Homer Davenport, Mel Blanc, Matt Groening, Phil Knight, Dan Wieden, Jim Blashfield, Will Vinton—just a few cogs in Portland's historic pop machine. The Rose City has a history of keeping a pulse on pop culture and often getting ahead of said pulse.

Anne Richardson and Carl Abbot know this machine well, and they're certain it's not rolling along by coincidence. There's something special about this city, and they're joining us Tuesday, May 17 at 6 PM PST to talk about Portland's pop influence over the last few centuries.

Anne Richardson is the Director of the Oregon Cartoon Institute, where she explores the intersection of Oregon history and Oregon film history. She's been widely published, and her next symposium is this October—a look at the influential artists that came out of Portland's underground press in the '60s and '70s.

Carl Abbott is a historian and urban studies specialist. His 2011 book, Portland in Three Centuries, will serve as a pivot point for the talk as both he and Richardson consider Portland's connection to pop culture.

See you at 6 PM Pacific Daylight Time. If you can't make it, go to the Curiosity Club homepage for a live stream.

As part of NYCxDesign, the students of the MFA in Products of Design at the School of Visual Arts present ACCESS LTD, a set of roving checkpoints that investigates the way access is granted and denied by design—based on where we're from, what we look like, how we speak, and what we own. Embracing the international theme at the Wanted Design show Manhattan, the students explored the way our national, cultural, and personal identities determine our opportunities—both locally and globally.

"Despite global common ground and interdependence, our differences continue to influence what rights and privileges we enjoy. Using the language and tropes of border control, the work invite guests visiting the Wanted Design exhibition to examine the role of design in granting or limiting an individual's access to place, people, and prosperity."

At the event, visitors received a "passport" and were challenged with collecting a different access stamp at each of the five checkpoints. ADOPT invited visitors to adopt a foreign identity; MOVE explored cultural and traditional dance; CONNECT was a game to match "foreign" words to iconic design objects; REVEAL dared visitors to declare their personalities through their possessions; and EMBODY turned you into a, well, into a kind of furniture monster.

REVEAL

Checkpoint: REVEAL prompted visitors to consider their power, privilege, and personality through their possessions using a kind of photobooth for your things. Using the vernacular of airport baggage scanning—in fact, all of the interventions used this formal and graphic vocabulary—visitors were asked to empty their pockets and arrange their personal items on a grid, labeling each according to the kind of meaning it held for them. After, they took a top down photo of their recontextualized belongings and shared them on social media. (You can find a ton of these images searching #accessbydesign on Instagram.) 

MOVE

At Checkpoint: MOVE, visitors were invited to dance in front of a motion-tracking device that gauged how convincingly they could move to 30 second clips of dance music from around the world. Predictably, this worked well on Friday night when people had a drink in their hand! (And with kids, of course.)

CONNECT

One of two interactions around language, Checkpoint: CONNECT was a memory game where guests spun a hopper, received a random language and had 20 seconds to memorize five "furniture words" in that language—table, stool, lamp, clock, and bowl. Presented with photographs of products on exhibit at Wanted Design matching those categories, visitors then had to correctly match them up.

EMBODY

Checkpoint: EMBODY used a "carnival cutout" with the help of augmented reality—where visitors could create a passport photo of themselves as a kind of furniture assemblage. (The images of the furniture items were actual pieces in the Wanted Design show.)

ADOPT

Picking up on the language thread, Checkpoint: ADOPT challenged guests to learn how to say one new phase in another language—"Hi, can I tell you about my work?"—again, corresponding to the nationalities and languages represented at the Wanted Design show. People listened to recordings by native speakers in that language, and then received a passport stamp if they recited it correctly. (Well, "close enough" that is. They were hard.) 

See more images of ACCESS LTD and learn more about the project right here. Learn about Products of Design at their site.

Lazer Tag Kit

In the mid-80s, I had the fortune of working at the red-hot toy startup Worlds of Wonder in its design department. Worlds of Wonder brought Teddy Ruxpin, the animatronic storytelling teddy bear that became a bestseller, to market, as well as similarly innovative products like Lazer Tag. But it was the knowledge that Worlds of Wonder hadn't invented Ruxpin, but rather, licensed the concept from Ken Forsse that changed everything for me. Because as I stood in a factory overseas and watched Teddy Ruxpin after Teddy Ruxpin roll off a production line, I came to what seemed like an obvious-enough conclusion: I didn't want to be standing there. I wanted to be like Forsse, who I knew was free to continue focusing on being creative—while also making money in his sleep.

The licensing model has always made sense to me for that reason. When I broke out on my own, I was perhaps a bit naïve. I thought, 'If I show one of my ideas to a company and they like it, they'll pay me.' That's what I'd seen work in practice, after all. And really it seemed quite simple! I could focus on being creative without taking any risks. My licensee could focus on what it did best, like manufacturing, distribution and marketing. Who wouldn't want to hear me out? If we decided to move forward together as partners and the product was successful, only then would they have to pay me. It seemed like the perfect partnership.

