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Behind the Scenes at the Acura Design Studio

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This is a story about how Acura lost their way, then refocused on design to successfully reinvigorate the brand.

If you're a designer, a car fan or simply someone who follows the sector, we think you'll enjoy and/or learn from this look at what's been going on, behind the scenes, over at the Acura Design Studio. Roughly four years ago the company started making some major changes and now, with the recent release of the new RDX, have had their renewed focus on design validated by some startling sales numbers.

A full-size mockup of the RDX at the Acura Design Studio in Torrance, California

"What we've got going now," says longtime Acura designer and now VP/GM Jon Ikeda, "we know it works."

Back Story: A Rise and Fall (Warning: Boring Business Stuff Ahead)

When Acura introduced the RDX in 2006, they entered an uncrowded market segment: The entry-level, midsize luxury "crossover" SUV. The only real competitor was BMW's X3, which had dominated the segment for years, but which had begun a steady sales decline.

2006 Acura RDX

The RDX overtook the X3 within three years, even as the 2008 recession began gutting the car market. RDX sales increased each year following that, but there was no time to rest, as Audi's Q5 and Volvo's XC60 had jumped into the game.

By 2013 and 2014 the RDX had beat them all, leading the segment in sales. But in 2015, Audi's Q5 pulled just ahead. The following year, the news was worse: Lexus' NX, an even newer competitor than the Q5, was now in the lead.

More troubling was that Acura, as a brand, was starting to lose some of its luster. Three of the automaker's six offerings were sedans, a form factor that customers had begun abandoning. The company had taken a sales hit, as all car companies had, during the 2008-2010 recession; but while most of their competitors had bounced back to pre-recession sales figures, Acura had not.

What Went Wrong?

Parent company Honda's sales figures had bounced back after the recession. Because the two companies share mechanicals, Acura's malaise did not appear to be engineering-based. If a finger was going to be pointed, likely targets would be Design, or Sales & Marketing. The former was either not designing cars that people wanted to buy, or the latter was not doing a good enough job telling the stories of these cars to the target market.

So which was it? Car publications rarely criticize precise elements of marketing, but design criticism always flows freely. The design of Acura's interiors seemed to draw particular fire; here's Car & Driver in 2015 commenting on Acura's TLX, the mid-sized luxury sedan that debuted the previous year: "The instrument panel's small, pixelated information screen already looks dated…Acura's two-tiered center displays are busy, redundant, and distracting in use."

Here's Road & Trackon the same: "The multiple interfaces
render the entire infotainment system confusing, made worse by illogical menus, inscrutable controls, and redundant displays. We suspect you'll get used to it over time, but the system is overly distracting and just a pain to use."

They were even more unsparing with the exterior design: "The TLX's styling is less love-it-or-hate-it and more…adequate…. The car comes across as rather bland.

"As usual, Acura excels at making a very good car, but doesn't deliver a slam-dunk on the desirability scale…. The one thing this car needs more than anything else is some gotta-have-it factor. And a name badge that won't confuse its customers."

That last sentence refers to Acura's controversial "beak" grille shown below:

It had begun appearing on cars across the brand in 2009, and a vocal subset of Acura fanatics hated it. One particularly brutal thread circa 2012 on the r/cars/ subReddit was titled "If Acura wants to succeed, they need to fire the lead designer who introduced this god forsaken design theme for the front/rear of their cars...aka the beak." The tone was rather shrill:

"WHY don't they realize that they offer AMAZING tech for the price but they are just so damn ugly and bland on the outside that everyone just moves to Audi, Infiniti, and even Cadillac now?"

Even local newspapers in Ohio, where Honda/Acura have four factories, were worried about an Acura decline, which would impact the local economy. In 2016 the Columbus Dispatch had an article called "Acura hopes design changes boost sluggish sales", writing:

"Analysts say Acura's main problem is that its sport-utility vehicle sales have not risen nearly enough to counterbalance the drop for sedans. This is on top of the long-running criticism of the luxury brand -- that it does not have a clear-enough identity.

"'Acura has always struggled with its brand, what it stands for,' said Michelle Krebs, a senior analyst for AutoTrader.com."

The paper asked Acura PR Manager Matt Sloustcher to comment. "Of course, we're never content with things," said Sloustcher, adding:

"This is a long-term game. Over the past year, we've put into place long-term, fundamental building blocks."

So what were those building blocks? On a trip to the Acura Design Studio, we got to find out. Some of these remedial steps were to be expected, but others were surprising. We'll start with one of the surprises, which involves longtime Acura designer Jon Ikeda.

Ikeda was instrumental in many of the brand's successes. And he was known not only for his design skills, but for having opinions--and not being afraid to share them, particularly in defense of the design department.

Jon Ikeda

The Outspoken Designer

The meeting wasn't going well. In a conference room, Jon Ikeda and a group of his fellow designers are sitting across from a group of executives, most of them "engine guys" who came up through the ranks from the engineering side. And they're ripping into Ikeda's team. We don't like this; we don't like that; the wheels are no good; forget this color, why isn't this blue?

"Maybe we should get a head designer from outside," one executive suggests.

Ikeda absorbs the insult and doesn't fire back right away, but waits in the pocket. Eventually the talk turns, as he knew it would, to where horsepower and fuel economy could be improved.

"Maybe we should get some engines from outside," he suggests.

The execs go silent.

To the other designers, it's as if Ikeda did this:

Ma(ve)rek

There wasn't much doubt that Jon Ikeda, California kid and car nut, would become a car designer. It was just a question of where he would work. When he graduated from ArtCenter in 1989, job options were clear-cut, and all in Detroit: "You worked for the Big Three," he remembers. "Depending on where you ranked in the class, you either worked for the big guy, the middle guy or the third guy."

Following an earlier internship, Ikeda had lined up a coveted job with General Motors. "Everything was locked and loaded," he remembers. But 1989 was a weird year, for at least two reasons: One, the bestselling car that year wasn't from Detroit. For the first time in U.S. history, the award went to the Honda Accord, a Japanese car. (Ikeda didn't know that at the time; 1989 sales figures wouldn't be tallied until '90.)

The second weird thing: Dave Marek, his hotshot classmate and buddy from ArtCenter, who had graduated two years earlier and had the talent to land a job wherever he wanted, was now working at Honda. "I couldn't understand it," Ikeda says.

Marek's last name might as well have been pronounced with a "ve" after the first two letters. "He was always pushing the action," Ikeda remembers. "He was this great guy with a huge persona and he did things really differently." Even so, Ikeda was puzzled: Why would Marek go to Japan when he could've gone to Detroit?

The answer was in an experimental facility in Tokyo's Ginza district. Marek had been lured by a new type of studio Honda had launched there, called Wave. Prior to Wave, Honda's design process was bewildering to ArtCenter guys like Marek and Ikeda: "They find the one guy that draws the best, and he teaches everybody to draw the exact same way. 'Same is good,' that was the culture."

The Wave Studio was meant to break that culture by, well, making some waves. Marek could only do so many cannonballs into the design pool by himself, so made some phone calls to L.A. for backup. "I knew every student at ArtCenter," Marek recalls, "so I picked four guys, and Jon was the top. His work was so cool, he was so opinionated, and he loved racing." (Honda had been heavily involved in Formula One since the 1960s.)

Ikeda already had the GM job in hand, but Marek persisted. "Just gimme one month over here, before you go to General Motors," he urged.

Ikeda figured a month over there couldn't hurt, and cleared it with GM first. "Yeah, go, go, go," Ikeda remembers them saying. "See what they're doing over there." GM probably figured they'd get some free intel on what Honda was up to, if they just waited 30 days for Ikeda to return.

Instead, 30 days turned into 30 years. Ikeda never left Honda.

Wave Hello

He didn't think he'd stay. Initially Ikeda found the Wave Studio "a special place, but I still wasn't convinced." Plus Tokyo was very expensive to live in, and Ikeda had a ton of school debt he wanted to clear up. As his 30 days were drawing to a close, Ikeda's bags were packed.

Honda, however, had seen enough of Ikeda's skills to know they didn't want to lose him. "You don't want to work anywhere else," the company told him, "you want to work here." The Jedi mind trick didn't work.

Then Honda figured out how to get to him. "The week I was supposed to leave, there happened to be a Formula One event," Ikeda remembers. "They gave me a ticket, so I went to the race.

"I'm there, and I'm watching [Ayrton] Senna and [Alain] Prost from the corner of the pits, and the Honda guys put a bright red team jacket around my shoulders. And then they ran the cars.

Formula One fans: A young Jon Ikeda happened to witness the historic Race 15 of the 1989 Formula One World Championship, where Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost battled it out in McLarens powered by Honda V-10s. A record-breaking 20 different manufacturers were competing. Prost ended up winning the 1989 Driver's Championship, while Honda-powered McLaren won the Constructor's Championship. With 10 first-place finishes in 16 races, it wasn't even close--McLaren-Honda had 141 points, whereas 2nd-place finisher Williams-Renault had just 77.

"And I realized, at that point, why teenage girls used to faint at Beatles concerts. You get all teary-eyed, you don't understand why, but you have to sit down.

"Right at that moment, the Honda guys hand me the papers: 'Sign right here, my friend.' I signed the papers."

"The Human Embodiment of Acura"

Ikeda spent the next six years in Japan, working on the award-winning Honda FSX show car, as well as the Acura RL, the brand's flagship luxury sedan and successor to the Acura Legend.

1991 Honda FSX concept

In '95 he was relocated to Honda R&D Americas in L.A., where he steadily worked his way up to Chief Designer and Division Director. Still split between brands, he served as the design lead for both the 2001 Honda Civic Coupe and the 2004 Acura TL, the brand's bestselling car to date.

In 2004, Ikeda's focus was narrowed to just Acura. In 2005, Honda canceled the NSX, a blow to the Acura brand. Ikeda didn't take it lying down and in 2006, pushed hard for the company to grant Acura a standalone design facility, which he likens to a sibling finally getting his own bedroom. The brass acquiesced and the Acura Design Studio came into existence in 2007, under Ikeda's leadership. (And at 49,500 square feet, it's quite the bedroom.)

Acura Design Studio, ground floor

Ikeda oversaw the Acura Advanced Sports Car Concept that debuted that year, allowing a young but talented designer named Patrick Lukasak to run with it. "So here's this kid just two years out of design school," Ikeda told Automobile Magazine, "and he comes up with this sketch and we're looking at it, and we decide this has all the stuff we're talking about. So we put [him together with master clay modeler Billy Yex] and let them do their thing." (Stay tuned for coverage on how Acura's stylists and clay modelers work together to develop concepts.)

Acura's Advanced Sports Car Concept, 2007

Acura's Advanced Sports Car Concept, 2007

Acura's Advanced Sports Car Concept, 2007

The Advanced Sports Car Concept was expected to manifest as the resurrected NSX. Sadly, the recession hit the following year, and the second coming of the NSX was shelved.

When the economy began to recover and the NSX re-entered internal discussions several years later, "Ikeda was instrumental in naming Michelle Christensen as the exterior designer of the upcoming NSX," Automotive News reported. Christensen became the first female designer in history to pen a supercar.

2016 NSX and exterior designer Michelle Christensen

2016 NSX

2016 NSX

Ikeda didn't cut Lukasak and Christensen in because he was doing them a favor; he did it because they had the talent. This was a management hallmark of both Ikeda and Marek, and it apparently trickled down from their career-long experiences with the company. (Marek had risen through the ranks since '87 and was promoted to Acura Executive Creative Director in 2014.) "Honda has embraced me, and not tried to make me something else," Marek said in an interview with Canada's Wheels. "If you work hard and you do good work, you grow up in the company. Then you permeate it back to the people who work for you. You trust them and let them do what they do.

"I don't want to hire a bunch of people and tell them what to do. I want them to create what they want to create, and I will guide them. Otherwise, every car would be mine, and what's the point of that?"

Designing cars is a complicated business, and even star designers aren't any good, in Marek and Ikeda's eyes, unless they can form a constellation. Ikeda reinforced to his team that they needed to rely on each other. "As we tell any kid that walks into the studio, you're only as good as the modeler who makes it," he told Automobile. "And we tell the modeler that you're only as good as the guy who makes the data off your skin. And we tell the skin guy that you're only as good as the fabricator who makes the car off your skin data. Everyone understands in our studio, that there's not a lot of me, mine, I."

Many years earlier a Formula-One-stirred Ikeda, his brand new team jacket smelling of exhaust fumes, had signed employment papers with Honda. Roughly 26 years later, Kelley Blue Book senior analyst Karl Brauer told Automotive News: "You could argue Ikeda's the human embodiment of Acura."

Even so, in 2015 Ikeda's "not a lot of me, mine, I" commitment was about to be put to the test. At the time, the company brass was beginning to put some of those long-term building blocks that Sloutscher had mentioned into place. One of them would throw Ikeda for a loop.

