For crowdfunding projects on Kickstarter filling clear gaps in the market, it seems true that it can only take a matter of days before a project is fully funded. With this in mind, Kickstarter has proposed a challenge: for the month of March, they will be conducting an initiative to see just how long it takes for projects to get funded. And for taking part, they'll try to help you along the way. 

Last week, Kickstarter announced their All in 1 initiative, which asks those hoping to fund a project to seek funding on their site with only one week to do it. 

Throughout the month, Kickstarter will support these promotions with extra zeal on their editorial and social channels to ensure your campaign runs as smoothly and successfully as possible (all you have to do is launch and notify them at allin1@kickstarter.com). They also suggest running your project in line with these proposed themes:

1s and 0s— Go binary: offer digital rewards only.

1-Hit Wonder— Offer a single reward tier.

1 Night Only— Create a one-time event or experience.

1st-Time Creators— Never run a project before? Now's the time.

There's no telling how this experiment will go—some projects will succeed while others are sure to flop. However, it will certainly be an interesting study in just how long it takes for projects to pick up steam; also what kinds of crowdfunding campaigns find backers in the shortest amount of time. If you feel you're one of the projects that's sure to reach the stars, it may be worth taking up the challenge and getting some serious help from Kickstarter on your week-long journey. 

Still looking for more info? Read in full detail at Kickstarter to learn more about the initiative—who knows, by participating you may be able to rack up thousands of dollars to support your dream within just 7 days!

Sunlight is a precious commodity for office-dwellers, but it's also a double-edged sword. That warming, Vitamin-D-providing light makes you feel alive and illuminates your desk, and yet we have to block it off to prevent blinding monitor glare.

3M has invented a clever way around this. Their Daylight Redirecting Film can be applied to any window and redirects the light upwards, bouncing it off of your ceiling rather than letting it beam directly into your eyes:

The company reckons it can redirect natural light for a distance of 40 feet or more into the building" and confers a lighting energy savings of up to 52%. If you're an architect or interior designer looking to spec this stuff out for a project, you can search for dealers by zip code here.

Via Architect Magazine

A new page is turning in the thickening book on 3D printed architecture. This time our idealistic concrete fabricators are from Russia's Apis Cor, and their claim to greatness— a residential tiny home printed in 24 hours—debuted this February. 

That land speed doesn't pose a great challenge to Chinese builders' efforts, where up to 10 houses can be constructed in a day and repurpose industrial waste, but the final product is certainly interesting to look at. With a circular and semi-open 38 square meter floor plan, the homes offer an intriguing alternative to cramped studio apartments. 

The homes are printed on site using a bio-polymer cement, and the company claims they can withstand a great deal of weather and geologic abuse. While the long-term value of their design and tech will have to be seen, the single room house feels like a gentle update to many of the idealistic bubble homes and expanded concrete architecture from the 1950s-'70s.

The mini homes can't exactly address the land scarcity driving up living costs in urban areas of the United States, but the printing tech appears to be picking up speed. If they live up to their touted efficiency, they might make way for a new era of moderately sized concrete innovation.

Electronic and Digital Art Lab Manager California College of the Arts SUMMARY: Do you have a passion for technology? For learning? For building a community of Makers? If so the Hybrid Lab may be the perfect place for you! The Hybrid Lab at California College

In the U.S. we have a local workforce of 700,000 people that work for less than a dollar an hour. They make eyeglasses, mattresses, clothing, they man call centers, they do farm work and mine. They are federal prison inmates, and they can be legally hired out for labor by private companies. But the emphasis appears to be on cheap labor rather than vocational training; according to an article in Mother Jones, in 2015 "federal inmates helped bring in nearly $472 million in net sales—but only 5 percent of that revenue went to pay inmates."

In the UK, an open-minded company is employing prison labor in a more conscientious way. Manchester-based Osco Homes, which builds affordable housing, is running a pilot program whereby they sifted through prisoners in their final year of incarceration, selected 10 and trained them to build components for pre-fabricated homes. They also trained them in plaster work, joinery and kitchen and bath installation—all valuable, marketable skills.

They are paid for their labor "over and above what they would usually receive from the prison," according to Construction Manager Magazine, though the actual amount is not revealed. The money is given to them upon release. So is a job: Once they're released they're offered full-time jobs at Osco with a starting salary of £19,000 (about USD $23,250).

