A dream intern is one who not only excels at the academic component of design, but also has a deep personal hunger for creation that permeates all aspects of their life.. Our Redwood City engineering team is looking for a currently enrolled or recently graduated Industrial Design intern who demonstrates both consulting professionalism and start-up adaptability. The successful candidate will create unique design concepts that consider material selection, surface finish, color, form factor, and ma

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With the news of Jony Ive's departure--and given the way things have been going lately--it certainly seems an era has ended for Apple. And while I haven't been fond of the company's developments, it's impossible to forget the affinity I gained for them in decades past.

Someone who shares that affinity, or at least a fondness for decades past, is the self-styled "retro designer" who goes by the ironic handle FuturePunk. The UK-based FuturePunk refers to the 1980s as "the greatest decade in the history of mankind," and his passion is evinced with these fanciful iPhone designs and commercials he created:

Good gosh but he nails the aesthetic.

As more proof of his '80s prowess, check out the following graphic designs he's created:

Check out more of his stuff here.

Starting today, you can experience the sprawling landscapes of the Chilean Atacama Desert or the Iguazu Falls of Argentina smack dab in the middle of Manhattan—and snap a picture to commemorate your "trip".

This is thanks to PLAYLAB, the New York creative studio responsible for landmark projects like the + POOL and frequent collaborators with Virgil Abloh, who are continuing their public art project with the Avenue of the Americas Association with the new installation FANTASY LANDSCAPES. The project consists of a series of four hand-painted, immersive installations around the avenue. FANTASY LANDSCAPES follows their last project on location, Grown Up Flowers in 2018, which became a big hit on Instagram. "The flowers were about getting something that was historically here and blowing it up, giving it attention," notes PLAYLAB's Ana Cecilia Thompson Motta, "now we're bringing another part of the history which is that of the Avenue of the Americas. [New York City originally] wanted to bring all the Embassies here, so we wanted to bring a little more history and take people to the Americas through the Avenue."

PLAYLAB's 2018 installation "Grown Up Flowers"

The decision behind hand-painting stems from the old Hollywood practice of hand-painting backdrop sets as well as 50's tourist Americana travel posters. "These movie sets really transported the actors outside of the real world; they allowed them to go anywhere in the world, and that's what we wanted to bring to the Avenue of the Americas," said Thompson Motta, "so not only is painting the better technique to do this because it adds to depth to wherever you are standing, but it's also a nod to the techniques of these old movie backdrop painters."

The installation will inevitably be used heavily by visitors for social media purposes, but also emphasizes the importance of designing an art experience that can be appreciated as is, in real life. PLAYLAB Partner Jeff Franklin says of the installation "we've always loved to do artwork that people can interact with that's not like a white glove, precious type of thing. Especially for public art, it's not a 'look but don't touch', but instead a 'look but get in it' type of experience."

FANTASY LANDSCAPES launches Monday, July 22nd. Launch day will be accompanied by several "tour guides" helping visitors navigate the spaces, who will be taking Polaroids of visitors in the installations to take home with them. Some pretty cool limited-edition merch will also be able for purchase Monday, July 22nd from 12:00PM to 2:00 PM at the 1177 Sixth Avenue location.

FANTASY LANDSCAPES is located at 1120 Sixth Avenue, 1177 Sixth Avenue, 1221 Sixth Avenue, and 1251 Sixth Avenue and will be installed until October 2019.

Interested to hear more from PLAYLAB? Partner Archie Lee Coates IV will be speaking at the Core77 Conference this October! Learn more here and buy your ticket today.

This post is presented by the K-Show, the world's No.1 trade fair for the plastics and rubber industry. Visionary developments and groundbreaking innovations will again lead the industry into new dimensions at K 2019 in Düsseldorf, Germany.

Sean Carney is the Chief Design Officer of Philips. Leading a team of more than 400 designers, he has created empathic and data-connected solutions with added value for millions of users – medical professionals and their patients. His success is widely recognized by the 158 top design awards won by Philips in 25 key global design competitions in 2016. He has over 25 years of experience as a creative visionary and, among other things, leads multi-disciplinary design teams in the US, Europe and Asia. Sean pioneered a user-centered approach to brand design while working with Electrolux and subsequently applied his approach to brands such as iittala, Assa Abloy and Hewlett-Packard.

It feels like there is no other area where the role of materials is so polar opposite in respect to the role they need to fulfill in healthcare. It's clear that it has been going through major transportation in both prediction, diagnostics and increasingly with self-medication.

In the second in a series of interviews on CMF and the role of materials across different industries, Sean Carney, Chief Design Office at Philips, explains how materials need to fulfill the extreme ends of patient needs. In the role of enhancing patient experience though comfort and emotional reassurance but also the day to day demands of emergency surgery and all that entails for durability, hygiene and just dealing with a lots of blood. Beyond this it's also about design and data that connects toothbrushes to tell us how to brush our teeth better.

