Missed the 2018 Core77 Conference, "Now What? Launching and Growing Your Creative Business?" No worries! We'll be rolling out videos of the morning speakers over the next week to fill you in. First up is Carly Ayres and Pedro Sanches of Brooklyn-based design studio HAWRAF who discussed the business of client services—from how to talk about money to soliciting client feedback:
Stay tuned for more Now What? coverage coming soon!
Most of the newfangled luggage designs we've seen lately focus on the UX during transit: How does it perform on-the-go? But little design attention is paid to how we interact with suitcases once we're at the destination. When I'm staying in a hotel, I usually use my rolling carry-on like an inconveniently-deep box, leaving it open and dressing out of it. This is less than ideal, but unpacking my suitcase into the hotel's drawers seems somehow weird.
The Carry-On Closet 2.0 is a suitcase designed to double as the dresser at your destination. At first it seemed kooky to me, but the more I thought about it, the more I think I'd use this as intended. Employing the extended handle as the suspension frame is a clever trick:
This most recent version of the design has been successfully crowdfunded, but apparently can still be pre-ordered here. They're also still selling their 1.0 version of the design here.
I've been looking at marble-topped baking tables out of general curiosity, and am surprised at how dowdy the aesthetics are:
This one went for a modern look and came out rather awful:
I did, however, find these handsome Lostine Marble Prep Tables, carried by American Street Showroom:
Lacking storage drawers, they're not as functional as the others, but look a damn sight better. If they could incorporate storage without ruining the aesthetic I'd call these perfect.
Speaking of storage, I also found this vintage Italian marble-top table that features a pull-out tray for cutting or drying pasta, and built-in rolling pin storage:
That latter piece comes with several mysteries: What's with the legs, was this a shorter table that was repurposed into working height? Or was the builder short of posts of the proper length? There's no way that reveal and taper was added for aesthetic reasons. I also can't figure out what's with the hump in the apron, or what the hinged door on the left side is. Any guesses?
It's rare that I see someone hand-render wood so accurately that I could tell which way to handplane it, if it were a real board. Here industrial designer Eric Strebel does just that, using basic observation and the drawing skills that come with practice.
"Many times as a designers we have to render materials that are foreign to us, even though we use and see them every day," Strebel writes. "Wood is a great example of that. There are so many species with varied textures, grains and finishes available to designers these days. My suggestion is to work form a real life sample of the material that you are rendering."
"In this week's video I demo a simple rendering, using a 2"x4" pine sample. I talk a little bit about the grain structure that runs through the wood, and also touch on the importance of the 1-2-3 read, as well as basic shadow layout for reading an object in 3D. The sample technique should be applicable to industrial designers, interior designers, and architects."
We’re starting the year with a bang and currently have opportunities for mid-level (3+ years experience) freelance industrial designers to come work with our team in our studio. We're lucky to work with such respected brands and companies as Harry's, Henkel, Goby, Oneida, Helmm, Roam and Field Company and you
View the full design job hereMissed the 2018 Core77 Conference, "Now What? Launching and Growing Your Creative Business?" No worries! We're rolling out videos of the morning speakers over the next week to fill you in.
Here, Joseph Guerra and Sina Sohrab, partners at Visibility Studio, talk through their approach to running a creative business, while maintaining a qualitative design process. Balancing client relationships with creative control, they share stories of the projects that taught them to how build a generalist approach to industrial design while maintaining a critical vision with imprinted authorship:
Watch more from the 2018 Core77 Conference:
Carly Ayres and Pedro Sanches of HAWRAF
This product design here might seem humble, but I consider it a triple win for both the business selling it and the end user: 1) It enables some seriously money-saving DIY; 2) It helps the company move more of their own product; 3) It makes good use of materials.
The object in question is the Quikrete WalkMaker. (Other manufacturers offer variants, this is just the one that's locally available to me.) It tackles a problem I never considered when living in Manhattan, which is drainage and landscaping. Now that I'm out in the country, and particularly on a farm like this where the land is trodden by animals, I've learned that rainstorms quickly transform wide swaths of the property into muddy hazards.