"It's not just about building homes, but providing training and opportunities to guys who may have taken a wrong turn in life but are keen to change. With the factory we're providing this two-fold service," [says Mike Brogan, chief executive of Osco parent company Procure Plus.]

"All the guys who have been released are now working on site and improving their skills as well as earning a regular wage. You can see the pride they take in the work and the chances of re-offending for any of them is minimal," says Brogan.

"It's been estimated that the cost of each person not going back to prison saves the government around £17,000 a year, but actually I'd put that figure much higher, which is another reason why this scheme is so important," Brogan adds.

Thus far four of the 10 inmates has been released and are now working at Osco, completing the project (building bungalows for a site in West Yorkshire, photo above) that they started on the inside. "We learned an awful lot in the factory," says one of the four. "We learned how to put the frames together for the houses, rendering the walls, putting the door and window frames in. It was quite intense but probably what we needed.

"I'm on a salary, have a full-time job and hopefully it'll be a job for life really. I want to be promoted through the company, go from say a site operative to a site manager and I think there's plenty of opportunity, it's just all up to me."

You can read more about the program here.

See Also:

Microapartments Designed by Italian Prisoners

Below is a preview of the stories from MOLD Magazine, Issue 01 on Designing the Human Microbiome, and some inspiration from the online platform to whet your appetite for future issues. The crowdfunding campaign is live. Help support the first magazine about design and the future of food.

IKEA x IDEO's Kitchen of the Future

When the biggest design retailer in the world throws its weight behind rethinking the kitchen, the concepts that emerge are always interesting. The prototype for the Concept Kitchen 2025 touched on four main themes: storage, waste, water and cooking. The overall vision felt like a cohesive imagining of the near future where daily drone delivery of groceries, grey water management and municipal fees for disposal of waste are the norm.

Slow Tools for Small Scale Farmers

As with most challenges, having the right tool for the job can be the critical difference between failure and success. With the rise of industrial agriculture in the United States in the '60s, the market for new technologies and tools for small scale producers all but disappeared. Now that is about to change. A group of farmers, engineers and manufacturers have been actively developing, advocating for and distributing Slow Tools—appropriately scaled, lightweight, affordable and open-source tools for small scale farmers.

New agriculture systems will be the focus of MOLD Magazine Issue 05.

Toilet Technology

Inside a non-descript building an hour outside of Tokyo, employees of the world's largest toilet manufacturer strap into an empathy suit. This exoskeleton, constructed of engineered medical braces which add weight to joints and constrict one's range of motion, mimics the physical struggles of elderly consumers. Frosted glass lenses are donned to simulate vision impairment in an elaborate exercise for design research. Established in 2002, TOTO's Universal Design Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology (UD Center), is a monument to decades of research-driven product development and the only facility of its kind. Here, the future of our most intimate products is being written and MOLD gets an exclusive interview with TOTO's design team for Issue 01.

Farming Insects in Your Kitchen

The reality is that we will all need to eat more varied sources of protein in the near future. Whether you're into beans or bugs, designers will be critical in the effort to transform new typologies for food into desirable products for consumption. Enter Livin Studio. The Hong Kong-based industrial design practice launched the first countertop farm for mealworms last year to much acclaim. Their work is a strong example as to how designers, with their human-centered approach, can create elegant, useful and seamless products for the future of food.

New agriculture systems will be the focus of MOLD Magazine Issue 05. 

A Car Powered by a Cow Stomach

Imagine a car that runs on methane. Inspired by the multiple stomachs of cows, YiWen Tseng considered the myriad possibilities for a future where bio-printed organs and biomimicry collide. Globally, industrial cattle farming contributes more towards global warming than all cars combined. 

The shape of each of the stomachs is designed to strengthen its original bio-function and replace the function of muscles in the original cow. Tseng designed the "Digestive Car" to create a self-sufficient, alternative fuel that captures biowaste and reuses it to help "green the world." 

The Digestive Car is featured in MOLD Magazine, Issue 01. 

Back the campaign that will help make MOLD Magazine a reality—learn more about MOLD and how you can support their launch on their Kickstarter page. 

PAIS was created by Brigitta Nemeth for Blaha officeand is designed to set your own space and to have an impact on your surroundings.