I've been licensing my ideas for products more or less since I left WOW. For the past 15 years, I've been helping other inventors license theirs. (The designer of Grid-It™, the first product Core77 contributor Bruce M. Tharp references in his excellent 2012 article on product licensing, was my student.)

Grid-It™

Some of the ideas I've licensed have been downright silly, intended only to put a smile on someone's face. On the other end of the spectrum, I've protected an Edison award-winning packaging innovation that I licensed to national brands with a wall of intellectual property.

That design schools don't teach their students how to license their ideas stumps me: The way I see it, open innovation enables creative people to design their lives, not just products. Work where you want. Work when you want. No more 9 to 5. (You'll work longer, trust me, but at least the exact time is up to you.) Open innovation is thriving! And really, no one is better primed to succeed at it than those who have studied product design. Most of the successful inventors I know have no formal training. I don't. You have a huge advantage!

A few years ago, I was invited to speak to Stanford's graduate design students. At the time, the economy was suffering, design jobs were few and far between, and students weren't able to start their own companies as readily. I can clearly remember how dumbfounded everyone looked after I described how licensing worked. They weren't aware they didn't have to start a company, nor work for anyone else.

At the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, I experienced the same reaction. When I walked in, I was blown away by the art projects lining the hallway. The quality of the work was astounding. I felt like an amateur in comparison. But when I asked what would become of the products, I was informed they were just for a class project and would most likely be thrown away. If I could license my ideas without having studied product design, what these students could do seemed limitless. Researching markets, making observations, thinking critically, building prototypes—everything I had taught myself to do they were already doing at a professional level.

Teddy Ruxpin

All of which is to say: I'm privileged and thrilled to share my strategies for licensing product ideas with the Core77 community. In future articles, I'm going to describe how to target the right companies, exactly what is needed to pitch an idea for licensing consideration, how to get a win-win agreement signed, and what to watch out for along the way. I'll explain how to protect your creativity from not only a legal perspective, but more importantly from a business perspective. Strategy is too often lacking when it comes to IP. I know how to write intellectual property protection that actually has value after having the 'honor' of defending my patents against one of the world's largest toy companies, Legos.

If you've studied product design or development, you already possess the skills needed to succeed at licensing. My intention is to show you how to leverage those skills to become an entrepreneur. Fair warning: It might feel uncomfortable. I'll be asking you to perceive, act and think quite differently from what you've been taught.

Stay tuned as we explore strategies for licensing and intellectual property protection every other week on Core77.

Stephen Key is an inventor, author, speaker and co-founder of InventRight, LLC., a Nevada-based company that educates entrepreneurs in how to bring ideas to market.

Think about this: We humans have been on the planet for about 200,000 years. For most of that time, the only way to travel long distances was by walking, riding an animal, or having an animal drag some rickety thing you built.

We still managed to spread far and wide as a species, colonizing the far corners of each continent just by hoofing it. But our progress came to a halt when we reached the deep blue stuff surrounding each continent.

To get across water you need to build something more challenging to operate than a donkey cart. For one thing, there's no way to get an equine to drag it, and your stupid idea to harness sharks for the task is going to end badly. That means the power has to come from humans. If you want the craft to travel far, that means a lot of power, which means more humans. So the thing has to be big enough to hold a large group of guys with impressive triceps and lats.

For raw materials to build the thing, you've got your choice of rocks, trees, grass, dirt or dead animals. There was early usage of animal-skin boats in Arctic regions, but wood, which is both sturdy and naturally floats, became the go-to material for regions with trees. The crucial step, as with shelter-buildling, was that we had to learn how to work wood and bend it to the task at hand. With no Industrial Revolution in sight, we had to develop tools and study the material closely to figure out how to make it do what we wanted.

The Egyptians and the Chinese figured out how to turn wood into seaworthy boats, but few examples have survived the centuries, and expertise on their techniques is slim. However, the documentation for what the Vikings, one of history's first undisputed naval powers, managed to pull off starting in the 9th Century is far better.

Viking ships were absolute marvels of design and engineering. They were both functional and beautiful. As an example of the former, they were designed to be more or less symmetrical from bow to stern, meaning they could reverse direction simply by changing the direction of motive force. As an example of the latter, simply look at their sleek overall forms, not to mention the mike-dropping touch of the dragon heads.

The Vikings had different styles of boats, from warships for raiding parties to funerary boats to proper cargo-carrying vessels (gotta get that plunder home somehow). What their boats all had in common was that they were lightweight, fast and strong. They were sturdy enough to make it across the open ocean from Scandinavia all the way to Iceland, and from Iceland to Greenland (and, some say, all the way to North America).

That the Viking ships were both strong but light is due not only to their design, which we're admittedly going to gloss over here (though earlier we looked at their excellent carry-on baggage policies), but closely tied to the way that the wood used to build them was actually processed. If you're an industrial designer today and molding a part, your knowledge of injection molding and understanding of how plastic behaves enables you to yield the most desirable part that the technology and material is capable of. The Vikings were no different, and studied the wood to gain a comprehension of how the material would best serve.

