Faraday is looking for a contract industrial designer to work with our Engineering and Product team to help shape the visual identity of future Faraday bike models and accessories. We've built our brand on the quality and originality of our design, and this is your opportunity to help carry that tradition forward.
View the full design job hereDelivery company UPS has successfully completed a test with a specially-designed electric truck whose roof slides open to reveal an autonomous octocopter drone.
The driver loads a package into a cage beneath the drone, the drone grabs the package, then flies it over to its destination.
The drone is no replacement for the driver, but is meant to increase the driver's efficiency on sprawling rural routes. For instance, imagine if the driver needs to hit three addresses that are miles apart in a triangular formation. The driver reaches point A to make the delivery by hand, and deploys the drone to deliver to point B. The driver then heads for point C, and the drone catches up with the truck on the way and docks itself. The driver has saved themself from having to drive two sides of that triangle.
The drone recharges itself in the dock, has a flying capacity of 30 minutes, can carry a 10-pound package, and tops out around 50 miles per hour. Both the drone and the truck were created by Workhorse, an Ohio-based company that develops both electric delivery trucks and drones.
It looks like in the near future, rural dwellers waiting for packages will be alerted not by the sound of an approaching truck--the thing will be silent, being electric--but by the noise made by whizzing rotors.
You'd think no one would buy hoverboards anymore, given the stories of exploding batteries that have burned peoples' entire houses down. Apparently no one told the owner of this hoverboard, who brought it into a mall just last month. Once it started smoking, things went sideways for almost two minutes, despite people's efforts to kill the thing with fire extinguishers:
So why does the darn thing keep exploding, even after being extinguished? Well, this isn't like a burning piece of paper, where once you smother the flame it's gone because paper is inert. The problem is that this is a lithium-ion battery, which by nature store a tremendous amount of energy. When that battery is shoddily manufactured using poor materials and quality control, as Wired explained way back in 2015, things can easily go wrong:
In a cheaper battery, [Jay Whitacre, Professor of Materials Science & Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University] says the separator between each battery's anode and cathode—which are what the current flows through—may not be aligned correctly. Image it like this: The cathode is at one end of the battery, the anode at the other, and the separator is (surprise!) between them; its job is to keep them apart so nothing short circuits. An issue, in the cheaper batteries, is there could be small holes in the separator thanks to impurities in metal particles that can puncture the anode/cathode separator. In either of those cases, the damage can cause a short circuit.
"If there is an inherent defect in the cell, it will go off at some point," Whitacre explains. "Small defects in the manufacturing or materials stream lead to the plus/minus sides of the batteries being shorted with each other after a small amount of use. When this happens, especially when the batteries are charged, a lot of heat is generated inside the cells and this leads to electrolyte boiling, the rupture of the cell casing, and then a significant fire."
That fire can build upon itself and be hard to contain. Whitacre says all lithium-ion batteries contain highly flammable electrolytes that burn "fast and hard" when air hits them. When things get hot, common cathode materials turn into additional oxygen sources, too. "This stokes the fire even more," Whitacre says.
It's a sin that these things are still being sold. And I'm thankful that you're not allowed to bring one on an airplane.
Last Friday, September 22, UK Prime Minister Theresa May described the June 2016 "Brexit" referendum as an opportunity for “imaginative and creative” solutions for the European Union. In the context of London Design Festival, the euphemism is equally coincidental and ironic. Central Saint Martins, for one, explicitly addressed Brexit—and subsequent geopolitical upheaval—in the expository text for its exhibition Creative Unions: “Creativity by necessity and inclination has to operate across borders, and there was a sense that borders (cultural geographic, racial) were now going to get more fixed, and so creativity was in danger of being stifled.”
Given the breadth of the works on view—not only within the college's Lethaby Gallery but across the city's design districts—LDF is as much an occasion to reflect on design as an expression of greater social, economic, and political forces as it is a celebration of its many forms. If May's conciliatory tone reduced the sense of urgency, it has become all the more imperative for designers to take responsibility for their actions since the publication of Victor Papanek's oft-cited Design for the Real World in 1971. And what better way to illustrate the “imaginative and creative” potential of design than with chairs?
Chairs for All Occasions
Following last year’s inaugural London Design Biennial, the cultural institution Somerset House framed its sundry LDF exhibition in terms of “Design Frontiers”—an oblique reference to a kind of border, perhaps—to encompass everything from fashion (Jijibaba, a joint effort by Jaime Hayon and Jasper Morrison) to textiles (Kvadrat, of course) automotive design (Jaguar being the banner sponsor). Among the innovators, Benjamin Hubert unveiled his new “Axyl” collection for the UK furniture brand Allermuir. Alongside a barstool and cafe table, the stackable chair is characterized by its die-cast A-frame aluminum legs, which, like its MCM-inspired plastic shell, is made from recycled materials. An exemplar of industrial design today, “Axyl” also nods to sustainability as a selling point—the legs account for "significant" cost and energy savings—though a cynic might question the point of creating new chairs in the first place.