To design for the real world requires questioning assumptions. Take flatscreen TVs and how people integrate them into their homes, for instance: In our movie-driven notion of what a modern home looks like, flatscreens are things that live on walls. You could be forgiven for thinking it's only you that hasn't gotten around to mounting yours. But when the design team at Sonos conducted consumer research and conferred with global TV manufacturers, they found that nearly 70% of flatscreen owners did not wall-mount them, but had them sitting atop a piece of furniture.

The Sonos team used this research to inform the design of a new product, a powerful home theater speaker intended to be so good that it would also be used to play music when the TV was off. They had already conquered this space with their well-reviewed PLAYBAR, a wall-mounted speaker that fits the bill for the 30% of folks with wall-mounted flatscreens:

But the research indicated that there were more than twice as many consumers who needed a speaker that complemented a furniture-dwelling flatscreen, and the designers had to figure out where it would live.

What they came up with is the PLAYBASE, which they unveiled just this morning:

You might be thinking, "I don't get it. Where's the speaker?" It's right there, hidden in plain sight. Yes, that slim thing underneath the TV.

Standing just 58mm (2.3 inches) tall, the PLAYBASE nevertheless contains acoustic architecture supporting a ten-driver speaker system (a woofer, six midrange and three tweeters). Despite the delicate innards it will support 75 pounds, "which covers just about any TV that comes with a stand," the company says.

Speaking of what the company says, we had a chance to ask Tad Toulis, Sonos' VP of Design, a few questions about the project:

Core 77: How did you discover the 70%-not-wall-mounted figure?

Tad Toulis: From a few different sources, including insights from global TV manufacturers we worked with as well as our own consumer research conducted with movie and music lovers around the world.

What made you settle on the under-TV base form factor?

What's most interesting about PLAYBASE is that we didn't set out to create an under-TV soundbase. We identified a design problem that exists within the majority of homes around the world and were inspired by the opportunity to provide great sound – both for TV and music.

What are some of the challenges of designing a sophisticated electronic device that needs to bear the physical weight of another sophisticated electronic device?

We knew it needed to be incredibly durable to give customers confidence their TV wasn't going to break or topple over but thin enough to essentially disappear within a room.

Prototypes

The design team resisted the obvious for a while. We were anxious about being "under" something — it's hard to make a statement as a "doormat." But as we got deep in the problem, the problem started to tell us, "You just need to make it the best damned plinth in the world."

Prototypes

When we embraced that, we could get on with the business of being thin and being understated, all of which pushed hard on acoustics and manufacturing.

Prototypes

The other variable here is we wanted to impact the viewing experience with the nominal height so the viewing angle didn't change much for our customers.

We imagine that during the design process, you went through multiple form factors before settling on the final one. How did you know it was "right?"

Sonos products are meant to live together within the home, all while blending seamlessly into their surroundings and PLAYBASE is no different. This meant a seamless, monolithic design that appeared as though the speaker was cut from granite. It was deliberately constructed within a 2.3 inch height constraint to remain visually unobtrusive within your TV space.

We knew we got it right when we arrived at the right tension of "this is as thin as we can go" and still blow minds on sound expectations.

Approximately how many people in total worked on the project, and how long was it in the making?"

PLAYBASE is the result of years of collaborative work between all teams at Sonos. Really, it's an entire company effort. Without the culture here, PLAYBASE wouldn't be possible.

________

On that latter note, take a look at the significant design and engineering challenges the PLAYBASE's development team had to tackle and see why, in Sonos Industrial Design Manager Youjin Nam's words, "Making a simple thing is never simple:"

The PLAYBASE rolls out this April, and you can learn more about it here.

As part of her work at Lund University's School of Industrial Design, Anna Gudmundsdottir got chummier than usual with the factories nearby. While developing her Beyond Local line of minimal home goods, she worked backwards through the standard ideation process. Beginning with consultations with multiple producers she took their manufacturing limitations and scare stories to heart first, before even hitting the drawing board. 

In partnership with seven local factories, including a tube bending facility, brush makers, and rubber producers, she dialed in a set of tight material and form limitations that set the aesthetic basis for her work. Throughout the final products, you'll see familiar tubing sizes and traditional brushes, tweaked gently towards haptic enjoyment and paired with unexpected materials. 