The typical solution is to buy gravel and cover the ground with it. If you're fancier, you can pay for flagstones. Neither of these options lend themselves well to DIY, and both can get expensive.
What the WalkMaker and other products like it do, is let you cast your own flagstones in place. Quikrete's is made from recycled plastic, and they've calculated the volume of the mold to correspond with one 80-pound bag of their product. (In practice, it appears you'll have product left over, according to reviews.) You can remove the mold immediately after pouring and leveling, letting the concrete cure in place, and start casting the next section. Check out how it works:
The product reviews on the website of my local big-box store are startingly effusive, with a 97% recommendation rate. "We priced a brick sidewalk & the contractor told us $2100," states a typical review, "so we went with this (& colored it brick color) to save money, spent less than $300 total for a 40 foot sidewalk." Another reviewer was quoted $1,500 to $2,500 by a contractor, and managed to DIY it using the form for around $200. And more than a few reviewers state that they had no previous concrete forming experience, yet found the product easy to use.
Bags of concrete, at least in my area, run $3-something to $5-something a pop, depending on the mixture you select.
If the fake-random, Flintstones pattern doesn't appeal to you, they also make more traditional patterns.
Of course, if you prefer to create your own pattern, you can always go with Ben Uyeda's method for DIY concrete casting.
Here's what I've found to be the pain points for roof racks, at least the one for my car:
1. It's a pain-in-the-neck to install. It came with a little cheapie torque wrench that I've been meaning to buy a replacement for, but I already spent several hundred dollars on this roof rack; now I gotta buy another tool?
2. If you leave it on, it reduces your mileage and creates wind noise.
3. If you leave the rack off, but carry it around with you in case you need it, the bars take up a lot of space in the trunk.
This inflatable roof rack, designed by a London-based outdoor gear company called Ultix, is an interesting alternative that solves those problems. It might not be suitable for carrying construction materials, but I appreciate the outside-of-the-box thinking:
The USD $65 Ultix Tair Rack has already been successfully Kickstarted, and for those who want one, there's still about a month left in the campaign.
With the surfboard example shown in the video, I'd still be wary of the spoiler/lifting effect. Speaking of which, do any of you have good tips for securing sheet-like things in a secure way?
While I'm not a fan of working with pallet wood, I understand the appeal of free raw materials. Here Brad from the Make It Youtube channel harnesses the stuff to create a desk. He not only manages to avoid the typical rustic pallet wood look, but also adds a nifty compartment in which to stow a laptop away:
Here's the full build video:
As a furniture design student living in New York City, Zev Bianchi found the space constraints rather different than what he was used to in his native Australia. This "living in high priced and confined conditions," Bianchi writes, "was where I developed my passion, partly out of necessity, to design furniture and products to help create the best living environment in the least space."
After returning to Australia and gaining a degree in Industrial Design, Bianchi set up shop as BCompact Design. The firm now manufactures and sells his folding staircase designs:
He's also designed a leather and bamboo chair that folds flat and can be hung on a wall:
The video below shows both of these in action. (Note that whomever transcribed Bianchi's words misunderstood "kerf cutting" as "curve cutting.")
While either of these two designs might be enough to hang one's hat on, Bianchi has bigger aims, and is running a full-fledged ID consultancy that does lighting, products, furniture and interiors. Check out more of his stuff here.
The Experiential Design Manager position is a unique opportunity for a candidate to make their mark on a historic global company. The newly created position was created continue to enhance the interactive
View the full design job hereWhen it comes to rendering by hand, "Soft goods and apparel products can be a real challenge for designers," writes industrial designer Eric Strebel." They're not shiny plastic objects, but are more organic and flowing. Getting the light and lay of the material to read correctly is key to conveying the story you want to tell about the product you designed."
In this video Strebel shows you his tricks of the trade by rendering a pair of ski gloves. He covers everything from the kind of paper and markers he uses, to rendering techniques specific to soft goods, to tips for getting texture using sandpaper and screens:
California was in a drought—its worst in recorded history. And for much of 2014, Bret Recor had been trying to convince a Mexico City-based hardware team to show him a showerhead that they had designed to cut water use by as much as 85 percent. Now, he was finally sitting in a San Francisco hotel room, about to hop under a "very ugly industrial prototype" and take his first Nebia shower.