Case in point, Yinka Ilori has made a name for himself precisely by doing the opposite, refurbishing chairs—often gathered from the curb—and reappropriating furniture as a canvas for storytelling. Known for his vibrant aesthetic, the British-Nigerian straddles the line between art and design, citing Martino Gamper's “100 Chairs in 100 Days” project as his inspiration to pursue the latter. For his LDF exhibition at the Africa Centre, A Large Chair Does Not Make a King, he challenges visitors to “leave their ego at the door” of the installation, featuring four chairs on scalable plinths, intended to level the height of the sitters and arranged to face the center, like points on a compass.
The chair-fest continued elsewhere with another take on the symbolism of a chair, in this case as an object of trade. In Brompton Design District, Faye Toogood returned to the South Kensington space where she launched her first collection in 2010 to stage Trade Show, featuring 50 of her friends in the UK creative community. From household name Tom Dixon to rush weaver Felicity Irons Bem, each participant received one of Toogood’s iconic “Spade” chairs, created in a special edition of sand-cast aluminum, in exchange for an original work of his or her choice, on view in the exhibition. But given the context of the star designer's enviable personal network, the utopian notion of a exchange-based economy remains aspirational at best, since the $500–2,500 retail price of the “Spade” chair (depending on materials and finish) undermines the premise of using objects as currency.
Makers Gon' Make
Meanwhile, yet another chair embodied an alternative to the designer-as-author approach. Whereas Hubert's “Axyl” collection incorporates recycled material, Ilori specializes in upcycled materials, and Toogood’s collective skewed toward craft, a humble armchair dating back to 2015 blends these undercurrents in the context of the maker movement.
Smile Plastics has been refining its eye-catching decorative panels—recycled from waste such as yogurt cups, confiscated CDs, Wellington boots, dashboards, etc.— since its launch at LDF two years ago. The materials company had a strong presence at LDF this year, from displays at London Design Fair to Michael Marriott's stools for the Ace Hotel, as well as hosting a panel discussion on circular design. A bit further afield, at the maker-centric exhibition A New Normal, the “Dapple” chair, made from Smile's plastic product of the same name, epitomized plastic as a craft material; flecked like terrazzo in custom colors, recycled plastic may well rival jesmonite as the material du jour (see also: Dave Hakkens’ “Precious Plastic”; James Shaw's “Plastic Baroque”).
Beyond DIY aesthetics, the maker movement continues to hum along, like a [insert your machine tool of choice] in the workshop downstairs. A collaboration between RCA research group Distributed Everything and fab lab Machines Room, A New Normal posed the question “Who is making products for a world beyond mass-production?” In addition to Smile Plastics, the exhibition highlighted startups such as made-to-measure furniture service Kobble and open-source fashion platform Kniterate as exemplars of emerging business models for decentralized production.
For all of its near-future optimism, the exhibition guide for A New Normal—a skeuomorphic moleskine, each page a facsimile of a near-future diary — dated itself by the end of the week, when news broke that Transport for London had revoked Uber's license to operate in the UK capital. Ironically enough, the fictional protagonist of the journal, presumably an upstanding member of the sharing economy, mentions “passengers I was taxiing.” Thus, while Uber has appealed the decision, the announcement came as a timely reminder that the social, cultural, and economic impact of design often remains subject to legislation and policy. (Incidentally, I personally found the bikeshare to be the best way to get around London.)
Good Design Is...
Which brings us back to Papanek’s point—and the fact that his outspoken position may well have been eroded if not altogether obsolesced by the neoliberal economic policies and globalization of manufacturing in the late 20th century. To that point, it was an exhibition not of new things but old ones that highlighted just how design speaks to higher principles: a selection of objects from Braun geek Tom Strong's personal collection. Easily a highlight of LDF, the Strong Collection made its debut in May at Vitsoe’s New York showroom, as part of NYCxDesign, before making its way to the company’s London flagship; after the exhibition ends on October 6, it will travel to its permanent location at the company headquarters at Royal Leamington Spa. More than a mere survey of products designed by the much-hagiographized Dieter Rams, these artifacts were actually used by Strong and his family for upwards of four decades and are still in remarkably good condition.
As Peter Kapos, director of Das Programm, noted in a panel discussion at the V&A, “there was a strong connection between the social orientation of Braun design [in the 1960's and] the rational relationship between the products that make up the program.” Taken as a whole, the collection presents a “utopian image,” one that represents “a kind of ideal social form of rational, law-governed, regular, conflict-free, harmonious society.”
Kapos relates the sentiment with an air of nostalgia for a bygone modernist era of such unbridled optimism. If that perspective was ambitious then, it seems altogether quaint now. After all, chairs and other products make up an infinitesimally small fraction of things in the real world. Down the hall from Hubert's presentations in “Design Frontiers,” Pentagram partner Domenic Lippa presented 250 Facts & Figures, a typographic tome of precisely that, as a comment on the greater social responsibility of graphic design.