The Phone Call

Honda had a lot of enlightened principles when it came to design management. But as with any organization, conflict is inevitable. Sometimes there's "an internal strife that you go through, to get to something great," Marek says, just after telling us the anecdote about Ikeda suggesting outside engines. Ikeda "wasn't afraid to be a loud voice."

Marek says those things with admiration. Ikeda's contributions to the brand were incalculable, and when he'd pipe up during meetings, it wasn't to create dissent; it was to defend design, and specifically Acura within its parent company's massive umbrella. "We are a product-based company. We make a lot of things, from lawnmowers to jets," Ikeda says. "Part of that is Acura. But, as all things start to become equal, it becomes more and more important for the brand to stand up: What do you stand for?

"This is critical," he continues. "Even if you're Apple, you don't come up with the iPhone every day, and you know others could start making things that are very similar. So what do you stand for?"

One of Ikeda's key gripes was the disconnect between design and marketing. His team would work hard on something for years, sweating every last design detail, only to see the resultant product mis-marketed at the end, presented as something else. "When we make something, I know what we're doing in design. I know what the designers are trying to do. But by the time it comes out, sometimes on the selling end, there's this disconnect, where the marketing doesn't represent what we were trying to do."

"To a designer or engineer that's working on these products for four or five years, that's your kid. You raise this kid, then time comes to hand the kid off to the sales guy--'Please take care of my kid, please represent him the way we raised him.' Then all of a sudden, they dress him up in another pair of clothes and send him off to do something different, and you're like 'What are you doing?' And now the kid's lost."

"That's what I started complaining about," Ikeda says, "probably too loudly."

The result: One day in 2015, Ikeda got an ominous phone call. An assistant informed him that the CEO wanted to talk to him. And not at the Design Center, but over at Studio 8, where Sales and Marketing was based.

This was irregular. Ikeda asked what all of this was about. No one knew. "You better go talk to them," his boss at R&D said.

Studio 8

At the appointed day and time, Ikeda reported for the meeting.

"Basically, they felt the brand was at a loss, and they were making some changes," Ikeda says. The brass knew he had issues with the sales and marketing side. They also knew he was passionate about the brand. So they presented him with a way to reconcile these things, for the betterment of the company.

In Ikeda's words, here's the gist of what he was told:

"Think you can do better with Sales and Marketing? Then come over and do it."

Ikeda was being promoted--out of design. His new job title would be Acura Vice President and General Manager. That encompassed sales, marketing, service, dealer relations, all fields he had no experience with.

He was stunned. "I've done no sales," he pointed out. "I don't know any of this stuff."

"Don't worry, we'll put people in place to help you with all of that," the company told him. "We need you to refocus the brand."

If Ikeda wasn't crazy about leaving design behind, he couldn't fail to see that it would be beneficial to inject consistency, from a designer's standpoint, into the long process of creating a car and getting a customer behind the steering wheel. Ikeda spoke design. He was design. He knew what the other designers wanted to do. With him in charge of the business end, there would be no danger that a designer's original intent would become diluted or misrepresented by marketers that didn't speak design. It was a personal sacrifice that he couldn't deny would benefit the brand and, at the end of the day, be better for his fellow designers.

"And if things aren't working, and you've got to think your way out of it," Ikeda reasoned, "you're probably better off getting creative people involved."

Ikeda moved his things to his new office at Studio 8.

Acura's Precision Concept: "The North Star"

Acura's Precision Concept, 2016

Meanwhile, Marek and his team were shoring things up on the design side. The mission was "returning Acura to its roots as Precision Crafted Performance," says Marek, invoking the company slogan. "And design is critical to that. We recognized the need to infuse more emotion into our designs."

The Christensen-penned NSX revamp debuted in 2016, checking the emotive-design box. (If you haven't seen the car in person, we recommend making it a point--2D doesn't do it justice. Walk around the car, study it up close. It's stunning.) Acura had their halo car back. But this was just one of the building blocks in the company's strategy, not the end goal.

A six-figure supercar would lure curious masses into the dealership, and several hundred hotshots would buy them each year, no problem; but what Acura ultimately needed was five-figure cars that five figures worth of people would drive home from the dealership in. And these five-figure cars needed to share DNA with the NSX in order to make the sales feasible.

Replicating that DNA would take time, but Marek and his team knew how they'd get started. "The Precision Concept," he explains, "is our North Star. We aim at this."

Revealed the same year as the new NSX, Acura's Precision Concept, also penned by Christensen, was a socks-knocker that debuted at the Detroit Auto Show.

The Precision Concept

The Precision Concept

The Precision Concept

The Precision Concept

It was bold. It was emotive. It was surprising. And the press' reaction to it, illustrating the common perception of Acura at the time, was a remarkably consistent series of backhanded compliments.

- "Acura has been struggling to keep up with Lexus and Infiniti," said Top Speed. "The fact that [Acura's lineup consists of] rather bland corporate design, limited body styles, and a couple of engines didn't help either. But, that may change soon, as the brand just previewed its next design language with a bold looking concept car at the 2016 Detroit Auto Show."

- "If you've been concerned about where Acura was headed, you're not alone. The company has struggled lately," wrote Road & Track. "Part of it has had to do with some unfortunate styling decisions that have been made…. The Precision Concept is what Acura hopes will change all of that."

- "A bold step," wrote Car and Driver, "for a brand teetering on irrelevancy."

Perhaps Acura's designers absorbed the insults, as Ikeda did at that meeting, and waited for their chance to fire off a comeback. One with four wheels.

Back to the Grille Again

Here's the older "beak" grille that had drawn such ire from fans:

Here's the new "diamond pentagon" grille on the Precision Concept:

This should be a transportation design school lesson. While there are myriad minor changes, the major gestural change, which was rotating those two outer lines in towards the center, pulling the headlights with it, completely changes the expression. And gone is the faux-metal, silver plastic band. Instead the emblem floats over a grille made up of dark diamonds radiating outwards from the center. In person the effect is cool, like you're looking at the corner of an anechoic chamber.

Diamond pentagon grille on a 2019 RDX

As a first practical step, the Precision's new grille design was subsequently facelifted into all of the cars in Acura's line-up. (This yielded forum posts from Acura fans like this one: "Hi guys, I have a 2016 ILX with the company's shield grille and was wondering if the new 2019 diamond pentagon grille is a direct fit. Any help would be most appreciated.")

Diamond pentagon grille across the line-up

The grille swap was a positive step forward, but admittedly a minor one. What Acura needed, and wanted, was to produce a full vehicle, from the ground up, that lived up to the promise of the Precision Concept.

Building Blocks Lined Up with Precision

The Precision wasn't a mere design study. "That's not the role of this vehicle," Marek explains. "It's not just a show car. It's also internal PR. This concept sets the direction for the future of our design. [It exists so that] internally, everyone understands and supports the direction."

The Precision Concept

The Precision Concept

Moving forward, every concept sketch, every clay model, every spline would be held up against the Precision Concept. If it aligned, thumbs-up, keep it going; if it didn't, pull out a fresh sheet of paper, put the clay back in the oven, go to File and click New.

Every once in a while you'll see a movie where the city it's set in--usually New York or Los Angeles--is said to be its own character within that movie. Similarly Acura's Design Studio, as much as the individual designers inhabiting it, played a role in what happened next.

"So we have three studios [under Honda's umbrella] in southern California: The Honda Studio; an advanced design studio in downtown L.A.; and us, the Acura Design Studio, where you're standing," Marek says. "We're the only studio in California that has every aspect of design. In this building we do product planning, we do concept, we figure out who the customer is, we do styling.

"We do development all the way through; once [the brass] commits we don't toss the sketches over the wall and say 'build that.' Instead we literally follow the car through every step, staying involved through the physical development, feasibility, working with engineers, everything."

Given the L.A. location, the studio also has access to the best students and graduates from Ikeda and Marek's nearby alma mater, ArtCenter. "We've got a lot of people from a lot of great schools," Marek says, "but ArtCenter is where most of our designers hail from."

And now we see what the building blocks that Sloutscher mentioned to the Ohio newspaper were:

- The Acura Design Studio, led by Marek, is staffed with top talent and has the facilities to develop a car from start-to-finish.
- Ikeda, a designer, is in charge of Acura's business end. Design has their full support.
- The NSX serves as the halo, building brand awareness and getting people to the dealerships.
- The Precision Concept has provided the direction for a new line of vehicles.

Now all they needed to do was execute. The first Acura model scheduled for a re-boot was the RDX, Acura's well-selling but beleaguered-by-competition crossover. The stakes were high. If they screwed this up, they'd lose market share in what had become one of their most important segments.

For the next several years, Acura's designers hunkered down to create an all-new RDX. And for the first time, it would be decoupled from Honda's CR-V platform; the RDX would be its own vehicle.

The car design process has multiple steps, which are all too involved to cover in this article; we'll look at them in detail with the next series of entries, debuting later this week. In the meanwhile, let's look at what Acura's designers emerged from the studio with.

The Redesigned RDX

Marek and his team had done it. Transposing DNA from a sports sedan onto an SUV form factor is not an easy task, but if we look at these shots below, comparing the Precision Concept to the RDX, we can see the spirit and gestures that the design team successfully replicated:

Despite the difference in proportions between the two vehicles, the spirit, the emotion, the character lines are all there. One of the most daring risks the designers took, and in my opinion pulled off, was the C/D pillar on the RDX, preserving the gesture of the Precision's fastback while still providing the proper roof of an SUV. And enough of the cross-contouring from the Precision was ported to the RDX that, if you were blindfolded and running your hands over scale clay models of the two, I believe your fingers would instantly recognize the similarities--and indeed might have a little trouble telling them apart.

That's just my opinion. But what did the automotive press have to say? Here's Road & Track commenting on the redesign:

"The new Acura RDX nails it.

"Behold the exterior. Prismatic, angular, and sleek, the RDX is a handsome, sometimes striking SUV—tidy like a Nakamichi receiver and as Japanese as a Gundam robot. It's not self-consciously restrained like rivals from the Continent. Even the handsome Volvo XC60 looks uneventful by comparison."

"The all-new 2019 [RDX] may be made from the perfect recipe," wrote Automobile Magazine, "to stand out from the rest of the luxury CUV segment. Our tester, in A-Spec trim and deep Performance Red Pearl is a sharp looker to defy the sameness of its rivals….

"The interior design continued the exterior's crisp and sporty lines. Fit and finish was impeccable and the ergonomics were just right."

Ikeda and his team had done it, too. As soon as it hit the market, the RDX posted startling debut figures, beating every other vehicle in its class. As The Drivereported, italics theirs: "The 2019 RDX— the vanguard of a new generation of Acura models—has exploded out of the gate. In June, its opening month in showrooms, the new RDX outsold every compact luxury SUV in America, its 7,292 sales smoking even the Mercedes-Benz GLC-Class, with its 6,608 units moved. The RDX also enjoyed the best sales month of any Acura SUV in history, and the most buyers for any Acura model since the TL sedan in April 2006."

Ikeda may not like charts and graphs, but he probably loved this one.

Competition in this segment is fierce, and from month-to-month the top sales crown changed hands several times after June. But by the end of 2018, the RDX had racked up annual sales figures of 63,580, versus 51,295 in 2017, and about the same for the previous two years. This appreciable increase of 12,285 units was in spite of the fact that the car had been launched mid-year; had it debuted in January of 2018, the figures would likely have been even higher.

We'll have to wait until 2019 is through to see how a full year of sales with the new model will turn out; but in February of 2019, the most recent month for which complete sales statistics were available at press time, the RDX had again topped the segment.

Acura had the hit that they needed and wanted. The building blocks had been Spocked into place, and the design team had Kirked their way to a design-affirming victory. This wasn't an easy process but, as Ikeda said up top, Acura can be confident that what they've got going now, works.

____________________________

Up Next: What does Acura got going now? At the Acura Design Studio, we take a look at the six design departments all responsible for the redesigned RDX. Stay tuned!





For Brooke Davis, Craftsmanship is Where CNC Meets Handwork 

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Texas-based designer Brooke Daviscontinues to "push the boundary of CNC as a tool" with her latest designs, including a quilted nightstand with a perfectly plush tufted surface made out of wood.

Davis brings her background in fine art to her design practice and uses digital tools to push the forms she can achieve and impart a sculptural feel. Her process involves sculpting in clay, digitally modeling in the computer, and prototyping with a CNC machine until the design is finalized. While the CNC plays a big part in the production process, Davis always finishes her work by hand, often sanding for up to 100 hours to get the right feel.

"To me, furniture is a great conduit for exploration, as you can quickly meet the functional requirements of a piece and move on to the more exciting challenges of what the object looks and feels like," she says. "I find a lot of inspiration in the human figure, automotive styling, and nature and using subtle influences to create forms that are meant to be felt."

Davis's newest pieces, the Pilo nightstand and Flicka chair will be shown at WantedDesign in May, after having previously participated in their Launch Pad program.


