Ivan Christianto is an Indonesia-based designer obsessed with product re-use. The self-described "sustainable materials specialist" and his firm, Ceha Ideatorium, seek out discarded objects—preferably in bulk—and bring them back into the functional world.

This is mostly impressively seen at Resto in Jakarta, a restaurant that Christianto and Co. designed with co-conspirators Iqra Firdausy and Erick van Houten. Sixty-five percent of the restaurant is physically comprised of repurposed objects.

Thus plastic palettes become banquette bases; coat hangers and plastic jugs are transformed into light fixtures; industrial machine switches turn the lights on and off; a 55-gallon drum becomes a sink.

The Smithsonian Institute archives what seem to be a tiny fraction of the exhibitions they hold. One of the older shows lucky enough to get a webpage is Doodles, Drafts and Designs: Industrial Drawings from the Smithsonian, which looks at how designers, inventors and engineers use drawings to a) work things out, b) convince others that the ideas have merit, c) communicate precise technical data to whomever will be actually manufacturing the object and d) document the entire process.

Spanning the 19th and 20th centuries, the exhibit covers a pretty random selection of products: Woodworking machines of the 1860s, gas station meters from the 1930s, fighter pilot interfaces of the 1940s, and that rare object that was designed way back when but is still in use today, like the Brannock device that you'll know from modern-day shoe stores. There's also weird inventions that never saw the light of day, like an electromechanical pest eliminator that drowns flies in kerosene.

Autodesk is not new to the cloud concept—their Buzzsaw software-as-a-service has been hooked up for over a decade—and on Tuesday they announced Autodesk Cloud, officially bringing together over a dozen web-based capabilities that customers can now use to interact with their documents via web browser or mobile device. Customers can also share their designs with anyone through the cloud, even those who aren't running Autodesk software.

Subscribers stand to gain the most, as Autodesk Cloud will throw in 3GB of storage and a bunch of exclusive services for them:

Designers, engineers and digital artists [will now have access to] sophisticated new capabilities, such as high-performance 3D visual communication, simulation and collaboration that were once limited to organizations with privileged access to expensive, high-end supercomputing centers.

These exclusive services include:

- Autodesk Cloud rendering. Customers with an Autodesk Subscription to the Premium or Ultimate editions of Autodesk Design Suite or Autodesk Building Design Suite will have access to powerful rendering capabilities, helping them better visualize designs, increase the number of renderings they can create and reduce hardware investments.

- Autodesk Inventor optimization. Customers with Subscription to the Premium or Ultimate editions of Autodesk Product Design Suites will gain an intuitive cloud-based simulation tool, enabling them to test multiple design options in the cloud, and to create more sustainable designs and higher-quality products while reducing material, transportation and energy costs.

- Autodesk Revit Conceptual Energy Analysis. Customers with Subscription to Autodesk Revit Architecture or Autodesk Revit MEP software, or select suites containing these products, can extend design beyond the desktop with powerful cloud-based energy analysis capabilities, helping them to quickly gain insight into the energy consumption and building energy costs of early design concepts from within the design application.

- Autodesk Green Building Studio web-based energy analysis software. Customers with Subscription to Autodesk Building Design Suite and other select products have access to this cloud-based service that can help designers, architects, engineers and building energy analysts perform faster, more accurate energy analysis of multiple building design iterations, optimize energy efficiency and work toward carbon neutrality earlier in the design process.

- Autodesk Buzzsaw software as a service (SaaS). Customers with Subscription to Autodesk Vault Collaboration AEC software now have access to cloud-based document, data and design management solutions for architecture, engineering and construction firms and owner-operators, helping them centralize and securely exchange project information and enhance team collaboration.

Read more about it here.

Forget flat-pack, the future of self-assembly furniture is clearly in "Whackpack"—a range on show at Tent London this week. By Be Benny, the stools and tables are put together entirely without nails and screws—the only tools needed being a mallet and a bit of brawn. Ikea take note.

IkeaMalaysia has started posting a series of videos featuring their interior designers giving tips on how to squeeze every last inch—sorry, centimeter—out of a living space. It's no surprise the videos come from an Asian branch of Ikea and not the U.S. one, as your average spoiled-for-space Yank would find the sizes of the rooms pretty alien: A 40-square-meter (430 sq. ft.) apartment; an 11-square-meter (118 sq. ft.) combo bedroom/living room (not shown below, but viewable at the link at bottom); and most impressively, a 2.7-square-meter (29 sq. ft.) bathroom that still has room for laundry facilities, including an overhead drying rack that lifts up to the ceiling when not in use.

