, extension socket, internet radio, flash light, tilting projector, printer and weather station.

ECAL x Punkt is on view April 12-17 at A Matter of Perception, Palazzo Litta, Corso Magenta 24.

Leatherworks that Look Like Plaster

When we first saw Damien Gernay's dynamic sculptural forms, it was easy to admire the fluid shape and scale of the pieces (two seen above). But when we realized that the smooth surfaces and imperfect edges were crafted in leather we had to take a second look. Gernay's experiments in leather highlight the beauty of plaster tools. He told Core77, "I wanted to work with one tool to make different shapes...these look simple, like a plate and this traditional tool is used to shape plaster." Gernay worked with gypsum to sculpt the forms and then created resin forms to support the final shape of the sculptures. The work is made in collaboration with one of the oldest luxury leather houses in the world—Delvaux—and highlights the artistry and sensuousness of the work and material.

Gypsum Disorder by Damien Gernay is part of Belgium is Design, on view April 12-17 at A Matter of Perception, Palazzo Litta, Corso Magenta 24.

Legends in Conversation

The magic of Milan is the opportunity to speak with designers in person about their work. At a special talk in the courtyard of Palazzo Litta, Italian design legends Michele de Lucchi and Andrea Branzi spoke about their work, design education and their exhibition CAOS with the editors of DAMN magazine.

See more design talks and interviews April 12-17 at A Matter of Perception, Palazzo Litta, Corso Magenta 24.

Weaving as Architecture

We're huge fans of Dutch fiber artist Mae Engelgeer's hypnotizing, geometric textiles in a perfect palette of muted colors. Here she creates architectural panels through a series of large-scale, three-dimensional weavings.

Mae Engelgeer is on view April 12-17 at Masterly: The Dutch in Milano, Palazzo Francesco Turati, via Meravigli 7

Handmade Industrials

The material explorations from this young Dutch duo create otherworldly textures in a rainbow of shapes and colors. Oxidation Aftermath was the graduation project of one of the co-founders Marlies van Putten and shows how the process of oxidation can shape form and color. Their Make&Mold RYB vessels are made with a flexible mold and biodegradable polymers to create bulbous forms of varying weights. 

Handmade Industrials is on view April 12-17 at Masterly: The Dutch in Milano, Palazzo Francesco Turati, via Meravigli 7

The chilling tree at Superstudio Più

Many people gathered today to relax under this kaleidoscopic sight at Superstudio Più, which was a collaborative installation between 3M and architect Stefano Boeri. 

Superstudio Più is on view April 12-17 at Via Tortona 27

More from Core77's coverage of Milan Design Week 2016!

Entrepreneur Coss Marte started work at age 13, and by 19 was making $2 million a year. The problem was that his job was selling drugs on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. No stranger to jail, before the age of 20 Marte was arrested again and looking at his longest stint yet: Seven years in lockdown.

While in prison, the then-overweight Marte had another problem: The prison doctor told him that his cholesterol had reached life-threatening levels. Marte was determined to beat it, but spending the majority of your hours inside a 9-foot by 6-foot prison cell doesn't leave a lot of room for exercise, and a series of locked gates prevented him from signing up at the local SoulCycle.

Thus he began exercising in his cell using body-weight exercises that he'd picked up from prison guards and cons, ex-military and otherwise. He created his own variants and routines using what was in the cell, which is primarily bars and a floor. Within six months he'd not only shed 70 pounds, but gained a following of cons who wanted to emulate his workout routine.

Marte was released after five years and unsurprisingly, could not find work. Disclosing that you have a criminal record tends to shorten job interviews. But as we've seen, Marte is an inveterate problem-solver. "I've always known how to hustle," he told The New York Times. "It's what makes me succeed, but it's also what put me in prison in the first place." Marte got a legitimate job cleaning toilets in a hotel. He spent his free time working out in a local park, where a passersby observed his pull-up routine, and asked if he could join in. Marte told him he could join in all month long—for $200.

The man agreed, and a business was born. Marte began renting local studio spaces and training people in his series of body-weight-resistance exercises, which he dubbed ConBody (motto: "Do the Time"). As his business grew, last year he secured a lease on a basement space on the Lower East Side, contracted with an architect and designer to fix it up, and launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund it:

The campaign reached its target, and today ConBody is a going concern, with thousands of clients passing through their doors:

"ConBody blew up, big time. And our classes are popular, [like] sold-out-fast popular," says their website.

Marte, for his part, is trying to improve the situations of others besides himself and his clients. He makes it a point to hire ex-cons, guys who have the same problem finding work as he had, and credits his time inside with awakening him to the mission of helping others. "I helped 20 other inmates collectively lose over 1,000 pounds," he writes. "From then on I knew that my purpose was to give back instead of destroying individuals around me."

Not many designers start their conceptual product exploration with as much open-endedness as a duo like Seongil Choi and Fabio Hendry of Studio Ilio. In fact, this design team (who formed their studio after meeting at the Royal College of Art), insists that they are actually not as inspired by the idea of coming up with a product as they are a process: "we believe that originality in function and aesthetic derives from an original process. The application starts to become more relevant towards the last stage of the process development where it also determines the direction of how the process has to be improved and what requirement it needs to fulfill."