There's a toilet brush featuring an easily produced bell shaped holder, with anti-slip rubber base. And a dust pan and brush set with oversized but inviting handles. There are silly but fun rubber wall hooks and toilet paper holders. All in all, it's a cleanup job of taking production constraints to heart.

Deadlines are creeping up here for the Core77 Design Awards, and so is the end of our jury captain interview series! We wanted to familiarize you with some of the captains so you knew more about the amazing team responsible for picking our design award winners (you can catch up with some of the other jury captains via parts 1, 2 and 3 of this series). Now we're ready to introduce you to our final installment of interview for three other categories, while also reminding you that the Regular Deadline and a chance to save some money on your awards submission is only a day away! 

Continue reading to learn more about our Open Design, Design for Impact and Interaction Design judges. They're excited and ready to see your work so don't wait too long—enter by tomorrow, March 8th to avoid late fees!

Dan Chen, 2017 Open Design

Senior Interaction Designer, Johnson & Johnson

Dan Chen is an interaction designer and improvisational engineer. He has several degrees including a MAS from MIT, an MFA in digital media from RISD and a BFA in communication design from UConn. He has over 7 years of design experience and now works at Johnson & Johnson as Senior Interaction Designer. Working in the realms of robotics, communication design, interaction design and product design, Dan explores the new ways of communication and human experience through working prototypes and storytelling, inviting a reflective evaluation and implication.

What do you think have been the most significant changes/developments in Open Design/DIY in the past few years?

# Open Access Information, standard parts, codes and tools are more accessible in recent years for the designers. Places such as Instructables and GitHub are allowing users to share and collaborate. Places such as McMaster-Carr, Adafruit, Sparkfun, Pololu and Amazon are providing standard parts for the designer, allowing for a standard reference and access to the same parts. Codes and boards for the Micro controllers are also made accessible, their libraries and schematics are often open source. This allows the designer spend more time designing, less time coding and sourcing parts.

In computation, networking and machine learning space, services such as amazon's web service are more accessible then ever. Companies are developing platforms with APIs for people to hook up to their own project, utilizing one open design on top of another without having to start from scratch. 

Open design also enables biohacking, utilizing open hardware and software, the designer no longer need the traditional expensive equipment.

# Cheaper & better tools & parts Tools are more accessible in terms of price and availability, for individual and small workshop communities. The cost has gone down for electronic parts as well, for sensors and micro controllers. They are not only cheaper but also precise and reliable. Think about the $1K Camera vs a $30K camera today, in terms of image quality and price, you only get incremental quality improvement as price go up. This is the same with the 3D printers, a $4k 3D printer today can produce parts in similar quality compare to a $300K 3D printer.

# Factory for makers Facilities such as PCB house, injection molding factories are realizing there is a big market for startup companies and DIY makers. They know that the manufacturing market needs to innovate and they are trying to find ways to work with the makers. 

Factories are starting to offer PCB or injection molding services to the makers or small startup companies. They also provide tools and advise to validate their design. You no longer have to be a big company to work with the factory to produce your product.

In some parts of the world, cities such as Shenzhen, the government sees the value of DIY maker movement, trying to facilitate the movement. For them, it's a way of transforming from manufacturing to a hub for innovations.

What do you think is the greatest misunderstanding about Open Design and DIY?

Some people think 3D printers are the only way to do open design, but it's just one of the tool for open design. For some, open design might be viewed as unreliable and complicated to follow. That is why as a good open design designer, we need to consider our users, creating clear instructions and documentations that are easy to understand, replicate and spark interest. In terms of the unreliability, it can only be improved overtime, with more testing, user feedbacks and contributions. The users needs to have patients as well, help one another.

For some, open design carries ethical and safety issues, things such as 3D printed gun or bio safety concerns. Like any technologies, they can be used for evil. I feel confident that most designers, makers are aware of what they put out and considered it's implication.

Protecting Intellectual properties are often viewed as a way of staying competitive, however in today's world IP often restricts innovation, only for the people who can pay for it. I think a right mixture of IP and open design could enable rapid growth of ideas, vetting, improvements and innovations, keeps each other more competitive.  

Where do you see Open Design having the biggest impact in the future?

I see open design as accessible in standard parts, tools, documentations and sets of principles that allows for modification and alteration. It should allow for improvisational making and prototyping during the design process. Better and cheaper tools and parts will enable that even further in the future.