Recor's design firm, Box Clever, soon became a close partner, and together, the two teams went on to earn more than $3 million in pledges on Kickstarter, acclaim for making a shower that feels like "hugging a warm cloud," and investments from Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google chairman Eric Schmidt—but not without some painful manufacturing lessons along the way.
The Nebia design reimagined water-saving showerheads as a luxury experience that's already saved over a hundred million gallons of water. (To put that in perspective, an Olympic swimming pool is about one million gallons of water.) Now that they're back on Kickstarter with a second campaign and a new manufacturing and distribution partner, they think they could be on track to save a billion gallons by the end of 2021.
Nebia first came to be when Philip Winter, who was working at an NGO that designed composting toilets, met Carlos Gomez Andonaegui, who was the CEO of a gym chain with high shower demand, in Mexico City. Carlos's father built the first prototypes for a water-saving showerhead that people would actually enjoy standing under, and Winter and Andonaegui soon relocated to San Francisco, where they brought on cofounder, CTO, and COO Gabriel Parisi-Amon, who had been working in manufacturing operations for Apple's iPhone team.
"We had a shared passion for beautiful, well designed products, and also for making products that are better for the world," Parisi-Amon says. He was intrigued by the proposition of helping them realize what seemed like a long-shot dream.
The first prototypes were very rough, Recor recalls. "The early ones used atomizing jets from industrial equipment, mounted to steel fixtures with off-the-shelf hoses to connect to the water supply. It was really crude, but I could see the potential. And whenever we're working through a design project, you have to not just look at what it is, but what it could be."
Those ugly prototypes were expensive, too—just the nozzles cost about $500. "We knew that the technology, at the start, was going to be incredibly expensive," says Parisi-Amon. "I also knew that we could bring it down with time, money, and volume, but we needed to start off marketing it as a high-end product."
"Box Clever were incredible partners, really understanding what we were trying to do with the technology and the user requirements, but also understanding that our price point was going to come in high, so we needed to have a look, touch, and feel that matched that," says Parisi-Amon.
Nebia recruited engineers from Tesla, NASA, and Applied Materials. Box Clever helped them develop the signature halo-shaped showerhead, balance the head and wand articulation, and simplify the at-home installation process.
"The water-saving mission is powerful, but I think we really helped Nebia take a step back and look at the storytelling aspect and stellar design that could make it an iconic object, something that's important when you're trying to convey a new, potentially highly impactful product," says Recor. "It has to be familiar and it has to kind of tie together with people's lifestyles."
"Everyone has a perception of water-saving showerheads being this dongle you buy for $5 at Home Depot that makes showers feel like pins and needles," he says. "We had to switch that perception into, 'This is a revolutionary shower that is an amazing experience.' It's really a new way to look at washing, versus a narrative about water reduction—and, bonus, now you happen to be using 70 percent less water, too." (They lost a bit of water efficiency as they refined the prototypes—the Nebia 2.0 reduces water use by 65 percent.)
"No one on our team had built a shower," Parisi-Amon says. "In some ways, I think that made our product what it is today. Almost every feature that people love is actually pulled from a different industry or has been designed from scratch. There are a couple things in the system that have just never been done before, period."
They reappropriated the mechanics behind desktop monitor height adjusters, fuel injection nozzles, and agricultural irrigation. And unlike traditional bathroom appliance makers, they didn't tie themselves to industry norms for water use. "The idea of optionally using less than the maximum amount [of water] was just unheard of. Showers are made to get you to the maximum amount, right on the edge of EPA mandates. For us, it was like, 'Why would you do that?' We wanted to make the best possible experience with the least amount of water."
"I called this a project of many nevers," says Recor. "I've done a lot of work in furniture, tech, and lighting, some really innovative material products,"—like the $100 OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) XOXO prototype that the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum now has in its collection. "This project did remind me somewhat of the $100 laptop, where we were trying to use materials and processes that weren't typically used in the industry."