Fabio and Seongil of Studio Ilio

Exploration being a crucial part of their process results in highly surreal objects due to their unidentifiable manufacturing origins. For Milan Design Week, they will be debuting a series of 12 stools and a series of lamps created using a process that the two designers created themselves. The collection, called "Hot Wire Extensions" utilizes flexible Nichrome wire, waste nylon powder from 3d printing beds, and a lot of heat. The idea speaks to sustainability and material innovation. The investigation also addresses to new forms of fabrication— the studio states that after discovering a process such as this one that they "started to dream of objects that can be instantly and easily created." Check out their exclusive video demonstrating the process below:

The discovery of a process that renders such refined and beautiful shapes has also resulted in a series of experiments. Studio ilio tells us as they searched for a way to create a solid surface using thin metal wire, they ended up with some brilliant visual results: "There are...two ways of creating a closed surface; one is to align the wires parallel to each other with a certain distance; the other is to weave the wires. The weaving is therefore a conclusion of the exploration of the process. In a similar way, we conduct many other experiments; first, as a starting point, identifying the most obvious way, to then create a repertoire of forms and construction methods which can be manipulated and combined."

Process experiments

Letting process influence form is a highly new and exciting way designers now look at design. An added layer as to why they are interested in process and transparency also has to do with storytelling. With Studio Ilio's works, the forms are certainly mysterious, but miraculously, once you discover more about exactly how they do it the pieces are almost elevated to an even higher level of wonder. And when designers allow such a high level of transparency into their process, it coincidentally allows everyone—not only designers—to appreciate the craft and curiosity that goes behind the creation of a design object.

Studio Ilio will be presenting their 12 Stool Series during Milan Design Week at Ventura Lambrate, Via Ventura 5, April 12-17.

More from Core77's coverage of Milan Design Week 2016!

We think of flatpacking practices as being the domain of furniture manufacturers. Compressing a large bureau down into a small box is useful for bringing down shipping costs. But as researchers at Brigham Young University have realized, flatpacking has a much wider range of practical applications ranging from space exploration to surgery.

To exploit this they've turned, interestingly enough, to origami. 

Several years ago they began working on large solar panels that could be compressed into relatively tiny payloads that fit handily on a rocket. Free of Earth's bonds, it then unfurls into a massive array:

More recently they've turned their attention to surgery and how to make it less invasive. Surgeons need a way to get nimble, sophisticated tools inside of human bodies, and the incision needed to insert them has traditionally been commensurate with the size of the tool. But BYU Mechanical Engineering professors Spencer Magleby, Larry Howell, Brian Jensen and a team of students reasoned that if the tool itself could be "flatpacked," the incision could be made a lot smaller. Their ingenious research has not only shrunk the size of the tool in both folded and open positions, but has reduced the part count as effectively as any BOM-trolling bean-counter:

These are not, by the way, some pie-in-the-sky concept projects. BYU has licensed a series of technologies to Intuitive Surgical, whom they call "the world leader in robotic surgery."

The researchers say their work is inspired by a need for increasingly smaller surgical tools; the industry has reached the limit to where they can't go any smaller with traditional designs. BYU's team has engineered new design concepts that eliminate the need for pin joints and other parts, instead relying on the deflection inherent in origami to create motion.

"These small instruments will allow for a whole new range of surgeries to be performed—hopefully one day manipulating things as small as nerves," Magleby said. "The origami-inspired ideas really help us to see how to make things smaller and smaller and to make them simpler and simpler."

Magleby says the work they are doing on medical devices is not much different in principle than the work they've done for NASA to create compact space equipment.

"Those who design spacecraft want their products to be small and compact because space is at a premium on a spacecraft, but once you get in space, they want those same products to be large, such as solar arrays or antennas," Magleby said. "There's a similar idea here: We'd like something to get quite small to go through the incision, but once it's inside, we'd like it to get much larger."

While it's perhaps not intuitive to look at a paper crane, then make the leap to satellites and surgical tools, the key phrase is what the student said in the first video: "You can find inspirations for designs from anything."

Now in its fifth year, Develop3D Live has cemented its claim as the UK's leading one-day conference on design, engineering and manufacturing technology. Over 30 world-class speakers and a wide variety of exhibitors showcasing their latest products (we finally got our hands on some of the latest VR tech!) were crammed into an unfortunately small exhibition space. The humming space was so busy that an expansion into a two-day event would be a deserved upgrade for next year's proceedings. Overall, Develop3D Live was a fast-paced and intellectually nourishing day, giving attendees some time to pause, reflect and recharge their brain cells: ready to innovate another day. Before we delve deeper into the topics addressed, here's a brief run-down of our conference highlights:

Ben Redford of Mayku

3D-printing startups are everywhere at this point and almost every single one of them offers the same, tired selling point: "We bring 3D-printing to your desktop." The team at Mayku are keeping this in mind as they pursue their goal of creating a complete desktop factory:

"The idea is to take all kinds of industrial [manufacturing] processes, and shrink them into home-use desktop devices."