Chris Lefteri: How did you take the experience of designing the products that Philips was traditionally known for and apply them to healthcare?

Sean Carney: The last few years Philips has been in a transitional period, moving from a diversified technology conglomerate, into focused health technology company. We've divested ourselves of other industries that made us great, such as lighting and consumer electronics, in order to focus on a continuum of care.

For example, we're working in prevention and precision diagnostics, improving our understanding of why people fall ill for more accurate interpretation of symptoms. This means we can apply medicine in a more precise way and through image-guided minimally invasive procedures.

In the field of patient monitoring, we've developed what we call 'connected care'; where we have approximately 275 million patients tracked with our patient monitors each year. We're also managing over 30 petabytes of imaging data for healthcare providers around the world. So if you're a radiographer or cardiologist, you can have real-time access to a wealth of information to guide your decision-making process.

CL: How does this translate into hardware? What are some of the material challenges you face in terms of patient experiences?

SC: Any clinical environment, hardware needs to be clean, germ-free, low-maintenance, but also robust enough to stand up to everyday wear and tear.

An extreme example of that was when visiting an emergency department in a major US hospital. As the major trauma center for the city, they deal with a lot of gunshot wounds. You're wheeling people in who are in extreme distress into this environment, often they're bleeding out and you're getting them onto a CT machine to determine what the damage is and what interventions they need; and it has to be done quickly and effectively. There's no time to dress up or prepare the area.

Now, when you go back in the cold light of day, and look at this device – which looked beautiful in the catalog and looked amazing in the trade show – when you see it in reality, it's battered, bruised, it's got scuff marks and cracks, and you can see they've hosed it down a million times to keep it clean. We need to make material choices and design with this context of use mind.

CL: You've got a complex set of guiding principles because on one hand you've got to have very practical materials for extreme conditions and then you've got to have something that is emotionally reassuring yet durable.

Tell me about the Ambient Experience project, which focused on the emotional needs of the patient.

SC: Having an MRI scan requires a patient to be inside the bore of the scanner for a lengthy amount of time - it's noisy, and for some patients it can be scary, a little claustrophobic - so how do we put them at ease? We designed systems that can project images and we can give patients access to those images in the bore.

But you also have to consider the patient's perception of the room, the materials and the colors we choose, the bed that supports the patient, the mattress that they're lying on. We have to consider, do you design it around clinical efficiency and speed so it can be wiped down quickly, or do you design it so that it's comforting as they're touching it? Of course the answer is both and it's the designers role to figure out how to create a win, win here. We've seen other people come with a pediatric imaging approach, where they've said, 'Well you don't need all these expensive projectors and colored lights; you can put up pictures on the wall, you can put stickers on the machine, you can even put an MDF cover over it and make it look like a fairytale castle'. But what they don't take into account is that not all children need that. Pediatrics goes from zero to the age of twenty-one in the US. Imagine an eighteen year old coming into a Disney princess environment - that's not really going to work.

Equally, there are children suffering from ADHD who get distracted and who will actually become more nervous and agitated if overstimulated. In those situations, you want to cool everything down and neutralize the environment as much as possible. So there is a real need for adaptive environments that can respond to the specific needs of each patient.

Ultimately, we're balancing between addressing needs on functional and emotional levels. On one hand, we design for cleanliness, efficiency and being able to be maintained long term rather than decaying with age. At the same time, we also have to consider the patient's perception, their experiences, emotive triggers and cues.

CL: What's your dream list, wish list, for materials?

SC: One that can do everything!

CL: Yeah ok, haha, I'll make a quest finding that one!

SC: And be recyclable and knowing what we know now, one of the things that we've pledged is by 2020, we will take back and repurpose all the large medical systems that its customers are prepared to return to us. Ultimately, we are driving towards circularity on everything we do, but right now, it's on the big capital goods. We're looking to take back hardware at the end of life and re-purpose it, re-use it or refresh it, scavenge parts or materials and even up-cycle where possible, which requires a fundamentally different approach to designing it.

This means designing with disassembly in mind, while expecting these devices sit in situ for maybe 10 years, we hope at least. So during its lifetime, can we upgrade it? Can we refresh it in the case of this US based CT? If we know it's going to get beaten and abused on a daily basis, could we design that into the product with materials that are perhaps more attuned to that kind of environment, where it's going to have trolleys running in to it or get blood splatters, detergents and other things in contact with it? In making deliberate choices around the materials, rather than looking at plastics, should we be looking at ceramics or metals? But of course there's a whole host of technical issues around metals in X-Ray, and obviously once you get into MR and you're dealing with powerful magnetic fields, then you have a real set of challenges as well.