While many manufacturers of even high-end bathroom appliances use steel or plated plastic, Nebia and Box Clever wanted to go with aluminum. "It makes this beautiful, sweeping arm that had just never been done before," says Parisi-Amon. "I talked to 40 aluminum extruders before I found one who was even willing to work with us. Then, to figure out how to do that, the real work started. So there were a bunch of challenges like that—many of which were absolutely worthwhile—that made the product.'"
"The first Kickstarter campaign was hugely successful," says product engineer David Shulman. "People were really excited about a general form factor, but now we now had to turn that into an actual product that functions and has all of the promises from our campaign."
Shulman is used to tough work environments; his last job was at Tesla. "Obviously the product at Tesla is a lot more complex, but the big difference coming here was that there was no product yet," he explains. "We had to take an idea that had never really been done and bring it to fruition. It was a lot of testing nozzle arrays and configurations and flow rates and pressures and seeing what's the absolute best experience we can give to the people we've promised this to, doing it all on this self-imposed deadline that was just breakneck."
Nebia and Box Clever's prototypes kept getting more ambitious as they neared production. Even after the Kickstarter campaign ended, they kept tinkering with features—such as the shower's adjustable magnetic wand—that would eventually become core to their product. "We allowed some feature creep," Parisi-Amon concedes, "but we were trying to deliver a great experience."
The biggest hurdle was in manufacturing. At the eleventh hour, a few cosmetic elements of the shower came out wrong. "We just went a little too close to the edge of what was possible physically and mechanically to get the design and the experience that we wanted," says Parisi-Amon. "Then we had to spend a lot of money to fix not just that one part, but all the parts around it." The minor issue ended up costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, and added several months to their production timeline.
This might have been an instance of experience working against them. Parisi-Amon, coming off of manufacturing the iPhone 6s, was well versed in overseeing manufacturing plans and the inevitable snafus—on an Apple budget. Leading up to manufacturing, he doggedly pursued partnerships with more than 100 parts makers and manufacturers, understanding he'd have to work much harder as a startup to win contracts. But when Nebia's production hit a snag, he really felt the pain of trying to set plans right without Apple's clout and coffers.
"Companies like Apple have really great suppliers, really smart people, and a lot of money. Hiccups happen, but they're equipped to deal with them. At Apple, if you have issues getting a raw material, let's say an adhesive, you talk to the person who makes that adhesive, most likely the highest person at that company. At a startup, if there's a material you can't get, you're talking to the lowest-level sales representative and you need to convince them to go to their boss and say, 'Hey, these guys are really making something cool, it could be something big, what can we do for them?'
"As a startup it's a lot more… I don't want to say 'begging and pleading,' but there's plenty of convincing," Parisi-Amon says.
The delays were a painful lesson, but backers got their Nebia showers, with the promised features and then some, in 2017. As the team developed its next iteration—live on Kickstarter now—smoother manufacturing processes and wider environmental impact were top of mind.
Those goals inspired a partnership with Moen that Parisi-Amon says puts them on track to save a billion gallons of water by the end of 2021. The established bathroom fixtures maker will help them negotiate major distribution deals—and avoid any more "projects of many nevers" in future manufacturing. Though the latest version of the Nebia showerhead looks quite similar to the original iconic design, it is compatible with a wider variety of home shower pressures, gets warmer, and, though water savings dropped from 70 to 65 percent with this release, the team is excited to report that manufacturing is now set for much smoother sailing.
"Having a partnership with someone who has this experience, we're able to ask questions about material choices or about how to build something, and they have answers, not just from their gut, but from doing it for the last 20 years," says Parisi-Amon. "It's really incredible being able to sit down across the table from people who share your passion in terms of products and have been in this industry for so long.
"We want to eventually make a product that can reach everyone; our roadmap is to take this technology and continue to make it more accessible."
Nebia is live on Kickstarter through March 14, 2019.
—Katheryn Thayer
Alexis Houssou, co-founder of the venture firm Hardware Club, worked with his business partner to upend the typical structure of venture capital firm. They didn't just want to fund successful hardware companies—they wanted to start a community for these startups looking for others to talk to about the daily challenges of trying to fund a successful tech startup. But that still doesn't mean Hardware Club isn't aiming for big returns—their website touts the words, "we want to be the catalysts of the Hardware Revolution and build the Apple(s) of tomorrow."
