The Senior Digital Designer is a multi-medium designer that will execute a range of graphic assets across many areas of the business including web, motion and experience design. The digital designer will work directly with the digital art director and digital team in our Detroit office to ensure projects meet
View the full design job hereHere's an interesting example of a company evolving new products around a central idea: Bissell got their start in the late 1800s producing carpet sweeping devices. By the 1950s they'd branched out into carpet-cleaning contraptions, and in the 1970s, carpet deep cleaning machines. In the 2000s, vacuums targeting owners of fur-shedding pets. Now they've combined the latter two categories, adapting a carpet-cleaning machine to harmlessly wash dogs.
As an owner of two dogs, I have been through the exact hell depicted in this video for the Bissell Barkbath:
The Barkbath, if it works as advertised, would be worth every penny of the $150 asking price, versus paying professional groomers to do it. Isolating the mess to the inside of a tank you can pour out, and obviating the need to scrub your entire bathroom down every time you wash your dog(s), would be a huge boon.
My only concern is that the unit is essentially a vacuum—which produces the exact type of noise that most canines find distressing. There's no way the more skittish of my dogs would come anywhere near this thing, long hose notwithstanding. My thought was to buy one of these and construct some sort of soundproof box to keep it within. However, while similar hacks exist for pancake air compressors, they are bulky fixes and care must be taken to ventilate them properly. The storage space and set-up required might outweigh the benefits.
What this product is begging for is noise-canceling technology. While that would raise the price drastically, I bet it would still find a ready market.
Adding metal inlay is a nice way to provide visual pop to wooden objects or furniture:
The art of inlay is something that used to take decades to master. Now, with digital fabrication tools--or heck, maybe even a trim router with a downcut bit guided by a steady hand--the cutting part goes a lot quicker. However, that doesn't mean the work can be taken lightly. As Instructables user Ninjosh shows, there's still a fair bit of manual labor and finessing involved:
"Inlays are a great way to set your work apart in a crowded market," writes Ninjosh. If you'd like to give it a try yourself, he's laid out a comprehensive Instructable listing all the tools you'll need and offering plenty of helpful advice, including the all-important, time-saving what-not-to-do's. Check it out here.
For people facing jet lag, Jeggo offers a preventative and treatment strategy: It automatically synchronizes with a 'jet lag plan' to adjust your body clock to the destination time, and it reminds you when to avoid or absorb light through light effects mimicking sunrise and sunset. By tilting the reflective panel or using the remote control, you can also play freely with natural lights and sounds, such as rain, leaves and birds, to ease stress and feel more relaxed.
Jeggo can be used either at home or as a special service in a hotel room. The personal portable controller, covered with felted wool, is soothing to the touch and easy to carry around. You can fiddle with it anytime, anywhere. It is an attempt to alter the experience of a medical device and transform the serious treatment process into an aesthetic pleasure. It also demonstrates how people could interact with lights in different physical and experiential ways.
You may have heard that you can't cut plywood with a hand saw. That's a myth.
Using a panel saw—10 p.p.i, teeth filed crosscut—on this 3/4" Walnut plywood produced not only a perfectly straight and square cut, but no tearing or fraying of the super-thin face veneer either.
Pictured here is the back side of the cut, which usually tears the most as the saw exits the wood. I have gotten much worse quality cuts from my old table saw and even my fancy Festool track saw.
Here is a shot of a crossgrain cut on the face veneer that shows a negligible difference to the cut quality.
I made these cuts with no blue tape on the cut line, no zero clearance support underneath, just a well-tuned saw with a tooth geometry well-suited for the task at hand. (In this case 20° rake, 15° fleam. The relaxed rake eases the saw teeth into and out of the wood, and the fleam creates tiny little knives that slice across the grain making for very clean edges to the kerf.) However I urge you not to focus on this as the exact formula for a plywood saw but experiment for yourself. I'm sure even better results could be had if I wanted to create a plywood saw, but I would rather keep this little guy more of a fine finish blade than anything more specific.
If you're unfamiliar with terms like "rake" and "fleam," stay tuned and I'll produce a post explaining saw tooth geometry.
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This "Hand Tool School" series is provided courtesy of Shannon Rogers, a/k/a The Renaissance Woodworker. Rogers is founder of The Hand Tool School, which provides members with an online apprenticeship that teaches them how to use hand tools and to build furniture with traditional methods.