We dig the videos because they go beyond traditional advertising, espousing principles that are simple and sensible independent of whether you buy from Ikea. In a nutshell, they are: When you don't have space to go outwards, go upwards; find objects that can do double-duty; repurpose pieces to your needs.

Here's the intro video:

Over the next months we will be highlighting award-winning projects and ideas from this year's Core77 Design Awards! For full details on the project, jury commenting and more information about the awards program, go to Core77DesignAwards.com

James Tichenor, Joshua Walton, David Rockwell and Tucker Viemeister
Photo Credit: Blandon Belushin/Rockwell Group

Designer: Rockwell Group & The LAB
Location: New York, NY, USA
Category: Interiors / Exhibition
Award: Runner-Up

The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas

The West Lobby is a kinetic space, centered around 8 giant central columns wrapped with mirrors and LCD screens. We installed 384 displays on the columns and 26 behind the registration desk to create a platform for a variety of customized immersive digital experiences in the space.

For the West Lobby, we created our first large-scale implementation of our Environmental Choreography System. This involved creating a series of hardware and software prototypes, testing the resolution, and stress-testing the synchronizing the 64 computers we used to power the installation.

We created a scale mock-up in-house to test content. Because of the overwhelming size and amount of displays and computers, this process also included months of on-site testing with the actual columns. All the content we developed had to be custom tailored to the environment, the colors had to be adjusted to amplify the mirror element, the pace and scale of all moving elements had to be finely tuned to create a dimensional, active environment.

Core77: What's the latest news or development with your project?

The project was built as a platform and we are really proud that work continues to be produced for it. The LAB at Rockwell Group, Digital Kitchen and the Art Production Fund have all produced a number of amazing digital experiences for the columns that have shown us a number of new ways to see the West Lobby itself. And it was very exciting to see Casey Reas' work on the columns as a generative artwork on such a large canvas.

Read on for full details on the project and jury comments.

MCM fans are certainly already clamoring over House Industries' recent collaboration with Herman Miller Asia-Pacific, a custom Eames Low Table Rod (LTR), unveiled at Herman Miller's Reach exhibition in Hong Kong on September 16. A total of 80 tables have been produced by Herman Miller; each tabletop is hand-printed—with letters, numbers and ornaments from the Eames Century Modern font collection—at House Industries' factory in Grand Rapids, Michigan, then "returned to Herman Miller for assembly then packaged in a special House Industries-designed wooden crate."

Suffice it to say that the tables themselves are absolutely gorgeous, as is the packaging, which was treated with equal consideration:

As with most House Industries projects, we tried our best to make the packaging for this limited edition something you wouldn't throw away once the table was removed. Who doesn't like a printed wooden crate that can do double duty as a storage container?

They're rather more classic looking than Alessandro Canepa and Andrea Paulicelli's "Fontables," a Mid-Century Modern mash-up for those of you who aren't over it.

Several times I've driven Mini Coopers through ZipCar, and one feature that takes getting used to is the "whoosh-click" noise that happens a millisecond after you close the door. That rather unique noise belongs to a BMW engineering feature whereby once the door is completely closed, the window shoots up a fraction of an inch and into the rubber seal, firmly sealing the cabin to minimize wind noise. The second you pull the door handle open, of course, the window scoots back down, slightly and imperceptibly, so the door can be opened without incident.

Ford has devised a door mechanism that is similar in action, if quite different in purpose. Their new Door Protector System features a protective rubber flap that pops out of the edge of the door when it's opened, providing protection should you run the end of the door into something; once you pull the door closed it automatically retracts.

I love this idea, as will anyone that's ever owned a car that's been dinged up in a parking lot. The rub is that the system protects the cars around you from dings—but who's going to protect your car? In any case, if you have the opportunity to park next to a new Ford Focus starting in January 2012, do it. That's the first model that will get DPS, so you can be assured you'll return to find your car ding-free, at least on the Focus side.

A lot can happen in 24 hours. Ernesto Bones was once thought to be a "super sensitive, dapperly dressed, dandy—a poet, a creative optimist, a lover of life and of all things bright and beautiful." A Day in the Life of Ernesto Bones tells a different story—one filled with drugs, alcohol (and a lot of it), stalkers and an inevitable murder.

5-6AM: A deconstructed mirrored silhouette of Ernesto—his own stalker after all—lies upon the floor with large parts missing. Nearby a restart button, photographed by John Short in the picture above, is close at hand to begin the story all over again.