Rather than sawing oak trunks into planks, the Vikings rived them. Riving is when you split the wood by driving wedges into it along the grain, splitting the log first in half, then splitting the halves into quarters and the quarters into eighths. Where the log divides is not determined by the line of a sawblade, but by where the grain will naturally split, keeping the resultant pieces stronger by virtue of their common grain direction.

Rob Tarule riving a log. Images via Fiske and Freeman

By hewing the resultant wedges down, the maker would eventually wind up with a parallel-faced quartersawn board. Here's what the process looks like, followed by a quick CG animation of how the boards were integrated into the ship:

Quartersawn is the hardiest, most stable cut of board there is. The Vikings could reportedly mill these quartersawn boards to as little as an inch in thickness, which was thin enough to bend into shape for the swoopy forms of their ships, strong enough not to break, lighter than a thicker board, and would not warp.

Riving is still practiced today by woodworkers, as it yields strong and stable boards. Another neat effect is that, well, rived boards look pretty darn cool. Missouri-based James E. Price, an expert in old-school woodworking techniques, recently gave a demonstration at the Institute for Traditional Ozark Crafts. Check out this box he made from rived boards for the event, captured by WK Fine Tools:

WK Fine Tools

It's even got a removable partition in the middle:

WK Fine Tools

If you're thinking of trying riving yourself from smaller portions of wood, Maine-based Lie-Nielsen Toolworks produces a froe for the purpose, demonstrated below by Peter Follansbee. The process is a lot quicker than what we saw above, where they're starting from scratch:

When you're starting with a full log, the issue with riving is that it takes freaking forever, as you saw in the first video above. As you can imagine, it took both a lot of time and manpower for Viking shipyards to produce fleets. 

Other rising naval powers wanted a faster way to transform logs into planks. Next we'll look at the wood-splitting method that succeeded riving.

If you want to turn a bunch of logs into boards, it might not occur to you to start digging a trench first. But that's exactly what the Romans did, as they developed a log-splitting method very different from the Vikings and their system of riving. The results of the Roman method more closely resemble what we'd see coming out of a modern-day sawmill, but it was backbreaking work.

The Romans would dig what was known as a saw pit. The log would be suspended over this pit. Two sawyers would then use what was called a whipsaw, and one guy would get in the hole and grab the bottom of the whipsaw while the other sawyer had the other end, up top. The top sawyer's job was to guide the cut and pull the saw back up after each pass, while the bottom man worked with gravity to pull the saw down on the cut stroke.

As for the whipsaw itself, early versions had the blade bound within a frame in order to place tension on it. Later, as metallurgical advances were able to produce better steel, frameless "open" saws could be produced that were sturdy enough not to buckle.

There are records of saw pits existing in what is now Italy in the 1300s, and the technique spread across the continent—and was eventually stolen by those thieving Pilgrims—in the following centuries. 

Sometimes trestles were built rather than digging a pit, presumably because the aforementioned thieving Pilgrims had stolen all of the shovels.

While saw pits were used to produce lumber for everything from flooring to housing, it was the shipbuilding industries of coastal nations that dominated demand. Unbelievably, naval power England maintained saw pits throughout the 19th Century, even after steam power had become commonplace.

As you can see in the photo, wedges prevented the kerf from closing. But there's no way they avoided wedgies with those pants.

As you can imagine, when pitsawing, being on the bottom totally sucked. You're basically just getting a faceful of nice, fresh sawdust to stick to your sweaty mug on each stroke. That's probably why the senior man was always up top and the new guy was on the bottom. Here's what it looks like in practice:

Not very thrilling work, but it's made a bit more manageable with British narration:

As slow as this was, it was faster than riving, though it didn't yield exclusively quartersawn boards. And as countries like England, France and the Netherlands sought to ramp up their naval production, pit-sawing gained prominence.

Until, that is, a certain brilliant Dutchman came along. We'll look at his revolutionary invention next.

The Ta+Too bike seat is Selle Royal's new commuter-friendly release, designed to keep your butt unbothered by thieves. The Ta+Too is built around the sad fact that unattended urban bikes are often cherry-picked of even crappy parts. Lights, seats and other bits that take a simple tool to remove will walk off at the worst times. But what if you could take your seat with you without tools?

This seat's Red Dot awarded design takes the route of protection via lowered attraction. Once installed on a standard seat post, these squishy commuter seats can go convertible, shedding their top half with the twist of a dial and leaving just the uncomfortable plastic shell behind.

The attachment system seems to be as simple as a formed ABS mating system between upper and lower halves, pinned in place by a large plastic dial. Turn the dial when you park and slide the comfy part out, then slide it back in and turn the dial until it clicks. The dial can be additionally "locked" into place for added security. 

The newly released line comes in an array of trim and center colors, and you can add a loop handle onto the base, though I don't know why you would since it doesn't look like it will aid with seat removal or carrying your bike. The upper is filled with 3D skingel and is designed for good shock absorption while in an upright riding position. The different configurations retail for €70.00 - €79.9, and as far as user-friendliness goes, they seem corny but well-executed. 