In our talk with Houssou, we hear a little bit more about what compelled him to start a venture capital firm focused on community, as well as some real talk about what it takes a company to receive venture capital and grow a highly profitable business.
I guess I started by launching a company when I was 20. Back when I was in school, no one really wanted to start startups. I started a company that was doing contextual advertising for web video ads; that's when the first generation of web video content was taking off and the idea was that we would analyze content and videos and be able to show ads that were actually contextual.
It didn't work for many reasons. I think we made a lot of mistakes and learned a lot through the process. I realized after that, that I was probably too young— I wanted to start another company, but I wanted to get some real-life experience first. I was also passionate about economics, so I wanted to try working on that side. I got a job in investment banking for a few years, worked with very big clients on how to manage their assets, how to hedge their funds, stuff like that. After a few years, I wanted to go back to startups. And I always kind of kept investing in companies and helping friends start their companies as well. So my [Hardware Club] co-founder and I both left our jobs and were like, "we're gonna put a bit of our money together and start investing in companies, but being really hands-on".
The first step of building this was creating a community, so we started in Europe. The first thing we did was organize dinners, and we would bring 5, 6, 7, 8, 10 of the best hardware entrepreneurs together. What's funny is that everywhere we would go, we would realize that there were usually very good companies in the city but they were not talking to each other. After that first step, we started a mini-conference series where we go try to bring the same entrepreneurs, try to create the same kind of vibe as the events but bring together more people, so it was going from 10 people dinners to 200 people gatherings.
Step three was building resources for startups that would join the community. For that, we went to the biggest manufacturing firm in the world. When we started investing in companies, we decided we would be very selective and only select 5% of companies.
And so the last step of that was adding the funds last year, which is $50 million dollars and the idea was that with this money we'd be able to invest in companies. We would not invest in all companies that are part of the Hardware Club community, but that it would be a way to invest in some of them at the early stage.
There are usually three things— the first thing we look at is teams. People. I think what matters the most is that you believe in the people behind the product. The first thing we want to understand is, does the company's team have the skill set to realize that first prototype into an actual product that's going to be manufacturable? And do they have the skills to grow on a large scale? Usually, we like teams where people on the team come from different backgrounds: there's a business person, there's a technical guy, there's a designer. It's always kind of interesting to find that those people who are the brand owners in the company, who have different stories, who have worked in different environments, they're all going to bring a unique vision to consumer companies.
The second thing we look at is technology and products. There are a lot of people who build stuff that is not necessarily useful because they think they've found something that could be interesting, but they did not think of what the customer pains would be early on, and so they build solutions to problems that don't exist or that are not so strong. So we're really interested in people who are laser-focused on customer pains and building products that can really solve them. And usually it's not just a product, it's a set of solutions, it's a service. We're more interested in how to enable solutions so you would use hardware as the part of the solution, not just as the "I'm gonna push products and I'm gonna sell them" model.
Another thing we're interested in is defensive solutions. There's probably going to be a Chinese company at some point doing something similar, so how you make sure that they don't just kill you because they're going to be able to do something cheaper.
The last thing we look at is market size. You could have a great team, you could have a great product, but if there are only around tens of thousands of people in the world who are able to buy a product, that's only going to be a few hundred dollars; then you know that it's going to be too small for it to grow long-term.
They usually come with a 10-15 slide deck, so we usually encourage people to go to our website and apply so we can approve their deck. We have a quick rating system— I would look to see if there's something missing, for example, from the application, we feel that it's not a good fit because it's not a hardware company or they're not full time, things like that.
We really focus on what we think are the most interesting companies. Probably out of all the applications we review, 25% of them we're going to have a call with. So we'd have a rather short first call, 28-30 minutes, trying to understand what they built, if they have the experience to build what they want to build. And the next step would usually be to have an in-person meeting. Again, we're in a people business again and we need to understand what people are building, their backgrounds, and that's why we try to meet with people.
After that, usually we talk again at the same team meeting that we have every week, and if we like them then we would invite them to join the club. To give you an idea, I think out of 100 companies that apply, we onboard seven and we invest in less than one.