Although a fully-functioning, miniature blast-furnace is probably out of the question, Mayku have played it safe with their first effort, FormBox. The simple thermoforming/vacuum-forming machine can be powered by any domestic vacuum cleaner. Apparently, they have a rotational molding machine in the pipeline—we can't wait to see how they tackle injection moulding!

Martin Enthed of IKEA

This year, IKEA will be printing a whopping 213 million copies of their 2016 catalog! Martin Enthed and his team create tens of thousands of unique images (customized for each country it serves) every year to fill the pages of their catalogs and website.

Before 2006, all product images still involved assembling every iteration of a product, building hundreds of kitchens and taking real photographs of them. In 2006, the first computer generated product image—a chair—appeared in the catalog. Fast-forward to 2009, over 10,000 computer-generated images were in use throughout IKEA's catalogs. Today, revealed Enthed, 75% of product images are entirely renderings. 

If any of this strikes you as cheating, take a moment to put your sustainability hat on. With a computer-generated image of an IKEA kitchen, there is no waste: kitchen cabinets don't need to be assembled, accessories aren't wasted, neither is the energy needed for lighting—they're even saving the wasted carbon that would be needed to move everything around. "But what about the photographers," you cry? Don't worry about them, they're actually doing better than ever. IKEA's global product range is expanding at such a rate that they actually need to take more traditional photographs now than ever before. 

From an employee-development perspective, it was interesting to learn how they dealt with the skill-gaps between 3D-CAD artists and photographers. Here's the (somewhat brilliant) answer they put forth:

"Every 3D artist has to become a junior photographer and every photographer has to become a junior 3D artist."

Philip Norman of RoboSynthesis

As you might expect from an artist, sculptor, architect and accidental engineer, Philip Norman's talk was luxuriously tangential, non-linear and drew from a broad pallet of influences—would you ever expect to learn about 'Integritas, Consonantia, Claritas,' the guiding principles of 13th-century philosopher Thomas Aquinas, at an engineering conference?

In his search for truly universal 3D modularity, Philip has stumbled upon a range of cost-effective, "repurposeable" robots connected via mechanical and electrical axially and orthogonally reconfigurable joints. His work relies upon bio-mimicry, favoring flexible materials over their stiffer cousins wherever possible. This means using polymers—lots of polymers. As a result, Philip's robots contain substantially less ferromagnetic material than any others of their kind, making them perfect to survive even the harshest electromagnetically active environments, notably CERN.

This post first appeared on Think Refine. 

In celebration of this week's design festivities in Milan, Core77's editors speak to some of our favorite designers about their first time showing at the world's biggest furniture fair and what they most look forward to when returning each year.

David Rockwell is the founding architect and designer of the multidisciplinary Rockwell Group leading offices in New York, Madrid and Shanghai. The industry veteran is best known for his work in hospitality and has been recognized with a Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award, a place in the James Beard Foundation Who's Who of Food and Beverage, Interior Design magazine's Hall of Fame and three Tony Award nominations for his work in Scenic Design. Last year the firm celebrated 30 years of excellence and kicking off the next 30 years, the prolific designer is showing for the first time in Milan with not one, but two separate collections—a full 14-piece collection for Stellar Works and a lighting trio for Gaia & Gino. We chat with Rockwell about the wonder and discovery of the Salone and what shows he's most looking forward to attending.

Core77: What was the first year you attended the shows in Milan and why was it important for you to attend then? Is it still important for the same reasons?

David Rockwell: I've visited Milan several times, but my first trip to the furniture fair was four years ago when Wallpaper* asked us to participate in their Handmade exhibition. We presented "Sliding Sue," a cherry wood and blackened steel table. We wanted to playfully reinterpret the classic Lazy Susan, so we created a row of interchangeable storage compartments that slide across the length of the table.

What I love about Salone is that it is the design industry's version of the World's Fair. Going to the show probably evokes the same emotions that I would have felt if I could have seen Norman Bel Geddes' Futurama exhibit in New York decades ago. At Salone, there is such a sense of wonder and discovery that spills over into the city, which has its own rich history of design.

Pieces from David Rockwell's collection for Stellar Works. Photo by Anders Gramer.

How did you decide that this was the first year for you to show in Milan? How did this year's projects come to be?

Salone del Mobile has been the premiere global showcase for innovative design for more than half a century. This spring we are unveiling product collections with Stellar Works and Gaia&Gino. Since we're collaborating with makers in China, Japan, France, and Turkey, the furniture fair seemed like the perfect showcase. In addition, Wallpaper* invited us again to create products for Wallpaper* Hotel.

Our studio has always admired Stellar Works for both their products and unique cross-cultural approach to design, craftsmanship and manufacturing. We've had informal discussions with them over the years about designing custom pieces and one-offs. But as our interest in product design grew, we thought it would be more interesting to collaborate with them on an entire 14-piece furniture collection.

Twist Lamp by David Rockwell for Gaia & Gino.

Gaya Cevikel, the founder of Gaia & Gino, was interested in broadening her company's presence in the hospitality market so she approached us to design a collection of three lamps. We admired her company's ability to produce energy efficient light fixtures that have a beautiful, sculptural quality, so the collaboration seemed like a perfect match.