Recip saw blades are typically thrown out when the teeth near the tang become dull—even when the ones near the tip remain sharp and new. The traditional way around this was to make use of the saw's adjustable shoe, which can shift cutting to a fresh set of teeth an inch or so out from the clamp that holds the tang.
But what do you do when your saw does not have an adjustable shoe or the blade is so long the shoe lacks the throw to bring all of the teeth into prime cutting position?
Someone at DeWalt asked that question and came up with the idea for the Breakaway Blade, which is punched through the body in such a way that a worn blade can be broken in two to expose a second tang.
With the second tang in the clamp, a fresh set of teeth can be used for cutting. The design is akin to that of the blade in a snap-blade utility knife.
DeWalt is not the first company to make a recip blade with more than one tang. Lenox makes an abrasive blade with tangs on either end. It works for that blade because with abrasive grit there is no direction of cut. Toothed blades cut on the in-stroke, so it wouldn't work to put a tang on both ends.
Breakaway blades come in 6- and 9-inch lengths and are currently available for cutting metal: steel and copper pipe, conduit, metal studs, and the like. I doubt these will be adapted to wood-cutting applications because the opening through the center will weaken the blade and possibly cause it to kink if it binds. Binding is less of a problem with cutting metal than it is with wood. Also, it's possible to cut wood and drywall without the shoe against the work—making it easier to use more of the teeth. It's harder to do this with metal.
It makes sense DeWalt would be the company to come up with this design. Why? Because most recip saws have adjustable shoes but many of DeWalt's do not. The availability of the Breakaway Blade makes up for the lack of that feature. And the ability to "start new" with a partially worn blade would be of value to those whose saws have adjustable shoes by allowing them to utilize even more teeth than before.
While the experience of driving is better today than it was fifty years ago, flying commercial has become worse. That has given rise to a rather bizarre, nostalgia-driven restaurant in Los Angeles: The Pan Am Experience, where people pay $300 a head to sit in a reconstructed 1970s-era 747 and have a 4.5-hour, six-course meal with caviar and booze.
The experience is meant to evoke the days when flying was a luxury and chances were slim that you'd get your teeth knocked out on the tarmac in Chicago. The stewardesses carve your food up for you in the aisles while you studiously avoid eye contact.
Speaking of stewardesses, judging by the photos, one of their hiring prerequisites is apparently physical attractiveness. As part of the experience they also put on a mid-meal "fashion show" where they walk the aisles in authentic flight attendant wear from different decades.
Copies of magazines from the '70s are on-hand, and there are even prop cigarettes that blow smoke.
What we'd love to see, in another 50 years' time:
- The evening begins with a 2.5-hour security line
- Patrons may be barred from entering the aircraft due to their apparel
- Others are randomly selected for ejection, but can opt to fight against mixed-martial-arts-trained interlopers in an effort to retain their seat
- Oversized pets are loaded into the cargo hold, while passengers take bets on which will and will not live through the experience
- Customers can load cowboy hats or bulky coats into the overhead compartment, to enjoy the experience of inconveniencing paid actors who are loudly told they must check their carry-on because there is no more room
- Customers can suddenly recline their seats in order to shatter a laptop sitting on the tray table behind, producing a satisfying crunching noise
- Customers are encouraged to remove their shoes and socks, and extend their feet into the row ahead of them
- Male customers are encouraged to dispense with aim while using the lavatory
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The Pan Am Experience is booked up until July, and they're eyeing Las Vegas and New York for second and third locations. You can learn more about the company's origins in this AdWeek article.
AERIA Luxury Interiors is the VIP completion division of VT San Antonio Aerospace, Inc., an affiliate of ST Aerospace. We specialize in the design, manufacture, installation & certification of private VIP interiors for Boeing and Airbus aircraft. AERIA's highly personalized, luxury interior environments are found in aircraft owned and operated
View the full design job hereThis article originally appeared on Coroflot, Core77's Design Job site. Visit their blog for more insight on working and recruiting in the creative professions.
Well...that was fun. The first ever Sketch Jam is officially in the books. We weren't sure what to expect, but based on the positive reactions from our judges, competitors and audience, we think it's safe to say it was a success. Sixteen competitors, five judges, and four rounds meant lots of seriously cool sketching happening.