CL: My philosophy is based-on thinking about materials at the starting point of the design process and then designing out. So, in terms of how Phillips is working with materials, how do you integrate materials within these types of projects?

SC: Here's one example - the neonatal intensive care unit, where you're dealing with premature babies, the most fragile human beings there are - just 26 weeks old. We can now not only keep them alive, but actually help them on their way to being fully functioning adults. But how do you put patient monitoring onto their skin, which is so fragile? Can we look at other ways of applying or picking up their vital signs without applying adhesives and things? That's one extreme example.

CL: And you're involved in that level of research?

SC: Yes, we work on that primary research level and that's becoming even more relevant as we get into wearables now. We have a big patient monitoring business, and we have approximately 275 million patients tracked with our patient monitors each year around the world right now, hooked up to our devices in ICUs and Acute care settings. What we're doing is leveraging wearable technology, reducing the number of cables on the patient. For example, we've introduced a medical-grade, wearable biosensor that automatically and continuously measures heart rate, respiratory rate, skin temperature, single-lead ECG, posture and activity data for at-risk patients in low acuity settings in the hospital.

This is a great development which will improve the patient experience, but it also requires a lot of thought to be put into the design, from how long it's going to be worn, to its effect on the patient's skin. We also need to consider the Sustainability angle, since the patch contains technology in it how often should the sensor be replaced? Can we split the patch into a patient interface component and the tech component, allowing for re-use whilst always presenting a fresh patch to the patient. This requires our designers to re-think the fundamentals of monitoring, moving from tech in the bedside box approach to the tech in the patch. The consequent material challenges are also then quite different as we move to this new system.

CL: As the market for wearables opens up there is going to give more opportunity for self-diagnosis and self-treatment.

SC: I would say Yes, but let's also recognize that we're at the start of a journey here. If our intent is to move into prevention and help people live a healthier life, we have to recognize that we're going to need a lot more than simply counting steps. Of course there are already health benefits in using step counts to get people moving more, but if we really want to help spot early indications of an illness, then we're going to need more than this. We have to look at how this data can help signal when there is a potential health issue. If you can start to measure things like, speed with which you get out of bed, speed with which you stand up, speed with which you move from point A to point B and then analyze that over a period of time, you can start to generate much more meaningful insight's. These insights in the future can potentially predict chronic diseases ranging from Cardio-vascular disease right through to cognitive issues. If we can capture these early warning signals and feed them into the medical system then clinicians will be able to start the diagnosis and therapy that much earlier, which will ultimately help drive up the success of treatments leading to better patient outcomes.

CL: But those kinds of experiences which are more to do with the emotional experience of materials and being part of a lifestyle - people buy smart watches not because they want to be healthy but because it's a cool product, a fashion lifestyle accessory. To me that feels like a new type of emerging trend, that in a way is something like sunglasses or prescription glasses, that rather than medical products, they've become fashion accessories.

So do you think that kind of monitoring has an opportunity, because particularly for materials, it's about wearables, trends and fashion, has an opportunity to grow?

SC: There's obviously a lifestyle link to this and adding the dimension of fashion and desirability can help drive adoption at scale, as we're already witnessing with the Apple watch. As people then instinctively start to wear these devices everyday we can start to derive a much more holistic view of their activities, their health but in the context of where they were and what they were doing. This is a much richer view than you would be able to obtain for instance if the person was sitting in a Cardiologists consulting room wired up to an ECG. I think there are true health benefits to be derived from it and we're just at the start of that journey. But this isn't just about those who have serious illnesses, it's also about optimizing your health and so increasing your performance, your focus, your productivity, all of those things can all be helped by having access to this data.

I'm working a lot in Japan at the moment, and they've got the problem of an aging society. We've seen it in other markets as well, and other countries of course, but Japan's a little further up that curve and there's also this stigma about not wanting to be perceived as frail and elderly, not needing help as it were.

So if they have a respiratory problem and they need supplementary oxygen, they don't want to have the stigma of that visible cannula going into their nose because it looks like a medical device and they don't look particularly attractive. These are people who care about their appearance. What if you could introduce an element of fashion, like sunglasses? So, like you mentioned earlier wearing glasses in the 1950s and 60s wasn't seen as cool, but today, Eyewear is seen as not only a corrective necessity but a fashion accessory. We can de-stigmatize a Cannular by making it more of a fashion statement and introduce materials in there that speak to that as well. Similarly, with things like hearing devices. Hearing aid manufacturers are scaling devices down to be smaller, smaller, smaller, to the point where you can hardly see them. Well, what if you went the other way and actually made it like an accessory made it a piece of ear jewelry? It's those kinds of insights which we are also interested in exploring.

CL: Going back to plastics, does it ever become an issue using recycled materials in health care products?