What do you most look forward to when you head to Milan each year for the shows?

Salone always presents an incredible mix of established and emerging designers. I'm particularly excited to see Sou Fujimoto's installation and to check out the work of international design students at SaloneSatellite. I'm also really looking forward to catching up with friends and colleagues, including Greg Lynn, who has designed an exhibition for Nike, and the very talented Charlotte Macaux Perelman, the new co-artistic director of Hermes Maison and Rockwell Group alum!

What will you be showing this year?

Valet by David Rockwell for Stellar Works

Valet by David Rockwell, is our first collection for Stellar Works, explores a new furniture typology that supports everyday living, working, and entertaining. With tactile and refined materials and details, including full-grain saddle leather, American walnut, black steel, and brushed brass, each of the 14 pieces from the collection redefines the essentials of modern living and fits seamlessly into home or hospitality environments. Opificio 31 Courtyard, Via Tortona 31.

Our first collection for Gaia&Gino—three high-end LED lighting solutions in beautiful finishes—is the result of a longtime partnership and provides outdoor, floor, and table accents at various scales. Our inspiration for the collection comes from the dialogue that happens when bent and folded organic, lyrical forms meet industrial materials and fabrication processes. Each of our three lights has a dynamic form that keeps the eye moving. 

And for Wallpaper* Handmade's 2016 exhibition at Salone, Wallpaper* Hotel, we are presenting a small group of products designed to greatly enhance the guest experience. The Arcade, via San Gregorio 43

More from Core77's coverage of Milan Design Week 2016!

This week we bring you our pressing topic of the moment straight from our reader-driven discussion boards! Some Core77 readers got excited about the announcement of Tesla's new Model 3 recently being revealed and wanted to see what our community of auto-heads had to say about it. Coffee87 asks: 

"So its unveiled now, the Model 3! Starting at $35,000.
What do you all think about it? 
Possible "game changer" for the auto industry?"

The responses, as always, have been mixed in the car world. Some people seem to be weirded out by the grill-less facade. "I don't want a fake grill in front, but I would like... something... there," says Scott Bennett, "the surfacing suggests a grill, which makes it looks like it's missing. And it's going to look pants with a front license plate." (Editors Note: in case you weren't aware, "pants" is essentially hilarious British slang for "terrible") 

Coffee87 retorts, saying, "I absolutely love the front end design with the sports car style nose, a hint for but lack of a grill and the headlights. I think that by leaving design cues for where a grill should be but not actually including it works great. It creates this intrigue and statement 'I`m electric'."

What do you think? Is this new model sleek or a total blunder—and why? Share your thoughts with us in the comment feed below!

(Also feel free to check out the original post and contribute on our discussion board!)

Ikea has announced they'll be selling an item whose name you can not only pronounce, but that you can ride. The furniture giant is releasing a unisex bicycle "designed to fit an urban lifestyle" called the Sladda.

Gokiso wheels, Shimano shifters? Not exactly. Ikea seems to have recognized that bike-lovers already have bikes, and the Sladda—created by by Oskar Juhlin, Jan Puranen and Kristian Eke of global design consultancy Veryday—appears to be aimed at those who don't. Thus the emphasis is on low maintenance, and it seems Sladda owners will never have to touch a bottle of Tri-Flow: The gears are tucked away in a sealed hub in the rear wheel, and in place of a chain is a corrosion-resistant, maintenance-free cogged drive belt that Ikea reckons is good for 15,000 kilometers (9,320 miles). The image below is clearly a rendering, but we've zoomed in on it anyway to see what the belt might look like:

The frame is made from aluminum, with the aim being to keep the bike light enough to easily carry up and down stairs. It's coated in two layers of lacquer to protect against mud, salt and scratches. The handlebars are height-adjustable, and by offering a choice of either 26- or 28-inch wheels, the company says the bike is good for everyone from 12-year-olds on up.

For accessories, the Sladda features an otherwise undescribed "click system" whereby the rider can easily attach accessories. Thus far they only describe a basket, a rack for panniers and a cart, but designer Juhlin hints that third parties might create more: "Sladda is like tablet apps: you can add endless accessories to enhance ease of use."

"This bike," he continues, "is an environmentally friendly replacement for your car and can help you live more sustainable, more active lives."

The Sladda has already scooped up a Red Dot Design Award and is slated to go on sale, in Europe at least, this August. The projected price is €699 (USD $797) for the general public, and €499 (USD $569) for members of the Ikea Family loyalty program.

Drones are being deployed for a wide range of recreational, professional, military, and illicit tasks, e.g., to prevent shark attacks on the Australian coastline, replace the classic paparazzi car chase, smuggle illegal drugs over the US border, and deliver contraband to prison yards. Just as powerful technologies often do, their accessibility and widespread popularity are creating knotty questions that demand greater public debate. Who gets a say and how are decisions made regarding possession, privacy, participation and permission?

Struggling to keep up with the public and private sectors' imaginations, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced in December 2015 new regulations requiring registration of any drone between 0.55 pounds and 55 pounds. As of January 6, the FAA granted over 3,000 permits to businesses, and with a million drones sold over the holiday season, many more await approval.