Organized by London-based designer Ab Rogers with the support of the Stanley Picker Gallery, A Day in the Life of Ernesto Bones is a multi-media, non-linear narrative told through the surrealist game of exquisite corpse—24 collaborators were each asked to write an hour of the fictional character Ernesto Bones' short life based on a photograph of an everyday object from the Stanley Picker House. Ab Rogers Design, in turn, took those stories and translated them into design objects that were installed in an unassuming hutong in the Dashilar Design Hop district. A truly collaborative project bringing together an international group of creatives, the estate and gallery of an art collector, photography and design objects, the project seems even more surreal set in the context of the backalleys of Beijing. All photos included in the exhibition are by John Short.

A Day in the Life of Ernesto Bones
Ab Rogers Design
Dashilar Design Hop District
No 7, Zhujia Hutong
XiCheng District

11-12AM: A responsive floor of undulating tiles that rise and sink as you walk across them creates instability to simulate the emotion of drunken walking. Inspired by Ben Kelly, interior designer, writing about Stanley Picker's cocktail strainer.

2-3PM: A collection of floating organic vessels connected by vivid yellow cables, containing and reflecting surreal light. Inspired by David Tanguay, graphic designer, writing about Stanley Picker's collection of swizzle sticks.

3-4PM: Lured to the keyhole the viewer is turned stalker by their own curiosity as they look in and see their back view on a CCTV monitor peering into the box. Inspired by Adrian Searle, art critic, writing about Stanley Picker's collection of envelope openers.

Over the next months we will be highlighting award-winning projects and ideas from this year's Core77 Design Awards! For full details on the project, jury commenting and more information about the awards program, go to Core77DesignAwards.com

Designer: Anvil Studios - Treasure Hinds, Greg Janky and Nice Reusables - Chris Hotell, Marta Hotell, Gretchen Bleiler
Location: Seattle, WA, USA
Category: Products / Equipment
Award: Notable

ALEX Bottle

An innovative eco-friendly stainless steel water bottle that provides a convenient alternative to disposable plastic bottles. The design features a mid-body split known as 'Clean Seam Technology' which makes it very easy to clean and allows itself to compact to half size, providing space savings during shipping/traveling/storing.

Mid-body Split :: This was a "face-palm" moment for us during the initial meeting with the client. The design research and development process employed a comprehensive competitive and comparative market analysis and brainstorming sessions that explored all of what a stainless steel water bottle could be. This included exhaustive exploration into how to best, how to easiest, and how to uniquely approach the mechanics around the mid-body split. The resultant is designed to have as minimal contact between the contained water and the plastic parts as possible.

Core77: What's the latest news or development with your project?

We've made some modifications to ALEX that allow for more color customization options which will release this fall/holiday. For instance, online customers at www.alexbottle.com will be able to mix and match our color ways to completely individualize their bottle and we'll build to their specific order. To date, we've only offered a black bottle with a pink, teal or dark grey accent, but this holiday, you'll be able to order a white bottle with pink, teal or dark grey accent if you want. We're also working on a much requested sport-cap design.

Read on for full details on the project and jury comments.

Industrial Designer - Digital Sport
Nike, Inc.
Portland, Oregon

As the Industrial Designer - Digital Sport at Nike, you'll craft market leading digital product experiences; from creating the vision for future Nike+ experiences and product concepts, through to sweating the details of tooled parts and user interfaces. This role directly impacts the positioning of Nike as a leader in this field, delivering high quality products that inspire key consumers and lead our business forwards.

The ideal candidate offers exceptional talent in tactical design, a strong foundation in strategic design and an aptitude to collaborate across a broad range of disciplines. He or she is a proactive team member, who can react quickly and positively to game changing observations throughout the product development process; committed to delivering ground breaking Digital Sport products of the utmost quality, while contributing to an open and respectful work culture.

» view

The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.

Gallery FUMI exhibited newly commissioned work from three different design studios during the London Design Festival. Under the name of Studioware, they curated an exhibition showcasing solid wood furniture by Max Lamb, as well as plaster mirrors and paper planes by Studio Glithero, and ceramic work by German designer Johannes Nagel.

Johannes Nagel's unusual ceramic pieces.

Max Lamb's new furniture range made from solid wooden pols.

This isn't the first time we've posted about Sugru, and hopefully it won't be the last:

Clorox is pleased to announce their first foray into the wonderful world of design competitions through their new online community Clorox Connects. The brief for the Clorox Maker Challenge is fairly straightforward:

Automate household cleaning products to make cleaning, well...enjoyable, rewarding, and even fun! Keep in mind speed, automation and ease of use in your thinking, but then kick it up a notch—how could household cleaning even deliver enjoyment, fun or reward? How could easier and more enjoyable cleaning create other benefits—such as freedom to spend more time with friends and family and do things you love? Consider products, packaging or new solutions that would be affordable and could be available in the market within 5 years.