Stripping the information down to black Caslon Pro bold text, Lippa's project is at once a provocative—and perhaps even imaginative and creative—critique of contemporary media as well as a refreshing sight during design week. Unsurprisingly, most of the factoids spell doom and gloom on a larger scale than Papanek himself would have dared to imagine, so we’ll end on a positive note: “78% of people feel happier when they see a stranger smile.”
Are.na is a collaborative research website that allows designers and artists alike to connect dots and dig into creative interests. This article was originally published on Are.na's blog.
In January, around the time of the Women's March on Washington, my pilates studio wrote an Audre Lorde quote on the chalkboard near the door: "Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare." At first it made me feel a kinship with the studio, because I like the quote and I admire Audre Lorde. But throughout the class my eyes kept wandering over to it as I tried to parse what was making me feel uneasy. I decided the quote was a ploy, a convenient way for the studio to justify a $35 exercise class. Don't get me wrong—I believe in self care, but luxury fitness is not a radical act.
More and more, companies are capitalizing on post-election liberal guilt—using the current political climate as a means to increase monetary gains. With advertisements or socially-minded products, these companies address complex social issues in a superficial way. But more than being tone-deaf, this strategy is potentially harmful: Instead of encouraging genuine civic engagement, it promises to 'raise awareness' through monetary transactions. The narrative shifts from the importance of the cause to how great the company is for being socially conscious (woke). Ultimately, this strategy is damaging because it focuses on the feelings of the individual consumer rather than the collective whole.
Last year, a friend purchased a retro feminist T-shirt from a retailer that promised to donate a portion of the profits to Planned Parenthood. When she got the shirt, she realized it was made in Bangladesh. She began an email exchange with the shop owner about how feminist products made in sweatshops is a lazy form of activism. Namely, it fails to recognize the intersectionality of feminism—that it is more than just supporting Planned Parenthood, an organization that primarily focuses on the reproductive health of women in the U.S. If we care about women's rights in America, my friend argued, then we should also care about the women and children who work abroad in sweatshops. We should make structural connections to understand parallel issues. In Freedom Is A Constant Struggle, Angela Davis writes, "Whenever you conceptualize social justice struggles, you will always defeat your own purposes if you cannot imagine the people around whom you are struggling as equal partners." It's possible that the women who made this T-shirt have read Angela Davis, but perhaps it didn't occur to them to apply it to commerce.
A similar argument can be made about the rise of feminist clothing companies like Nasty Gal or Thinx. These companies built their brand on the platform of empowering women, yet they do not foster a work environment—with fair parental leave, for example, or equitable pay—that reflects these values. As consumers, we have agency in how we spend our money and who we choose to support. But capitalism is a beast, and relationships complicated by capitalism are exacerbated by globalization. Take Starbucks, for example: the company announced at the beginning of the year that it was committed to hiring 10,000 refugees over the next five years. That's awesome, except that most of Starbucks' coffee is not fair trade—meaning their coffee pickers are not being paid minimum wage or overtime. While supporting refugees might be more topical at the moment, Starbucks ultimately has more control over their own labor practices. To symbolize solidarity with one marginalized, vulnerable group while failing to support another—one directly under its charge—suggests that Starbucks' refugee pledge is little more than a strategic piece of marketing.
On January 28, the New York Taxi Workers Alliance staged an impromptu strike to protest against President Trump's executive order on immigration. During the strike, Uber tweeted that they were removing surge pricing for rides from JFK. Customers interpreted this move as Uber trying to profit off of the strike, and then the hastag #deleteuber began trending. Not letting an opportunity for publicity pass, Lyft publicly donated $1 million to the ACLU. In retaliation, Uber pledged to provide legal support for threatened drivers and established a $3 million legal defense fund. Within the span of two days, Uber and Lyft had entered into an arms race to publicly "out-good" each other.
There is a long history of companies giving back to society—it can be a symbiotic relationship that raises awareness to both brand and cause. Microsoft, Bank of America, and General Electric all have philanthropic arms that work in community development. There is even a new wave of social entrepreneurism that uses the "buy one, donate one" model as part of their core values—for example, Toms Shoes donates a pair of shoes to a person in need with every purchase. Warby Parker does the same with its eyeglasses.
However since the most recent presidential election, companies have moved away from non-partisan issues, fully embracing divisive politics. They use political outrage to increase profits, exemplifying basic principles of neoliberalism. By commercializing the resistance movement, brands draw attention away from the original cause, thus weakening the message and presenting activism as something that can be purchased.
It is no coincidence that the 2008 Obama campaign was the first to feature graphic design so prominently in its campaign strategy, effectively introducing branding to politics. ? The challenge of Obama's campaign was to make him more presidential; up until that point, he had limited political exposure to the American public. Obama's campaign co-opted corporate branding strategy by prominently featuring a slick logo, as well as consistent typography and brand language. The aesthetic was fresh, favoring a friendly, geometric sans serif font (Gotham) rather than the typical serif font that had been popular in political campaigns since the 1980s. This approach appealed to millennials, and prompted grassroot efforts like the Shepard Fairey "Hope" poster.