Design Job: Standard International is Seeking a Design Development Manager in New York, NY

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Responsible for supporting the Design Department in creating space planning studies, plan layouts and design drawings, design briefs, design presentations and 3D studies as needed. Instrumental in supporting team in all project management tasks. Job Duties: Responsible for assisting the Design Department

View the full design job here

Meet Anton Lorenz, the Man Who Brought Tubular Steel Furniture and Reclining Chairs to the Masses

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To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus this year, Vitra Design Museum is highlighting the work of a lesser-known yet key figure, the entrepreneur and designer Anton Lorenz who helped bring the promise of tubular steel furniture to life. The exhibition at Vitra Schaudepot in Weil am Rhein, Germany, titled "Anton Lorenz: From Avant-Garde to Industry," looks at Lorenz's legacy as the man behind the Bauhaus' "machined aesthetic." It traces his career, following him from Germany to the United States where he deployed his interest in ergonomics to develop some of the most popular reclining chairs in American furniture design history.

Anton Lorenz on a chair with a pillar made from glass (experiment), 1938/39

Lorenz was born in Budapest in 1891 and was teaching history and geography in a secondary school by 1913. Further details about his early life are unclear. He married an opera singer and they moved to Germany after she received a job in Leipzig, where he continued his teaching career. Somehow, he entered the lock manufacturing business and they relocated to Berlin in the early 1920s.

Smoking area in the day room of Anton Lorenz's Berlin apartment, 1932

Cover of the Standardmo¨bel catalogue, 1927

In Berlin, Lorenz met fellow Hungarians and architects Marcel Breuer and Kalman Lengyel, who were both associated with the Bauhaus in Dessau. In 1925, Marcel Breuer became the first designer to construct furniture out of tubular steel and he joined forces with Lengyel to found the manufacturing firm Standard Möbel in 1927 as a way of developing his tubular steel designs. Before long, Lorenz became the manager at Standard Möbel where he used his business savvy to aggressively pursue patents and establish a network of rights of use for the new tubular steel furniture. He went on to do the same for Desta and Thonet and began to dominate the growing industry.

Photo from a test series at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institute for Labor Physiology , Dortmund, 1938

Alongside this work, he showed a keen interest in ergonomic design, an area that was gaining popularity at that time. In the early 1930s, architect Hans Luckhardt was developing a slatted wooden chaise longue that allowed users to go from a slight to a full reclining position, and Lorenz funded extensive research at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (now Max Planck) to support the design. To determine the precise angles of the body's relaxed position, he had subjects sit in tanks of salt water and photographed their legs. Luckhardt's final design went on to become the popular Siesta Medizinal for Thonet, a version of which was used in German military hospitals.

Look what Barcalo has done for TV viewers..., brochure by Barcalo, not dated

The chair a man can call his own... brochure by Futorian on the Stratolounger, 1967

Stratolounger 6100, (demonstration model with plexiglass relaxing position), ca. 1960

In 1939, Lorenz emigrated to the United States and established a now ubiquitous furniture typology: the adjustable recliner, a beloved centerpiece in living rooms across the country. In the USA, Lorenz again collaborated with many companies and profited from the increasing interest in comfortable, informal furniture that reflected the growing presence of television and aspirations toward leisure. He developed his own design, the BarcaLounger, in 1940, which became one of the most successful products in the history of American furniture design, and later partnered with Chicago upholsterer Morris Futorian to create the Stratolounger.

Model for the visualization of the mechanism of a moving chair, fabricated on the occasion of a lawsuit Lorenz versus Berkline, 1963

The new exhibition is the first to take a deeper look at Lorenz's vast career, which has mostly been mired in some well-known court cases and copyright scandals. Vitra Design Museum acquired the archives of Lorenz's estate in 1989 and now, for the first time, the museum is presenting important documents from this collection alongside furniture designs by Marcel Breuer, Mart Stam, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe as well as pieces by Lorenz himself, to show a behind-the-scenes look at how he adapted Bauhaus designs to have broad appeal.

"He lived for his wife and his chairs," Lorenz's lawyer once said.

"It becomes clear that the breakthrough of modern furniture did not solely result from ingenious designs," note the exhibition curators. "Equally important were companies, legal cases, patents, manufacturing methods – and innovators like Anton Lorenz, who merged all of these aspects to bring the ideas of the avant-garde to as many people as possible."

"Anton Lorenz: From Avant-Garde to Industry" is on view through May 19, 2019.


Dror Benshetrit is Joining We Company as Co-Founder of New Smart Cities Initiative

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After recently expanding into co-living with WeLive and education with WeGrow, the We Company—formerly known as WeWork—has announced it will also be launching a smart cities program, led by former Waze executive Di-Ann Eisnor and designer, futurist and 2018 Core77 Design Awards Jury Captain Dror Benshetrit.

Together the two will "build a team of engineers, architects, data scientists, and biologists who will work to fuse nature, design, technology, and community in our cities in order to measurably improve the lives of citizens," Benshetrit told us in an email announcement. This work will be a natural extension of the ideas-driven projects he's pursued with Studio Dror over the years, which include the design of an island in Turkey, a masterplan of the first self-driving car neighborhood in Canada, an art installation that recreates the feeling of standing on the moon, and a new lightbulb concept.

Studio Dror's 2012 Havvada Island in Turkey

Studio Dror's proposal for Holland Park in New York City

This news comes just a few months after Benshetrit launched a new practice, SUPERNATURE Labs, with a focus on creating structures that collaborate with nature. "One of the biggest problems that I see in architecture today is the fact that it's either urban or natural," he explained in an interview last year. "What we set out to do with this practice is to work on new ways architectural systems can incorporate soil and nature within them and allow for people and vegetation." To find these new ways of living together with nature, the practice seeks to act as a catalyzing agent. Benshetrit envisions local teams of people forming Supernature Labs around the world and bringing together their local and collective knowledge to address problems of globalization and climate change in our cities.

Studio Dror's Montreal Dome on île Sainte-Héléne

Studio Dror's proposal for Parque de la Innovación in Buenos Aires, Argentina

Since launching in 2010, We has collected an enormous amount of data on how people work and live and has been using that information to shape more than 600 co-working spaces. Not only has the company recently expanded into co-living spaces, schools, and wellness centers, in the past two years it has also acquired an extensive portfolio of software companies. In 2017, We bought Meetup, a platform for getting groups together—and along with it over 18-years worth of data. In 2018 We acquired Teem, a workplace analytics company that measures how workers use conference rooms and already this year it acquired Euclid, a startup that maps how people move through physical spaces.

The $47 billion company will use the spatial data and tools drawn from these acquisitions as it strives to develop a smart city. As others have noted, We occupies an interesting space to tackle this project: a technology-driven real estate company ready to bring together design, construction, data, security, and customer experience expertise to achieve its vision of connecting cities and people.

It will be interesting to see how Benshetrit pushes this agenda through his more holistic approach. "Creativity has tremendous power of solving the world's biggest problems," he notes. But "a lot of time we're looking more at data and analyzing data and studying a certain pattern; sometimes those are not necessarily the only places to look at."



A Look at Six Car Design Specialties, Part 1: The Stylist

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"Just imagine being able to take a thousand different bits of metal; and if you fit them all together in a certain way, and then if you feed them a little oil and petrol; and if you press a little switch; suddenly those bits of metal will all come to life. And they will purr and hum and roar. They will make the wheels of a motor-car go whizzing round at fantastic speeds…."

That quote is from Roald Dahl's book Danny, the Champion of the World, where the young car-nut protagonist recounts his father's description of engines as "sheer magic."

A car engine is indeed a miraculous thing. So is the team of human beings that, like those thousand different bits of metal, must all fit together in order to create the car that surrounds the engine.

At the Acura Design Studio we were granted an in-depth look at how all of the different design departments contributed to the creation of their winning RDX. For the design student that's thinking about pursuing Transportation Design, this series should be an indispensable read. And if you're a fan of car design or industrial design, you'll enjoy this look at how an impossibly complicated multi-year design process all plays out.

We'll start with Randall Smock, the designer Acura tasked with translating the Precision Concept's spirit into the new RDX. As mentioned in the first article in this series, Smock would use the Precision as the "North Star" to navigate towards the final design.

Core77: Can you describe your position?

Randall Smock: I'm the exterior design leader for the RDX. I've been with Acura for 18 years and had the chance to work on a bunch of stuff, but my biggest project so far is the RDX.

What led you down the path of becoming a car designer?

Growing up in Arizona, I was always around cars. My father was a wholesale dealer, so he'd buy and sell cars constantly. It seemed like every day he'd pick me up from school in a different car. So I was really exposed to a lot of different types of designs and different brands.

More importantly, over time I could see how cars changed--although they were considered the same model. For example, I'd see a Corvette, and walk around it--"Okay, this is a Corvette"--and three or four years later, see the new model and ask "Why is it still a Corvette even though it's changed?" So I learned about this idea of DNA in styling.

And then you decided to study car design?

I actually didn't know that there was such a thing as car design. I knew that there was engineering, but not the idea of car styling.

When I was a sophomore in high school, we had to write a letter to a major company for an English class assignment. I wrote to GM and said, "Hey, I like Corvettes. I like cars. I like to draw…."

They actually replied back to me, with a lot of information--but most importantly, a list of schools that offered industrial design and specifically transportation design. That led me to ArtCenter College of Design here in Pasadena.

So being in Arizona, it was a quick flight to L.A. I came out with my mom. We saw the student gallery and I saw quarter-scale models. I saw hand drawn renderings and my mind snapped. I said, "This is it. This what I'm going to do. This is me, I can tell." So I had to finish high school, obviously, and went to junior college a little bit, and then made the switch to L.A. to go to ArtCenter.

Both ArtCenter and the Acura Design Studio are in Los Angeles. To what extent does the locale influence your work?

We're very accustomed to seeing premium cars and high-end sports cars every day here, and that's really inspirational--but it also gives you a craving, where you think "Okay, I've seen it. What else? What's next?" So it kind of drives your creativity.

What was your assignment with the RDX?

We were given the challenge to take the Precision Concept and apply it to an SUV--a daunting task, because the Precision Concept is a sports sedan and the RDX is an SUV; very different proportions. So we had to dig deep and identify that DNA that I was talking about, and fortunately the Precision Concept has very solid DNA.

During the RDX design process, the full-size mock-up of the Precision Concept was kept in the studio for all of the designers to refer to.

We wanted to think of this as a "sports sedan utility vehicle." So "SSUV" was an internal tagline that we used for it. We wanted to keep the sweeping cabin, keep the cross-contour surfacing from the Precision Concept. But to apply those things to an SUV, you have to have a really solid foundation. So that means the design has to be wheel- and fender-centric. All of the sculpting needs to sit very well on the wheels to make it look capable.

Smock's Precision-based rendering for the RDX.

Smock's Precision-based rendering for the RDX.

This mock-up [we're standing in front of] is what we would use later in the process. After we worked out all the feasibility numbers, we would build this, show our executives and say, "This is what we can make. We're ready to go if you can approve this." And they did, obviously.

This is the full-size mockup Smock refers to in the paragraph above. In person, it is virtually indistinguishable from the real thing.

[Editor's note: At this point Smock takes us around the mock-up, pointing out details and explaining the design decisions. Below, we'll insert photos of a production model and attempt to use images that correspond with Smock's talk.]

This is our achievement of taking the Precision Concept and applying it to an SUV platform. Starting with the prominent "diamond pentagon" grille. We had released [the grille] to the public already in the MDX, mid-cycle, but this time we could design the whole car with this in mind.

You can see the car really grows from this grill, whether it's the lines in the hood going from the corners, or the way that the jewel-eye headlights sweep and take your eyes from the center to across the car.

The daytime running light actually sets right on the fender to accentuate the stance.


Everything's a connecting device taking you around the car, and that leads you [around the side of the body] into this dance of lines, that cross-contouring that we were talking about.

Here's the fender line appearing and disappearing, the strong character line of the body side bisecting it, and then going above the rear fender. So everything's planted on the wheels.

Just like on the front with the headlights, the taillights nestle very well between these character lines and continue that motion around, and this kind of leads us to what we're calling the "dragon tail" taillight.

Early on in the development we actually didn't have this [design for the taillight], we were trying to be very avant garde with it and [have the light end abruptly], but it kind of disrupted the flow and we wanted to keep that motion going. So we brought the taillight across, onto the lid. We made a literal point, a dragon tail shape, to be that final exclamation to the statement that started from the front of the car.

We're all very proud of this, and it's doing very well [sales-wise]. We were confident with the design, and now the sales are proving the public loves it. I love it, I just got one a week ago in the white A-spec [trim]. It feels great to have been a part of it--but also to own it and experience it.

What role does manufacturability play in the design process? Do practical concerns force you into compromises?

The idea is that we want to take that [awareness of manufacturability] and design that into it, rather than recklessly designing something so super sleek that there's no chance it's going to get made. It's about pushing those limits: "How far can we push this, but still have everything be doable?

We do come into challenges, but we fight, we push. At one point we needed to heighten the bumper beam [for safety reasons] in the front fascia. It took a while to do that [and maintain the design], but we were persistent, we said, "We've got to keep this aggressive sculpted front end." We made it work.