And if Clorox doesn't have flashy graphics or a star-studded jury, just think of it this way: you could design the next Swiffer or Roomba, giving 20-somethings the world over yet another go-to product for impending parents' visits.

We believe household cleaning is due for reinvention. After all:
-Pick-up trucks used to be pure work vehicles. Now Land Rovers and other SUVs are status symbols and comfort on wheels.
- Gyms used to be the place you dreaded going. Now there are gyms with concierges greeting you, mood lighting and cool music to motivate you.
- Workout wear used to be purely functional. Now workout wear is a long way from mere baggy sweat pants - it's self-expressive and trendy.
- Kitchens used to be hidden in the back of houses, purely for the required work of food preparation. Now they are the center of our homes, idyllic odes to gastronomy.

Five years from now, the way we clean our homes will be just as self-expressive, convenient, comfortable and alluring.

In other words, you're competing to design a household product that most, if not all, of your friends will eventually own.

Last but not least, there's a $5,000 cash prize attached to first place, as well as with smaller sums for two second place winners and five third place awards, so register today!

It never occurred to me that if you printed a woodgrain cross-section on a piece of paper, and the ink bled enough to appear on the paper's edges...

...and you stacked those sheets into a solid brick, you'd then see woodgrain along the sides. Making this one nifty Post-it pad.

It still raises the question of how they generated a slightly different cross-section for each sheet. If they were all the same, the sides would just have straight lines running down them, but as they've executed this the grain seems natural. Do you think they scanned the cross-section of an actual block of wood, then shaved a hair off, scanned it again, sanded it again, and so on?

When visiting our friends from dezeen in their "pop-up gallery, store, video studio and micro-event space" during London Design Festival, we were particularly intrigued by these Moments in Time, designed by London based Dominic Wilcox. Watch the video to hear the designer talk about his new work.

Over the next months we will be highlighting award-winning projects and ideas from this year's Core77 Design Awards! For full details on the project, jury commenting and more information about the awards program, go to Core77DesignAwards.com

Designer: Herman Miller Healthcare & Continuum Design Team
Location: West Newton, MA, USA
Category: Interiors / Exhibitions
Award: Notable

Herman Miller Compass System

Compass is a modular system of interchangeable components used to create applications for patient rooms, caregiver work areas and other clinical spaces. Compass improves caregiver efficiency, supports new and changing technologies, improves the patient and family experience and offers surfaces and construction that have been optimized for the healthcare environment.

The goal for hospitals is obvious—to help people get better. However, hospitals employ many stakeholders, and the goals of these stakeholders on a moment-by-moment basis are not always aligned. This can create an unsettling environment for the patient and impede the patient's road to recovery. Our research focused on the patient and how to heal them, but we also focused on understanding the needs of physicians, nurses, custodial staff, patients' families, hospital administrators and architects so that we could design a system that would help them all achieve their shared goal - better patient care. By understanding the needs of all the stakeholders in the hospital care ecosystem, we were able to understand how their relationships can conflict with each other and how we could design a system to overcome these conflicts.

Core77: What's the latest news or development with your project?

Compass continues to be a huge success and Continuum and Herman Miller are planning to continuously add new capabilities, applications and features. The First installation of Compass is complete in Virginia Mason Hospital.

What is one quick anecdote about your project?

The Eureka moment in the development of Compass was the realization that no matter how hard we tried we could not design the ideal patient room! We needed to design for constant change. The fact is that there are new hospitals being built and old hospitals being renovated constantly. That the day a hospital opens it needs to change. This is because of changing technologies, changing demographics, and changing approaches to delivering health care.

Read on for full details on the project and jury comments.

My favorite part of MoMA's current Talk to Me exhibit, although out of place amongst the "high concept" media pieces, was the 911 Command Center Radio Control Application. Designed by Philadelphia-based Electronic Ink, this is the best designed piece of software I've ever seen for use by emergency response personnel.

Your typical 911 dispatch center. MMMM, green MS-DOS...

Most computer programs you're likely to see in your average 911 dispatch center, police car, or fire truck are eerily reminiscent of MS-DOS. Luckily, Electronic Ink's program looks more like the love child of a Sim City-like RPG and, you know, some actual interaction design. The way the dispatcher can patch together different radio operators, putting firefighters in communication with each other or with police officers, calls to mind some of the physical processes behind the software. You can almost imagine the old-fashioned telephone operator sitting inside the computer switching the wires.