I think it goes back to what I was saying—it's really the people. One thing that I really look at is, what are people's backgrounds? Where did they start? You can meet someone that has an amazing economic background, they went to Harvard…but one thing that I think is interesting to look at is where the origin came from. Whether their parents were wealthy; what's their kind of general background? You could almost draw a line between where they were generally and where they are today. We have one founder, for example, that has a very complete story. He's Nigerian, came to the UK when he was 11. Things were really complicated. He ended up in a university in the UK called The Bristol Robotics Lab and ended up creating his company, first doing those workshops for kids to familiarize them with robotics and technology, and used the money and grants that he got through that to build this company. He was at the university, realized that there were some rooms available that no one was using, so he went to the university administrators to see if they could actually open a small incubator and give him money for that. He managed to make that happen. All of the story of the company has been that; you can say he's got a kind of drive, and that's impressive.
What is the common trait of the companies that are successful? Obviously, teams. You also need some luck. You need the market to bring it in this direction. Usually, you're making a bet that the market is going to accept this solution. Again, there's only a very small percentage of companies that make big returns on a fund like us, so it's usually out of 50 companies if you have a portfolio, there are only 3 or 5 companies that really make it big, so with that we can return the fund. We invest in very risky businesses, so it's more high risk, high return. When we look at businesses, we don't look at it like, "oh, there's a chance they fail." It's not a problem. If there's a chance they make it big, it's fine. We're not interested in businesses that have a high chance of becoming a medium, large business. We want big, big, big potential profits.
Well, for the first question, I don't think anyone was talking about diversity a few years back because everyone would assume society would change, like more diversity long term in society would allow more diverse people to get funded over time. That it was more going to solve itself.
I think what's changed over the past few years is that venture capitalists realized that they actually have power to change things and make diversity happen, or that if they were not taking diversity into account when they were making investment decisions, then there'll always be this reproduction process. The same type of people would get funded, and we would end up with not enough diversity.
The second thing is that I think everyone realized that the more diversity there was, the better the company was. More diverse teams build better businesses than non-diverse teams.
That's a good transition to your second point—you're totally right. I think sometimes we see products for women, things that usually my experience of those products would not be good enough to make an investment decision, right? I haven't experienced that issue, so it's hard for me to see if the solution that they are building makes sense or not. The way we try to solve that is by having a very diverse team—that's something I'm really happy about is that our team is really diverse. We have companies we're investing in from different continents, so having cultural perspectives from people in different continents is crucial. I have a partner who's Taiwanese—he was raised there, got his undergrad there. I have another partner who is French American. I myself, my father came from Africa, so I think that the fact that we have people coming from different backgrounds enables us to sometimes rely on other people's experiences or use that kind of diversity that we have in the team to be able to understand problems that one person may not have, but another person does.
I guess that's also why it's really important to understand at the VC level. Also, I think the more diversity varies in the team, the more diverse the teams we are going to invest in as well because there's kind of natural drive to invest in the people who have similar backgrounds.
I think there should be some time spent early on thinking, "do I want to do this or what?" Do you want to get in this game? Because as I said, venture capital has its pros and it has its cons. I suppose for some people, if you're a designer, you want the freedom over what you do. Going into this process is not necessarily going to be exactly like that ... at some point, you're going to have investors who are going to lend their voice.
You also want to surround yourself with the best people you know. It's an industry where, again, if you take a hundred companies, there's only one that's going to grow extremely, extremely big, that's going be hundreds of millions of dollars of potential value. If you really, really need to have the best people around you, you cannot just settle for people you know. It's about adding some people that you can really work with. One of the main reasons why companies fail is because at some point, people take sides. They don't agree on the vision and part of the team wants to leave...it's really trying to understand how you can work with people. Bringing the best people around you and making sure that you can work with those people.
Then it's really thinking about the market and focusing early on who the customer is instead of over designing products. It's really about what the issue is in this market. For example. I could design a very nice table and sell to companies. If I wanna do something in that space, what is the issue that people have? Then the market may be ... how do you create a table that allows people to better communicate? We sometimes see companies spend too much time on building parts, not having spent enough time trying to understand the customer. Making too many assumptions—like, "if I build this, everyone's gonna want it."