The product and press info is scant, and this video seems more interested in demonstrating the models' graphic design skills than flaunting their lifestyle products, but the premise is still an interesting one. 

As a bike wonk, I'm morally required to note that saddles are best chosen for personal ergonomics over their security rating, but comfort clearly isn't every commuter's first concern. In thief-dense cities even ugly and odd bike parts get stolen, so would this prickly looking plastic thing act as a deterrent when the seat post could still be removed? 

WantedDesign is a unique destination during NYCxDesign in two parts with one location in Manhattan's west side and a second location in Brooklyn's industrial Sunset Park, focused on providing a platform for emerging designers, student work and dedicated to highlighting the global design community through a series of curated international pavilions which this year included Argentina, Mexico, Norway, France, Tunisia, New Zealand, Colombia, Poland and the Netherlands. A common thread of attention to craft and collaboration brings together the diverse exhibitors.

At WantedBrooklyn, we were excited to see the results of WantedDesign's annual Design Schools Workshop—sponsored by Core77 and judged by our very own Allan Chochinov—featuring the work of 27 international students. At WantedManhattan this year, the spotlight was on Chicago-based designer Steven Haulenbeek who won the second American Design Honors award for his beautiful, interdisciplinary work. 

Ghata Project by Rabih Shibli for Design and Flow

This multifunctional structure for refugees is designed for portability, adaptability, scalability, economic efficiencey and endurance and was installed in the courtyard of Wanted Design Brooklyn. To date, eight Ghata schools have been assembled in the Beqaa district in Lebanon, each built to cater to an average of 700 refugee students.

Photo credit: LinYee Yuan

Design and Flow Tote Bag

A tote bag for designers who want to change the world.

Photo credit: LinYee Yuan

Wearable Homes by Mary Mattingly for Design & Flow

Part of Design & Flow's presentation of design projects that address challenges for refugees and migrants.

Photo credit: LinYee Yuan

Wanted Design School Workshop

Students are busy putting their finishing touches on their presentations for this year's design challenge on Playtime, led by ENSCI's Matt Sindall.

Photo credit: LinYee Yuan

Wanted Design School Workshop

Photo credit: LinYee Yuan

Visual Magnetics

Collaborating with the popular Instagram account @PlantsonPink, attendees were encouraged to play with and rearrange magnetic objects on the magnetized wall covering.

Photo credit: LinYee Yuan

Quilting Workshop with Libs Elliott

Photo credit: LinYee Yuan

Experiments from ECAL's Heart of Glass

A research project led by ECAL's Masters of Product Design program to question the potential of glass in contemporary art and design.

Photo credit: LinYee Yuan

Talking Textiles by Li Edelkoort's Trend Tablet

An exhibition of entries this year's Dorothy Waxman International Textile Design Prize.

Photo credit: LinYee Yuan

We Trust In Wood by Matali Crasset

Created in collaboration with the Vent des Forets organization, Crasset worked with local artisans to produce a collection of homewares including this iron apple roaster.

Photo credit: LinYee Yuan

Jukey joins social media with social life like never before. A jukebox re-envisioned for the 21st century, Jukey brings people together for a shared music listening experience that plays tunes that are sure to be a hit. Put simply, Jukey pools the favorite and most commonly occurring tracks on all devices connected to its network, and DJ’s from the songs that appear most often, guaranteeing a soundtrack that everyone present will love.

After seeing the Stair-Climbing Wheel Design for Handtrucks we posted, engineer Adrienne Clark wrote to us:

I am a mechanical engineer at Fikst, a mechanical engineering consulting firm in the Greater Boston area. I saw the Stair Climbing Handtruck post yesterday and I noticed that all of the handtrucks in the post use the same technology, the three wheel design, which is helpful for lighter loads but not for real lifting.

We developed a hand truck at Fikst that uses mechanical leverage to help you get really heavy items over a curb or up a set of stairs. If you are interested, take a look.

So we did, and the design seems fantastic:

Look more closely at the design and you'll see it's not just the levers down by the wheels that provide the assistance...

....but the handle placement as well:

Clark goes on to write "I, a petite woman, am able to get multiple reams of paper up a set of stairs using this thing!"

Now for the crappy part:

"Our hand truck is not currently available but is a totally different approach to a similar problem, so I thought that I would write in to share."

Sigh. Engineering FTW, Sales/Marketing/Business Reality FTL!

A couple weeks ago, we asked Core77 readers what they thought about Dyson's new quiet hairdryer. The topic seemed to spark some hot debate—so much so, moderator Michael DiTullo set up an impromptu sketch challenge to redesign the hairdryer:

"The hair dryer is the classic design school student project, yet there seems to be a true lack of nicely designed options on the market. Have at it designers, lets see what you would do unfettered by the constraints or retailers, marketers, and engineering BOMs."