With the brand strategy, Obama was able to reach millennials and compel them to vote. Ultimately, those millennials were a deciding demographic of the 2008 campaign. Because of this, Obama became the 'cool' president, the candidate that knew how to reach the youth.
Using Obama as a model of success, Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign took a similar aesthetic approach in developing a logo and custom sans serif font. What the campaign failed to realize was that the same graphic strategy that reached millennials in 2008 would not necessarily be as effective in 2016. In the eight years since the election, the aesthetic of the Obama campaign (the friendly sans serif font, the stylized logo) had been absorbed back into the corporate branding world. If you want to sell stuff to young people, design things that look like the graphics of the Obama campaign (minus the red, white and blue).
Since the 2008 election, numerous brands have been designed or redesigned with logos that build upon the Obama campaign's typography: Bud Light, Facebook, Glossier, Google, Grubhub, Mastercard, Mcdonald's, Spotify, Zocdoc, and lastly, Hillary for America. Hillary's 2016 graphic design reflected the candidate's values through its meticulous attention to detail. However, what this approach failed to recognize was that using corporate branding in her political campaign only intensified her association with the corporate–incidentally her most consistent critique throughout the election cycle (aside from the emails). What was once fresh and new, is now a brand strategy re-co-opted by the corporate world—the same world that was its genesis. The Obama campaign not only changed the visual approach to politics, it also changed how corporations use and value the millennial aesthetic. Obama borrowed a systematic approach to branding from the corporate world and in turn the corporate world borrowed the friendly, youthful-cool of his campaign from him. By the time Hillary's second presidential campaign came around, it was played out. Millennials, the progenitors of 'personal branding,' were already wise to the scheme.
Hillary's loss to Trump, and the subsequent absurdity of Trump's term, has sent parts of the U.S. into a tailspin that brands have been all too eager to capitalize on. During the 2017 Super Bowl, Airbnb ran a 30 second commercial that featured a geometric sans serif font, on top of the faces of people from different minorities. The message was an implied critique of Trump's travel ban, stating: "We believe no matter who you are, where you're from, who you love or who you worship, we all belong."
A year prior, the creative agency HUMAN produced the video "Together" in support of the Bernie Sanders campaign. The visual approach of Airbnb's Super Bowl video is remarkably similar to the Bernie campaign video—in both, different combinations of people's faces made a diverse whole. Bernie called his campaign a political revolution, creating an urgency and an authenticity that could not be captured in a single logo. What a shame that the momentum of this revolution has now been flattened into a piece of marketing, paid for by a company valued at $30 billion. Is this the new radical?
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Allyn Hughes is a graphic designer based in New York. In 2016, she was a member of the design team on Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.
At a press conference in Australia today, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced his plans to focus the company on BFR. Endearingly, "BFR" is short for "Big Fucking Rocket," and developing it is vital to the company's goals of reaching both the moon and Mars. That aside, at the end of his presentation he showed another potential application for BFR: As a replacement for airliners.
Traveling by rocket rather than jet would get the travel time between most world cities to 30 minutes or less, Musk reckons, and could get you "anywhere on Earth in under an hour." Here's how it would work:
"Cost per seat should be about the same as full fare economy in an aircraft," Musk wrote on Instagram. "Forgot to mention that."
How is that possible? Maybe SpaceX can save a few bucks by paying flight attendants by the hour.
Seriously though, New York to Shanghai in 39 minutes is insane. You can spend three times that long just trying to get from Manhattan to Greenpoint in Brooklyn, and you don't even leave Earth's atmosphere.
A roundup of Kickstarter projects currently crowdfunding for your viewing and spending pleasure. Go ahead, free your disposable income:
The T3D Mobile Multifunction 3D Printer allows you to print directly from your smartphone or tablet—with multiple colors if you wish!
SPLATWARE is Granby Workshop's first Kickstarter campaign. The funky pieces in this collection are made by squishing clay in a hydraulic press. You can get a closer look at the whole process in the campaign video.
WOLVERINE Pack is a packable bag with self healing fabric for those of you who like living dangerously.
Qbit is a sexy little tool inspired by the earliest known portable measuring device, the Cubit ruler. Used to design everything from the Great Pyramids to regular roads, the Cubit ruler could be considered one of the first makers tools. Now it can be yours, in updated form of course.
X-Bows Mechanical Ergonomic Keyboard is designed to maximize comfort during long days of typing. Traditional keyboards force our wrists to angle themselves inward, causing discomfort over time, whereas X-Bows conforms to your natural wrist angle.
Xcissor Pen is exactly what it sounds like—a pen that hides a handy pair of scissors inside. The tool is ideal for carrying around instead of a regular pen for moments where you need to trim small things on-the-go.
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Launching a Kickstarter campaign you're proud of? Send us an email to blogs@core77.com for consideration.
