There's this dichotomy in woodworking about bringing the work to the tool (i.e. using a tablesaw) versus bringing the tool to the work (i.e. using a handsaw). A company called Pink Donut has looked at the act of playing records through a similar lens and developed RokBlok, a quirky product that reverses the typical equation. Rather than bringing a record to a turntable, they've created a player that you bring to the record:

Sure it's silly, but it's fun, and I really like the simple user interface of the lever. The device weighs 3.2 ounces and runs on rubber wheels, so as not to scratch your record.

RokBlok is a runaway success on Kickstarter: At press time 1,377 backers pledged $121,651 on a $50,000 goal, and there's still 41 days left in the campaign.

Barrington Stage Company is the fastest growing theatre in the Berkshires. Home to four venues, BSC has over 55,000 patrons per year and programming that ranges from new works to large scale musicals. The Graphic Designer works with the Marketing Director to ensure the artistic mission

Our knife selection this holiday season includes a bunch of pocket knives for casual day to day use. They're all sleek, slim, and super-lightweight.

Our two new favorites are the Otter Messer Mercator in Brass and Copper. Along with a lot of other folks, we've come to love the Mercator blade. It's super sharp and strong, and now it's set in two pretty irresistible handles. The Mercator is a carbon steel blade, and this variation is a little shorter than the beloved Kat Knife. It's a perfect everyday carry and well-placed in the kitchen or workshop. 

Otter Messer Mercator Copper Handle

We've also long-carried some variation of the Higonokami knife. At the peak of the knife's popularity, there were 50 manufacturers producing them in Japan. In 1961, after a political assassination led to a banning of blades, the popularity waned and now there are very few manufacturers still making them. But we're big fans and have always made an effort to have them in stock.

We have the Higonokami in all-silver, but also in the always-trusty black...in two different sizes. Higonokami blades can easily clip onto your keychain, so they're great for quick on-the-go jobs. Plus, they look damn cool. 

Miyamoto Higonokami Pocket Knife with Black Handle

We also have the Anchor Knife in from Otter Messer, which features a strong blade that locks in a snap. Rounding out our favorite knives of the season are the majorly affordable Svord Mini Peasant Knives. 

Svord Mini Peasant Knife

Check out all our knives here.

Shop the whole Holiday Collection here. Hey, time's running out. 

And scour the whole shop for all your last-minute buys.

Happy Holidays from Hand-Eye Supply. 

What's the opposite of the singularity? How about the idea that multiple species on the planet are secretly capable of conversation, they just won't talk to us? Researchers at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute are creeping out anyone ready to listen with a Science Advances report showing that macaque monkeys do have vocal chords capable of articulate speech. This is pretty surprising, given the previous decades of work which suggested that physical inability was what separates us speaking primates from our hairier neighbors. Turns out we're not so different after all.

Prior autopsies and molds taken from monkeys' larynxes lead researchers to believe that physical limitation of the vocal tract makes human ranges of vocalization impossible in other primates. This new study uses x-ray video of living macaque monkeys to record in-use range while vocalizing, eating and making facial gestures. Turns out we were wrong. The upshot is this pretty surprising, and let's say semi-ominous, simulation of what a macaque's vocal language would sound like. 

This leads the researchers to conclude that our differences are largely mental. These findings, like most good ones, raise many more questions. What neural barriers to spoken language exist, and can isolating them illuminate the hazy parts of human language development? How does macaque anatomy compare with our closer cousins, the chimpanzees? Can the missing neural component be learned? Or externally introduced? 

Most importantly, are we living in the grittiest reboot of Planet of the Apes yet?

Lola is a completely reimagined headphone that brings new levels of detail to your listening experience. It’s a headphone the true music listener—designed to help you get closer to your music, not just make a fashion statement. Everything from Lola’s revolutionary form and fit to its massive custom drivers was designed to help you rediscover your favorite music.

I'm pretty clueless as a businessman; my background is in tools, computers and mechanical engineering. So I read a lot of books on sales, marketing, and running a business. My favorites are first-hand accounts, and the old books are the most interesting to me.

Right now I'm reading "Forty Years of Hardware" by Saunders Norvell. It's about his career selling Simmons Hardware starting in the 1880's first on the Kansas frontier and then later in Denver, and then onto other adventures. It's a great read—I am learning a little on marketing and sales but also lots about business in the 19th century. A lot less has changed than you might think.