Of course, Sketch Jam wouldn't have been possible without all of our talented competitors, who showed off enough enthusiasm and skill to keep the audience entertained throughout the event.
In case you missed it, here is the full list of competitors:
Nick Daiber
Sean Nemoto
Andy Thaemert
Anna Myers
Christopher Hanks
Cesar Idrobo
Eric Von Holten
Jared Rhind
Louis Toussaint
Mengyan Li
Jimmy Nguyen
Vito Morbidini
Dewayne Dale
Jeffrey Brummer
Jeff Thrasher
Bianca Jordan Cha-Camp
The four competitors who made it the third round were Nick Daiber, Sean Nemoto, Andy Thaemert, and Anna Myers. The goal for that round was to create an effective rendering of a specific kind of product that was named at the beginning of the challenge. The catch was that each competitor was given a pack of mystery drawing tools while artfully using all the drawing tools given to you. These included highlighters, metallic gel sticks and art crayons. Here is what the sketchers came up with:
Following an intense deliberation from our judges, it was decided that Nick Daiber and Sean Nemoto would be the two finalists to face off head to head in the fourth round. For this one, each competitor was given twenty minutes to render their favorite product to sketch (their 'go-to' as it were) using all of the tools in their kit and tricks in their bag to create a beautiful, finished product rendering.
Finally, Nick Daiber was chosen as the winner and he received a Wacom Cintiq 27:
All in all, everyone who showed up to view and participate in Sketch Jam had a blast. Special thank you Outlier Solutions for filming the event and to our sponsors: Wacom, ComedySportz,Pensole, Fort George Brewery We're already looking forward to Sketch Jam 2018!
Did you miss out on the action? Fear not! You can watch the entire stream here.
We'll be posting more post-event coverage soon, so stay make sure to follow Coroflot on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for more Sketch Jam updates!
Designed to easily optimize inventory, minimize stockouts, and reduce missing doses with smart drawers that have 50% more capacity compared with similar units on the market. The cabinets securely store medications with durable metal locking lid drawers, and prevent medication mix-ups with the integrated Medication Label Printer.
View the full content hereGerman mathematician David Hilbert said "a perfect formulation of a problem is already half its solution." What is true for math problems is also true for design challenges: without a well-framed problem statement, it's easy for the industrial design and detail engineering stages of the product to move very quickly in the wrong direction.
Your framework for making decisions matters as much or more than the decisions themselves, because the "chaos" of the system makes most outcomes indeterminate (again, chaos theory: "long-term prediction [is] impossible in general"). [Andy Weissman, "The Chaos Theory of Startups"]
At DtM, our framework for making design decision is the "hypothesis of record." For an early stage project like the Otter Warmer, there are a few critical elements of the product hypothesis.
The first component is the product "point of view" (POV), defined as follows by IDEO's Diego Garcia:
A point of view is the set of conscious constraints a design thinker adopts in order to make a specific statement. [...] I submit to you that, as a rule, things that are remarkable are born from a strong point of view. Those that are not remarkable are often the result of a muddled point of view, or no point of view at all. Having a point of view requires making choices among many possible alternatives. Having a point of view means having a vision of what good looks like as a means to make those choices. You can feel it when something was created with that vision in mind. And when that vision was not in play, you can feel the lack of it. [Diego Garcia, "On Anathem and points of view", Oct 2008]
A POV is almost more useful in how it defines what a product is NOT. Great products are very narrowly focused. During the product development process, there is an irresistible temptation to add new features, or to stretch the product's role to cover more users and situations. The POV is one way to fight against scope-creep and the tendency for great narrow ideas to bloat into "one size fits all" garbage.
A DtM POV takes the form: this USER in this CONTEXT has this NEED. The goal isn't to generate deathless prose, but rather a rigorous definition that we can use as a test to answer ambiguous design questions. After a couple weeks of research, here's the latest Otter POV:
District-level hospitals in developing countries that admit newborn patients for 24-hour care, that have reliable electricity, that are staffed by care providers with limited training but who are able to visually assess newborn hyperthermia and hypothermia, that want to prevent hypothermia in newborns for observation or treatment in the neonatal intensive care unit
-- NEED --
a durable, wipe-clean, always-on single-infant warmer that will maintain a 36 degC conductive surface beneath the newborn, that has a user interface and temperature feedback control system that are "hard to use wrong," and that works both in complement with Firefly phototherapy, with conventional overhead phototherapy and as a stand-alone device.