So far, sketch challengers have delivered plenty of exciting results! Here are just a few promising examples out of several: 

UE Boom Dryer by Bengt Brummer

Ever get frustrated when you dry your hair but can't hear anything outside of the whirring hairdryer buzz? Well, this ingenious sketch by bepster brings the sound to you by incorporating a speaker into the nozzle portion: "Now you can headbang to Slayer while you give your luscious mane that volume and sheen!" 

 This upgrade on a classic by KenoLeon incorporates a few especially thoughtful features, including a USB rechargeable battery not unlike a portable drill as well as a free-standing option. 

A couple sketchers reimagined the form of a hairdryer entirely in some thought-provoking ways. The above sketch by gmay3able may look like a normal hairdryer at first glance, but "by adjusting the two tubes apart like headphones to have the air blow at two different angles [you get] more drying surface area instead of one powerful direction." 

And last but not least, Jboogie941 designed an entirely new form for the hairdryer, saying "I've never used a blow dryer for my hair personally but, see my lady use hers often. I think they take up too much space. Secondly, I feel that the hand held use could use some different explorations...." This model might require some prototype testing to see if it makes for a better product, but it's definitely a worthwhile exploration!

Think you've got a good idea up your sleeve to add? Share your own sketches and commentary on the comment feed below!

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

We've seen how being able to effectively split wood was important to earlier societies that aimed to build ships. Both riving and pit-sawing were effective ways to turn logs into the needed boards, but they were also highly time-consuming and laborious. For a country to win the naval race, they'd need a radical new production technology, something that would blow the competition away.

"Blow" is the right word, as it turns out. In 1594, an ingenious Dutchman invented something amazing: A wind-powered sawmill. Cornelis Corneliszoon, who described himself as "a poor farmer with wife and children" figured out that he could harness the power of the wind and attach it to a whipsaw to make it go up and down. He then added another gear to the crankshaft that would advance the material by means of what looks to be a rack and pinion. Here is the drawing from the patent granted to Corneliszoon in 1597:

The result of Corneliszoon's invention was much faster sawing, without the calorie-burning. Men were still needed to maintain the machine's operation, of course, but the merits of the design were so obvious that others immediately began copying it (leading Corneliszoon to finally apply for a patent three years later).

The importance of the the wind-powered sawmill taking off in the Netherlands cannot be understated. Wood production didn't double, triple or quadruple; it grew by a factor of thirty, or 3,000%. It was all in the time savings: Using the pit-saw method, sawyers could process 60 logs over a span of 120 days. Using a wind-powered sawmill, they could break down 60 logs in four or five days. What used to take four months now took less than a week.

As the sawmills began to proliferate and be improved upon, the Dutch began cranking out ships. In the 1600s they became the world's foremost naval power, destroying a large fleet of their Spanish antagonists in 1607. They began establishing colonies or trading posts, depending on how politically correct or revisionist you are, as far as Taiwan. In 1614 they founded New Amsterdam on a little island called Manhattan, and named a nearby district Breukelen, which we would later bastardize as "Brooklyn."

By 1650 the Netherlands had some 16,000 merchant ships that sailed all around the world, facilitating their trade. The English weren't happy with this and a series of Anglo-Dutch wars were prosecuted; this resulted in the Dutch delivering England's little-talked-about worst naval defeat in history in 1667. Beefs continued, and in 1688 William III of the Dutch Republic sailed to England with a large fleet, toppled the King, and had himself crowned King of England to put a stop to it.

The bottom line is that the Dutch successes of the 1600s were predicated on them having a large fleet. Of course other things were also necessary, skilled businessmen and politicians and military commanders, et cetera, but it's not unrealistic to think that without Corneliszoon revolutionizing the production method of timber, they'd not have made it as far as they did.

So enough with the history talk, let's take a look at this wondrous, completely green sawmill technology. While Corneliszoon's own didn't survive the 400-plus years until now, there is a rather amazing recreation of a 1600s Dutch wind-powered sawmill, built from the plans pictured above, called Het Jonge Schaap in Zaandam, outside of Amsterdam:

After previous missteps, Tokyo needs their hosting of the Olympics to not only go smoothly, but to wow visitors in order to regain some face. If Japan-based research company Star-ALE has their way, they'll be the ones to provide the opening ceremony show-stopper that will get things off to a fantastical start—by way of a manmade meteor shower lighting up the night sky.

The company's "Sky Canvas" project would launch a microsatellite into space (the first is scheduled for next year) that's loaded up with 500 to 1,000 proprietary pellets containing various elements. In the company's earthbound testing, they've place these pellets into a vacuum chamber and blasted them with hot gases traveling at supersonic speeds, simulating atmospheric re-entry, and found that as the pellets burn, they produce different colors depending on which elements they contain.

The plan is that once the satellite is locked into geostationary orbit over the desired site, an onboard device will start spitting the pellets out like a baseball pitching machine. 

Based on their testing, researchers have "no doubt" that the pellets will burn brightly enough to be seen on the ground, even over light-polluted Tokyo, within a 200-kilometer (125-mile) radius. (In the event of inclement weather, the meteor shower can be remotely canceled and postponed prior to starting.)