Lastly, you want to build something that you're passionate about. It's so hard. There are going to be so many setbacks. Every overnight success is usually a company that almost died five times. That ran out of money. When you have those one-on-one discussions with entrepreneurs, even solid companies, they always tell you about those times where they almost felt like it was not gonna work. It was gonna be too hard.
What I mean by that is that you're gonna have to be extremely, extremely determined. The only way you are gonna be determined to that point is if you are working on something that you're passionate about.
Watch more from the 2018 Core77 Conference:
Carly Ayres and Pedro Sanches of HAWRAF
Joseph Guerra and Sina Sohrab of Visibility Studio
A company named Altan Robotech (yes, that's their real name) is selling Giddel, a small robotic toilet cleaning device. You can let the device do its thing while you try to initiate hooking up with your partner. If you don't believe me, watch the video below:
Were I the director, I probably would have edited out the footage starting at the 0:15 mark.
In any case, while I appreciate that the designers came up with the little recharging dock for the object and thought about where it should live…
…I am critical of the Giddel itself's design.
Aside from the fact that it just looks like something that's going to break, the variety of surface transitions and forms make it look as if the object was designed over the phone. I'd want to see something that visually corresponded with the typically smooth shape of a toilet bowl, not something that looks like Marvin the Martian.
Tasked with designing this, what would you all have done differently?
I have a lot of respect for Austin Hodges, as he's one of those artists that produces good work, yet is grinding it out at a 9-to-5 to support himself. "I don't think I could ever make photography my career," Hodges told Messy Nessy. "I would lose interest in the fun of taking photos. My dream job is my current one. Working at Whole Foods as a maintenance employee [in West Philly]."
Hodges, whose Instagram profile reads "I will die with a smile on my face," takes photos of derelict structures in run-down sections of Philadelphia and Chester in Pennsylvania, as well as nearby Camden, New Jersey. His favorite are these standalone structures, which were once part of entire blocks and, in some cases, larger houses with half of them removed:
Check out more of his work, and/or support him by purchasing a print, here.
Last month we posted about what appeared to be a wondrous tool, the DOMOM Deburring Tool. We weren't the only ones to spot it/be suckered by it; following an extensive social media advertising campaign, DOMOM's product bought their way onto the radar of many, including a YouTube channel I've been watching, "Don the Small Engine Doctor." (His channel is a great place to learn about repairing and maintaining everything from chainsaws to cars to riding mowers.)
Don purchased the DOMOM tool to see if it really works. It doesn't. Here's why:
My first thought was that he started out running the drill too quickly to cut metal. I did the same with a screw extractor, and figured I'd ruined the cutting edges. In any case I found that tool useless as well.
If we give Don the benefit of the doubt, it appears the demo tool used in the company's video was a good deal sharper than what they actually ship.
Also, commenters on the original post mentioned the Uniburr, the deburring tool (successfully Kickstarted in 2014) that DOMOM appears to have knocked off.
Here's another YouTuber using the Uniburr, at what I believe is the correct speed:
Unfortunately his video contains a cut, so we cannot tell if he has cleaned up the bolts before attaching the nuts; but when he's drilling out the third bolt in particular, you can clearly see shavings coming off of it. So it appears that the Uniburr does the job.
We owe Uniburr an apology for overlooking them, and we hope DOMOM gets what's coming to them.
I was wandering around the Metropolitan Museum of Art when it occurred to me: nothing much has changed over the millennia.
Before the mid-seventeenth century, steel was not common. Craftsmen had a choice between expensive tools made of blister steel and iron tools that were case hardened to get a steel skin over an iron core. Moxon, writing in 1678, cautions the woodworker buying a saw to ensure that they buy one made of steel, not iron, because the steel ones were vastly superior. In the centuries before Moxon the situation was worse. Iron tools, bronze tools, crappy case hardened tools: none hold much of an edge. So it is quite obvious that pre-steel craftsmen were unable to build much of anything.
Just kidding.