"Memories of a Sheffield Tool Maker" by Ashley Iles was a major guide when I first started. Years later when I finally met Ray, Tony, and Barry Iles it was great to tell them how inspiring I found their father's book. The details and specifics of making tools and running a mail-order business are very different now, but on the basic theory of selling and growing a business, a lot less has changed than you might think.

"The Modern Hardware Store" by Carl W. Dipman (1929) was not only interesting, but the pictures of hardware stores in the heyday of hand tools excited me. A lot less has changed than you might think.

You'll have to track those books down on Amazon, eBay or a library. But not the next one, which is the most unusual of the lot: Daniel Defoe's "Complete English Tradesman Vol. 1 and 2" (free to download on Project Gutenberg). Published in 1745, it's one of the first, if not the first, guides in how to run a store. The author was THE Daniel Defoe of Robinson Crusoe fame, who by trade was a milliner (a bad one apparently) and every time he needed money he wrote a book. The book is really interesting with early lessons on double-entry accounting and sections on how to treat an apprentice - teach them the trade but make sure that the customers don't get too used to dealing with him, so when he leaves his indentures he won't steal your customers. He also mentions that you should teach your wife the business so that if you die she will be able to carry on the business and not have to marry your shop foreman or lose the business or sell it for pennies.

A lot less has changed than you might think.

________________________________________________________

This "Tools & Craft" section is provided courtesy of Joel Moskowitz, founder of Tools for Working Wood, the Brooklyn-based catalog retailer of everything from hand tools to Festool; check out their online shop here. Joel also founded Gramercy Tools, the award-winning boutique manufacturer of hand tools made the old-fashioned way: Built to work and built to last.

Have you ever wanted to search for existing or expired design patents not only in your own country, but in the countries where you'd like to sell your designs? A website called DesignView has wrangled together the design patent databases of 45 countries, plus the ARIPO (African Regional Intellectual Property Organization), EUIPO (European Union Intellectual Property Office) and WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization), and lets you search all of them at once with a single search box.

Even better, the service is completely free, and they claim the databases they have access to are updated daily.

Just out of curiosity, I typed in "waffle irons" and got 97 results from a host of countries. I then discovered that the 2003 patent on Philippe Starck's waffle iron design has expired, meaning this is a prime time for me to swoop in and produce a too-close-for-comfort competing product.

Here's a complete list of the countries and organizations covered:

Albania
ARIPO
Austria
Benelux
Brazil
Bulgaria
Canada
China
Colombia
Croatia
Cyprus
Czech Republic
Denmark
Estonia
EUIPO
Finland
France
FYROM
Georgia
Germany
Greece
Hungary
Iceland
Ireland
Italy
Latvia
Lithuania
Malta
Mexico
Morocco
Norway
Poland
Portugal
Republic of Korea
Romania
Russian Federation
Serbia
Slovakia
Slovenia
Spain
Sweden
Tunisia
Turkey
United Kingdom
United States

WIPO

Get started here.

The shower is one place where we can get away from it all. You just let that hot water wash over you while ignoring your ringing phone, the sirens outside, the neighbor banging on your door and that strong burning smell coming from the kitchen.

But for me the escapism is not enough. See, I don't just want to feel like this in the shower:

I want to feel like this.

I want to feel like I am literally teleporting to another planet as I wash my sins away. But I can't because I look down and see my stupid average shower drain, and I know I'm in my shower, not a Star Trek Teleporter.

Well, help is here from a company called Easy Drain. Their Easy Drain Dot is a huge white circle that you could swear Spock's feet have been on. 

And just look at how easy is it to install:

And I mean, cutting those eight triangular tiles intersected by an arc should be a breeze on your average tile saw, right?

Added bonus: As far as I can tell, this system makes it completely impossible to remove hair that clogs up in the trap. I think after a couple of years the drain will look like Chewbacca trying to come out of a manhole.

Also comes in orange.

Product Designer Swimways Corporation, located in Virginia Beach, VA, is a leader in outdoor recreational products. Recently Swimways has joined with Spin Master to create an outdoor Global Business Unit which will be key to driving innovation and growth within the category. Our mission is making free time

In Boston's North End is a massive 65,000-square-foot facility known as the North Bennet Street School. Originally founded in 1879, today they offer programs in Bookbinding, Cabinet and Furniture Making, Carpentry, Jewelry Making and Repair, Locksmithing and Security Technology, Piano Technology, Preservation Carpentry and Violin Making and Repair. Anyone 18 or older can apply.