Star-ALE Founder/CEO Dr. Lena Okajima

The pellets cost $8,100 each to produce, to say nothing of the satellite and launch costs. If an $8.1-million-plus lightshow sounds frivolous, we should point out why it's not. Star-ALE founder Dr. Lena Okajima, who holds a PhD in Astronomy and formerly worked at Goldman Sachs, understands both astronomical research and finance. As she explains,

Astronomy in Japan is supported by large amounts of government assistance. By pouring large amounts of public funds into the creation of enormous equipments, we can aim to fly further into space, and conduct more accurate experiments and observations.

It's certainly true that this approach has led to numerous discoveries, and large space programs are a common phenomenon in many countries. However, I thought I'd try a less conventional approach, specifically one which centers on the private sector with a business model that could guarantee stable financial resources, and then contribute to the advancement of astronomy. This shooting star project is the result of that approach.

This type of project is new in the sense in that it mixes astronomy and the entertainment business. These shooting stars that are born through science function as a high-profit entertainment business, and the resulting funds will serve to further advance fundamental scientific research.

In short, Okajima—who describes the theme of her life as "contributing to the development of science by connecting science and society"—hopes to ultimately fund research that will help her team figure out what to do with space garbage. Their end goal is to safely handle the disposal of the decommissioned satellites and other junk we humans have launched into the atmosphere and neglected to clean up.

Perhaps Okajima and her team will figure out how to collect floating space debris, infuse it with particular elements, and send it into the atmosphere to burn up on re-entry—while providing a spectacular light show sponsored by a spectacle-seeking corporation. That would be a win-win.

The sharing economy has accustomed us to the concept of sharing homes, cars, bicycles, offices, labor, even food. But for some reason I never thought I'd see a company built around sharing furniture.

A startup called Furnishare is betting that folks who own furniture they're not using are willing to rent it out to others. As for those others, they're targeting folks who have just moved and want to furnish their new digs on the cheap. Here's how it works:

On their website, the company's tone is identical to the cheeky, we're-disrupting-business-models archness of an Airbnb or a ZipCar. In the FAQ section they answer the question "Is the furniture clean?" with "Frankly, our couches are probably cleaner than yours. Yeah, we went there."

Obviously a company like this isn't going to work out in the sticks. In order to build up a desirable stock of furniture and not go broke with transportation costs, they need to be located in a population-dense area. Thus the company only services New York City, at least for now.

So, have they built up a desirable stock? Browsing what's on offer reveals a mix of CB2, West Elm, Ethan Allen, Pottery Barn and yes, Ikea, along with assorted antiques and vintage pieces. A storage unit from the latter category is the only one that jumped out at me, and it seems that's what's in demand; in the section advising would-be rentees, the company writes "Check if your item is considered vintage, which can increase its value."

Here's the real point: I'm ambivalent on the existence of this company because I like the idea of what they're doing, yet simultaneously dislike that there's a need in the first place.

On the one hand, I can see the clear environmental benefits of their service. During my nightly dog-walks around lower Manhattan, I routinely see discarded Ikea/West Elm/Pottery Barn furniture out by the curb, the previous owners apparently unwilling to go through the hassles of Freecycle or Craigslist, and I lament that it's going into landfill when someone else could probably use it.

On the other hand, as a designer it makes me a bit sad that furniture has become so disposable, just a collection of items that owners form no real attachment to and have no problem parting with. It was only a few generations ago that people bought furniture they'd keep for a lifetime and/or kept in the family. But these days furniture is going the H&M/"fast fashion" route, and the only heirlooms we interact with are heirloom tomatoes.

I'm generally in favor of sharing things in order to increase their utility, but am curious to see what you think. What say you: Is Furnishare's service pure pragmatism, or pimping out?

The Walker’s Design Department is the recipient of numerous honors and awards. Its work has been featured in publications such as I.D. Magazine, eye, Émigré, and Metropolis. Since 1980, this department has maintained the Mildred S. Friedman Design Fellowship program that provides individuals who

There is a certain kind of book that exists between a technical manual and a true piece of theory or literature. There's a book like this that I keep under the dash of my 1965 VW Bus: John Muir's 1969 VW repair manual How To Keep Your Volkswagen Alive. It's an invaluable resource for perpetual novices and driveway tinkerers who insist on driving fussy and fragile old Volkswagens. Muir's manual is equal parts philosophy and practical know-how. It not only tells you how to fix your car but also what tools you need, how to handle them, and why doing so in a careful and considerate way matters.

Chris Schwarz's book The Anarchist's Tool Chest is the only other book I have read in the same vein as How To Keep Your Volkswagen Alive. I have picked up a number of woodworking manuals; they all tend to be hideously drab reads. Invariably, I get 20 pages in before my eyes roll into the back of my head and I pass out.

Not so with The Anarchist's Tool Chest. 

The core idea of the book is to walk you through what basic hand tools you need to become a proficient woodworker (no fancy multi-thousand dollar Festool setup needed), how to determine if a tool is any good, then how to use those tools to make a tool chest to house them. Schwarz walks you through each tool, explaining its purpose and place in a way that reads like a story, acquainting the beginner or further familiarizing the hobbyist.