The next component of our hypothesis framework is the product value proposition. Where the POV is concerned primarily with the user, context and needs, the value proposition address the competitive landscape. For DtM to claim that our product is "better", we have to define "better than what". Here is the latest Otter value proposition:
For district hospitals in resource poor areas who want to treat low birthweight newborns at birth rather than risk transporting them to crowded central facilities, Otter is a conductive warming bassinet for thermally stable newborns who are at-risk for hypothermia to maintain normothermia while undergoing other treatments.
Unlike devices that provide a regulated microclimate that are complicated to use and maintain (for example incubators and radiant warmers), Otter provides affordable active warming that is hard to use wrong and easy to clean.
For an excellent reference on writing value propositions, we recommend Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm.
The final component of our current hypothesis framework are the "design principles", a set of qualitative statements we use to guide product development. Where product requirements and specifications are prescriptive (guidelines to follow), design principles are intended to be generative and inspirational.
For example: Kurt Andersen and Graydon Carter created Spy Magazine to mock the pretensions and excesses of Eighties society and its obsession with wealth and social status. Kurt Andersen said that their mission statement for the magazine, aka their "design principles", were: "Smart, fun, funny, fearless." This framework inspired them to create stunts like mailing tiny checks to billionaires to see who would cash them. Bloomberg ignored a dozen checks; Trump cashed every single one, including a check for $0.12.
With each design principle, we'll include some examples that help to ground the idea. Our current design principles for Otter are:
Is effective: prevents hypothermia; improves clinical outcomes; meets international standards
Looks effective: looks like a trustworthy modern medical device; looks warm; appears intuitive
Context-friendly: compatible with both rural context (cost to buy, own) and other newborn clinical interventions
User-friendly: hard to use wrong, facilitates mother-child bonding, provides good patient visibility
Check back in a few weeks as we update other key components of the Otter hypothesis!
The Core77 team spends time combing through the news so you don't have to. Here's a weekly roundup of our favorite finds from the World Wide Web:
Parametrically-designed folding chair in the 'digital minimal' style, by Carlo Ratti for Cassina.
A free 3d model for everyone who is into 3D printing.
1977 EPA Graphic Standards System reissue.
IKEA wants to make sure you don't accidentally spend $2,245 on their $0.99 bag.
What if your bike made music to make your presence obvious to others? An experiment by Studio José de la O.
100 successful projects, products, and processes currently connecting Berlin with the world.
Izzy Swan is coming out with a new line of tools, starting with this clever invention:
April Wilkerson has finally moved, and here she starts setting up her new temporary shop--which she has to share with her husband:
Matthias Wandel gives us a final tour of his shop before he moves, explaining how he arrived at the layout and what the pluses and minuses of it are:
Jimmy DiResta produces an insanely labor-intensive brass and wood sign for a distillery:
Who could make a video of fabricating and installing a deck rail post sexy? The Samurai Carpenter:
Designing on the fly, Bob Clagett creates a functional, handy storage unit out of scrap pieces:
Linn from Darbin Orvar designs and fabricates a padded bag for street photographers, feauturing adjustable dividers:
Laura Kampf gets to use the bending machine she built last week, as she turns steel sheets into a set of large illuminated initials for a friend's wedding:
Ben Uyeda experiments with laminating veneer sheets to create this bentwood coat hook:
We like watching people design out loud, and here the MacGyver-like Jeremy Fielding does so as he rescues an old grinder from the trash, then devises an adjustable sharpening platform for it.
Ron Paulk takes a look at a cool new tool, Stabila's space-saving telescoping levels:
Not a build video, but in this episode of his "Let's Talk Design" series, Chris Salomone gives his take on how to successfully integrate angled legs into a design:
At 3M, we apply science in collaborative ways to improve lives daily. With $30 billion in sales, our 90,000 employees connect with customers all around the world. 3M has a long-standing reputation as a company committed to innovation. We provide the freedom to explore and encourage
View the full design job hereRobert Pirsig didn't set out in life to change American pop philosophy, or to inspire designers, yet he certainly accomplished both. The writer, mechanic, tinkerer, and philosophizer passed away this week at the age of 88, but he leaves us with a classic text on mindfulness, process and observation. His immensely popular book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was a mechanically minded adventure story about a motorcycle tour with his son, but the layers of philosophical questions inside are still useful at any age or level of motorcycle-interest.