I think the future of Open Design will change the way we learn, teach, make, collaborate, prototype, manufacture and innovate. Open design has a low point of entry, without needing a deep understanding of everything, user can create projects using libraries and standard parts, it creates small moments of success for them, making them wanting to learn more, find out more, use it more and modifying it more. Like repositories, people can "branch" out, make a new version or something totally different. I see it as the new education and innovation platform. This is a way of learning how to learn.

This will also improve people's lives in developing countries, allow them to make tools cheaply and effectually. 

What serves as your greatest source of inspiration these days?

Anything improvisational. From improvisational comedy to improvisational making, design and engineering. It's inspiring to me to see people who can use materials in front of them, and think on their feet and quickly come up with ideas that are fresh, risky and coherent to the source material.

Joe Speicher, 2017 Social Impact

Executive Director, AutoDesk Foundation

Joe Speicher is the Executive Director of the Autodesk Foundation. Under his leadership, the Foundation supports the people and organizations designing and engineering high-impact solutions to the world's most pressing social and environmental challenges. Prior to joining Autodesk, Speicher was on the founding team of Living Goods, where he spent six years leading operations for the global health organization.

Our interview with Joe Speicher on Core Talk—

For our last installment of the jury captain-focused chapter of "Core Talk", Joe Speicher discusses how new advents in technology are changing the social impact design space and what he recommends to organizations and groups looking to get funding for their social impact design project. 

Listen to more interviews from the series on our Soundcloud

Eric Grant, 2017 Interaction

Creative Director, SapientRazorfish

As Creative Director for the SapientRazorfish Emerging Experiences group, Eric manages and inspires global teams that create groundbreaking, interactive experiences that live on screens, in physical spaces and among virtual worlds. Working with clients like Mercedes-Benz, Adobe, and T-Mobile, Eric's work focuses on compelling storytelling moments that create memorable and dynamic experiences.

Tell us a little bit about your background and how you got into the realm of interaction design?

The path to where I am today was an odd and rather unconventional one. I went to school for political science, worked in politics and actually ran for the Wisconsin State Assembly at the age of 22. I lost (thankfully) but along the way discovered a passion and a talent: print design. In college, I was involved in a number of student organizations and campaigns and began to try my hand at designing fliers, newsletters, logos and posters on my Mac LC. My first job out of college was a policy analyst, but after a few years came across a position for a "graphic artist" with the state legislature, applied and got it. It's there when the Internet sprang to life and when I got my first taste of interaction design. One of the first projects I ran was designing—and building—one of the first websites for the State of Wisconsin. Still an avid print designer, I designed all the pages in Quark, cut apart the images in Photoshop and built the entire site in Adobe PageMill.

As technology evolved, the mediums I designed in changed. I went from print and branding, to web, mobile, retail and large scale installations to where I am today: designing for a multitude of mixed reality and connected experiences. I like to say "the medium doesn't matter" in design because if your thinking is grounded in solid design principles, you can design for anything.

An Interaction designers job is often—and correct me if i'm wrong—to synthesize a large amount of information in a way that feels accessible and friendly. To you, what are some of the easiest ways to keep this in mind in the midst of a design project?

The first step is to make sure everyone involved—client and design team—is aligned on the goals of the project. Ask questions; don't assume. But...
Fail often but fail early. Designers need to feel empowered to take risks, even if those risks result in failure. Design is fun and it's messy and not perfect. It's an extension of who we are and should encapsulate who we are as designers. Nobody and nothing is perfect.

All this said, when I joined Hot Studio in San Francisco, one of my first projects was leading the redesign of BART.gov, the region's main transportation system. We had a fantastic team who did a lot of research and forged a great collaborative partnership with BART. And as a result of one of our visual design workshops (to align on the look and feel), we had our marching orders with how the new site should look. We presented four concepts: three of which were variations of the look they wanted, and one that was completely the opposite of what they desired. I took a risk by going with my gut on how it should look... and it was the option they chose.
Research, question and go with your gut.

You work in a very fast-moving and evolving field—what are a couple trends or phenomena that are starting to come into fashion that you think will be big in the future? To note a few examples, things like Flat design, etc.