The Anarchist's Tool Chest is not just another stodgy woodworking book written for woodworkers and sold in woodworking stores. I think it would be fair to say that traditional woodworking isn't necessarily on the minds of many Core77 readers, but this book offers an important perspective for those of us who feel uneasy about the chipboard junk that has become the standard of quality in our culture. It is a book to empower the reader be something beyond a consumer. I think people have largely forgotten that they have more control over their environment than they realize. Perhaps the first step towards wresting our identity back from big box consumption is equipping ourselves with the tools and knowledge to fill our life with meaningful objects. This book helps the reader become more self-reliant. Self-reliance is often freedom. 

courtesy of Lost Art Press

Hand-Eye Supply also stocks The Anarchist's Design Book, another great text for the beginning or experienced woodworker, in which Schwarz explores the construction of a number of pieces of furniture in traditional yet unpretentious forms.

Written by Luke Murray, originally for Hand-Eye Supply. 

We've been following the work of critical designer and filmmaker Keiichi Matsuda since we first caught a glimpse of a both entrancing and disturbing film he produced for his Master of Architecture in 2010. The short POV clip (which went on to rack up over 650,000 views on Vimeo) transports viewers to a near future world where augmented reality (presumably delivered through some form of technology infused contact lenses) is a very constant and slightly tyrannical layer on top of everyday life.

Fast forward six years via a successfully funded Kickstarter campaign (and undoubtably many, many hours of After-Effects)—Keiichi and team have just released onto the world an all new concept film that dives deeper into speculating what a future living with augmented reality might mean for us.

Kickstarter backers were of course rightfully first to set eyes on the 'provocative and kaleidoscopic' short film but Keiichi kindly invited us along to the films premiere screening and Q&A in central London last night. The full video has now been made available to watch on Vimeo and the project's homepage.

Like all good speculative visions of the future, Hyper-Reality doesn't shy away from grappling with the complexities and interrelation of technological trends—weaving in hints to themes as diverse as gamification, advertisement overload, personal development, personal promotion, service rating, chatbots, cyber-crime and even existential Googling. The depth and detail of the fiction being both a pleasure and pretty troubling to behold.

As Matsuda pointed out following the screening in London, the film set in a future Medellín city in Colombia (the Akihabara styling, which Keiichi attributes to his part Japanese upbringing, hinting towards a future blending of cultures) with the protagonist being a lower middle-class woman who relies on, what he imagines, what a 'freemium' augmented reality service might look like—hence the constant visual and bombardment of consumer advertising. 

Having spent years imaging and designing the details of this future world, Keiichi revealed he now has ambitions to turn the piece into a trilogy, with the next film showing the world through the augmented eyes of a premium user, and a third exploring the life of a hacker-type user. Interestingly, Keiichi also tells he is currently working with a start up to develop some of the gestural interfaces he imagined in the film—giving rise to the interesting possibility that he may be the designer as well as the critiquer of parts of his dystopian vision. Having thought about it for so long and hard however, perhaps we can hope that our lives future UX is safe in his hands?

Games of the AR future look much better at blocking out the noise of public transport

Ad overload on Columbian bus

Ugh. I can totally imagine supermarkets using some weird AR Tamagotchi to make use by more crap. Damn you supermarkets.

When will the Catholic Church get in on the AR and gamification game?!

Intimate and sophisticated screening at Bulgari Hotel in London's Knightsbrigde

Creator Keiichi Matsuda introducing the short film

Swap to unlock Catholicisim ROFL :D

Sight Unseen continues to put their special touch on the world of design with their third installment of their annual OFFSITE design fair. While taking in sprawling views of Bryant Park in Manhattan, visitors were treated to impressive works from emerging designers, established design studios and artists alike. The fair differentiated itself from other events going on during New York Design Week through its immersive installation and somehow fully unified vision despite it broad range of designers and mediums. 

Hardcore design devotees could enjoy to expertly crafted works, including but not limited to Furnishing Utopia's impeccably made tables, baskets and everyday tools inspired by Shaker design values while aesthetes could appreciate booths focusing on objects overlooked by modern designers like Tetra—a shop known for their collection of well-designed smoking objects—and immersive installations like Leong Leong's "sound bath" for Ford, built out of thousands of foam rollers and mirrors intended as a refuge from Design Week madness.

Linguistic Inspired Chairs by Brendan Timmins

Timmins, a Brooklyn based designer, said he most enjoys making work with a imperfect element to demonstrate the human hand behind it— for this series of chairs, he was primarily inspired by typological forms.

Photo credit: Allison Fonder

Ouli for Arborite Laminates

LA-based designer Brooke Intrachat of Ouli design studio created a series of furniture pieces for the Canadian laminate company Arborite to challenge the aesthetic of the traditional material.

Photo credit: Allison Fonder

Ouli for Arborite

LA-based designer Brooke Intrachat of Ouli design studio created a series of furniture pieces for the Canadian laminate company Arborite to challenge the aesthetic of the traditional material.