Initial mockup by Electronic Ink designers

A few months ago, we picked up on Dario Antonioni's Kickstarter campaign for "Botanist Minimal," an article of furniture that may or may not have needed crowdsourced funding. Just over a month after we posted it, the bent-poplar bench was successfully funded (as we had predicted) at nearly twice the goal, so the meta-level questions about the DIY spirit of Kickstarter were moot points.

Which is a long way of saying that there's another, arguably more deserving, bench on the Kickstarter market: as of press time, Jonathan Kemnitzer's "Skate Bench No. 1" is roughly 60% funded. Again, it's a bench with an uncompromisingly minimal form factor, though its usable surface is limited to one adult: the seat is simply a skate deck (new or used) that sits atop a stainless steel frame that matches that of the Eames Low Table Rod.

The pitch after the jump:

Over the next months we will be highlighting award-winning projects and ideas from this year's Core77 Design Awards! For full details on the project, jury commenting and more information about the awards program, go to Core77DesignAwards.com

Designer: Stiven Kerestegian in co-creation with artisans in the Patagonia
Location: Puerto Varas, Chile
Category: Design for Social Impact
Award: Notable

Chilote House Shoe

This simple, noble, extremely comfortable and highly sustainable indoor shoe redefines the concepts of inclusive design and conscious consumption through the synergy created by three valuable assets; design guided craftsmanship, noble renewable materials from the Patagonia, and a disruptive collaboration and manufacturing process.

From the very beginning we understood that we needed to deliver more than just a highly desirable and commercially viable product, we needed to create value for everyone involved in the products complete life cycle.

We set out to design a model that truly contributed by creating measurable positive social impact in the lives of the artisans that provide the craftsmanship, it being the soul of the product.

From this point of view, a great design would not be enough, we needed a highly innovative ecosystem around it that was not only highly inclusive socially but also completely environmentally benign. We wanted to focus on the less addressed and more challenging aspects of sustainability.

The product addresses the interest of all the individuals involved in synergy; the intended market and it's consumers, the local and global environment and all the individuals who are involved in it's manufacturing model.

Core77: How did you learn that you had been recognized by the jury?

I learned that I had been recognized by Core77 from my colleagues from the Innovation Center of Un Techo para Chile. It's just a coincidence, but they received the same Core recognition with their "Safe Agua" project in collaboration with Art Center's Designmatters.

What's the latest news or development with your project?

The product is creating much unexpected buzz at a local level here in the south of Chile, we are contacted almost daily by artisans from all the surrounding areas wanting to participate in the production model. Same at the opposite side of our operation with our target retailers; museum stores, eco-premium boutiques and on-line sales. Quite a bit of buzz all around... things are pretty crazy right now.

Also we had an amazing launch in NYC at the NYIGF where we received several recognitions among tens of thousands of products at the show including winning the "Eco-Choice Award for most sensitive use of Material" a visitor voted award...

We have sold most of our production capacity (limited to just 1000 units per month due to our highly inclusive [far beyond fair trade] production methodology). We plan to duplicate the production in the next 6 months...

We just launched a great new website www.chiloteshoes.com: another nice upgrade is our inclusion of QR codes with each pair of Chilotes—when scanned, the code leads to a mini-site that features the personal and geographical information of the actual artisans that crafted that piece.

What is 1 quick anecdote about your project?

Interesting fact: I designed the Chilote Shoe in about 1/2 an hour (with many iterations since but the concept itself came out pretty fast). Of course, all the insights, material research, cultural learnings, etc. that came before and lead to the design was a very long process.

Everything that came after was even more laborious and challenging including the most important aspects such as the inclusive manufacturing process and especially all the social interaction elements, the relationships that are inherently developed are truly rewarding. We had to create a socially sustainable model from scratch, a model designed to meet the local socio-cultural reality and at the same time address and deliver on the global consumer trends and desires.

It's extremely difficult to think globally and act locally especially in a location so remote as the Patagonia. It is also very challenging to create a product and brand eco-system without a large company (and the associated resources) behind you. We basically started from scratch in every aspect.

It's been a long 2-3 years of work leading up to the US launch last weeks, but the actual product design was a breeze and very enjoyable.

When asked about the Chilote, I always talk more about what is around the product (it's ecosystem), the people and places and materials involved more that the product itself asI feel it speaks for itself. Sure it's cute, super comfortable and sports highly innovative materials in a functional and useful product, but I believe that the most interesting quality of the design is the "story" around it. Not to sound overly artsie but I do really think it's a conversation piece!

Read on for full details on the project and jury comments.