Natural user interfaces (NUI): how users interact with experiences is going to evolve in a huge way in the next decade. Over the past three decades we've moved from command-line interfaces (CLI) to graphical user interfaces (GUI)—which were enabled by the mouse—to NUI and we're starting to see the first real-world applications of them in virtual and augmented reality experiences.
When we start to augment or change the world around us with interactive experiences, we're going to need to tie the user experience back to natural human behaviors. This will require designers to not only think about how interfaces look, but how they interact with our environments. We're no longer just dealing with a monitor or a cell phone; we're dealing with physical spaces, lighting, sounds and other human beings. 

"Microinteractions" is a fairly new term relevant to interaction design—what are your thoughts on this? What are good examples to you of microinteractions and how do you make something like this truly memorable and enjoyable?

Each moment of my day is a microinteraction. I shower and move on. I brush my teeth and move on. I indulge and eat a bag of Doritos and move on. Microinteractions are completely natural and are what make successful interactive moments successful. It's why Snapchat is now worth $28 billion and why Facebook is used by nearly 2 billion people. 

People are busy, juggling lots of things and quick wins in interaction design is key. For businesses, it's understanding what people really want. One of the best examples for this is the Starbucks app which solves a basic problem consumers have: waiting in line. Now you can walk out of your office, order your latte and have it waiting for you at the counter. No lines required. For designers, the problem to solve is how to make these experiences quick, easy and delightful. 

It seems like in the world of UX, there are a number of different elements to consider to make an experience pleasurable; obviously visuals but there's also sound, color, etc. I imagine all of these concentrations require people with different skill sets and titles so I'm wondering: what are some of the weirdest job titles you've seen at your firm or elsewhere?

I would say it's interesting, not weird, that SapientRazorfish now has a Harvard physicist as its director of data science. It's interesting because now designers will be creating experiences crafted with knowledge from deep learning algorithms, allowing us to anticipate the needs and desires of consumers... sometimes before they do. Welcome to the connected world.

You have one day left to submit your project under the Core77 Design Awards Regular Deadline—so save yourself some money and submit your project now!

It's not often that I feel guilty after watching a manufacturing video, but this one did it to me.

I go through a pair of sneakers in under a year, and after seeing the absurd amount of labor, processes, machines, energy and materials that go into each, I can't believe that a) they wear out within eight months and b) they don't cost me $2,000 per pair. Watch how your average run-of-the-mill running kicks are made:

Good gosh. Fabric, leather, plastic, resin, rubber, foam, reflective material, adhesives; CNC sewing machines, manual sewing machines, hydraulic presses, stamps, glue-spraying nozzles, embroidery machines, heating machines, and all that handwork. And I will break them at the seams or wear the soles out in less than 250 days by doing nothing more strenuous than daily walking. I think I ought to start searching for a more sustainable form of footwear, or find a way to comprehensively recycle them.

Seaside Casual is a leader in the design and manufacture of outdoor furniture, made from recycled, High Density Polyethylene (HDPE). Our extensive collection of Classic, Traditional and Modern designs is sold throughout the US and expanding international markets. Seaside Casual is an award winning manufacturer, recognized for exceptional customer service,

Accessible technology tends to lag behind mass market options, but sometimes it's not about demand, it's about taking a risk. The South Korean design startup DOT has been working hard on making braille-enabled smartwatches a reality for over three years. This month their labor (and awards) finally paid off. 

The DOT smartwatch incorporates mobile braille into a traditional watchface and syncs with smartphones via Bluetooth to provide updates, call notifications, texts, and more. Most watches and devices for the visually impaired lean towards disruptive audio feedback, or a silent tactile face without digital access, like the Haptica or Eone.  

The DOT has been through many iterations and has won some high level praise. As of this month, they'll finally be shipping out to the ready wrists of their thousands of backers. While refining the design, they've been dedicated to the idea of an open platform, allowing developers and users to tailor the digital side for more wrist-friendly use. As-is, the DOT can already give you directions to Starbucks or display what your dumb kids are whining about by text.

The current iteration of the DOT boasts a sleek but conservative face, a protective bezel, a seven-day battery, and a neat magnetic charging base. Their early Apple-inspired versions were attractive, but the final form harnesses an everyday elegance of its own without sacrificing the space needed for clear reading. 

More user interviews, specs, and preorder on the DOT site.