We like Christopher Alexander's Notes on the Synthesis of Form for the way he takes a sledgehammer to the fetish over aesthetics and artistic pretension in design. We're often mystified by the design community's enthusiasm for uncomfortable chairs and weird-ass light fixtures. If the goal is to apply design principles to achieve social outcomes, aesthetics are only useful in that they help us achieve our purpose.
We love Notes on the Synthesis of Form for Alexander's rational and systematic approach to identifying the appropriate design opportunities, managing the real world's bewildering complexity and delivering meaningful results for real people. Published in 1964, the book has plenty of sections that are dry as toast, but the good stuff is so good it's worth persevering.
What follows is a quick summary of my favorite ideas. Fantastic book, check it out! And if you buy the book through the links in this email, Amazon will send part of the proceeds to DtM! [Notes on the Synthesis of Form]
Alexander describes the fundamental elements of design in terms of form and context. "The form is the solution to the problem; the context defines the problem." In other words, Form is the design objective—the thing we're going to change. Context is the ensemble of environmental constraints that will remain the fixed, that we will not change.
Each insight derived from the user and the environment can be thought to exert a kind of pressure on the product form. Alexander gives the example of designing a teapot to demonstrate the importance of choosing the appropriate context. Ordinarily, the teapot is the given form, and everything else around it (counter, stove, faucet) is the context. It is possible, though, to choose a context that leads to very different results. For example, what if the form is "easy-access hot water"? Given that we're no longer restricted to a container we need to heat on the stovetop, we might abandon the tea kettle in favor of an electric hot water dispenser that sits on the counter, or something exotic like a high-pressure nozzle attachment for the sink.
The key point is that in choosing your context, you can "marry in haste and repent at your leisure." Alexander argues that we should carefully consider the limitations we're choosing to "marry", and whether they're based on careful deliberation or mere tradition. On the other hand, we need to resist the temptation to "boil the ocean." Alexander writes about the "impractical imperialism of designers who want to redesign whole cities and whole processes of manufacture when they are asked to design simple objects.
Alexander is critical of designers who put the burden of adaptation on users, giving an example from architecture:
Since everything in the human environment can nowadays be modified by suitable purchases at the five and ten, very little actually has to be taken care of in the house's basic organization. Instead of orienting the house carefully for the sun and wind, the builder conceives its organization without concern for orientation, and light, heat and ventilation are taken care of by fans, lamps and other kinds of peripheral devices. (p.29)
American architects of McMansions from Hell can assume that future residents have access to IKEA. When designing for social impact, we have to consider very carefully the total cost of outcome. A rural hospital in sub-Saharan Africa can't exactly run out to the hardware store to buy a missing surge protector, or send their staff off to language training because the designer assumed everyone understood technical English. Once you release your product, what else has to be true about the world in order for it to work?
Alexander explains that there exists an opportunity to divide forces into subsystems containing relatively independent groups of strongly-related constraints. Within each group you indicate the relationship between requirements--for example, in a "House of Quality"-style a matrix where a plus-sign indicates a complementary relationship, where a minus-sign demonstrates mutual exclusivity. The key is that by thoughtfully separating the product elements, you are free to modify each subgroup almost independently. For example, in Firefly we were able to treat the top light, the bottom light and the bassinet as three nearly separate and independent design elements.
Alexander noticed that some patterns of constraints, or forces, occurred again and again. For example, every house has to provide the inhabitants with a place to sleep and eat. Alexander labeled these commonly-occurring groups of forces as "patterns." DtM has already developed a few "patterns" related to medical device design for low-resource countries. For example, many existing medical technologies fail in low resource settings because of five typical misfits:
Alexander in fact wrote an entire book on hundreds of common patterns in urban planning and architecture around the world. A Pattern Language is another DtM favorite!
Alexander warns about the hazards of "self-consciousness" when considering the key factors influencing a design.
When a number of issues are being taken into account in a design decision, inevitably the ones which can be most clearly expressed carry the greatest weight, and are best reflected in the form. Other factors, important too but less well expressed, are not so well reflected. (p.69)
Defining "purchase price" for a medical device is easy, defining "usability" is hard. In "Black Swan Farming", Paul Graham explains the hazards for venture capitalists who focus exclusively on metrics like early-stage fundraising success that have no correlation with a company's long-term prospects.
The philosopher Alfred Korzybski put it another way: "The map is not the territory." Our model of a thing is not the thing. Just because our business plan says product cost is important doesn't mean that product cost is the most important factor in the ultimate outcome.
WHAT GREAT DESIGN REVEALS
Alexander makes a key point that explains our experience with Firefly:
A well-designed house not only fits its context well but also illuminates the problem of just what the context is, and thereby clarifies the life which it accommodates. (p.91)
In other words, a great design illuminates the context and can generate a deeper understanding of the problem. A well-designed product's most important features or greatest value may only become apparent after the fact.