SC: We are doing a lot of work at the moment on wearables around sleep, and not only for OSA (obstructive sleep apnea) sufferers where we need to have devices to keep a constant positive airway. These products blow air into your nose and keep your airways open to avoid a drop in oxygen through the night. Traditionally they looked a little like Pilots masks and wearing them wasn't always comfortable. You got sweaty, maybe skin irritations, so people would take them off in the night or brush them off because they were so uncomfortable, which of course defeats the whole purpose. So we created one called Dream Wear, which is using the lightest possible combination of silicone that you can hardly feel touching it, and then minimizing the touch points while still providing a seal because you've got to get an air seal in there. We're moving beyond pure silicone, looking at new material technologies to make the fit even more comfortable.

CL: What is crucial for the success of a designer?

SC: A crucial aspect of being designer is getting as close to the action as you can. I encourage designers to embrace what we call 'radical empathy' – immersing themselves in the reality of user experiences. That's the way we think, 'get the designers in there, understand the context' and this is the way you build empathy with the user, with the patient, with the clinician. You've got to do that, you've got to get in and get your hands dirty. Otherwise, we're destined to design only beautiful concepts, have great coffee table books, amazing visions of the future. These things pay a role of course, but working in the field of Health I believe we need ensure our vision become reality and we ensure our designs have impact which results in driving better outcomes for patients and better experiences for them, and the clinical staff..

This post is presented by the K-Show, the world's No.1 trade fair for the plastics and rubber industry. Visionary developments and groundbreaking innovations will again lead the industry into new dimensions at K 2019 in Düsseldorf, Germany.

The Throw-away Society we live in every second is not only built by the needs of consumers but also well-planned by market-driven designers and brands. They, or we, did so well in capturing and utilizing the desirability of goods that consumers have been educated to perceive that "new is better than old." We have got used to easily throw old things away instead of repairing them.

Repairing Society is a speculative design practice inviting us to imagine an alternative way of consumption and production that is opposed to our current Throw-away Society. It focuses on cultivating a stronger emotional attachment between objects and human through building a 'Repair not Replace' lifestyle. By encouraging repairing things, we can cultivate a longer relationship with objects and revive our bonds with old things.

Repairing Society was inspired by Kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. It treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to conceal. Kintsugi proposes that broken and old can be better than the new which resonates with the philosophy of the Repairing Society. In Repairing Society, people can keep and reuse old things by regularly repairing and repurposing. In this model brands and designers are required to consider, from the beginning of product development, how products can be easily repaired or repurposed.

To better illustrate the Repairing Society, I proposed a series of designed services and objects based on three topics below.

REPAIR: Broken is Better than the New

GRAFT: Recombining for Repurpose

AUTOTOMY: Design for Broken

Repaired Basket (3D Scanning and Printing)

The rattan basket repaired with 3d scanning and printing by new repairmen. The composition of half original rattan and half 3d printed woven PLA make this basket hard to be defined as old or new. Ideally, objects give form to ideas, but they also provide us with permission to reimagine what is possible.

Credit: Xiaodong Ma

Repaired Piggy Bank, Plate, and Cup (Kintsugi)

The piggy bank, plate, and cup repaired with Kintsugi technique by traditional repairmen. Each breakage is highlighted with gold instead of being concealed. The golden joineries on the piggy bank tell the stories of its owner.

Credit: Xiaodong Ma

Repaired Dish (Resin)

The dish repaired with clear resin is made by new repairmen. Through the transparent resin, you can observe each broken vine declaring the history of this dish. And the history of objects should be cherished.

Credit: Xiaodong Ma

Watering Cup #2 (Watering Neck + Cup)?

This watering cup is a grafted product made with a plastic watering can spout and broken cup pieces. As its spout neck is vertical to the cup handle, every time I use it to water a plant. I feel like I am pouring tea for an old friend.

Credit: Xiaodong Ma

Tea Mug (Teapot Handle + Mug)

?This Tea Mug is a grafted work made with an elegant ceramic teapot handle and an IKEA glass mug. The mesh and clash of vintage and modern make it much more interesting than the original pieces.

Credit: Xiaodong Ma

Grafted Colander, Spatula, and Protractor?

The colander is grafted into a soup spoon by getting its holes filled with plastic; This spatula is a grafted product made from a plastic barbecue fork. Its graft-designer endowed it with the function of the shovel by extending its surface area; The ruler is a grafted object made from a Protractor. It got a second life by being given a drawing function.

Credit: Xiaodong Ma

Grafted Spoons (Old Spoon + New Spoon)?

These two grafted spoons are great examples to embody the collaboration between old and new. The small one is the combination of a ceramic spoon head and a wooden spoon handle. They are merged with clear resin. The second is a grafted rice spoon made up of a plastic rice-spoon head and a wooden handle with an elephant woodcarving.