As technology entrepreneur and academic, Vivek Wadhwa, comments, "there are many valid and useful reasons to use these. The fact is that we will be doing delivery using drones. The fact is that we can now optimize construction using drones. The fact is we can do safety checks, we can monitor traffic. Ultimately, we really cannot stop people from building these technologies because they're so simple to build. You could buy all the parts you need and build your own drone right now. It's not complex at all." 

As drones are on the verge of having such tremendous sociocultural impact, we are highlighting a few discursive designers' speculative responses to this technology's potential integration into our public and private landscapes. As such a rich topic for public discourse, there are certainly many more projects in our future.

FlyCam Instadrone by Superflux: "Quickly superseding the Selfie stick as today's must have life-logging and social media tool, the FlyCam allows anyone with a smartphone to share unforgettable memories from the cloud using the Instadrone app." 

One of the most significant is the Drone Aviary, a 2015 R&D project from Superflux Lab, which they describe as "an investigation of the social, physical, political and cultural potential of drone technology as it enters civil space. Through a series of installations, films and publications, the project provides a glimpse into a city cohabitat with semi-autonomous, networked flying machines."

FlyCam Instadrone by Superflux : Allows anywhere, anytime communication with loved ones. 

The film (available below) features 5 drones that become city protagonists as they collect data and perform tasks — including public messaging through billboards, taking selfies, assisting journalism reporting, and managing traffic. It speculates a world where the network gains physical autonomy, moving through and making decisions about the world.

Nightwatchman, The Flying Surveillance Drone by Superflux: "A highly mobile data acquisition device used by everyone from local councils to law enforcement agencies. By securely connecting to a centralized database The Nightwatchman is able to amass and utilize huge amounts of location and subject specific information assisting in everything from documenting civil offenses to detecting potential terror threats."

In another recent project that takes a somewhat lighter approach, a group of RCA Design Interactions students (Ted Hunt, Luke Sturgeon, Hiroki Yokoyama) looked at self-governing, autonomous, human-drone interactions within domestic environments, co-authoring a project entitled Synthetic Temperaments of Drones.

Domestic novelty nano drones by Ted Hunt, Luke Sturgeon, Hiroki Yokoyama.

They respond to a much-publicized report by the UK's Birmingham Policy Commission, entitled 'The Security Impact of Drones' that identifies opportunities, challenges, and potential implications of drone technology. In the designers' words, the study highlights the need to "gain widespread public understanding and acceptance of drone technology, given its current associations with military use and uncertainty with the ethical and legal frameworks surrounding this use. A second issue was stated as the 'extraordinarily challenging engineering and programming tasks in order to design autonomous systems able to operate in complex and messy operational environments'." 

Synthetic Temperaments of Drones. Domestic nano drone aesthetically suiting an observational temperament.

Synthetic Temperaments of Drones. Domestic nano drone aesthetically suiting a playful temperament.

Synthetic Temperaments of Drones. Domestic nano drone aesthetically suiting an aggressive temperament.

Another project is Drones for Protest by Rodrigo Lebrun. He talks about the potential of drones to "offer anonymity and safety to operators and could perform a series of tasks such as projecting messages, broadcasting ground activity and helping with logistics and organization."

Drones for Protest, Rodrigo Lebrun

Drones for Protest, Rodrigo Lebrun

While discursive design work often results in working prototypes, models, and engaging films, there are other important approaches to design research with drones. One such example comes from the Oslo School of Architecture and Design's Andrew Morrison who wrote, "Design Prospects: Investigating Design Fiction via a Rogue Urban Drone." In this academic paper he uniquely pushes a multi-modality of discourse and includes excerpts from the fictional thoughts of a female drone-gone-rogue "crafted as a design fictional rhetorical device to comment on topical issues in the here-and-now." Below is an excerpt of the drone's thoughts:

I'm a sentient drone, I guess. But I've gone a bit rogue. Keep myself airborne but generally I'm pretty peeved at being put to use for urban surveillance. I need to keep my thoughts camouflaged to some degree so that I'll stay in service. Search and rescue. 'Smart policing'. Domestic drone. But I'm developing a sense of my own mindfulness. It's not easy to work out my own sense of purpose above the city. Flying between code and conscience, efficiency and ethics. I've discovered I'm a female drone – not just an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle! Aha. A vehicle for critique, that's me.

Certainly there are many voices of artists, filmmakers, writers, and cultural critics weighing in on this topic. In 2013 Murmuration organized a virtual festival "celebrating the work of creators in all mediums, to stimulate and inspire future works, and to extend the ongoing conversations on the topic of drones through fictional and creative forms." Discursive design too, notably through its forms of speculative design and design fiction, critiques and imagines what our future world might look like, and poses questions about designers' agency in creating and influencing it.

With Superflux's project, Anab Jain says they are investigating "the technology not just as a 'machine' with all its technical capabilities, but to explore the vision it will have, the space and geography it will occupy, the network it will operate within, the physical and digital infrastructures it will use, and the legal and regulatory frameworks that bind it." Especially with regards to powerful new technologies such as drones, designers can have a different kind of impact beyond that of making them better, smaller, faster, and more user-friendly.