Can you talk about how materials can influence design choices or options?

Sure, it depends on the materials you're using, of course, steel versus aluminum, and obviously plastics open up a lot of opportunities. For example, this is a completely resin tailgate, so we could make this whole thing in one piece. Usually you'll see a lot of cars where, in the back here, they'll have some kind of chrome trim or there's an extra line in here, because it's half-plastic and half-metal [necessitating a seam or cover-up]. This is all one piece of plastic so we can eliminate that, keep it really clean, more like the back end of an NSX. We wanted that performance car feeling and to get all of that sculpting. We couldn't get some of these radiuses if was steel.

Do you have a say in where the cut lines (the lines where the panels meet) go?

Absolutely. On the clay model, we actually tape on where we want the lines to go. We'll make that proposal to our engineers and they'll come back and say, "Well, you know there's a limit to how big the bumper is, so it can't be up to here," for example. And so we work within some limits, but it's definitely our say as to where we want these. We try to design them in and there's a reason [this cut line here] turns on that character line on the fender, rather than just mindlessly blasting straight through.

Let's say the line was here instead--

[Smock traces an imaginary line on the fender with his finger]

--then you'd have less plastic [in one piece], but then you'd have more metal [on the adjoining piece], and then what complications or challenges does that open up? It's a collaboration with the engineers, but in the end the designers make that proposal, and then we have a chance to tune them.

Not everything in a sketch or rendering can make it to production. What's the most challenging aspect of that?

Just the getting to grips with reality. What I find, though, in the production cars that I have worked on, I honestly feel that the car gets better as it settles into feasibility, and when they start to give us those limitations, it just looks more real.

This is the best the car has looked. We started off with [all kinds of] models and mock-ups, and I think this one still looks better. There's a lot of sculpting going on here for a very usable amount of internal space, and I have nothing to complain about on this one. I don't feel we compromised on anything, and we completely got the proportion that we want.

What was your favorite part of the project?

I enjoyed the whole process, honestly. As we kept going, it just got better and better and better. Sometimes if you do too much of an exaggerated theme early on you're going to lose something, but again, we started with such a strong base [in the Precision Concept] all we had to do was map that onto these proportions. The whole thing was the best part.

Up Next: After the Exterior Designer's rendering is green-lit, it goes to the next phase of design, clay modeling. Stay tuned!

Design Job: Apple Inc is Seeking a CAD Sculptor/Digital 3D Modeler in Cupertino, CA

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Apple is looking for candidates with a strong interest and aptitude in digital 3D modeling for the Industrial Design group’s CAD sculpting team. Description The CAD sculptor creates high-quality digital 3D surface models used in the industrial design and product development process. Responsibilities

View the full design job here

Currently Crowdfunding: A Speaker Made of Plastic Waste, a Portable Bike E-Motor, and More

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Brought to you by MAKO Design + Invent, North America's leading design firm for taking your product idea from a sketch on a napkin to store shelves. Download Mako's Invention Guide for free here.

Navigating the world of crowdfunding can be overwhelming, to put it lightly. Which projects are worth backing? Where's the filter to weed out the hundreds of useless smart devices? To make the process less frustrating, we scour the various online crowdfunding platforms to put together a weekly roundup of our favorite campaigns for your viewing (and spending!) pleasure. Go ahead, free your disposable income:

Each Gomi speaker is made out of 100 plastic bags (or other flexible plastics) then hand-marbled to create a one-of-a-kind statement object. The portable speaker comes with an 18-hour battery.

MEZONE's wireless earbuds have an 8-hour playtime but snap them into their wireless charging case and you'll get an additional 72 hours!

It may sound like science fiction, but PlatoWork uses well-known neurostimulation technology called tDCS to optimize the natural activity in your brain and boost performance. It works in four modes—learn, concentrate, create, and rethink—to help you tackle a range of tasks.

If the only thing keeping you from biking to work is the fear of showing up sweaty for your morning meeting—CLIP will have your back. Attach the portable e-motor to your bike when you need a little boost getting over that hill and you'll arrive effortlessly.

This minimalist pen—available in polished titanium or stainless steel—features an addictive bolt-action mechanism and comes with a detachable pocket clip.

Do you need help designing, developing, patenting, manufacturing, and/or selling YOUR product idea? MAKO Design + Invent is a one-stop-shop specifically for inventors / startups / small businesses. Click HERE for a free confidential product consultation.


Swarovski is Challenging Designers to Innovate with Their Crystals in Lighting, Home Decor & Architecture

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Swarovski (along with MASS Beverly, a luxury interior designer showroom) has launched a competition calling designers to incorporate their crystals into one of three categories: Lighting, Home Decor and Architectural Surface. Swarovski is encouraging designers to get creative, looking at Swarovski's long history in crystals, their full assortment of crystals in varying shapes and colors, as well as push boundaries by using mixed materials.

Infinite Aura lighting by IDEO and Swarovski

The competition was announced as support for Swarovski's new exhibition at MASS Beverly, called The Brilliance of Design. The exhibition celebrates Swarovski's explorations in lighting, architecture and interior designs and is curated by lauded designer, Mary Ta, co-founder of MASS Beverly. Particularly spotlighted is the brand's Crystal Palace lighting; Swarovski Professional Architecture, Lighting and Interior Solutions; and Atelier Swarovski's home décor and jewelry collections.

Swarovski seems to have a particular interest in supporting the design community over the past few years, as they've introduced competitions like Designers of the Future and collaborated with renowned design brands like nendo and IDEO. Brilliance of Design seems to be a continuation of this interest, as they are inviting designer of all disciplines to participate.

Softpond by nendo for Atelier Swarovski Home

For this particular competition, all designs must comprise of 50% Swarovski crystals. One winner will be chosen from each category and each will receive $5,000 of crystals to be used for future projects and will be showcased at the MASS Beverly. Judges include Nadja Swarovski, Member of the Executive Board, Swarovski Crystal Business, Mary Ta and Lars Hypko, co-founders, MASS Beverly, Yves Behar, founder and CEO of Fuseproject and Swarovski collaborator and Edie Cohen, deputy editor, Interior Design magazine. The final deadline for the competition is March 29, so there's just a few days left to submit your work. Crystal seems like a very limiting material, given its lack of flexibility, so we're curious to see how designers across all fields choose to address this design challenge.

Design Job: Knoll is Seeking a 3D Digital Media Designer in New York City

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Knoll is a constellation of design-driven brands and people, working together with our clients to create inspired modern interiors. Our internationally recognized portfolio includes furniture, textiles, leathers, accessories, and architectural and acoustical elements brands. These brands - Knoll Office, KnollStudio, KnollTextiles, KnollExtra, Spinneybeck | FilzFelt,

View the full design job here

Our Favorite Winners from iF DESIGN AWARD Night 2019 in Munich

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Last week, we headed to Munich to celebrate the 66 gold winners of the iF DESIGN AWARD 2019 at the striking BMW Welt. Part of Munich's Creative Business Week, the iF DESIGN AWARD welcomed a total of 6,375 contributions from 50 countries within the categories of Product Design, Communication Design, Packaging Design, Service Design, Architecture, Interior Architecture and Professional Concept.

After party at the BMW Welt

Each year, iF puts together an annual exhibition in Hamburg where many of the award-winning products can be viewed in person. Walking through halls of vacuums and refrigerators in a gallery setting was rather humorous, but similar to MoMA's current exhibition, "The Value of Good Design", the iF DESIGN AWARDS takes a strong stance that good design encompasses products that positively impact and improve our lives on an everyday basis: and that such objects should be celebrated.

iF Design Awards Exhibition in Hamburg

The iF DESIGN AWARD tends to recognize everyday designs, such as lighting and home appliances. The concepts they do choose to award are ones that aren't too far off from reality. We noticed that (as opposed to last year), this year's winners were more technology-focused, all aiming to create a more seamless, tech-integrated life for humans.

Below we selected a few of our favorite 2019 iF DESIGN AWARD gold winners that we learned about while in Munich:

IONITY

One of the more conceptual winners, the IONITY electric vehicle charging system is a unique collaboration between BMW, Daimler, Ford, Volkswagen, Audi and Porsche. The charging device aims to address long distance travel for electric vehicle drivers with its capacity of up to 350 KW and quick charging speeds.

Wireless Audio VL Series (VL5 and VL3)

There's nothin' wrong with a little nostalgia! Samsung's Wireless Audio VL Series combines the modern box shape we've all become accustomed to with old school dials reminiscent of radio dials.

Card Phone KY-01L

This business card-sized phone designed by NTT DOCOMO offers an alternative mobile phone option for when you don't want to carry your sensitive data around with you—so basically a work phone. The device features a power-saving e-paper display (think Nook or Kindle) and a simple, easy to navigate display.

LUMI 2.0

Computer = ...Lamp? This friendly desk lamp designed by Compal Experience Design doubles as a computer with the ability to project educational VR and AR experiences without a screen. "With powerful object recognition abilities, family members can interact through interesting AR games. Then, rotate Lumi 2.0's head against the wall to project fun color doodles or any other child-friendly, mixed-reality content for immersive learning experiences."

Balanced

The Balanced kitchen knife set designed by Paul Cohen Design allows you to adjust the balance and weight of each knife individually with a magnetic weight. The patented adjustable balance weight ensures a firm and comfortable grip—positioning the weight forward allows for firm chopping, while moving it to the rear balances the knife for precision cutting.

Nest Thermostat E

Thermostat E is a promising evolution of the classic Nest Thermostat. It simply lets you change the temperature from anywhere using the Nest app or by voice command with your Google Home Assistant. No boiler access is needed—you can install it yourself using your previous thermostat wires and then place the Nest Thermostat E wherever you like.

Beside

Beside is a portable indoor/outdoor air conditioner with a minimalist flair. Designed by Daikin Industries, Beside features an ultra-small compressor and a new radiator layout, allowing the device to be portable and flexible. Most air conditioners are comprised of two parts, but Beside has everything in one.

Projector Molded Pulp Packaging

BenQ has simplified and reduced their electronic product packaging with this box that both cushions and protects—without the use of any glue or additional protective padding. Even without these extra wasteful materials, the molded pulp packaging passed drop and crash tests. The non-composite molded pulp materials are also very easy to recycle.

T.um

T.um is a technology museum designed and run by SK Telecom, SouthKorea's largest telecommunication operator. The museum's goal is to highlight and inform visitors of technology's affect on society at large. The clean, futuristic space was brought to life in a collaboration between designers, neurologists and futurologists and offers an interactive experience on multiple levels , including AR experiences.

Volvo Concept Wheel Loader ZEUX

If you think this concept autonomous wheel loader looks like an adult LEGO set, you're not too far off: Volvo and LEGO actually combined their skillsets to bring this bad boy to life. According to Volvo, "Multi-disciplinary teams from Volvo Construction Equipment and LEGO Technic joined forces with a focus group of children in a comprehensive design process. The result is not only an inspiring LEGO Technic play set, but a revolutionary concept for the sustainable construction machines of tomorrow." Needless to say, the future of construction looks epic.

The BMW Vision iNEXT

BMW's Vision iNEXT concept is a highly automated, emission-free, and fully connected vehicle that boasts the size and proportions of a regular car. The vehicle can be automated if desired but easily switches over to full human control. Our favorite feature is the the jacquard-like textile upholstery inside the car that BMW has made "smart". When drawing certain patterns on the seat with their finger, users are able to complete basic tasks like switching between songs.

Endoscopy Department Transformation

This redesign by Philips goes beyond a clean, sleek update to include a full, streamlined patient experience design. A seamless workflow, patient flow, and service delivery strategy was co-designed with staff and supported by an updated spatial environment design.

Dongziguan Affordable Housing

The project is a new village for relocated farmers built on the southern Yangtze River near Hangzhou, China. Buildings are organized in the traditional Chinese courtyard style, bringing cultural familiarity and respect to a new development that promises opportunity for rural revival.

Learn more about the iF DESIGN AWARDS here and how you can apply for the 2020 awards cycle cyclehere.

Carla Diana on Embracing the Challenge of Creating a World for Both Humans and Robots

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In many ways, the technological future is upon us, but do we really know what it will look like? Designer, author, and educator Carla Diana is working at the intersection of industrial and interaction design to explore the impact of future technologies through hands-on experiments in product and interaction design.

"Whereas designers typically use form, color, and materials to make an object express some human element...we're entering a time when sound, light, and movement are equally important parts of the creative palette," she notes in her seminal article Talking, Walking Objects which appeared on the cover of The New York Times Sunday Review in January 2013. Emphasizing the need for designers to take stock of the emotional value of robotics as much as any other product attribute, Diana's research aims to uncover new ways of making our everyday objects come to life.

Diana was recently appointed to create the 4D Design program at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, which will open its doors to the first class of students this Fall. Steeped in Cranbrook's history of experimental design, "the department explores the myriad ways that the physical world around us has become infused with an undercurrent of flowing data, turning everyday experiences into connected, feedback-driven interactions that are transforming every aspect of culture and society," according to their website.