Credit: Xiaodong Ma

Watering Cup #1 (Tea Pot Neck + Watering Body)

This watering cup is a grafted product made with a ceramic teapot spout and a plastic watering can. The strong contrast of their sizes and using-context creates the aesthetic of Graft.

Credit: Xiaodong Ma

Autotomy Chopsticks?

Traditional chopsticks break disgracefully because of the structure of the wood fiber. Its messy broken section makes it hard to be repaired. The autotomy chopsticks leaving a groove in one side makes it break from the weaker groove and leave a clean broken part for later repairing and grafting.

Credit: Xiaodong Ma

Autotomy Bowl

Ceramic bowls usually break at the thinner parts, the walls, and rims. The base usually stays complete. Autotomy bowl with five bases can break into five small ones which can be easily repaired and grafted. It is a bowl holding the potential for five future lives.

Credit: Xiaodong Ma

Planterworx is currently looking for Senior/Lead Industrial Designers with 5+ years of experience in the design field to join our growing design and manufacturing company in Brooklyn, New York. Planterworx is unique in that we have both our design, and manufacturing facilities in the same building, that means

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This interview is part of a series featuring the presenters participating in this year's Core77 Conference, "The Third Wave", a one-day event that will explore the future of the design industry and the role designers will play in it.

The need for designers to collaborate with other industries and brainstorm creative solutions to face emerging environmental, governmental and societal concerns is becoming more and more imperative each day. In such dark times, how can designers keep the fun alive during their brainstorming process? Archie Lee Coates IV, co-founder and partner at PLAYLAB, INC., knows a thing or two about both successful collaboration and playful ideation. Using tools from art, architecture, and graphic design to initiate ideas around various themes that interest them, PLAYLAB works with a variety of clients to bring quirky, lovable products and experiences to life.

Most recently, PLAYLAB had the opportunity to work with Virgil Abloh to design the accompanying book to his Figures of Speech exhibition at MCA Chicago, as well as the set for Louis Vuitton's recent men's spring 2020 runway show, where the studio erected a full-sized bounce house as the show's main prop. Outside of PLAYLAB, Archie also co-founded + POOL, an initiative to build the world's first water-filtering floating pool in New York, which has required him to simultaneously work with designers, architects and government officials to bring their vision to life.

We sat down with Archie, who will be giving a talk called "SHITSTORM" at The Third Wave, to discuss the role collaboration will play between different industries in the future, as well as tips for having fun during the brainstorming process:

Core77: To start off, can you tell me a bit about the work PLAYLAB does and how you define the studio's mission? You started PLAYLAB when you were in college, have you changed the way you approach or talk about your work since then?

Archie: The answer kind of changes every time, which is probably the mission and a good thing. The core of the studio is my best friend, Jeff Franklin, and I. It started as an idea in college to create a space where we could explore the things that we cared about or were interested in learning about, basically. We started it in 2007, more or less, and then incorporated in 2009 so this is our 10th year. It started as a graphic design office, primarily, but we also initiated a lot of work. And the thinking there was we don't really need to or want to wait for people to ask us to do things. We want to be able to do them ourselves. We're a little naive in nature, or at least we really were back then.

Over the past 10 years we've seen everybody start working in every field, so that's nothing new but it brings an element of freedom. As the studio grows, we continue to explore what we care about, what we're interested in—it's like a giant adventure. That's a general way of speaking but we do creative direction and art direction and graphic design and branding and product direction. We do fashion shows. We design books and album covers and advise on creative strategies and stage designs and performances. You name it.

The more we move and operate, the more we realize that there isn't a specific type of thing we want to be involved in, in terms of form or discipline. It's more about the people that we work with and the feeling that we get from it. We want to create—always—a healthy environment that is about education, learning, growing, and experimentation.

GROWN UP FLOWERS is a multi-site installation in New York and China that launched in May 2018. It imagines flowers inflated many times their normal size, giving visitors a new perspective on these iconic and playful representations of beauty.

You mentioned that you've initiated a lot of your own projects, can you expand on that? Do you essentially pursue passion projects and tangential ideas and then look for ways to make them a reality?

Right. A key thing we're working on in the studio now is developing shoes. That came from stints working with footwear companies, like Adidas, seeing how they iterate and make shoes, and then realizing we can do that in our own studio. One of our designers, Dylan, came on board over a year ago and wanted to pursue this so we let him run with it and now it's become a serious part of our practice. We have a small museum show opening in September in Colorado, which will debut a size run of one shoe we've developed. This project will continue to grow and develop however we want it to.

These avenues are really important for the studio because they don't come with a brief, nobody's asking us to do them. But the goal is to get a check in some way so that we can continue to do it, but we're not driven by that. We self-fund a variety of things that we do in the studio so that we can continue to do what feels natural and genuine to us and then we project that onto the world and see who's interested in it. Conversations follow and then we start to move forward in a direction. It just seems like the right thing.