The airfoil wing section which allows airplanes to fly was invented at a time when it had just been "proved" that no machine heavier than air could fly. Its aerodynamic properties were not understood until some time after it had been in use. Indeed the invention and use of the airfoil made substantial contributions to the development of aerodynamic theory, rather than vice versa. (p.91)
With discoveries like the airfoil,
The invention is based on a hunch which actually makes it easier to understand the problem. Like such a hunch, a [product point of view] will often precede the precise knowledge which could prescribe its shape on rational grounds. (p.91)
Alexander says that design can be a process for testing and formalizing a designer's instincts. He writes about the "recent tendency among designers to think about their designs as hypotheses," tentative assumptions about the nature of the context.
We expected Firefly to be "hard to use wrong," and included features that would reduce the harm from users putting blankets over the baby, putting too many patients in one bed and positioning the overhead light incorrectly. It was only after we started testing that we discovered the Firefly outcomes of reducing overall newborn treatment times, reducing the incidence of newborn cross-infection and averting risky and expensive exchange blood transfusions.
In his 2010 talk "Designing with Forces," Ryan Singer from 37 Signals does a fantastic job interpreting Christopher Alexander's Notes on the Synthesis of Form from a UI/UX perspective [Vimeo].
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This "Design Experience that Matters" series is provided courtesy of Timothy Prestero and the team at Design that Matters (DtM). As a nonprofit, DtM collaborates with leading social entrepreneurs and hundreds of volunteers to design new medical technologies for the poor in developing countries. DtM's Firefly infant phototherapy device is treating thousands of newborns in 21 counties from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. In 2012, DtM was named the winner of the National Design Award.
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:
"My signature was a result of a class assignment in Design School. I'd read about Oscilloscope signals. My family name is four letters with the 'M' resembling a ray trace on an oscilloscope screen. It was relatively easy to take it from there." —Syd Mead
90 artists around the world follow the instructions to "Look up, paint what you see".
Will someone please purchase this van on my behalf?
Trump's Sharpie sketch of the Empire State Building is being auctioned off for 12 grand.
Eight great tools still made in the USA.
A cool interactive article that demonstrates how exactly slot machines are designed to be addictive.
"The rise of the made-for-Instagram museums."
Government breaks that can get more electric cars on the road.
"I only started weaving at this large scale in this last nine months. I was really inspired by Azilal rugs that are made in Morocco—each one tells the story of the woman who made it." —Katherine Entis
"How parks lose their playfulness."
When you're on conference call waiting for the person on the other line to finish their spiel...
Is Fashion Modern?, a new exhibit at MoMA organized by Senior Curator Paola Antonelli and her all-female team of curators, is as much a celebration of fashion and design as it is an extensive history lesson. Leaving no rock unturned, the show investigates many of the everyday fashion items that make up our wardrobes, taking a historical, cultural, or even political lens to each one. Fashion can often feel innovative, but how far do some of these concepts stem back? How are modern designers reinterpreting these items by incorporating new techniques and technologies to progress the field further?
Many of these questions are contrasted and explored with examples from present and past, demonstrating how some trends have dramatically shifted while others remain. With a dedicated concentration to both backstory, technical detail and culture, it's easy to say that Is Fashion Modern? is a worthy visit for artists, designers and history buffs alike.
For a minute, forget about browsing job post after job post and just imagine your perfect design job. Probably not at a company that sells warranties, right? Guess again my talented, visually oriented friend. It’s here at SquareTrade. “How is that possible???” you ask. Because even though warranties are what we sell—brand love is what we make. Google us and you’ll find thousands of five-star reviews, 200,000+ followers on Facebook, and millions of views on YouTube. It’s crazy.
View the full design job hereThere are things that we design to keep us safe from those who would do us harm: Pylons and cordons, bulletproof vests, security checkpoints, facial recognition software, personal firearms, criminal databases. But the tactics used by last night's mass killer in Las Vegas defied all of them.
At 10:08pm last night, well-armed 64-year-old Stephen Paddock opened fire on the attendees of the Route 91 Harvest country music festival. Here is the precise moment the shooting began, captured by a festivalgoer:
It brought to mind last year's deadly Pulse nightclub shooting in Florida, where a 29-year-old slaughtered 49 people and wounded 58 others, barricading himself inside and taking hostages before being killed by police. Some survived that incident by hiding in locations that the gunman couldn't get to.
Paddock's attack was tactically very different. He was across the street from the open-air venue—and firing from the 32nd floor of a room at the Mandalay Bay hotel, hundreds of feet above street level, with a commanding view over a crowd of thousands. There was no place to hide and no way to tell where the gunfire was coming from. After the first round of gunfire, this is what the scene looked like on the ground:
After the second round of gunfire, panic reportedly broke out. People ran, and some were trampled in the ensuing stampede.
Consider the situation: Even if you yourself were armed to the teeth, there would be virtually no way to pinpoint where the fire was coming from and accurately return fire from that distance. There were off-duty police in attendance at the concert and they were unable to return fire. Even if the range of your weapon matched Paddock's, absent sniper training and a spotter you'd be peppering the side of a hotel filled with innocents above, below and to either side of the shooter. Paddock, with no such concerns, could simply continue to reload and spray.