Intriguingly, they began incorporating the principles of Sloyd education all the way back in 1885, and still practice it today:

Pauline Agassiz Shaw, the school's founder, was a visionary educator and proponent of the Swedish system of manual training known as "sloyd" which means "craft" or "hand skills." The sloyd method focused on the development of character and intellectual capacity as well as technical skills. The method encourages students to systematically develop hand skills along with an understanding of tools, materials, processes and a sense of care and commitment to excellence. Shaw saw the school's mission as teaching the "whole person" both how to make a living and how to live a fuller life.

Today, the philosophy of sloyd remains at the heart of the school. Full-time programs provide intensive, hands-on training in a structured framework with a focus on practical projects. Each project builds on previous learning and requires students to solve increasingly complex problems.

Here's a look at the school and what they offer:

"Working at the bench," the school writes, "remains the most important part of each program — providing a practical context for students to receive and apply information and advice from instructors who are masters of their craft."

In addition to the full-time programs, NBSS also offers shorter courses and continuing education workshops; looking through the Woodworking classes alone makes me wish I lived closer to Boston. You can learn more here.

Are you sad? Tired? Dry and blotchy... emotionally? If you don't live in a sauna-competent culture and do live in a dark place, winter can be grueling and depressing. Vitamin D and exercise only do so much, but the SAD lamps on offer aren't much to cheer about. 

The last few years have seen building consensus that exposure to higher light levels can alleviate symptoms of Seasonal Affective Disorder and depression. The prescribed clinical plasticky blue and white lamps are easy to find in lighting shops and all over Amazon, as small or big or clock-radio equipped as you'd like. But nearly none look good enough to display. Maybe it's universal schadenfreude, since artists and designers suffer at a slightly elevated rate, and women at almost double the rate of men. Or maybe it's still a cultural blind spot since, like most accessibility design, depression isn't fun to talk about and it's not a pressing issue until it's your issue. 

So here are three designers' visions for a SAD lamp that would bring warmth to your brain and less embarrassing design to your home. It's worth noting that NONE of these are in production, so maybe take a note and think of the cornered market...

Day and Night Light, Eleonore Delisse

The designiest of all is the Day and Night Light by Éleonore Delisse. This pair of lamps casts tones of blue in the morning, and shift to warm oranges and reds in the evening. The underlying concept is that our emotional sensitivity to color is an overlooked component in the effort to get as much light as possible. That said, the medical benefits alluded to in most of its copy and coverage are really only proven with full spectrum lights that emit ~10,000 lux. Maybe someday we'll get a second edition with more power, or maybe someone should just take a more health-minded hint from its award winning form.

Day and Night Light, Eleonore Delisse

Next is the SOL lamp concept by Jeanett Madsen, which I voted 'Most Likely to Succeed.' And like most high school yearbook darlings I can't really tell what happened to it. The SOL pays a good deal more lip service to the mechanics of light therapy, as well as how people use therapy lights in their real lives. Most solutions require sitting in front of a large stationary light, using a battery powered portable lamp, or wearing pretty nutty glasses. 

SOL takes the shape of a clean and attractive desk lamp with variable lux output, allowing it to function as a traditional lamp as well. The head can also be removed and propped up for portable use, using conductive charging. While the tech makes a lot of leaps, Madsen's design address the physical and functional limitations of fixed lamps, as well as the inefficiency and low lux output of smaller options.

SOL Lamp, Jeanett Madsen

SOL Lamp, Jeanett Madsen

SOL Lamp, Jeanett Madsen

Last up is the subtly named Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) Treatment Light, by Colin Williams. This concept gets an honorable mention because SAD lamps at heart are pretty much a bunch of LEDs, but few manage to show it with visual cohesion or cleanliness. Instead of a bulky lightbox shaped like an iMac G3, this frosted tube leans toward contemporary industrial inspired lighting. 

The project additionally paired an app for controlling wake-up functions, adjusting color, and tracking mood. The cord is a bit unresolved, and permanent lighting in the SAD-beneficial spectrum might not work for most spaces, but the form and material choice are laudable. The suggested ability to shift spectrum and lux in sleek existing fixture would be great. 

Now if you need me I'll be hunched over in the dark, sketching lamps. 

Here's another great design from Sander Lorier, the fellow behind the Natural Balance pot. Lorier has created this Hybrid Chair, which initially seems like an ordinary desk-height chair:

Looking closer, you may wonder why the legs are so elaborate:

That's because the chair can do this:

Even cooler is the mechanism by which it works, which steals a trick from the seatbelt:

Here's what it looks like in action.

At first I figured the chair would want to tip forward when he sits in it in the lower position, but I've watched this over and over and you can see Lorier's carefully calculated where the weight goes. 