The expression "A poor workman finds fault with the tools" is well known. The inverse situation comes to mind when considering the many superb Medieval (and earlier) craft works. How on earth was it possible to do this work with the tools of the day?
The relief carving above (now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art) comes from the castle of King Ashurnasirpal of Assyria and is almost 3000 years old. The gypsum alabaster stonework is precise, smooth, masterful and most certainly done without steel tools. The creators would have used bronze and some iron tools and lots of abrasive sand.
The issue turns out not to be that these early tools didn't work. Even working in copper and bronze you can hammer harden an edge and then use honing stones to get a sharp edge. The edge will work fine. What you can't do is work for a long time with that edge. It just doesn't last.
What was the solution?
Before steel and tungsten, stone masons would use a tool for a short time and then have it reforged sharp. You needed a steady supply of extra tools and a blacksmith close by to get anything done. Also essential: an assistant to ferry the tools back and forth so that you did not have to stop the flow of work.
Here's a question for you. If you are milling wood by hand, and you have a brilliantly sharp blade made from common carbon steel (O-1), how long would the blade last before you notice it's getting harder to push and might be starting to get dull? Same question for A2 or D2. I am going to suggest that the O-1 will be noticeably dull in 10 minutes; the A2 and D2 in double or triple that. (YMMV.) Since most of the time we need to plane for longer than that, we really have the exact same problem the ancient or medieval stone mason had. Tools get dull before the job is done.
Stopping work to sharpen is a drag. The whole work flow gets interrupted. Even worse, the tendency is to push the slightly dull plane blade until it is really dull and starts to tear out. Sawing takes longer. In the case of chisel usage, the chisel slips instead of cuts.
The simplest modern solution is exactly the same as the medieval or bronze age solution. Before the days of the Skilsaw, house carpenters had a till of saws -- both for the optimal match of saw to task and to have spares to grab when the first used saw grew dull. This solution applies very much to the modern shop. When I do any serious planing, the first thing I do is sharpen up all the plane irons I have. They don't all have to be brilliant or fancy, but they do have to work. I have a pile of extra blades of various provenance, plus I pull all the blades I can from similar sized planes. (#4, #5) (#4-1/2, #5-1/2, #6, #7) and get them ready. I also try to have as many as possible matched with a cap iron, although I don't have as many cap irons as I do blades. I go to town and the second I feel the blade getting dull, I swap it out. This way, I barely lose momentum and the work gets done. I think psychologically even if you have an iron that holds up for a long time, being able to swap it out for something sharp really reduces the chance of bad behavior and pushing a dull blade towards the end of the job.
We spend a lot of time today testing tools to find which keeps the longest edge. There are trade-offs in ease of sharpening, perceived sharpness, and cost. But in general, reviewers favor longer lasting edges made with alloys such as A2, D2 and PMV11, to name a few. Japanese woodworking tools have a reputation for considerable forging and correct hardening, which results in very long edge retention. But "longer edge retention" doesn't mean forever. I suggest that the next time you do some planing, have a spare iron ready to swap in. I think it will make your experience better.
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This "Tools & Craft" section is provided courtesy of Joel Moskowitz, founder of Tools for Working Wood, the Brooklyn-based catalog retailer of everything from hand tools to Festool; check out their online shop here. Joel also founded Gramercy Tools, the award-winning boutique manufacturer of hand tools made the old-fashioned way: Built to work and built to last.
Missed the 2018 Core77 Conference, "Now What? Launching and Growing Your Creative Business?" No worries! We're rolling out videos of the morning speakers over the next week to fill you in.
Through offering attainable pricing, same-day delivery, easy-assembly, transparent customer relationships and a dedication to great design, furniture company Floyd has been able to successfully create its own market within the longstanding furniture industry. Here, Floyd Co-Founders, Kyle Hoff and Alex O'Dell discuss how they are building a brand that continues to stay ahead of the game and tackle the problems of the typically painful processes of buying, assembling and moving furniture.
Watch more from the 2018 Core77 Conference:
Carly Ayres and Pedro Sanches of HAWRAF
Joseph Guerra and Sina Sohrab of Visibility Studio
Alexis Houssou of Hardware Club