Photo credit: Allison Fonder

Ouli for Arborite

Another avant-garde piece by Intrachat made from laminate and an elegant burlywood.

Photo credit: Allison Fonder

Nap Lab by Various Projects and Print All Over Me

A space composed of textiles covered in grid like forms by Various Projects, Print All Over Me and Wallpaper Projects—deemed the "Nap Lab", the project is an immersive space meant for relaxation.

Photo credit: Allison Fonder

Object and Totem x Pat Kim

Ceramic explorations by Object and Totem are always a favorite and pair beautifully with Pat Kim's wood turned sculptures.

Photo credit: Allison Fonder

TOPO Sound Bath

New York based architectural studio Leong Leong created an installation sponsored by Ford for OFFSITE—TOPO, an immersive installation made using thousands of foam rollers and mirrors for an abstract fun-house feel.

Photo credit: Allison Fonder

Art Objects from Uprise Art

Works by ceramic artists Virginia Sin and Saint Karen as part of Uprise Art's booth installation.

Photo credit: Allison Fonder

Tetra Shop Smoking Accessories

Ashtrays by Andrew Hughes and beautiful glass pipes

Photo credit: Allison Fonder

Tetra Shop

Tetra's selection of accessories for an elevated smoking experience.

Photo credit: Allison Fonder

Hard and Soft Maple

Acer Saccharum and Acer Rubrum

Maple is one of the widest spread species in North America and can be found in nearly every region of the continent. Here are the differences between Hard and Soft Maple.

Hard Maple

Hard Maple is also known as Rock Maple or Sugar Maple, and as one of its names implies, it is very hard for a domestic wood. Hard Maple is widely used in cabinetry and flooring, and its light blond color makes it a great species for matching any decor. Hard Maple is a fine-pored wood with a very tight grain. The sapwood is almost white, and Maple is one of the only trees for which the sapwood is almost as highly prized as the heartwood.

The wood's high density and hardness mean that Hard Maple can be harsh on tools' cutting edges, but Hard Maple will maintain a hard, crisp edge for mouldings. The wood is quite stable, thereby making it perfect for flooring applications. Because of the tight grain, however, stains, dyes, and wax will not penetrate very deeply; therefore, surface film finishing options like varnish and lacquer are the preferred finishing methods.

Soft Maple

Soft Maple, also known as Red Maple, is very misleading in name. While the wood is softer than Hard Maple, this is true by only a very small margin. The heartwood of Soft Maple is slightly darker than Hard Maple's, with reddish-brown latewood lines that can give the lumber a pinkish hue overall. The flat sawn lumber of Soft Maple has wonderful wandering grain lines that contrast with the straight and orderly grain of Hard Maple.

Soft Maple grows in a more limited region (mainly on the US eastern seaboard), but it is still readily available and also tends to be cheaper than its harder brother. The wood's slightly softer nature does make Soft Maple easier on tools than Hard Maple, yet it still machines and holds details very well. It also finishes nicely, although it does not have the polished luster of Hard Maple.

Figured Maple: Both species are prone to a wide variety of special grain effects, such as Bird's Eye, Curly, Quilted, Tiger Striped, and Spalted appearances. Each effect is highly prized by furniture and instrument makers, while simultaneously being shunned by flooring and kitchen cabinet makers (who instead look for consistent color and uniform grain patterns). J. Gibson McIlvain carries a large volume of Maple, and we separate our figured boards from our straight grained boards in order to offer both distinctly desired types to our diverse customer base.

Figured Maple ( By Xyzzycoder at English Wikipedia, CC BY 2.5)

This continuation of the Wood Species series is written by Shannon Rogers, a/k/a The Renaissance Woodworker and founder of The Hand Tool School. It has been provided courtesy of the J. Gibson McIlvain Lumber Company, where Rogers works as Director of Marketing.

It's crucial for designers of physical objects to understand how the world around us is constructed. Whether your materials of choice are wood, metal, plastic or fabric, your comprehension of how that material behaves is the first step in you creating a successful design with it. It can also be helpful to look outside your wheelhouse and see how other materials behave.

I'm guessing few of you work with sand, so you'll likely find the video below fascinating. Here civil engineer Grady Hillhouse demonstrates how sand, an inexpensive and widely available material, can be made stronger by adding slices of material to counter sand's natural inclinations. (You've got to sit through some science-y explanations in the beginning, so if you're impatient, skip ahead to 4:09.)

Ever since my subscription to Kite Monthly lapsed, I didn't realize octopus kites were a thing. Turns out there are YouTube videos of octopus kites going back years and years, but it's one that was shot just this week that's gone viral on social media:

That massive beast was launched by the Show Kites enthusiast group in Singapore. According to the Straits Times it took six people to get the kite, which is "about the length of five buses," into the air.

"This is the fourth time we've flown the octopus," Show Kites Singapore co-founder Maggie Mok told the Times. "It's not that easy as it requires perfect weather and a large enough space to get it up into the air. Keeping it afterwards is also a difficult task!"