By all accounts local police arrived on the scene swiftly, armed with handguns, shotguns and even assault rifles, but there was no way to take Paddock out from the ground. It's also not clear if he was even still firing when police arrived. Paddock reportedly fired for several minutes on the crowd of 22,000, then took his own life. Police say they found some ten rifles in his hotel room.
The numbers may change, but at press time the casualties were estimated at 50 dead and over 400 wounded. As grim as this sounds, given the circumstances that seems miraculously low.
Perhaps what's most terrifying about this particular mass shooting is that none of the commonly-suggested solutions could have prevented this. For example:
Number one that's simply never going to happen in this country, where the rhetoric around gun control has become too polarized for any kind of meaningful debate to take place. Number two, even if you somehow convinced all law-abiding citizens that all guns should be illegal, criminals will still find a way to get them. Guns are illegal in New York City, yet we had nearly a thousand shootings here last year.
As mentioned above, there's no way people on the ground would have been able to accurately return fire. And even if you were in a room on the same floor as the shooter, armed, and a crack shot at the gun range, are you trained to breach a room and take out a hostile?
Paddock is apparently homegrown.
Paddock, 64, lived nearby in an upscale retirement community with its own golf course. At press time there was no indication that he had links to any terrorist groups.
Paddock reportedly had previous run-ins with the police and was already "in the system," but there was no indication that an event like this was in the cards.
This is, of course, impossible to do comprehensively. All cities offer large gatherings of people and a plethora of high vantage points.
The absolute root of the problem is that our society contains individuals who, out of ideology or mental illness, want to harm scores of others at once. In America it's with guns, in China it's with knives, in Europe it's with vehicles, in Israel it's with explosives. It seems to me impossible to design and build enough physical impediments to safeguard against those weapons.
These kinds of mass crimes against humanity originate within the minds of their perpetrators. And while we have thousands or millions of medical professionals worldwide dedicated to keeping the human body healthy, it seems to me that the brain—and what's going on inside of it—is perhaps the least-well-understood organ of all.
It's a pity that society no longer values manual artistic skill. Once upon a time, if you were good with a brush you could land a gig painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. These days, this artist here puts his considerable talent to use at a used car lot:
It must be strange to create something that you know will eventually be wiped away with a sponge.
The man's name is John Oliver, and he runs his own sign business, Oliver Signs, in Ohio. There's an interview with him here, and more video of his work on his Instagram.
Saturday Night Live's sketches are often hilarious, and this one's got nothing to do with politics—but with graphic design. Here Ryan Gosling plays a tortured designer who cannot get over the fact that the logo for James Cameron's "Avatar" uses Papyrus as its font:
Admit it, that was a lot funnier than you thought it'd be!
LUX is a car air purifier and on-the-go air monitor that utilizes PCO purification technology. Its design mimics the purity of the cleaning process andhas been designed to neatly fit into the cars cup holder and is powered off the 12V power supply using a USB-C cable. The aim is to provide a cleaner and healthier environment inside the vehicle while educating users about their exposure to air pollution while on-the-go.
Many people have no alternative to commuting to work inside via car, which results in exposure to unhealthy levels of pollution. Research shows that pollution levels inside vehicles can be up to 15x worse than outside. When stuck at a red light or in a traffic jam, this can rise up to 40x worse than the outdoors. The health issues related to overexposure to Carbon Monoxide, Nitrogen Dioxide, Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) and Particulate Matter (PM2.5 and PM10) are alarming, yet there is minimal action being taken to prevent this overexposure.
Over two years ago, Google's Advanced Technology And Projects group began developing Project Jacquard, an effort to transmit the idea of futuristic wearables from tech to the textile world. Head of the Jacquard project Ivan Poupyrev (who spoke at our 2015 Designing Here Now conference about it) along with his team sought out to create conductive yarn that they would then embed into manufacturing chains within the fashion industry to create interactive, touch-activated clothing. After a long stretch of development, their first collaboration with denim giant Levi's is now available for sale—behold, the Levi's Commuter Trucker Jacket with Jacquard, the first jean jacket with invisible embedded technology.
Here's a breakdown of the jacket architecture: all of the technology is installed in the left cuff of the jacket, which consists of a removable, rechargeable energy drive and the raised conductive yarn embedded into the denim.
How Jacquard connects to your phone is clever in that it lets you customize the interaction to your liking: using three primary commands (brush in, double tap, and brush out), you can tell Jacquard to either turn your music on and off, give you directions or your current ETA, it can even read off text messages and answer your phone calls. Overall, the number of tasks Jacquard is able to juggle are low, but it is certainly the beginning of an interesting new look at wearables.
So now that the jacket is finally on the market, the real question is whether it's worth the wait, and I think this question rests primarily in your day to day. As advertised, this jacket is ideal for commuters, especially those who ride bikes to work and would rather keep their eyes on the road than their phone.