Rejected by over 100 publishers before being picked up in 1974, it's also a case study in dedication to a project. In the decades since it's inspired innumerable copycats, literary responses, tattoos, mechanics, and critical thinkers.
Most obituary pieces have focused on Pirsig's early high school graduation and army recruitment, where he encountered Eastern philosophy in the service, or his later adventures navigating a sailboat across the ocean in the days before GPS. But I'd argue that his interim years bouncing between menial and mechanical jobs, technical writing and treatment for mental health were just as formative, rooting his high fallutin thinking in utterly concrete experience.
While it can drift into pure narrative, mechanical musing, or deeply navel-gazing philosophical critique of belief systems, Zen and the Art... blends the three in such a way that even the most esoteric moments carry a glint of the relatable. Here are a few choice quotes from a book about nearly everything, with particular savor for design thinkers.
"The pencil is mightier than the pen."
"Of the value traps, the most widespread and pernicious is value rigidity. This is an inability to revalue what one sees because of commitment to previous values. In motorcycle maintenance, you MUST rediscover what you do as you go. Rigid values makes this impossible."
"The material object of observation, the bicycle or rotisserie, can't be right or wrong. Molecules are molecules. They don't have any ethical codes to follow except those people give them. The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn't any other test. If the machine produces tranquility it's right. If it disturbs you it's wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed. The test of the machine's always your own mind. There isn't any other test."
"The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn't misled you into thinking you know something you actually don't know."
"Quality . . . you know what it is, yet you don't know what it is. But that's self-contradictory. But some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, it all goes poof! There's nothing to talk about. But if you can't say what Quality is, how do you know what it is, or how do you know that it even exists? If no one knows what it is, then for all practical purposes it doesn't exist at all. But for all practical purposes it really does exist."
"We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world."
"There is a perennial classical question that asks which part of the motorcycle, which grain of sand in which pile, is the Buddha. Obviously to ask that question is to look in the wrong direction, for the Buddha is everywhere. But just as obviously to ask the question is to look in the right direction, for the Buddha is everywhere."
"The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there."
"The way to see what looks good and understand the reasons it looks good, and to be at one with this goodness as the work proceeds, is to cultivate an inner quietness, a peace of mind so that goodness can shine through."
"To the untrained eye ego-climbing and selfless climbing may appear identical. Both kinds of climbers place one foot in front of the other. Both breathe in and out at the same rate. Both stop when tired. Both go forward when rested. But what a difference! The ego-climber is like an instrument that's out of adjustment. He puts his foot down an instant too soon or too late. He's likely to miss a beautiful passage of sunlight through the trees. He goes on when the sloppiness of his step shows he's tired. He rests at odd times. He looks up the trail trying to see what's ahead even when he knows what's ahead because he just looked a second before. He goes too fast or too slow for the conditions and when he talks his talk is forever about somewhere else, something else. He's here but he's not here. He rejects the here, he's unhappy with it, wants to be farther up the trail but when he gets there will be just as unhappy because then *it* will be "here". What he's looking for, what he wants, is all around him, but he doesn't want that because it *is* all around him. Every step's an effort, both physically and spiritually, because he imagines his goal to be external and distant."
"Anxiety, the next gumption trap, is sort of the opposite of ego. You're so sure you'll do everything wrong you're afraid to do anything at all. Often this, rather than "laziness" is the real reason you find it hard to get started"
"This condemnation of technology is ingratitude, that's what it is. Blind alley, though. If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything."
These days Zen and the Art... clearly carries a western and male perspective, often dated, but the questions posed are worth holding onto, perhaps especially when they call the author's own voice into question. Isn't that where our critical breakthroughs usually come from?