A Cranbrook alumna herself (she also holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering from Cooper Union), Diana spent her early career as a Senior Design Technologist at frog design and designer for Karim Rashid. She went on to work with Smart Design for many years, where she founded the Smart Interaction Lab. In addition to her own studio work, she is an ongoing collaborator with the Socially Intelligent Machines Lab at the University of Texas, Austin.

Diana writes and lectures frequently on the social impact of robotics and emerging technology. She spoke at the first Core77 conference back in 2014, right after publishing LEO the Maker Prince, the world's first children's book on 3D printing. She currently cohosts the Robopsych Podcast, a biweekly discussion of design and human-robot interaction, and is coauthor of a forthcoming book on smart object design to be published by Harvard Business Review Press.

We recently caught up with the designer to learn more about her upcoming program at Cranbrook, how we can make sentient objects feel more human, and her vision for the "sweet spot" of robotics in the future:

Core77: Your new program is 4D Design. What is the fourth D, and why is it important?

Carla Diana: The fourth D is time. The program is focused on exploring critical questions about the world around us through creative applications of emerging technology. It includes everything from augmented reality to applied robotics and 3D printing, and the essence of it is around products and experiences that are responsive. The common thread is that all of these things will have the ability to change over time through intrinsic behaviors such as light patterns, sound, motion, and other dynamic displays. This is more important than ever as so much of our world is influenced by data flowing through it. We see it directly in the important role we give our mobile devices, but we can easily extrapolate to a future where this data flow is frankly present everywhere, from interactive spaces to wearable devices to networked autonomous vehicles.

"We need designers to better understand the implications of this future through tangible artifact and scenarios explorations." 

Diana led the shell design of POLI, a social robot platform currently under development at the University of Texas, Austin in the Socially Intelligent Machines Lab run by Dr. Andrea Thomaz. It features camera recognition, a mobile base and a Kinova arm for object manipulation. Its body combines plastic shells with a soft neoprene body covering.

How did your design work and experiences influence your curriculum planning?

I have always been passionate about making the physical world around us interactive in some way. In my studio, I specialize in creative design for social robots. Earlier in my career, at Smart Design, I led very interdisciplinary teams that developed interactive products such as home appliances, medical equipment, and robotic vacuums. It was a thrill to bring together experts in engineering, industrial design, communication design and strategy to work on a product concept, and it also felt like these types of projects demanded a new kind of discipline that didn't exist yet.

When I branched out on my own with my studio, I also decided to take what I'd learned and create courses that synthesized all the seemingly disparate skills that need to come together to work on these kinds of products including storytelling, coding, projected images and displays, electronics prototyping and robotics. I launched the Smart Objects course at SVA, which has always been jointly run by the Interaction Design and Products of Design programs, and I also brought this course and others to UPenn and Parsons. The 4D Design department at Cranbrook is a chance to expand the philosophy of those courses into an entire program.

Diana's studio led the design of Moxi, a healthcare service robot developed by Diligent Robotics to autonomously complete tasks in hospital environments, allowing nurses to focus on patient care.

What makes this program different from other product design or robotics programs?

The key difference between 4D Design at Cranbrook and most programs in Product Design is our focus on interactivity and the creative application of technology. And we're different from most Interaction Design programs in that our projects will be based on object qualities, taking a holistic view of form, light, sound, and motion; many interaction programs have more of a focus on screen and app-based solutions whereas we will emphasize prototyping in the physical world. We will embrace applied robotics but are quite different from robotics programs in that we are at the epicenter of art and design, with a studio-based model. We will place value on the overall concept of projects, looking at how well they relate to the context in which they operate, placing high importance on societal and cultural relevance.

We will also be highly influenced by the other departments at Cranbrook such as Sculpture, Metalsmithing, Ceramics, and Fiber. For example, a student wishing to explore interactive textiles and wearable computing can draw on Cranbrook's rich history in textiles, going back to Loja Saarinen's historical design work. And a key difference between Cranbrook and most other programs is that we have no traditional classes, so instead of everyone having to meet preset benchmarks that may lose relevance over time, they will set individual goals based on their own career trajectories, diving deeper into the particular tools and methods that apply to their work rather than trying to cover everything in that short two year period.

Can you tell us more about the 4D Design Catalysts?

4D Design Catalysts are internationally recognized experts in the area of design and/or technology who will have an ongoing relationship with the program. They will work directly with students through lectures and workshops in active engagements that will take a variety of forms such as charrette challenges with specific design prompts, one-on-one critiques, studio tours, and targeted research projects. I'll be continually curating a list of Catalysts to represent a spectrum of current ideas and contribute to the collective voice of the program.

So far we have folks like Rob Walker, who will do a workshop with students to coach them on developing a point of view, and Bruce Sterling who will share his cyberpunk wisdom. Brendan Dawes has already come through campus to set the tone with his playful and experimental work in data expression. Joshua Walton is a Cranbrook alum and expert in augmented, virtual and mixed reality and works with James Tichenor to provide groundbreaking workshops. We've also got Nervous System to inspire us with their pioneering work in algorithmic form and digital fabrication. The innovation firms Tomorrow Lab and Jared Ficklin from Argo Design will provide a glimpse of product design solutions and business savvy. Emilie Baltz will encourage us to explore ways to engage the senses, and Zach Lieberman will look at poetic computation. We also have Matt Jones on board who has been part of many seminal experiments in tangible interaction and is now part of Google AI.

You've had a lot of experience designing and researching robotics. How did you originally get interested in robotics?

I think it all started when I was in high school and took part in a summer program that was run by a professor at NYU's Courant Institute. His name was Henry Mullish, and he was awarded a grant to teach computer programming to tenth graders. We started by learning how to encode punch cards and worked our way up to learning the syntax for five different computer languages, along with complex techniques such as sorting algorithms. I spent six weeks of that summer in a windowless basement surrounded by geeky kids like me and I loved every minute of it.

Since then, I always loved the magic of code, but I was also driven to make things. It was during my time in the 3D Design program at Cranbrook (yes, I'm an alumna!) that a light bulb went off in my mind as I realized that the physical and digital would soon become intertwined and decided to focus my career on exploring that vision.

The aim with Simon's shell design was to strike a balance between machine/appliance-like aesthetics and friendly, human-like characteristics. The robot also needed to appear youthful, suggesting a creature that is in a mode of continuous learning and observation.

Robotics entered my life quite a few years later when I was teaching at Georgia Tech in 2007. A professor named Andrea Thomaz was building a research lab to study how we might interact with computing devices in a natural way, using gesture and language instead of having to content with intermediary tools such as a mouse and a keyboard. She understood the importance of design and was looking for a creative partner to be part of the core team for a new robotics platform she was developing to study robot social interactions, so I jumped at the chance to join her team. The result was a robot named Simon that laid the groundwork for important research in human-machine interaction, and we have continued to work together on many robot projects over the past ten years.

The second evolution of Simon is Curi, named after Marie Curie and a reference to the word "curious." It has more refined facial features and, unlike the stationary Simon, Curi is mounted on a mobile platform.

A lot of your robotics work involves figuring out how to make them communicate in ways that people can relate to. We seem to be making slow progress in this regard, as opposed to leaps in sensors, processing speed, connectivity, and more. How do we make robots and other sentient objects more human?

I think one of our hangups in this regard is the fascination with making things literally mimic human behaviors, like text and speech. Instead, we can glean a lot about meaningful product design by exploring abstraction and striving for more poetic expressions of messages through light, sound, and motion. We have a tendency to be burdened by the history of devices, so it's hard to break us away from the devices we're accustomed to, like the mouse and the keyboard.

"From a business and marketing point of view, we get misled by the temptation to compete through improved specs and 'feature creep' when the real breakthroughs will come from understanding social mores and figuring out how to make products socially appropriate."

For example, the Amazon Echo has some lovely nuances, like the light that indicates the direction of the person it's currently listening to. But then it can go even further, like letting us understand and control when it's actively listening. Right now it's more like a spy that doesn't truly let us know what it's up to.

This is a topic that I'm squarely focused on right now as I'm co-writing a book with design research expert Dr. Wendy Ju on the social aspects product design for Harvard Business Review Press.

What sort of technology intersections are you most excited for your students to explore in the next few years?

Robotics in everyday objects, mixed reality, cyborg stuff (prosthetics and body augmentation), truth, wisdom, and privacy.

When users approach the Smart Coat Rack, it greets them current and upcoming temperatures as well as conditions such as rain, wind, and snow so users know what they'll need to face the day. A circular rack at its base balances the form with a space to keep umbrellas.

We noticed a lot of "companion robots" at CES—relatively simple objects that respond in cute ways and make you feel good. These sorts of robots seem effective, even helpful. Houskeeper robots, automatic breadmakers, laundry folding machines are large, complex, expensive, and seem to be WAY over engineered responses to 'problems' that ultimately don't work well. What is the sweet spot for robotics right now, and in the next few years?

I think the sweet spot will be in distilling robotic behaviors to only those behaviors that are meaningful in relation to the time and place they're in.

"Right now there are many new products that try to be what I call 'everything machines,' with multiple functions, tackling many contexts and offering all kinds of connected data feeds. My experience as a product designer has shown that successful products emerge from a focus on real and specific needs."

The Clever Coat Rack project is about this. It's made of wood, with embedded electronics. It has a full internet connection but instead of offering Twitter feeds and email alerts it just gives you the information you need at that moment when you're walking out the door: the current temperature, the day's high and low, and significant upcoming weather conditions. It offers what's needed to make a split-second decision about which coat to grab and whether or not you need an umbrella, but doesn't burden the moment with other interactions or decisions.

Some of the new Amazon housewares are starting to point that way, as well as products like the Jaxjox Smart Kettlebell that can track activity and offer relevant connected content. The Casper Glow lamp, for example, is a lovely product that captures the poetry and simplicity that I'm talking about, being designed with a focus on helping sleep through subtle changes in the glow it emits. It can be programmed as well as networked with other lamps. It's not trying to be a lamp for every purpose—all design decisions were in service to the sleep context.

A Look at Six Car Design Specialties, Part 2: The Clay Modeler

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This series is about the different sub-specialties within car design. No matter the studio, a half-dozen different design teams are all required to provide a complete design. But the sequence and the manner in which each team is utilized may differ from studio to studio. Most studios start with 2D concept renderings, which then have to be translated into 3D. Some studios accomplish that by handing the rendering off to a computer modeler, who then interprets the drawing to realize the form in his or her screen.

Acura's recipe, however, is to go from concept sketch to clay, almost directly; in between, a computer modeler does interpret the sketch to get rough dimensions, estimating mechanical fit, and then a digital milling machine carves a rough approximation of a 1/4-scale model using the digital modeler's files. But at that point the all-important clay modeler jumps in.

In Acura's process, the clay modeler plays a significant role in determining the final form, using old-school hand tools, aesthetic judgment and expertise. But it's not all artistry with no science; the clay modeler will even optimize the exterior for the sake of aerodynamics, coordinating with wind tunnel testing facilities for validation.

Here in Part 2 of this series, we chat with Acura Senior Design Modeler Matt Mantz. Mantz had an unusual upbringing that might've been common a century ago, but which is pretty rare today. We were fascinated by the role that upbringing played in Mantz's aesthetic training.

Core77: Can you describe your position, and what led you to it?

Matt Mantz: Sure. It's nice to have people come in, see what I actually do. I'm a Senior Design Modeler here at Acura. I've been here for about 12 years. Some of the other cars I've worked on are the 2014 MDX, the 2016 NSX and I was the project leader for the 2019 RDX.

So before I get started--I was raised on a horse ranch in northern California and my parents had horses. I was actually a pig farmer. I went from pig farmer to car design. Yeah.

On the farm I rode dirt bikes and I was also really into art as a kid. I had some good art teachers that taught me sculpture, and I really enjoyed it. I loved modeling and building things.

How did you get from there to car designer?

I went to school at the Academy of Art in San Francisco, and that's where I learned clay modeling. I was recruited by another auto manufacturer and worked there for about 10 years before coming to Honda. I always loved Honda because of the dirt bikes I rode as a kid.

Where do you come into the car design process here?

When we get started, I'll get these sketches from the designers, and a package drawing [of the chassis] from the engineers. It's my job to take that sketch and put it over the package. Sometimes [that transition yields something that] looks a little funky and weird, so then we go back and forth changing the proportion of it, [while still being faithful to] the image.


As you're interpreting the sketch into the clay, what are some of the things that influence or inspire you as you're shaping the clay?

Being an artist that grew up on a ranch, I'd really studied the forms of the animals that we had. I ask myself "How does that relate to cars?" As a clay modeler, I'm trying to make the car look attractive, and I get a lot of proportions from the animals that I've observed, on or off the farm. I'd look at the hips of a horse, and you can see that's where the power comes from. So I'll put the [gestural] power over the wheels. Or look at a cheetah: It's really lean through the middle, the power is over the shoulders. We tried to do that same thing here [indicates the RDX model], make the body look really lean and nimble, and put the fender flares on the car to try to emphasize where the power is coming from.