This is no concept, by the way; Lorier's producing and selling the chairs for €1,360 a pop.

The President Clock is a new project by Los Angeles artist and designer Nicholas Hanna. It marks the term of the U.S. President with a custom designed time mechanism that slowly rotates the single hand of the clock over a period of 4 years.

Whether you think time is on your side, or the clock is ticking, we have four years together. The President Clock is a special “slow” clock by artist Nicholas Hanna that uses a custom engineered time mechanism to rotate the hand of the clock slowly over four years.

You will not perceive the hand of the clock moving when you look at it. Only as time passes, will you notice the hand slowly change position around the face of the clock. The clock is not a countdown, but rather a companion to help mark your own awareness over the next four years.

The experience of living with a “slow” clock is unique, because it gives you an external reference point to become conscious of your own passage through time. It gives you an index into a period of time that is difficult to contemplate. We live day by day, and The President Clock is a useful prompt to apprehend a longer span of time.

We know plenty of designers with a soft spot for well-designed toys, which is why the latest feed from SophieHortonJones via the Core77 discussion boards struck a chord with us this week. Sophie writes,

"I love a good toy craze, and love looking at what makes the craze successful that year. Two of my favorite craze categories to pick apart are: Pocket money driven collectibles with expandable lines, and tech pets... and one of this years biggest crazes has got me thinking I might make a trip to Toys 'r' Us!

I think Spinmaster's Hatchimals are brilliant, and not just because of the final product, but because I can imagine the design, engineering and testing challenge this one must have been! [...]

What's your favorite toy craze, and why? Is it nostalgic, brilliantly designed, evergreen, innovative, or just plain weird?!! I'd love to know what you love and why."

Alright designers, we know you have some picks—share your favorites for the holiday season below in the comment feed or on the original discussion board.  

The Industrial Revolution and the world's first factories antedated electricity. How is it possible that a machine shop could run, in an age when you couldn't just plug a machine into a socket?

The answer is, miles of leather (or cotton) belts. Factories had their power source, whether it was a steam engine or a waterwheel, rigged up to drive huge rotating shafts called line shafts. These were suspended overhead and festooned with pulleys. Belts ran from these pulleys down to the factories' machines (or to intermediary pulleys driving another belt), where they drove each machine through another pulley. The line shaft was the powerstrip of the day.

Machines could be turned "off" by sliding the belt from a fixed pulley onto a loose pulley next to it. By cutting power to the machine, you could then switch the belt onto pulleys of different diameters on the machine, which changed the machine's speed of rotation. In the lower right of both photos below, you can see machines that have pulleys of multiple diameters stacked up against each other.

Sometimes you had machines that needed to rotate in the opposite direction of the line shaft. There was a simple trick to this: You simply twisted the belt a half turn, making it into a figure eight. You can see one such twisted belt on the right side of the photo below.

Wondering what it all sounded like? Here's footage of a line-shaft-driven machine shop in Elnora, Indiana:

Fun to watch, but probably not so fun to work within. According to Louis C. Hunter and Lynwood Bryant's "A History of Industrial Power in the U.S., 1780-1930: Vol 3: The Transmission of Power," the line shaft system had plenty of downsides: The layout of machines was dependent on the location of the line shaft rather than efficiency; the systems were noisy, dangerous and dirty; they required frequent lubrication, meaning oil was constantly dripping onto everything.

Then there was the air quality, with the belts constantly shedding and circulating dust—right next to the worker using the machine. When factories finally switched over to electric in the 20th Century, manufacturers not only saw a productivity boost—they also noted "significantly less employee sick time."

I'm a hand tool nut, but I don't begrudge anybody from using and loving power tools. However, what happened to "Necessity is the mother of invention?" So many of the time-saving wonder tools that exist today seem to have killed some fundamental abilities. There is nothing wrong with using a power jointer and planer to mill a rough sawn board, but what happens when the board is too wide, or the planer breaks down? Do you stop working? Maybe if you're not pressed to deliver on a deadline, but eventually the job has to get done.

Hand tools offer an alternative to sitting on the couch when the power goes out or the tool capacity can't handle your lumber. When faced with a difficult joinery problem that perhaps involved stopped cuts and compound angles, the humble chisel will succeed where fancy power tools fumble. So use your router all day long, but when it can't handle a task, don't give up! Fall back on your hand skills.

On this topic, I have to relay a story from this past weekend:

My neighbor is a foreman for a general contractor. He has lots of shiny power tools and jobsite gizmos to make jobs go faster. He puts up siding, crown moulding, and sheetrock. So our ideas of precision are very different. This weekend found him in his driveway making a bean bag toss game (I believe many of you call this "Cornhole" but as a child of the Beavis and Butthead generation, I am hesitant to call it that).