Take some time today to enjoy our archive of the Designing Women Series, Core77's look at the achievements of lesser-known and under-appreciated female design pioneers.

The Belkin Charge Dock for iPhone and Apple Watch makes it easy to charge both your iOS devices simultaneously—using just one cable. The dock features an integrated magnetic charger for the Apple Watch and an integrated Lightning connector for the iPhone in one compact, minimalist design.

Jim Cardon runs a custom woodworking firm in Denver, and I think he wins the Brother of the Century award. When Jim's brother Doug wanted a library added onto his home in Arizona, Jim obliged and pulled out all of the stops. Take a look at this masterpiece of a room:

In Jim's words:

Getting Started

[This is a] custom built library that began February of 2007 that I built for my brother in Mesa, Arizona. This project took 2,700 hours to complete. This library has over 10,000 pieces of walnut.

The book shelves can hold over 2,500 books. The library was built as an addition to the house with a bathroom. The library room is 17 x 27 feet.

Project Inspiration

The height of the room is 12 feet. For inspiration I looked at anything I could get my hands on; woodworking magazines, photographs, art, pictures in books, and even movies that included fine woodworking projects and furnishings. There is a beautiful library in the movie, The Illusionist. The library in that movie gave me the inspiration to get started on this huge project that I was about to take on.

Custom Library Base Cabinet

Once the rough-in carpentry work and plumbing, electrical, windows, fireproofing foam, insulation and drywall was complete, I was able to build and install what I call "The mother of all base cabinets." This cabinet for the library has 23 drawers that hold 3x5 index cards, used for reference notes but not a book index.

Below you have 4 file cabinet drawers below and on the two wings you have glass doors. The top of the cabinet I added a shadowbox cabinet with a glass top to display smaller treasures or items. The challenge with this piece, along with everything else, was to have it look different and yet blend with the rest of the room.

We finally nailed down the design for the longest wall. Most of the features were planned out in terms of proportions and sizes. We also had to consider the accent lighting and the moldings and about a hundred other things. The challenge of it all was trying to figure out how to blend all of these elements together with the rest of the room.

Work Center Completes The Library

The last cabinet I built for the library was an elaborate upper desk section. It included some significant detail. I actually built this piece in my home in Denver and put it into a crate and drove it to Arizona. So it was one of those unveilings where we opened up the crate in the room and my brother saw it for the first time. I remember I was very nervous because I had built it quite different than what we had talked about the year before. I remember when I pulled the packing blankets off and saw it, my nerves became calm because I thought, "Wow this is beautiful. If he doesn't want it I'll take it back home."

Here are some of the things my brother was wanting in this piece. a space for his computer screen, a place for some of his files to lay flat, some drawers to hold pencils and so forth, and some shelving for books.

We had talked about for the detailing of this cabinet, some ideas that we saw in some of the woodwork in the LDS Kirtland Temple, in Ohio. This was done based on a 1806 or 1830 printing of Asher Benjamin's pattern book illustrations. So this was my interpretation of some of the things I saw. The keystone, the dentil molding, and the interwoven circles.

Another very cool thing about this desk is that the table slides in and out completely. You can adjust if you need more desktop or you can slide it out to the center of the room if you want.

Despite the high level of his work, Cardon remains pretty humble. "I work out of our garage and take on whatever projects seem to come up," he writes. "We have a relatively small circle of contacts and I would still like to build something off the charts, mind altering. If anyone reads this and the stars of the universe align, and you need to make your dream happen, and you are looking for someone to do a mind altering woodworking project for you, that would be me!"

You can see more of Cardon's work, and/or contact him, here.

After seeing a show the other night, my wife and I walked down Madison Avenue. This strip of New York City has some of the more rarefied shopping in the world. While the stores were all closed, the windows were lit, and a theory that has been banging around my head for several years passed another test. It has to do with those of you who design, build and sell furniture.

Lower Madison Avenue is mostly multinational flagship stores. But upper Madison Avenue, where there are more wealthy people living  than there are tourists, is loaded with small boutiques with tiny or unique brand names. With the exception of Ralph Lauren on 72nd Street, most of the stores on upper Madison Avenue aren't household names—and wouldn't want to be.

That's because every consumer, in all markets, wants to be treated special and these stores all thrive on selling expensive exclusivity. These stores are small, and if they expanded too much or didn't constantly ensure that their store and merchandise was unique, they would vanish from Madison Avenue. Many do and then new stores take their place.