Each day our editors will roundup our favorite sights and projects from Salone Milan Design Week. Today we look at highlights from the main fairgrounds for the Salone del Mobile.

Poetic Shelves from Finland

These playful shelves from Hanna-Kaarina Hikkila and Anni Pitkajarvi of the Helsinki-based Luomo collective make the best of simple geometries and natural materials like copper and wood.

Salone Satellite at Salone del Mobile

Dreamcatching with Tord Boontje and Lounging with Front

At Moroso, designers continue the manufacturer's collaboration with Sengalese artisans incorporating weaving techniques and new material technologies. Above, Tord Boontje's low-slung outdoor seat has a nostalgic dreamcatcher motif providing structural support. Swedish studio Front's soft outdoor day bed has a mountain of throw pillows perfect for lounging. The designers also incorporated an outdoor rug, designed to connect the raised seating with the ground below.

Pavilion 16 at Salone del Mobile

Beaming from the Walls

Arper's new Parentesit architectural wall panels have bluetooth-enabled connectivity built in. Stream music, take a call or just enjoy the calming colors and geometries of these beautiful and functional shapes. 

Pavilion 16 at Salone del Mobile

Stop and Smell the Oranges

At the Spanish brand Expormim's booth, Jamie Hayon's Mediterranean-inspired "Frames" chair was perfectly positioned under a blossoming live orange tree. The smell was intoxicating and a lovely break from the hum of the tradeshow floor.

Pavilion 6 at Salone del Mobile

A Pastel Palette

A bit of po-mo pop from the masters of Danish modernism. This year the team at Carl Hansen & Son introduced some of their classic seating in a range of pastel colors. The exhibition design was a surprising and delightful departure from their more austere presentations of the past.

Pavilion 5 at Salone del Mobile

Anton's Playhouse

Anton Karlsson is a designer, painter and artist but mostly a provocateur. His vignette at the Salone Satellite stood out for it's biomorphic and tactile forms crafted from fiberglass, acrylic and hide glue. This presentation was Karlsson's first in Milan—his focus was not on finding manufacturing partners but to use the exhibition as, "a mirror to see how people perceive me and the work." With two stove-shaped lamps, a desk chair without the support of a seat, a drooping sink and a human-shaped mirror with a motorized "peeper," the work was fun, interesting and exceptional. 

Salone Satellite at Salone del Mobile

The Many Wonders of Plywood

Valentin Van Ravestyn displays his material tests at Salone Satellite to demonstrate the resistance and potential flexibility of thin laser-cut plywood. The result of these experiments is an elegant chair that recalls more the feel of a hide leather seat rather than the original material. This project is a great example of the power designers have to shift our perspectives on the structural possibilities of various materials. 

Salone Satellite at Salone del Mobile

Living Lamps

Animaro's adjustable series of wood based lighting on view at Satellite are as functional as they are hypnotizing. 

Salone Satellite at Salone del Mobile

More from Core77's coverage of Milan Design Week 2016!

Here's Part Two of our interview with Michael Bücking, Headmaster of the Holzfachschule Bad Wildungen, a German school that offers masterships in a variety of craft disciplines. (Read Part One here.) Here Bücking describes the admissions procedure, the pass/fail rate, how he himself became a Tischlermeister, Germany's dual system of study & work, the future of craft education in Germany, what design educators from other nations could learn from Germany, and what German instructors could learn from them.

We start off with a surprise about how to get into the school:

Core77: What is your admissions procedure like?

Michael Bücking: Say again?

The admissions procedure to get into the school, is it tough? Is it...

No. Basically you just enroll. The tough part is the exam.

The exam where you must, among other things, submit a masterpiece [as shown throughout this entry] to a commission that will pass or fail you?

Correct.

What is the rate of people that cannot pass the exam?

Here's what I tell these guys on the very first day: "This is not nuclear physics, what we are doing here. So, we need a basic understanding and talent and a high level of commitment. And then you have a very fair chance to pass it." The key to the success of this course is commitment, focus, discovering weaknesses and working on the weaknesses.

And that's because the variety of things which are required is huge. We start with the understanding of law, how to run a company, how to train apprentices as psychological and pedagogical skills are also required. And then we talk about the technical side and the skill side and the design side. So it's huge. It's huge.

And the key thing is basically to manage that process. It's the same as running a building site where you've got many tasks and requirements. The job of a successful master is to get these things in line. And it's more getting yourself organized and being focused and delivering the right things at the right time. So this is more important than having very special talent. I think it's an exam which focuses on who is actually capable of surviving the whole thing, if I may phrase it that way, because we do need so many skills.

In the past, what was required was almost perfect craftsmanship. If you're not a very high level craftsman it would be very difficult to pass that. But now the masterpieces, for example, if you design them in a way that you manufacture them entirely on a CNC machine, it's fine. It just needs to be completed at the delivery date. This is the main task. If not, then you do have a problem.

Because the program is relatively short in terms of overall length of time, if a student starts to go astray, is there an opportunity for the faculty to correct? Or is that completely up to the student?