Then there's the eagle and the shark. The eagle is a very aerodynamic animal and aerodynamics on a car is very important. So we think about things like, how does air flow over an eagle? And how does the water flow over a shark?

The animal inspiration is fascinating. How do you reconcile that with real-world performance?

For one thing, we do wind tunnel testing. In our wind tunnel in Ohio, we'll have [clay models of the] car mounted to these posts and as wind blows over the car, those posts are measuring the forces being pushed on the car. You get figures for drag, lift, yaw, all kinds of different forces. Then we'll make actual changes to the clay model while it's in the wind tunnel.

Digital tools have changed the car design process over the years, but one thing that's the same now as it was 50 years ago is clay. Can you talk about why?

Everyone asks, why do we still use clay, and there's a number of reasons. Number one is, the evaluators want to not only see the car, but feel it. We could show the car digitally, but you can't actually feel a digital model on the screen.

Another reason is because we make a lot of changes to this as we're going through the development. For example, [in the middle of the design process] the hood on this thing had to be raised to meet some pedestrian impact standards. So, clay is a material that can be easily added and removed and it's always very accurate. We can control the accuracy on this. Other materials would either be slower to use or not quite as accurate.

We do use some digital tools now [points to a nearby milling machine]. We do a lot of digital modeling, but those are just another tool in my toolbox, to speed up the process. I have my analog tools and my digital tools.

Can you talk about the interchanges between the two?

So by hand, we'll actually concentrate on one side of the car, usually the entire driver's side. Then we'll scan the car and use the digital mill to mirror the passenger side of the car.

There's two benefits to this: One, the mill can keep working overnight, when I'm at home, and two, it's much quicker than I can do it. It would probably take us three days to mirror the full passenger side of this car, but for me to do that by hand might take three weeks.

Were you there for the digital transition? From when you had to do both halves of a car by hand to when the mill came in?

Yeah. When I started clay modeling in '98, after one side of the car was finished, we'd have one guy on the finished side measuring and calling out points. Another guy on the other side of the car would literally be digging a pointer into the clay, and we'd do that every 50 millimeters, a whole row of points up the car. Then move 50 millimeters beyond that and do another whole row of points. That took forever, just weeks of calling out points. And you had the possibility of human error, where I'm reading 346.5 but I might say "345.6."

That lasted until maybe 10 years ago. Everybody's using the 3D scanning and the mill tools now.

Is there still handwork to do after the mill cuts the other half?

So the mill leaves a surface that's--I left this side rough so you guys can see it. Even the finished cut of the mill, you can see it has a little bit of a texture to it.

So we'll take that texture off [with hand tools] before we view the car.

Is the car evaluated with just the clay finish?

No, we use ScotchCal film over the entire car. It's almost like wallpaper, it's got glue on the back. You soak the ScotchCal and then it's like a big sticker sheet. We'll use different colors for the headlights, the grille, that kind of stuff.

And then how do they--for a clay model, what's the equivalent of marking up a sketch for revisions?

We use tape. Dave [Marek, Acura's Executive Creative Director] will tape different lines on the car to communicate revisions to the designers. I have another design director who uses aluminum wire, he'll say, "I think this shape should be flatter here--" and he'll bend the wire and stick it on here. Those are very good communication tools, I can see exactly what they're talking about. Then we'll come back in and remodel based on those lines.

How do concerns about manufacturability affect your work?

There's thousands of regulations based on safety, stamping--can the metal be stamped into this form? Sometimes we'll create a shape that is so formed that when they try to stamp it, it just rips the metal. So they'll come back to us and say, "Look, you've pushed it too far, we can't stretch the metal that far. You've got to bring it back a little bit." So then it's, can you create the same shape, the same feeling, with a little bit less draw to the metal. So, we go back and forth.

Then there's other changes needed--what I was talking about before with the bumper beam was, an engineer needed to make changes to the chassis for safety, and the form we had didn't allow for the bumper beam to be hidden behind it. It would have been sticking out of the car.

So then we scanned the clay model, and I took that digital file and dropped it right over the chassis, which existed digitally. And I could see in Alias, very easily, exactly where that bumper was interfering with the exterior surface. I could take measurements and see exactly how much room I have. Then I was able to go back to the clay and just pull the form over the outside of it, but in such a way that it looked exactly the same. Dave came back and he was like, "Where's the bumper beam?" and I'm like, "it's in there." He was like "How'd you do that?"

Can you talk about why you guys work in 1/4 scale?

The clay process is a two-year process, and we start with 1/4 scale because we can make a lot of big changes very rapidly. If they want to move the windshield forward a hundred millimeters, it's only 25 millimeters of material for us. If you had to do that in full size, that's a lot.

We try to get the main proportion of the car set in the 1/4 scale. Then we'll scan the 1/4 scale car, mill out a full-sized buck, and do the same thing. We'll sculpt on that for probably a year, while we're going back and forth with the engineers about regulations, stamping.

Do issues crop up when you go from the 1/4-size model to a full-size?

So, in 1/4-size, a lot of times--we call it cheating, but we try to cheat the model to make it look better for the evaluators. We'll make the fenders look a little bigger, add a little more curvature, a little more puff to them. But when you blow that up to a full size model, now they look like balloons. So we'll make the 1/4-scale look good and after they buy off on it, we'll fix it and tune it on the full-scale.

[Looking at Mantz's hand tools] Did you make these yourself?

Most of my tools you can buy at a clay shop, but all my steels are handmade. Sometimes I won't have a tool that fits the exact shape that I need, so I just take one with a generic end and modify it into whatever shape I want.

Once you decided you wanted to do car design, what drew you specifically to the clay modeling side?

When I was going through art school, we did all the different aspects of design: Research, sketching, clay modeling. I actually really enjoyed the research, I thought that was really fun--researching different companies, the customer, who are we making this product for.

Sitting down and sketching on paper, two-dimensionally, was not that much fun; it's really hard for me to do that.

But as soon as we got into the clay model, it was really easy for me. My teachers saw that and recommended to me, "Hey, you should really be a clay modeler over being a designer. You're really good at it." And honestly, it's a really good career. It's tough being a designer. These guys have to perform all the time. I get to take their sketches and create this.

Also, some companies are more reliant on the Alias digital modeling, and one cool thing about Acura is that we still rely heavily on the clay model. The "touch, feel" is so engraved in, and you just can't touch a digital model.

A benefit I try to explain to people about clay is: Let's say I'm tuning and adjusting [a character line in the body], maybe a quarter of a millimeter over the entire line here. When I'm looking at this line and I'm this close to it, I can still see the rest of the car. So I have that reference there. When you do that on the computer screen, you can zoom in on the detail or you can look down the car, but you can't see them both at the same time. So the clay allows us to reference the entire car and see the details at the same time.

___________

Up Next: Once the clay model is complete, it's time to turn the data into digital files that can be manipulated in CAD. In steps the Digital Modeler. Stay tuned!



By Eliminating a Major CAD Drawback, SimSolid Gives Designers New Opportunities for Workflow

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We've just learned about a fantastic CAD tool—one that works with whatever CAD package you have—that will be a game-changer in the industrial design space. Altair's SimSolid is a simulation plug-in (also available as a stand-alone app) that completely eliminates meshing, that tedious process of simplifying geometry for Finite Element Analysis (FEA). By running SimSolid over your CAD model, you can do simulations nearly instantly—on your original geometry, with no clean-up required.

I know what you're thinking: "Isn't that FEA stuff for engineers? I'm a designer, why should I care about this?" To answer that, let's explain what has been the traditional FEA process up until now, then show you how SimSolid's new advantages would make a difference in your design workflow.

SimSolid is structural analysis software developed specifically for design engineers, enabling the analysis of fully-featured CAD assemblies in minutes without meshing.

Traditional FEA: Useful, But Often Difficult to Use

Finite Element Analysis, or FEA, has become a crucial step in the CAD process. The more simulations you can do, the less prototypes you have to build, saving you both time and money. The problem is that no CAD program is sophisticated enough to run simulations on original CAD geometry, particularly with complicated assemblies, and requires the dreaded meshing step.

So traditionally, you'd design something and draw it up in CAD. It then goes over to an analyst or CAE department, where your CAD geometry is converted into a mesh so that simulations can be run on it. This geometry conversion is time-consuming and a bit of a black art: Should we run a coarse mesh for greater speed, and sacrifice accuracy? Or should we run a finer mesh for accuracy, waiting hours or even days for the computer to produce it?

Another problem with meshing is that it plays havoc with CAD geometry, creating extra busywork and providing opportunities for error. Often lost in translation during the meshing process are crucial connections, gaps and overlaps. Mating parts that you slaved over no longer line up precisely. Designs with small features, both thick and thin parts and/or irregular transitions all provide headaches that must be hunted down and re-worked. To save time, a common trick is to break your assembly into parts and analyze them separately. This introduces the opportunity for errors that can cost end users even more time down the road.

According to the website of one major CAD manufacturer, "Meshing a model is an integral step in performing any simulation. There's no getting around it—it has to be done." Well, with the arrival of SimSolid, that's no longer true.

SimSolid Simplifies FEA, Making it Easy for Designers to Use

SimSolid can run analyses nearly instantly—on your original CAD geometry. There's no meshing required; you pull your CAD file in and it's ready to go within seconds. You don't need to be an analyst with a background in mesh voodoo. You, the designer, can run simulations to figure out if your concept is even viable before kicking it over to ME.

SimSolid eliminates geometry simplification and meshing, the two most time-consuming and expertise-extensive tasks done in traditional FEA.

And if you're a designer working without the benefit of a dedicated engineering department—let's say you're a design entrepreneur or part of a small team crafting low-tech objects for a crowdfunding campaign—the utility of SimSolid should be obvious. Where is the clamp for your new bike light design most liable to break? Will your design for a cantilevered monitor stand support the 21.5 pounds of a 27" iMac Pro? Is the wall thickness for your object appropriate for the application? Are two mounting bolts enough, or do you need four?

A complex machined part with more than 100 small holes. It's time-consuming to mesh and solve this using traditional FEA. SimSolid does it in seconds.

To be able to see these results in seconds to minutes—rather than hours or days—can let you know, early on, if you're barking up the right design tree. And as you refine the design, having the ability to definitively see whether you're over- or under-engineering an object can give you a more accurate idea of BOM and eliminate that "Hey Kickstarter backers, sorry, but we screwed up" update down the line.

For a designer working within an organization that does have access to a dedicated engineering branch, SimSolid can provide an entirely new workflow. Even if ME ultimately needs to sign off after doing their own analysis, you can learn if your initial designs are viable well before knocking on their door. And by being able to spot problems early, you can tackle them with design proposals that hew more closely to your original vision, rather than you designing a unicorn and the engineers coming back with a rhinoceros.

Without having to ask the engineers, you can quickly find out exactly where this stepladder's liable to break if overloaded. That gives you the power to foresee problems and tackle them with design first.

"SimSolid a very empowering piece of software for those users who were locked out of a part of the process; now they can participate," says co-developer Ken Welch. "Let's say you're an industrial designer, and you realize 'I can run a structural simulation right now, without having to wait.' Well, now you can ask a question, and answer it yourself.

"That allows you to develop your designs faster, because now you can use simulation as an integral part of the design process. When you have performance insights available to you early on in the design process, that opens up the possibility for new workflows that were simply not possible in the past."

You can use SimSolid to quickly check where the stress points are on this pull-up bar, and how they change depending on which of the three handle sets are pulled on.

"And you can explore more. Not just with simple parts, as with most other FEA systems; with SimSolid you can look at full assemblies and very complex geometries."

Video Demonstrations

The following videos can give you a better idea of what SimSolid can do for you.

An Introduction to SimSolid

In this first video Warren Dias, Altair's Director of Global Business Developmen, explains the benefits of the software. This is the video you show to your manager:

Demonstration #1: Modal Analysis

Here you can see not only the multitude of CAD formats supported, but just how fast it is to pull a complicated part into SimSolid and run a quick modal analysis:

Demonstration #2: Comparing Multiple Design Variants

In this second demo, Dias r?uns a linear static analysis on two models, showing you how easy it is to compare them directly:

Demonstration #3: Performing a Non-Linear Static Analysis

In the third demo a non-linear static analysis is run, revealing separating contacts with as much ease as the first two demos:

As you can see, results are nearly instantaneous; that little flashing green bar at the bottom left of the screen seems to finish impossibly quickly. I noticed the same during demonstrations given to us by Welch, and I asked him what kind of high-powered hardware the program required.

"I'm just running it on a laptop," he explained. "A lot of people see the demos and think 'I need to run this on a supercomputer in the cloud, right? Or buy a really expensive GPU?' But no, I'm running this on a standard-core i7 laptop, and it runs great."

In short, SimSolid is fast, accurate, and doesn't require extra computing. It opens up a world of possibilities to designers working within today's fast-paced timelines, removing a barrier between ID and ME that seemed intractable. "Analysis never really had the impact it could," Welch says, "because it just couldn't work at the speed of design."