Tell me a bit about the structure of the studio. How many people are on the team right now?

We're five people right now but that'll change again this year. Everybody's called a designer and everybody does everything from strategy to production work, client meetings and management. There's a lot of ownership at the studio and if somebody wants to pursue something, we try our best to make that possible.

Image by Luca Venter

About how many projects does the studio work on at any given time? How does that break down between client projects and other projects?

We balance a lot for 5 people, it's a little crazy. The photographer Luca Venter shot a studio portrait of us recently called "How Many People Work Here", which shows each of us three times, making it look like we're a 15 person office. Definitely accurate. We're averaging around 10 "client" projects and 5 initiatives at any moment, including right now. Those projects are all at different phases, for sure, so they're timelines aren't necessarily all firing at the same time.

Let's talk about the process. Say you get a brief or chat with a potential collaborator about a new idea, what happens next?

What's funny is no matter what the project is, the process is almost always the same. We take whatever's been given to us and we each boil it down to the simplest idea, something that feels like plain English, but we go really deep into it. We're definitely a research heavy office. We come back together and it's like dumping crabs on the table: Here's all this shit we found, let's have a crab bake.

As we start to have conversations about it, we find similarities in the ideas and we bucket them into categories. Then we take the idea that we all respond to the best and we build a world around it. What if X happened? And if X happened, how would people hear about it? And how would people communicate about it? What is it actually made out of? What if it's made out of this thing and we go as far as we can? Jeff calls this part "throwing the flag." We throw the flag as far as we can and then, as a team of designers and critical thinkers, we use the limits around us to figure out what's the best way for it to exist. Sometimes we think of it in terms of small, medium, and large options. We'll go back to our collaborator or client and say, here's the core concept or several core concepts and here are the small, medium, large ways to go about it.

This studio is truly an adventure in relationships and conversations. Ideas are better in groups. Jeff and I met at architecture school and that way of thinking is prevalent there, and we keep that really sacred at the studio. It's always like: "More ideas! More ideas! More ideas! Now let's have a conversation about it and let's not have an ego about it. Let's have a great conversation and see where it goes, and then let's go make it!"

And then you've got the energy to go to the next thing because life doesn't need to be that serious all the time.

CLOG is a publication founded in 2011 by PLAYLAB, INC., Kyle May, Julia van den Hout, and Jacob Reidel. Originally focusing on architecture, CLOG explores, from multiple viewpoints and through a variety of means, a single subject that is relevant now. In addition to designing and editing, PLAYLAB directs all creative aspects of the brand, which so far includes15 issues,10 events, and 2 exhibitions.

What do you do when you get stuck?

They don't teach you this in school, but designing is only like 20% of it. It's really about communicating with people: figuring out how to speak to them properly, what they need, what they want. So if you're stuck, it's probably not because of the idea, it's probably because of a relationship or a conversation that you've had, or haven't had. It always goes back to pouring more time and energy into the people that are around you. The more face time you get with people, the better things are. The more understanding that you can have and the more trust you can have, the better things are. We talk a lot about energy, but energy is really real. It moves the dial forward. Some of the best designers I've ever met, they're just producers. And the producers are the ones that know how to keep things moving.

We think like producers, now more than we ever have in ten years of PLAYLAB. How do we get this thing done in the best way? It's very difficult and we have to relearn it for almost every project, but at least we know that that's the goal, figuring out how to navigate those channels.

As PLAYLAB has grown over the years, you've been refining the art of collaboration. Can you talk about why collaboration is so important through the lens of one of your biggest projects, +Pool?

+ Pool has radically changed the entire way that the studio operates. When we began the adventure it felt like such an impossible feat but we weren't thinking about the details, necessarily, of how it would exist, we just wanted to paint a picture of it and how powerful that would be. The feedback loop after that was so intense and so fast that within two weeks we had a little bit of funding and we were off to the races.

We knew from day one that a project like this was going to take a substantial amount of people and effort but I don't think any of us had any clue how many entities, organizations, companies, and individuals would need to be involved for it to be successful. There's the Army Corps of Engineers, there's the Coast Guard, there's the Department of Health, the Department of Environmental Conservation, the Department of Transportation, City Hall, the Economic Development Corporation. And then depending on where you're at, there's community groups, local organizations, etc.

It's not just identifying these players and then figuring out where they fit in your puzzle, it's you going out and figuring out how you fit into their puzzle and what you could service them with. That's design.

One of the biggest things we're involved with right now is programming and the biggest program we have is called the Summer Bluefish Program where we get kids in the water. The life of architecture projects that are proposed by developers or someone like that doesn't become real until it's built and it's open to whoever it's supposed to service. Part of what + Pool aims to do is go ahead and build that community before so that they can see and feel what they're going to have and how it's going to impact their community.