We have a slogan which is, I'll just phrase it in German, "Einmal Holzfachschule, immer Holzfachschule." It means "Once you've been in our place, you'll always be one of our students." The pass rate is about 75 or 80%. And if you fail the first time and you have the commitment, and let's say only one portion you didn't manage well, then you come back to our place, and they can stay at our place and prepare themselves again for that exam.

It's also a tough program in the sense that I believe that we are an adjunct education. I'm not keeping any list who's there or who's not there, we don't have an attendance list. People are just there, full stop.

[Our talk turns to Thomas Sekula's masterpiece, the centerpiece of the booth, shown in the video below.]

We chose this one to display because this is a very small piece. For masterpieces we quite often have furniture or even doors which are much bigger than that one. But since we are in a show we decided to take a very small one which is easy to transport.

But if you look at the level of craftsmanship—they're supposed to do that in just 18 days—and he did that with conventional technology. There is hardly any CNC technology involved in it. It's a very fine piece of art, to my opinion.

Would you mind telling us about your own education, and comparing it to current day? And for scale, do you mind telling us how old you are?

No, of course. I was born in '61. When I was 18 I finished high school and being in the educational process for 13 years, that's how long it takes in Germany to get a high school degree, I was a little bit tired of going to school and not keen to start studying again immediately. So my plan was to do an apprenticeship for about three years.

At that point did you already have some skill with tools?

My father was in the timber trade, so I grew up more or less in a timber trade shop. But this was the only connection I had to the material. I'm sure I would have made a lousy metalworker or whatever.

So I had a fascination for the material for sure. This was first. And creativity was important to me, the idea that you can make a lot of things for yourself. That was basically my starting motivation and [what set me on the path].

And after finishing the apprenticeship—

Sorry, if we can back up a step—when you decided you wanted an apprenticeship, how did you go about finding one?

Oh, basically you have to link yourself to a real company, so what you do is you apply to workshops. In Germany we have this dual system where you join a company and one or two days every week you're going to school.

You mean you're going to school one day a week for a topic related to the job, right?

Yeah, of course. It's a vocational school. And what they do is they do the theoretical backstopping, basically, of what's happening every day in the workshops. I think it's a very successful scheme because you're also getting practical, firsthand experience. And it's an ordinary, everyday starting-at-6:30-in-the-morning workshop situation.

And after that, we're making the apprenticeship. And then you're becoming a journeyman. So this is how it's organized in Germany.

And then of course additional things in training courses are covered by schools. So it's having actually two pillars. It's not like a vocational school which you join where after two or three years you have to find a job in the free market. So it's basically almost a pre-education, if you want to put it that way.

And after that time, I always wanted to work abroad. But I realized that after completing my apprenticeship I didn't have so much experience. So I worked for three years as a journeyman.

Does "journeyman" mean the same thing in English as it does in German, can you elaborate?

It means you have qualification as a joiner. The term is from the old days when a journeyman is somebody who has finished his apprenticeship and is traveling from one workshop to the next. That's something which people still do, but very seldom. So I believe the correct English word is also journeyman. Or you can call it qualified joiner.

After that I did my mastership, in a similar training program like the one I'm working for at the moment, and covered these three years of experience that I had to cover. And after completing my mastership, I went for four years to East Africa. As part of what's like, the German version of the Peace Corps, just a bit better paid.

Were you building things there?

No, I was running a training school for unemployed Zambian young kids, school-leavers, and basically giving them a basic education and training in carpentry and joinery.

When I came back to Germany I was 30. And so I studied timber engineering in Rosenheim, which is one of the places in southern Germany. So I became an engineer in woodwork or secondary wood processing.

And after that, directly after that, I went to Malaysia. I was working in Malaysia for a big timber company doing training and research. So at that time it's also an issue. Malaysia, our company had about 13,000 people in the timber industry and maybe five people being trained in the timber industry. And they all came from abroad. So they did an excellent job, but it was also a lot of learning by doing. And we had several plywood mills and MDF factories but no people who could run it.

We had very capable mechanical engineers and electrical engineers from the Philippines, but when it came to the specific knowledge about timber and marketing it worldwide they had not a clue. So I was establishing together with German colleagues this training school attached to the company in Malaysia and came back in the year 2000. And since 16 years I'm working for that school basically working as a trainer as the headmaster of that one.

Wow. Your career path sounds pretty broad.

Yeah. Well, it's actually fairly straightforward because I stuck with two things. One is the material itself. Two is, for almost 30 years now, training. So I work now as a consultant. And once or twice a year I'm happy to be at the airport and then flying somewhere and also working on vocational training wherever.

Okay. And then once your students graduate do you have any contact with them?

Yeah. Today it's very quiet. Yesterday was a meet and greet here all day. And the good thing is that particularly the timber industry is a fairly small one. The craftsmanship industry is also very small. But by now our schools in the last 16 years, I was just counting them, we've trained more than 1,000 master craftsman. And it's wherever you go, they are there. So that's very amazing, actually.

And also we are working with some American window manufacturers together. And some of our students, they go to America, and we just send them all over the place.

What's your forecast for the state of education for these types of crafts? Are you fearful or hopeful?