Well, now it can.

To confirm it yourself, you can try SimSolid for free. Altair has also launched a social media promotion where SimSolid users can post a simulation for a chance to win weekly cash prizes. 

"Post your SimSolid simulation results to social media throughout the months of March and April 2019," the company writes, "and every week, five people will be selected to win $50 Visa Gift Cards. The best model at the end of the promotion will win a $1000 grand prize." 

Click here for details on how to enter.

Design Job: Step to It! Timberland is Seeking a Footwear Design Intern in Stratham, NH

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Work with the Special Make Up design team to assist and create footwear concepts and storyboards based on seasonal color/material trends, as well as consumer and fashion trends. Assist in completing CAD revisions, color updates, technical packages, graphics,

View the full design job here

Karim Rashid Designs a Single-Serving Wine Bottle for Usual Wines

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From ancient Egypt to Greece and China, civilizations have produced their own wines with local ingredients fir generations. Back then, clay vessels and oak barrels were the best ways to transport the precious liquid. Today, we've turned to our standard glass wine bottles to transport (and more importantly protect) the 'nectar of the gods.'

Our wine glass has even gotten bigger as our appetites for wine have increased, but let's be honest with ourselves: how many bottles of opened, unfinished wine do you have at home? Did you open one after a hard work day because a glass of wine was the perfect way to relax? Or maybe a friend came over, but you still couldn't finish the whole bottle?

Usual Wines has designed a single-serving wine bottle ideal for said evenings—it's about a quarter of a typical full-sized bottle, but slightly larger than the average pour of a glass of wine at a restaurant. Industrial designer, Karim Rashid designed the bottle, explaining, "With Usual's wine-by-the-glass approach, I wanted to design a simple form belying the complex flavor of the wine within. The goal was to preserve the nuanced flavor of the wine, while reinventing the traditional wine bottle typology."

"It is a single-serving size: portable, shareable, and easy to distribute. Usual Wines elevates the everyday moments, which is what I seek to do every day through design. Sleek and sophisticated, the eye-catching conical shape is pure geometry, communicating efficiently. Form and function are inseparable, so the bottle's size determines its shape; it is easy to hold and elegant to display."

At the moment, only a red blend and a rosé blend, are available for purchase, but here's to hoping a white comes out soon, just in time for spring.

Dong-Ping Wong on How Architecture Reflects Culture

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Dong-Ping Wong, this year's Core77 Design Awards Built Environment Jury Captain, is both an architect in the purest sense of the word, and yet, a rule breaker vying for change in an industry built on tradition. With projects varying from Plus Pool, a civic project aiming to simultaneously provide New York City with a public pool and filter the filth in the Hudson River, to Virgil Abloh's concept-driven Singapore retail location, the projects his architecture firm FOOD New York take on are as varied as they come.

In a recent interview, we spoke with Wong about what fueled his initial love for architecture and his predictions for what changes the field is bound to see in the future:

Off-White store in Singapore

Can you tell us more about your background in architecture and what got you interested in the first place?

My architectural training is pretty straightforward, but I think the things that I always come back to are the first two pieces of architecture that I saw. One is a very classic thing, the Salk Institute in San Diego. I grew up in San Diego, so that's a very classic piece of architecture—it’s by far the most famous thing in San Diego, which isn't saying a lot, but it's a very classic modernist architecture thing. And it was definitely one of the first things where I was like, “oh shit—architecture can kind of have that emotional resonance and be really powerful as a space in that way”. It's actually where polio was cured, so how the architecture was set up served as a very direct and easily understandable cause. 

So that was one inspiration on that high-end architecture side, and when I was a kid one thing that started me getting me thinking about it, although I don't think I knew what architecture was at the time, for a little while my parents lived in a very normal, middle-class suburb in San Diego. My parents were always looking to move, and you know how when you look at new suburban developments there's like the same house but it painted different colors? And it's like "model home A model home B", And you're basically choosing if you want like a pink one or a beige one. So I remember walking into one of those, walking into a few of them and being super fascinated by how in one of them, the bathrooms on the left, and the other, the bathrooms on the right. And I thought, "we should definitely pick the one with the bathrooms on the right because the bedroom is over here…" You know, not really thinking about it architecturally, but I loved how different the houses felt simply by moving certain things around. As far as I can tell, that was probably before the Salk Institute. I do think it was a very mundane suburban thing, but because they set up their homes that way, you get a really easy way to compare the differences between two things within like a 30 second or a five minute minute span.

Golden Tower concept for Chinatown, NY

You've managed to put yourself in a position where you're in the pop culture realm working on set production while also designing projects around accessibly and universality. What area of architecture would you say speaks to you most?

Yeah I know, it's funny because it's only relatively recently that I feel like I'm noticing a theme; not an aesthetic theme, but a philosophical one. And the reason those projects that I brought up I think are very useful for me is that the theme is basically… I've never tried to articulate this actually… it's like, there's a huge satisfaction in doing work in the way that people really resonate with it and understand it. That's why I think the suburban side came in. I want non-architects to really feel affected and fall in love with something, or at least understand how it's affecting them. And there's the Salk Institute side, where our work strives for the sublime beauty that Salk has. And through that philosophy, you can actually create something hugely productive and functional in this totally weird way. 

"It feels much more eclectic, much more decentralized and democratic in terms of who can get into architecture and design architecture, and that's really exciting."

So I think the key with my work really is, as dumb as it is, designing things for normal people and for normal things. Every time we design even something like a store, it's not so much just a place to buy stuff. We ask ourselves, can you make a space where anybody would want to come and spend time in and is just a really interesting and great place to be and attracting a lot of interesting people? So beyond the kind of objective functionality of it, there's a reason to be there, and anybody can feel that even if they can't articulate it. I think that's always been really important. 

I remember listening something in the past where you we're talking about the idea of "productive architecture". Is that what you mean by what you’re saying?

In some ways. On the productive side, what’s become very important in our office is that whatever we put out there does something, and everything does something fairly tangible. There's a purpose for why you're spending all this money and why you're spending all the time on it, all our energy and resources going into something, so it should produce something of benefit. And it seems really dumb, like it's weird to say that something doesn't produce a benefit, but I think as soon as we started saying it that way, it changed the way we started thinking about architecture. It’s less about how it looked or even how it felt necessarily; it was like, "what's the product?" So sometimes that “productive” element is very direct, sometimes it's more ephemeral, but that frame of mind helps us make sure we're doing things that really benefit people. And I think that's usually counterbalanced with creating an experience at the end of the day that's readily tangible to everybody, even though it's something hopefully very conceptual.

What is some architectural work you've seen as of late that's particularly exciting to you—something new that you haven't seen before? 

This doesn't really answer that question, but one thing I’ve noticed that's kind of funny...so I always ask either our younger staff or students who their favorite architects are, and I've noticed recently that nobody seems to really have favorites. And I think that's because there's so much more architecture media out there.

I've noticed it's kind of hard for me to feel like there are lasting movements happening. It feels much more eclectic, much more decentralized and democratic in terms of who can get into architecture and design architecture, and that’s really exciting. But weirdly I've noticed it's harder to notice really big shifts happening, just because it's not really presented that way anymore. 

Japanese architecture is really huge, especially in schools and around the world in terms of this really white, minimalist, super simple, almost non-existent architecture that's really beautiful in this ephemeral way. And I still really love that stuff, but almost as a reaction I feel like there's starting to be more interest in rich materials and decoration; so the opposite of ephemeral. Spaces are becoming less minimalistic—I couldn't tell you why that is except maybe it's a reaction to that movement of Japanese minimalism. I think that's kind of interesting because there's so many more materials you can explore, ways of building you can explore, ways of making that also people can get into now. It's just fun to see really weird shit that doesn't really have a function sometimes.

Set Design for Kanye West's 2013 Yeezus tour

Do you feel, in that way, architecture reflects culture? Do you believe architecture had that ability like, say, fashion does?

Yeah, absolutely. Actually, that's a good parallel. You know, we're in Paris right now for a couple of Virgil [Abloh] shows, Louis Vuitton shows, that sort of wave of street culture turning into high fashion culture. What's really interesting about that is the availability of that sort of fashion—I mean, maybe not price point-wise—but the ability to make a t-shirt and turn a graphic into legitimate fashion—and I think it means it's not down to the top 10 fashion houses. Like, any kid can make something and start getting interest and movement from it. 

"My hope is that down the road a young architect is not someone who's under 50, a young architect is someone who's under 30."

I do think new architecture is reflecting that. It's much slower obviously compared to fashion, but I think that eclecticism is maybe coming about because of that, where people are finding new ways of building things. Like, people are making their own tiles, for example—finding weird choices of terrazzo and constructing things in ways that wouldn't have been able to be done before. 

And of course, publishing things that aren't beholden to any established publication, just through Instagram. So I think there is a reflection of that if eclecticism or democratization I guess, it's just much slower in architecture. It's exciting, my hope is that down the road a young architect is not someone who's under 50, a young architect is someone who's under 30. And they're actually getting stuff built, they're actually making waves and affecting the world physically.

How do you envision architecture changing in the future?

I think it's probably just about looking at other industries—I mean, fashion is a perfect one where communication of ideas is much faster and more seamless and more direct. The production of architecture hasn't gotten much faster—it's still a long slog to get something from conception to getting it built. There's been a promise of technology helping that once in a while with prefab stuff or kind of machine robot assisted production, but it's not quite there yet. 

"My interest is not so much whether it's pretty or done particularly well, but more that it's a totally wild thing that someone actually carried through. It's one thing to put ideas out there, but it's a totally different thing to commit to it and execute it and actually get it done and have a belief in it."

I don't know if 3D printing or 3D building is necessarily an answer, but at the very least I think there is a totally different way of delivering ideas that didn't exist 5 or 10 years ago, and I do think that's bound to affect what qualifies as good or worthwhile architecture and architects. Especially in a place like New York where there's still a very a big belief in established architects. I would like to think that slowly when you're looking for something new [it's coming from someone young], like it would be in fashion or other design fields. I don't think architecture's quite there yet. You're still looking at the same established firms hoping to come up with something new. But I feel like that's slowly happening where younger and younger firms are landing bigger projects and more notoriety.

Yeah, accessibility is probably kind of universal across all disciplines now, so it's easier to create products and maybe somewhat easier to create buildings or find new ways to create them.

Hopefully, as the building of architecture will get cheaper and easier. Right now, for example, product design doesn't cost as much, it doesn't take as long, so it's much more accessible to a younger designer base, and hopefully that gap between that and a building, closes slowly. I think architecture needs to get cheaper, it needs to get faster, and I think it will as cultural demand grows for that sort of thing. 

One thing I'm even noticing is, in our studio and I think a bunch of our friends, are trying to do things really quickly. Not necessarily to rush for a deadline but to see if we can design things on a track as a way to sort of test it. We as architects were trained I think to take a lot of time to build something, so it's fun to kind of do the opposite.

Plus Pool concept rendering

Yes, I actually never wanted to study architecture because of the time cycle! So going back to the Plus Pool—nowadays, it feels like a lot of architects and designers really want to involve themselves in public affairs. Do you think a project like Plus Pool could only be dreamed up today with entities like Kickstarter and social media?

I'm not sure what we did [with Plus Pool] would have been possible even 15 years ago because now there are new modes of communication like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Kickstarter, the Internet in general. I think there's examples, like the High Line, of general public creating public space out of thin air without a kind of top-down ask, so it was certainly possible, but I think the method is very different now. Especially now it's much more accessible to anybody that has an app and can put an image online. I think somebody can put a project out there, and that's really exciting. But it's also where it starts getting… where you can tell the cultural shifts haven't happened yet, where everything slows down, becomes more like a traditional project.

So for example, one of the longest slogs of the Plus Pool project is on the political side where we're still having to go through traditional routes of getting political buy-in and support, because I think that public engagement with city life and the effect of politicians making actual decisions and signing off on things, that's still kind of a slow and old [process]. So I love the idea of this model where people get really engaged, but it's not quite there yet where we can really push and assume the thing can be built in an entirely new way. I almost feel like it's 40% new and innovative process and 60% very old, slow New York [political bureaucracy].

What kind of projects would get you excited if you saw them being submitted to the Core77 Design Awards? What are you looking for?

I guess I really get excited by stuff that's kind of fucked up. My interest is not so much whether it's pretty or done particularly well, but more that it's a totally wild thing that someone actually carried through. It's one thing to put ideas out there, but it's a totally different thing to commit to it and execute it and actually get it done and have a belief in it. I think things that look like they were done totally outside of traditional architectural process would make me very excited. So I don't know what that looks like yet. 

For sure from a design level, I'm looking for something different, but if there were projects that were somehow conceived and built in 2 months or a way they were built with methods that are completely foreign to how a typical building is made, especially if it's more democratic, if it's more accessible, less formal, I think that would really excite me. Mainly because I think it points to different ways of creating buildings. And then at the end of the day, I think it also points to opening up the ability for lots of different types of people to create buildings, and have effects on cities in that way. I think that would be the most exciting thing I could imagine.