We've been able to grow this program from 20 kids three years ago to hundreds of kids this summer, from one pool to three pools. We partner with artists to kit them out with gear and we'll partner with the New York City Housing Authority to serve a population of people that really want this program and really need the education about the importance of water quality and the ability to swim.

I've just spent two and a half, three minutes talking about swim programs when it's a design project. I didn't expect that this would be the job but it's really good that it is, you know what I mean?

Along the way, we've talked to so many people and partnered with those who really know how these things come together. They advise us and push us forward—that's collaboration. It sounds maybe kind of boring or too detail-oriented but it's the coolest thing ever. That's what our office really is, a community of designers, not just in this office but outside of it.

This is a bit of an annoying question because this word can be off-putting but I'm curious, how do you define innovation and why is collaboration such a key part of it?

The new wave, the next wave, there will always be a new one or a next one but I really, truly feel like right now it's about wrapping your arms around people and getting things done together. That requires you to communicate with other people, and that's not the easiest thing to do.

Jeff and I teach at the School of Visual Arts in an MFA program that's ironically called Design for Social Innovation. A lot of what we end up doing is training the students away from thinking they're going to upend the system and change something. The term "innovation" inherently needs people. Often, the things that are the most innovative are the most simple and obvious things that we overlook because we want to do something big.

There's a lot of conversations going around right now about this idea of the big flat now. That with the amount of technology and communication, and the Internet and everything going on, all sorts of cultural artifacts and disciplines are merging into what we call content. And content is just a pretty, smooth surface that's easy to digest because it's flat.

The advantage of the flatness is that anybody can do anything and everything can be relevant. The answer is to constantly throw things that maybe have no relevance to each other, next to one another. Once you do that, you start to find combinations of things that are radical. Or maybe they're not that radical but because you saw them in this way, you're like, "Oh my god! This is sick!" But it has to come out of an individual, personal perspective.

What can you tell us about how all these ideas will fold into your talk at the 2019 Core77 conference?

We talk a lot as a studio and we think sharing stories about the reality of what happens at the studio is important, especially for other people that are like us or that are in similar positions. We had to consult so many people to get a sense of what it would be like to start a studio and those pieces of advice—whether they came in the form of talks we saw, or lectures, or workshops, or conversations, or just emails—changed our whole life. So we made a rule that whenever we do a talk, we won't stick to a particular theme, but we'll be really honest. Sort of like: "I'm going to tell you where the studio is at today, right now."

We always subtitle our talks by saying, most likely somebody's going to cry. Like, I'm going to cry. Running the studio has been a life-changing experience for us and when we talk about it, it's a very real thing.

Hear Archie Lee Coates IV of PLAYLAB and other design industry leaders speak at this years Core77 Conference, "The Third Wave"! Tickets are available now.

In this age of technological gizmos and design-for-Instagram, it's easy to forget what the real promise of industrial design is: To deliver useful, durable, attractive, ergonomic, mass-manufacturable objects to the masses. Smart Design recently tackled such a project by entering the BetterBin Design Competition, which asked entrants to redesign New York City's ubiquitous--and very long-in-the-tooth--green trash cans.

"New York City is home to more than 23,250 public street litter baskets," the competition brief reads. "The most widespread design—the green, wire-mesh basket—is affordable, easy to service and has remained largely unchanged since the 1930s. While iconic to the streets of New York, the wire basket is in need of a redesign to better address the current and future waste needs of the City."

As an NYC native, I don't consider myself the end user for a public trash can. I feel that distinction belongs to the sanitation workers who tirelessly empty them, helping to keep our city clean. If you've ever watched one of them hoist a full can--which might weigh over 100 pounds--to empty it into the back of the truck, and if you consider that their routes require them to do this hundreds of times in a single shift, you won't wonder why the NYC Department of Sanitation's workers are referred to as "New York's Strongest."

This is where design can make a real difference. If you can take even a little effort out of emptying that can, the benefit to the worker grows exponentially. Not to mention that you've got this object on practically every corner that everyone will see, and it oughtn't look like a dated eyesore. Smart Design had their work cut out for them, and I think they knocked it out of the park. (The competition judges clearly agreed, naming Smart a finalist.)

To learn how Smart executed their design, we interviewed industrial designer and project lead Dan Grossman.

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

Core77: What was it about the BetterBin competition that drew Smart Design in?

Dan Grossman: As a designer, you want as many people using and interacting with your products as possible. That's the dream, and the idea of having millions of New Yorkers interacting with our trash bins for the foreseeable future is really a dream project in many ways. It was an opportunity that we just couldn't pass up. As soon as we saw the competition, we knew it was something that we all wanted to be a part of.