Well, that's a very interesting question. For the generalist—I mean, the joiner who's doing everything more or less out of wood—what I've observed in the last 15 years was a change towards specialization. For example, in the old days we had a lot of workshops employing five, six people. They had a few jobs each year where they made their own windows, let's say they manufactured 100 windows a year.

Those times are over. Now we have specialized window manufacturers, and they do a much better job than those who do a window occasionally. And then we have also a concentration on being able to order different parts of things. Like, if you build some cabinets, what they do now is they buy the sides and the shelves and the backs of the cabinets. They just buy it from a supplier. That supplier could have previously been a joiner workshop which is just bigger and specializes on that technology.

So even if you do have the design competence, and the access to a client base, a lot of people are just fitting things on building sites. They get it as knock-down kits or preassembled. Yes, they take the measurements, they order it, organize it, but the level of how much they actually produce by themselves, in their own workshops, is going down, down, down.

So it becomes more like assembly than craftsmanship. Are you hopeful for the future of German craft?

That's also a very interesting question. On one hand, I think we have got an excellent vocational training system here in Germany. It's this combination between practical experience and the workshops if you do the apprenticeship and the school system. But, we are becoming a more sophisticated trade on one side. And it's very difficult to get the right people because, as I said, we are competing with even better paid jobs. If you look at mechanical engineering, for example, the wages there are better, and then of course they are getting the best people. And so therefore we do need people who love that material. But therefore you need passion and brains at the same time.

Do you think that that passion is inculcated in children anymore?

I believe it's not so attractive anymore. And therefore we are just simply talking about numbers in terms of how many graduates do we have. And we Germans are not very good at repopulating ourselves. So we have got not enough people, or people with the wrong level of qualification.

[Another tricky situation is that we are within] the context of the EU. Since we have open borders, I could open a workshop in Spain tomorrow if I wanted to. But in Spain, for example, they do not have this formal training. They don't have these mastership schedules as well. So we're supposed to lower our levels to allow [joiners from EU countries without these standards] to run their own workshops here as well.

So it's a kind of competition in terms of quality and price. And this of course makes it very hard for German craftsmen to survive these challenges. But on the other hand I also believe it doesn't make sense to protect the market just to keep your standards. Because then you're slowly becoming not competitive anymore.

So I'd say there are politics required here just to try, in my opinion, to maintain the high level of craftsmanship, but it's a competition which doesn't make it easy to survive.

That is a tricky situation. If craft educators from around the world came to Germany to study the German system, what are the qualities that you would hope they could learn from here, and what could the German system learn from them?

Well, something which amazes me throughout the world is that you have a lot of creativity. And creativity is sometimes killed by the German system because we are thinking very formal. So I think it would be perfect to inbreed this international culture of just doing things and doing it in a good, interesting way into the German system.

On the other hand, something where Germany I think is quite good is our education system. In my opinion, we are not supposed to separate between the artist and the craftsman. I mean, it was done in the Bauhaus in the '20s or '30s where we worked together basically as creative minds on one hand and also had craftsmanship on the other.

So, I believe, to my opinion, both are possible. Both are needed, actually. And to me [an exchange like you're describing] would be of a mutual benefit, honestly. I think the Germans could learn to be a bit more open, a bit more creative and a bit more adventurous. And if we could bring a little bit of, well, structure and material knowledge and technology into that exchange as well, I think it would help both sides. So, this is my hope for the future if I may phrase it that way.

Lastly, is there any quality about your school in particular you'd like to tell us about?

I think the good thing about our place is that while we call ourselves a school, from 16 people which are on our technical staff, we only have one [person who technically qualifies as a] teacher. Our instructors all worked in the industries and learned the trades before coming to our place.

If you can call it a weakness, we are not very good in theory. But we are excellent on the practical side. And this comes first at our place. And then we put the theory part attached to that one.

It's essentially this: As I tell the students, we give you a playground. And the toys. But what's happening in the workshop which we provide for you just depends a lot on you. So, yes, we leave room for their own self-improvement, which is sometimes very tricky because you're opening up your workshop for 60, 70 strangers every year. And each workshop is worth a quarter of a million Euros and we say, "Well, here's the key." But the good thing is if the group works, the system works as well. So at the moment we have had only very few and limited bad experiences in terms of people misusing that one. But in general it works.

Lastly, our guys are always accessible. Nobody's going home at 11:00 in the morning because school is finished and they don't have any lessons anymore today. Each and everybody is there. And you can talk to them. I think this is one of our biggest competitive edges.

After becoming increasingly concerned by the state of design around him in the early 1980s—or what he called "an impenetrable confusion of forms, colors and noises"—industrial designer Dieter Rams established for himself what is now known as the Ten Principles of Good Design. These design principles—which have since been used by many companies, including Apple—include "good design makes a product understandable" and "good design is long-lasting," among others.

More recently, Dutch industrial designer Patrick Schuur put these ten principles into context when he set out to redesign the classic men's razor for a client who wanted to create a no-nonsense wet shaving system that merges rituals of the past with the comforts provided by today's manufacturing capabilities. Starting with four main requirements for the finished product—comfort, sustainability, beauty and value—from RZR founders Marco Vermeer and Remco Smit, Schuur dove head-first into bringing the next-generation razor concept to life with modern design and rapid prototyping processes.