For Google, it was obvious what the benefit was of working with a large and fashion-informed company like Levi's instead of designing the jacket themselves. For one, the jacket is inherently stylish and affiliated with the most classic of denim brands, and two, Levi's is taking into account the comfort, material, and tailoring needs of the commuter while Google can focus on the ideal UX.
For those who have tested it out, the two main issues with the jacket seem to be finicky rather than deal breakers. One highlighted issue has been the cuff. Even in the videos, it's easy to see that the hardware within is a bit stiff, although subtle enough that it doesn't significantly distract from the overall style. The other hot issue at hand is the fact that the jacket can purportedly only be washed 10 times before the conductive technology fuzzes out (and note that the removable charging button on the side cuff should never be washed). Several publications have written about this, but as fashion experts weigh in, they emphasize the fact that many people who work with denim don't recommend ever washing your denim items.
Final verdict? The Levi's x Jacquard jacket carries a considerable price at $350, but if you're a bike commuter who is looking for safer options to stay connected while cycling, this could end up being a pretty good outerwear option.
It feels like years since the IKEA x HAY collaboration was announced, and today after plenty of waiting, the Ypperlig collection is finally here.
This expansive collection designed by Mette and Rolf Hay of over 60 objects such as stools, benches, tables, vases, and even candle holders, are each elegant and modern with an aesthetic that is still very true to Hay's original studio work. With practically all of the pieces being such a reasonable price (nothing is priced over $600), many of them are going to be tempting.
Here are a few items that have caught our eye already:
The Ypperlig collection page on IKEA's site also includes a very interesting video released earlier this summer detailing the production of the Monobloc Chair, which was originally envisioned as one solid piece. IKEA's product development engineer Ricky Ericsson states in the video that they had to modify the original legs of the HAY design for greater stability, and their conversation conveys the fastidiousness and attention to care required when designing for large-scale production. Rolf Hay points out an interesting fact about how design modification differs when working with a giant retailer like IKEA: "When you stand in front of the machine and you're surrounded by huge plastic molds and robots, you understand you need to get the job done fast because the machinery is extremely expensive."
Check out the Ypperlig collection in full here
This is a wonderful experimental video that uses rotoscoping, a century-old process whereby artists traced footage of live humans in order to create believable animation frames. But instead of creating an animation, here creative director Masahiko Sato creates geometric figures and traces the abstract shapes "drawn" by ballerina Kurimu Urabe:
"The geometric figures were created by connecting the movement of ballerina's joints by using algorithm of computer geometry (such as 'convex hull' and 'Delaunay diagram')," reads an obviously translated description of the project. "Our aim was to represent a complete new type of beauty, by showing the interaction of abstract animation with realistic movements and documentary film."
Via Kottke
Swimwear Anywhere has an opportunity for a full-time Associate Designer of Women’s Active Swimwear and Activewear. The Associate Designer is responsible for managing projects independently as well as collaboratively with the Design Director, Merchandiser, and the Company Principal. We are looking for an experienced designer who has a clear understanding of the swim and active markets, along with knowledge of functional construction and technologies. Our designers are open-minded, flexible, organized, and team oriented with the experience to handle direction and feedback.
View the full design job hereAs authorities search to find a motive behind Sunday's horrific mass shooting in Las Vegas, others are re-examining security measures. The police now state that 23 firearms were found in Stephen Paddock's suite, and it seems incredible that he was able to transport that amount of guns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition there without drawing scrutiny.
The conventional wisdom is that the tragedy Paddock unleashed could not have been prevented; Nevada's liberal gun laws (rundown here) do not require a permit to carry rifles and shotguns, for instance, nor is there any limit on the amount of firearms someone may possess in the state. So it seems it would be legal for Paddock to have that many weapons in his hotel room.
However, had Paddock tried to check into the Wynn rather than Mandalay Bay, it is likely that his arsenal would have been detected and that he may have been confronted. This has come to light because Reuters has uncovered a video from last year, where casino tycoon and billionaire Steve Wynn--"who had been dismissed as 'obsessed' about security before Sunday's massacre, a rival casino executive said"--revealed his previously secret security measures to a local news station:
I mean, holy crap. Assuming Wynn's not exaggerating, 40 ex-Marine embassy guards at each entrance? (His wording is unclear, so perhaps he meant spread over all of the entrances.) Ex-Navy-SEALs and CIA counterterrorism agents? Invisible metal detectors? With those measures in place, Wynn administrators would certainly have been aware that Paddock was transporting his materiel into their hotel. What's not clear is if and how he might have been confronted.
Wynn's previously-dismissed obsession with security now makes him look prescient, and other casino owners will presumably follow his lead.
It is extra tragic that Wynn predicted an eventual threat would materialize by the hand of a jihadi terrorist. Instead, at least at press time, it appears that mass murderer Stephen Paddock did not have links to any extremist group. And that, at least to me, is much more worrisome.