He was nailing the face board to the frame with a cordless framing nailer. One of those battery powered thingies that screams to be used to shoot cans off a fence when the foreman isn't looking. Suddenly, he ran out of nails with more than half the job remaining. He yelled to his son to bring him more nails and discovered that there were no nails to be found.

He called across the street to me since my shop door was open and asked me if I had any nails. I replied that I only had your typical hardware store wire nails and a hammer. He laughed and said "I don't think so!" and went back to rummaging through his tools to find the special nails for his gun. He further refused my offers to help with the apparently esoteric hammer and nail approach, so I went back to work.

Two hours later!!! His wife came outside and said that their guests would be arriving soon for their BBQ and was the bean bag game done yet.

"No, I ran out of nails, I guess we will have to skip the game" he said, then began to pack up his tools and headed into the house.

Have we become so dependent on our power tools that the job has to stop when they inevitably fail? My only hope is that were he on a job site and more was on the line that the necessity would have forced him to try the hammer and nails approach.

Perhaps a nice EMP event is needed so we can regain our workmanship roots? Maybe just for a few weeks to remind us that work is still possible without pneumatic- and electrical-powered brute force.

How would you tackle the following design problem? Here's the desired user experience that the client, a convenience store chain, wants its customers to have:

1. Customers walk the aisles, physically selecting items for purchase.

2a. They check out via machine.

2b. They check out without physically handling the goods.

3. Their goods are automatically bagged for them by a machine.

Goals 1 and 2a are easy and already solved, but how would you handle 2b and 3? How are the items scanned in place, without the customer handling them? And how do you then manipulate those items into a bag? Look at how Panasonic handled the problem with the design of their Regirobo system:

For goal 2b, an unimaginative designer might focus on the checkout kiosk/area and think, if the consumer oughtn't handle the goods, well, let's get a robot picker arm in there. It can pick the goods up and present them to the scanner, then place them into a bag one by one.

That approach presents obvious problems. Panasonic's designers instead backed up to the shopping basket itself, rigging it up to scan items as they are placed within it. Then adding that removable bottom and that entire bagging system.

It's Byzantine, overly complicated…and totally cool. Pretty much what we've come to expect from a subset of industrial designers in that part of the world. 

Amazon Go, the ball is in your court.

The Director of Digital Design will oversee the FX Networks visual branding across all digital platforms and will lead design strategy for visual, user experience and interaction design as it applies to all digital marketing tactics and initiatives. The FX brand continues to expand through content distribution

I get what they're trying to do here--and I don't like it one bit. Take a look at this "Gatebox Virtual Home Robot" out of Japan:

The character's name is Azuma Hikari (her "personality profile" is here) and even after accounting for cultural differences, I find her downright disturbing. While the target market--young salarymen whose brutal hours provide little opportunity for dating--exists, it seems perverse to attempt to fill life voids with a doting digital doll.

What's even crazier is that Gatebox already has a competitor: A company called Vivoka, which has created a similar holographic assistant, this one a talking raccoon "home butler":

It is interesting that both companies are attempting to deepen users' connections with digital assistants by providing them with visual forms, both taken from cartoon tropes relevant to each culture. If I had to pick one of the two I'd go with Zac, as he's presented as an animal assistant absent any bizarre psychosexual connotations.

The differences in form factors between the two objects is interesting. Azuma appears to be trapped in a coffeemaker designed by Tron during his internship at Braun:

Meanwhile, Zac resides in a slanted rectangle with an awning.

Although as we saw in the video, Zac can make the jump into your phone or device, whereas it appears Azuma cannot, at least for now.

If these take off, it will be interesting--and a little creepy--to see the universe of characters that the two companies, or perhaps independent developers, will start cranking out. I think I'll go for a Liger with a Scottish accent.

There are several devices on the market that will let you charge your cell phone independent of a power socket. But this one is significantly different: Inventor Michael Vaga has created HandEnergy, an apple-sized device that lets you charge your phone using nothing more than your own personal energy.

To be clear, while he states in the video that HandEnergy charges your device at the same speed as when it's plugged into the wall, that assumes that you've fully charged HandEnergy beforehand. The FAQ on the Kickstarter campaign page says that takes 40-60 minutes of wrist-twirling action first.

That hasn't deterred backers, who have pledged $63,756 on a $52,559 target. At press time there was still a week to pledge, with prices starting at €79 (about USD $84).