Accomplished woodworker Nick Offerman and former "Parks and Recreation" co-star Amy Poehler will host "The Handmade Project," a competition series for makers. Slated to run on NBC for six episodes, the show is meant to "[celebrate] artisanship and the makers who can create amazing things with their hands ... and a few tools too."Let's see if you fit the bill:
Each week eight of America's best all-around makers, from all walks of life, will undertake a series of projects they must complete in their own unique way with the hopes of impressing Poehler, Offerman and our expert judges. Over the course of each episode, the contestants must tackle a different theme, hand-making items in different disciplines — the difficulty of which increase as the competition unfolds. Shot in a serene outdoor setting, this friendly competition will ultimately crown a winner at the end of the six-week journey, but the series will focus on the characters and camaraderie of those who enjoy creating their own crafts, all under the comedic guidance of Poehler and Offerman.
Participants of all ages — many of whom are eager to share their craft making skills on social media — will be featured on the series with skill sets as wide-ranging as woodwork, quilting, knitting, scrapbooking, cake decorating, metal work, doll making and general crafting. Artisans and makers of any type or any creative person who loves making things by hand are welcome.
If it sounds like it's up your alley, the show is currently seeking participants. I checked out the application and they are doing some serious due diligence: The application is 102 items long and features in-depth questions about the type of work you do and tools you use. It also requires a three-minute video of you. Check it out here.
Varian's ProBeam™ proton therapy system uses protons rather than X-rays to treat cancerous tumors with great precision. It is effective for certain types of cancers and can treat with a high dose of radiation to the tumor, while delivering lower radiation to the surrounding healthy tissue. Elemental8's treatment of the Varian ProBeam proton therapy system is an integrated solution to numerous design, engineering, and usability challenges, while treating a room-sized medical system with an attention to detail normally use on much smaller products.
View the full content hereI almost put this in the "Hell in a Handbasket" category, but since I am not the target market for this product, I figure judgment is best left to those who are.
The Under the Weather Pod is a personal tent designed for parents viewing their children's sporting events in inclement weather:
I find the product ridiculous. Examining my personal biases, here's why:
1. The Swedes have a saying I've taken to heart: "There is no bad weather, just bad clothes." When I know I'm going to be out in weather that's rainy or cold, I wear clothes designed for rain and cold. To me this is a solved problem, and inexpensive gear is readily available. During poor weather in the city, you'll see everyone from dogwalkers to on-location film set production assistants--neither of these are high-paying jobs--manage to clad themselves in weather-appropriate gear for long stretches outside.
2. Anytime you see a bunch of Americans lined up on a bench--on the subway, at a bus stop, at a park--the bulk of them are staring into their phones. A sporting event is the rare communal event where folks are all observing the same thing at once and have an opportunity to interact, or at the very least to cheer together or groan together. It seems strange to me for everyone to seal themselves off into side-by-side individual pods that preclude communication with one's neighbors.
3. Playing outdoor sports in crappy weather inculcates toughness in inspired kids; children of the '70s will well remember the footage of O.J. Simpson running through the snow. (This was before the number on his back changed from 32 to something significantly longer.) Is it not weird for Billy and Sara, slogging through the rain in pursuit of the ball, to glance over and see mommy and daddy ensconced in a plastic bubble?
4. Do we really need more PVC in our lives?
So those are my biases, but I'm not a parent that's sat through game after game and found it insufferable. For those of you who are parents in that situation, do you see any merit in this product?
The things people will believe on social media are truly depressing. For instance, last year I began seeing this video pop up. People eagerly forwarded this "amazing" footage supposedly showcasing the Presidential limo's defensive driving capabilities:
Even if you were watching this on a low-resolution monitor, the giveaway should be the impossible camerawork.
Another video by the same creator is titled "Trump's new fast limo! Secret Service learning how to drive the POTUS limo on the Top Gear Track!"
People bought that too.
Now you've probably heard that the Cassini space probe is currently on a suicide mission to Saturn. Nearly out of fuel, Cassini is currently orbiting between the planet's rings and surface and will dive towards the planet (resulting in the probe's destruction) sometime in September. In the meantime it is beaming photos back to Earth. Here are two photos I saw this weekend being circulated on Facebook, with captions like "Incredible!" and "Amazing!":
Those are freaking renderings, folks, two of many that NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory commissions (and credits as the work of artists) in order to spread awareness and excitement about the project. Cassini launched in 1997. Its image-capturing instruments were designed in the '90s. The real images it's sending back look like this:
It is still an amazing feat that something can be shot into space, survive for 20 years while traveling over a billion kilometers and beam images back to Earth. It is freaking amazing. But there's nothing worse than when people are amazed by the wrong thing.