A furniture maker is in exactly the same situation as these stores. Let's take the example of a bespoke table that you'd make for a client. Let's say it takes you a week to build, and that being a trained craftsman you want $1,000 for your effort, plus materials cost. This of course doesn't take into account marketing costs, the time you spent in outreach, and the time you spent with the client finalizing the design. But let's say $1000 for now anyway.

$1,000 for a dining table isn't a lot for all your effort, and typically dining tables are several thousand and up. But it doesn't matter; the number of people in this country who can spend $1,000 on any bespoke piece of furniture is pretty small. The very cost of bespoke furniture limits your customer base.

The stores on Madison Avenue spend a lot of time and money to make sure that they have unique exclusive merchandise. That there are so many stores on Madison Avenue that are small and not well known, shows how important exclusivity is for selling to people can afford something special.

For the single craftsperson there has always been a compelling story of a personal relationship with a customer, with the very fact of limited production being appealing. There is also the compelling appeal of a customer "discovering" a new maker, like "I found a little shop in Bushwick that's hard to get to and nobody has heard of...." You can deliver the exclusive product that customers want. The trick has been getting the word out to potential customers without the advantages of being located on a ritzy street right down the block from where the ideal customers live.

But with the arrival of the internet, everything has changed. New methods of communication between maker and customer now exist, with increasing numbers of news and promotion opportunities outside the mainstream media, all with a desperate need for new stories. You don't need a fancy store on a fancy block to reach customers (even if that experience is quite enjoyable.) You can reach customers in a whole bunch of ways that the previous generation of designer/builders could not. There are ways to get good work out there; the trick is finding those ways, nurturing customers, and getting paid enough.

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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.

2016 undoubtedly marks a moment in the modern era when the global population was not only blatantly confronted with a number of troubling problems, but also stimulated by a heightened sense of direct responsibility for what the future holds. "This is the age of rebellion," social justice activist Van Jones noted to MIT Media Lab, and as such, it's also time to reform the way we look at right and wrong. This is why yesterday MIT Media Lab announced the search for the recipient of their very first Disobedience Award. The press release for the award states,

"This idea came after a realization that there's a widespread frustration from people trying to figure out how can we effectively harness responsible, ethical disobedience aimed at challenging our norms, rules, or laws to benefit society...The award will go to a person or group engaged in what we believe is extraordinary disobedience for the benefit of society. Specifically, we'd like to call out action that seeks to change society in positive ways and is consistent with a set of key principles. These principles include non-violence, creativity, courage, and taking responsibility for one's actions. We're seeking both expected and unexpected nominees. This could include–but isn't limited to–those engaged in scientific research, civil rights, freedom of speech, human rights, and the freedom to innovate."

Looking back at visionaries like Harriet Tubman or Nelson Mandela, the idea of disobedience is nothing new. However, with the introduction of this new award, MIT Media Lab hopes to complicate the idea that disobedience should always be cast in a nefarious light. In the promotional video, Harvard public policy senior lecturer Marshall Ganz notes that disobedience is "sort of like being confronted with a disruption—it can be construed as either a threat or a challenge. And if it's construed as a threat, that's where the fear comes in; if it's construed as a challenge, that's where the engagement comes in. If hope is what's driving it, it tends to be more open, more inclusive".

For the next three months, MIT Media Lab will be accepting nomination for potential recipients of an incredible $250,000 cash prize award. The winner will be announced live on Friday, July 21.

Read more about the award at MIT Media Lab's website.

Those of you with kids, or with a foot in the toy design world, are probably familiar with Magformers. If you're not, scan through the vid below to see some examples of this modular educational building toy in action:

The brilliance of the Magformers system is that the magnets always rotate to form attractions, rather than repelling each other. This makes for a satisfying, hassle-free play experience for your child, who can easily join the shapes together.

It's therefore funny to see Matthias Wandel show you how to render the magnets uncooperative, so that "if you've got a kid that's really anal retentive," you can drive them nuts:

Nest is looking for a talented Senior Industrial Designer. We are passionate about reinventing important home products by redefining human interaction and its aesthetic quality with strong attention to detail. At Nest you will collaborate closely with Engineering, Operations and the User Experience group to fulfill the complex demands of