Thinking of submitting to the Built Environment category in the 2019 Core77 Design Awards? Submit today—your final day to submit is April 1st at 9 PM EST!

Design Job: Ready for a Career Change? 3D Hubs is Seeking a Product Designer in Amsterdam

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Design is an essential part of the 3D Hubs culture. We believe that it is one of the key elements that sets us apart from the competition. We aim to build a user experience that turns our customers into engineering superheroes. As our team continues to grow, we are looking for an outstanding Product Designer that will help us get there.

View the full design job here

Instruments? Kinda Over 'Em. Dubler Transforms Your Voice into a Sound Studio.

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Musicians Novelist and PREM using Dubler Studio Kit to make tracks based on vocal triggers and instrumentation.

Musicians who can play two or more instruments and sub in for orchestral colleagues are sometimes called "doublers." They're flexible, they're fixers, and they're a big help when you're trying to bring a piece of music to life.

George Wright's Dubler Studio Kit, for which he's raising funds on Kickstarter, aims to expand that ability to just about anyone, regardless of musical ability. Dubler's microphone and software turn a person's voice into a MIDI controller, transforming simple vocalizations into a huge range of musical noises. With just your voice—or non-vocal cues like clapping or playing an instrument—you can dub in any sound you want.

Wright converts his construction expertise into music tech at the Royal College of Art

In the first year of his graduate studies at the Royal College of Art in London, Wright cofounded a business that built IoT solutions for construction sites. But by his second year, he knew his heart wasn't really in it. "It was a good idea with a really nice team—but I realized that I didn't care about the project or the industry," he says.

He saw his second and final year there as an opportunity to start fresh on whatever he wanted, and decided to make a music creation tool.

"I started broadly, following a user-centered experimental process," he says. To understand how people communicate about music, he asked test participants to listen to Prince's "Let's Work" and explain it to someone else. His findings—that many people communicate ideas about music via the voice—got him thinking about how to facilitate that common behavior.

"I saw the creative spark of people expressing complex sounds, instrumental ideas, and rhythms all using the voice, and I thought, 'What if you could translate that live to the actual instrumentation?' It fascinated me, so I just kept testing, learning, and prototyping."

Wright heads to Abbey Road, and puts a band together

In 2017, Abbey Road Red, a music tech incubator created by the iconic British recording studio, welcomed in Wright and his nascent company, Vochlea, to develop his early prototypes of Dubler. "We were probably the earliest-stage company they have ever taken, and maybe ever will take, but they saw the potential in the tech."

While there, he not only refined the technology, but also started connecting with musicians, who proved to be incredibly valuable prototype testers, and building a small team: culture and communications lead Kelly Angood, senior engineer Cam Thomas, and cofounder and technical lead Daven Sanassy.

Latency kills the groove—Vochlea needed a real-time performance machine

Sanassy came from Mixlr, a live audio broadcasting software startup, and brought a great deal of experience in building fast, lightweight audio tools. It's because of his expertise that Dubler syncs seamlessly with programs like Ableton, Logic, ProTools, and GarageBand at the studio and in live performances.

"At Mixlr, we expected our desktop app to run on low-end machines, and this challenge ensured that I had a solid understanding of the pitfalls of real-time audio programming. For example, if you produce a game and it stutters visually, you see some visual artifacts temporarily and the visuals recover. But in audio, if you have any delay or even the tiniest error, the whole audio chain can break down and likely needs to be restarted to work properly again.

"What makes Dubler stand out from anything that has come before," Sanassy says, "is that it has a low enough latency to feel real-time. It feels as if your mouth moves and the sound is instantly triggered, as if you were playing a physical instrument. One of the most major challenges has been producing a piece of AI software that is so sophisticated that it can do what Dubler does, but also so efficient that it can do it very quickly whilst running on a normal computer."

Working musicians put it into practice

From the very beginning, the Vochlea team has tested Dubler with musicians—and hasn't had any trouble finding willing participants. "Generally, once an artist sees the possibilities of Dubler Studio Kit for themselves, they have been keen to get involved," Angood says.

Luna Neptune using the Dubler Studio Kit.

Luna Neptune, a rising folk star based in London, first saw a Dubler prototype in a Facebook video, and started badgering the team to let her test one. Now, she's working it into her live act and planning to use it on her first full-length album.

"On my EPs, I have lots of bleeps and wooshy noises and spacey sounds that, currently, as a solo artist, I've not found a good way to replicate live," she says. "I just play guitar and vocals. But Dubler brings a whole new aspect to my live show. I'm not a beatboxer at all, but I'm finding ways by being able to do interesting beats whilst also kind of singing—being able to play a flute noise and a drum kit at the same time, for example.

"I just can't wait to see it in the hands of more and more creators," she says. "There are so many uses. Like, film soundtracks are going to be so incredible because of the technology, or anybody who makes electronic music can do that in a live setting. It just opens up so many possibilities."

The Dubler Studio Kit is live on Kickstarter until April 16, 2019.

ArtCenter's Jenny Rodenhouse on Integrating VR/AR Technologies into Design School Curriculum 

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Jenny Rodenhouse, this year's Core77 Design Awards Design Education Initiatives Jury Captain is an artist, designer, and researcher in Los Angeles exploring our increasingly immersive, screen-based lifestyles. As the Director of the Immersion Lab at ArtCenter College of Design, Rodenhouse works with both the Interaction Design Department and Media Design Practices MFA program at ArtCenter to discover ways in which mixed reality technologies can enhance our lives. The ArtCenter graduate also has an industrial and interaction design background, working as a designer at Microsoft Research in Social Computing, Xbox, and Windows Phone Advanced Development before returning to ArtCenter as faculty.

The Logistical Baroque by Jenny Rodenhouse

In a recent interview, we spoke with Rodenhouse about her work with ArtCenter's Immersion Lab and how she views AR/VR technologies becoming an educational tool:

Can you tell us a little bit more about ArtCenter's Immersion Lab - how/why it started, what programs it houses and what it aims to accomplish?

The Immersion Lab at ArtCenter College of Art and Design is a dedicated prototyping space designed to immerse students into making with emerging spatial computing platforms from Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality, Virtual Reality, to Motion Capture. As more information is embedded within the world around us, the lab offers new opportunities for artists and designers to rethink our experiences within these overlapping physical and digital environments.

The lab hosts 8 dedicated VR and AR workstations with a diverse range of equipment: HTC Vives, Oculus Rifts, Microsoft HoloLens and Mixed Reality headsets, 360 cameras, Leap Motions, and Perception Neuron mobile motion capture suits. Through the lab's dynamic hardware and software library students can creatively intermix and augment existing platforms.

ArtCenter's Immersion Lab

Departments across ArtCenter can utilize the lab for courses, workshops, and lectures that explore all aspects of a field that is still very much in flux. We invite guest speakers who share their works-in-progress projects, ideas, and methods. Last year we collaborated with a local Los Angeles motion capture school, Mocap Vaults, for workshop on video game acting and digital body capture. The space serves as a center for students, faculty, and the greater spatial computing community to exchange skills and ideas. As an educational resource the lab's goal is to advance the discourse around the future of augmented reality, mixed reality, and virtual reality, imagining new opportunities and future applications of these emerging technologies through art and design.

Immersion Lab layout

With VR and AR technologies becoming more commercially available over the last several years, it's finally possible for more people to participate in the medium, not just a select few. Still limited in consumer use, the commercialization of VR and AR has opened up the medium to a new population of creators, including artists and designers. This continual opening of the toolset is a really important milestone for its evolution and future.

VR and AR is this incredible mix of media—3D models, interaction, animation, environments, film—which inevitably pulls together an amazing collection of people, interests, and skills that are all here at ArtCenter. It became really clear to both faculty, students, and alumni that establishing an accessible resource was a really exciting teaching and learning opportunity, where we could not only affect how we practice as artists and designers, here and today, but also the broader community of spatial computing, VR, AR, MR, XR, and every future '_R'. Maggie Hendrie, Chair of Interaction Design and VR club president Filip Kostic, who now since graduating teaches in the lab, were instrumental in its development!

VR & AR are so cross-disciplinary at this point, so how do you support/promote this diversity across various fields?

Because the lab is a community resource that any department at ArtCenter can use, faculty Filip Kostic and I have really focused on developing an immersive learning curriculum that helps frame the technology specifically for artists and designers. It is important to make the technology accessible but equally important to contextualize it's use. The lab's curriculum focuses on immersing students in prototyping day one as a way for students to learn, make, and think through the hardware and software.

"It is one thing to read about [these tools], and it is entirely different to allow them to inform your creative process, which I think only comes from actually using them." 

Graduate Media Design Practices student, Eli Hong uses an architectural modeling as an augmented reality trigger to explore the future of AR real-estate. Citizen's purchase seemingly empty air space in order to have more control over what digital content appears near, in front of, or on their physical location.

With this method of prototyping as research, students use their own personal observations on the technology to develop new interactions, aesthetics, products, and future scenarios. Through our cross-disciplinary space, diverse technology library, immersive learning curriculum, we are purposely confusing disciplines, mediums, and the _Rs in order to open up new opportunities within the field. We also host many transdisciplinary studios. Any student in ArtCenter can enroll in the course, encouraging cross-disciplinary collaboration and diverse investigation. We find that through these collaborative studios, students discover new opportunities for design, VR, and AR.

VR & AR technologies are evolving at a such rapid rate. How do you as an educator in this field go about teaching students the skills they need to take with them as software and hardware continues to evolve each year?

Artists and designers can readily access VR and AR now, so concepts we previously made through simulated video or drawings have new life and should take on different forms by actually engaging the tools. Like any new tool or material, you have to go through a process of understanding how to shape it—giving it context, form, and meaning. What is the technology really good at, what does it want to do?

Inspired by an introductory assignment on photogrammetry, graduate Media Design Practices students Nan Tasi and Nicci Yin propose a future where you can immediately scan any physical object and bring it into VR, overlaying the physical cup and the virtual copy. The project was selected to be exhibited at Microsoft's Design Expo.

We focus on teaching strategic prototyping through the creative use and misuse of the medium. We believe in stepping students through the process of how to research by making with the technology—what can VR and AR technologies do that are unique, interesting, novel, bad, good, ect? It is one thing to read about it, and it is entirely different to allow it to inform your creative process, which I think only comes from actually using it. As artists and designers, we often critique or try to consider how to make new technology relevant/useful/better within our society, and this need isn't going away. Overall, whether it is VR, AR or any new technology that follows, we want students to come away knowing how use this process of resourceful play/experimentation/exploration as a way to learn about an emerging technology, how to make with it, and how it could be used.

Interaction Design student, Sam Giambalvo designed a line of VR Furniture that is tracked in both physical and virtual space. Designing the furniture from within VR, Sam proposed new material qualities and affordances that are informed by digital aesthetics found in the Unity game engine.

In our introductory immersion weeks, we focus on rigorous exploration, abstracting VR or AR capabilities, and deconstructing the parts. The overall package or layers can be quite complex, but in those layers are a lot of really interesting projects. VR and AR use game development software, cameras, machine vision, and track objects, people, or spaces in order to render a digital scene. The camera doesn't have to be worn just on a person's head. It could be held in a hand, or taped on a chair, or on top of a Roomba vacuum, or embedded within architecture. The controller doesn't have to used as a gaming controller but could be a worn or used as a scale model of a car to explore autonomous vehicle scenarios. I think in this repurposing of the parts we get most excited because it challenges the popular or stereotypical notions of the field, extending it beyond its existing bounds. There is still so much to explore with VR and AR, it just might not be how we are currently imagining it.

What are some cool projects that have come out of the Immersion Lab or are currently being developed?

This year faculty Elise Co and I ran a transdisciplinary studio called High Resolution Body Tracking where students used mobile motion capture suits and other forms of tracking to think about future scenarios when our bodies—from our skin to our skeletons—are tracked, moving away from the estimated GPS blue dot to a high rendered copy of ourselves.

High Resolution Body Tracking transdisciplinary studio

I am also currently teaching a course with furniture designer Benjamin Borden for graduate Media Design Practices called Mixed Reality Furniture: Make Room for the Interface. The studio explores the impact of the virtual interface on our physical interior spaces, from hyper-real materiality to the collision of interior design and information architectures.

What are you looking for in entries to the Design Education category of the Core77 Design Awards?

A few things I'm looking for are:

- Creative learning that extends across our entire lifetime, going beyond the classroom model

- Methods that teach how to constructively critique, disagree, listen, and question one another

- Pedagogy that uses non traditional perspectives and non western design histories

- Affordable spaces that increase access to tools, community, discussion, and job opportunities

- Critical use of emerging technology that deeply embraces the new practices, process, aesthetics, and projects that come out as a result

Thinking of submitting to the Design Education Initiatives category in the 2019 Core77 Design Awards? Submit today—your final day to submit is April 1st at 9 PM EST!


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