We're a New York City-based firm, and we've done a lot of work with the City over the course of our nearly 40 years in business. Most notably, we had collaborated with the Department of Transportation to rework the new taxicabs, in collaboration with Nissan. So working with the City is a bit of our DNA, and for both myself and the team, having the opportunity to design for the City is such an amazing opportunity.

Designing a municipal trash can is real nuts-and-bolts ID. What kinds of research did you guys do?

There's very few projects that you approach that have the history and longevity of the New York City trash cans, so the first bit of research was really understanding that history, understanding how they have or haven't evolved over the past 100 years. The existing trash cans, in some iteration of the current construction, have gone mostly unchanged since the 1930s. So [we sought to] really understand the history of the object itself.

From there we went on to the next layer, which is working with the DSNY (the Department of Sanitation) attending these open houses, communicating directly with representatives, and interacting directly with sanitation workers. Having the chance to talk to them one-on-one, communicating with them on the streets, and also just a lot of observation. The trash routes that happen every day and wake you up in the morning, now we were getting out of bed to go watch them happen in real time. That type of actual observation and interaction with the actual users themselves, that was a huge part of our research.

The last thing was watching civilians. On one side of the spectrum you have the sanitation workers that service these things. The other side was watching everyday New Yorkers like ourselves interacting with these cans, watching them throw things away when the can is empty and when it's full. Watching them move around them and navigate their daily lives around these objects was certainly interesting.

One of the things that I really like about your design are the grab handles on both the top and bottom. What was the insight that led you to that design?

One of the biggest challenges that a sanitation worker has while servicing a trash can is the weight; these cans can get extremely heavy when they're full. They're about 30 pounds-plus when they're empty, so you can imagine the daily [demands]. Having to lift 30 to 100 pounds every other block is extremely strenuous, and that's what leads to a lot of injuries on the job.

So we sought to understand: "How can we improve the actual physical experience of a sanitation worker servicing the bin?" And that started with the ergonomics: How they lift it, how they turn it, how they twist it, how they drag it. These are all things that we took into consideration when we were designing for it--really watching how they actually lift the can.

And they don't just lift the can, they hit it against the [inside of the compactor]. That noise that we hear that wakes us up in the morning, that's a sanitation worker banging the can against the side of the truck. And they do that because trash gets wet and gross and things get stuck to the bottom. So they do this thing where they turn it and twist it, they're literally rolling the can on the side.

So these are the pain points and touchpoints that we established as opportunity areas to design into. Creating handles for them to lift, handles for them to turn and twist, and handles for them to essentially bang it against the side of the truck. We just wanted to give the user, who's the sanitation worker in this case, as much flexibility and opportunity to comfortably service and use these cans.

Your design features vertical bars around the can. Those are to provide protection for when they're banging it against the truck?

Yes, precisely. There's a lot of constraints that had to go into this project, and one of the things I mentioned prior was weight. The other thing is durability. These cans are serviced thousands of times in their lifespan, and New Yorkers are tough on things. These cans get a lot of wear and tear. Aside from just daily usage and living on the street, they're also being literally lifted and thrown and banged and dropped.

So a big part of the work that went into our final design was trying to create something which would structurally hold over time, through all these challenges. We wanted to create a sort of roll cage, like with race cars, around our trash can so that it would be really strong, and able to withstand anything that was thrown at it.

What was the most interesting or surprising thing that came up during your research?

Understanding the ergonomics and [the sanitation workers'] behaviors was the most interesting thing.

The thing that was most surprising to us, was actually finding a newfound respect for the existing trash cans. As designers and as New Yorkers in general, it's really easy to crap on things and be like, "That's not good, and "That's not pretty," and "That's not cool."

But you start to realize that for a thing to live on the streets of New York for almost 100 years, there's a lot of really great things that went into that. And you start to realize the value engineering that has enabled these trash cans to be mass produced, to be serviced, to be replaced and discarded in some sort of a systematic way. There's a lot of really good thought that went into it. The more we learned about the existing can and the more we watched sanitation workers use it, the more we didn't want to just completely reinvent it. We wanted to evolve it. We wanted to make it better.

One of the things I've observed over the years is seeing sanitation workers dragging full, heavy cans over to the truck. How does your design of the feet, those bottom grab handles, hold up to the dragging action?

That was another thing, we wanted to make it easy. Our whole mission was to make the job of the sanitation worker easier and safer. And with these things being so heavy, they do often have to drag them, sometimes they even have to have two people drag them.

So the way we actually built our design, by creating these reinforcement bars and adding in all these additional handles, we also created these feet. And the feet do a couple things. One of them is they create a sled, and so these bars actually allow for the user, again in this case the sanitation worker, to tilt the can and slide it and drag it to the actual truck. These sleds are almost like skates--they actually allow the sanitation worker to move the can to the truck much more efficiently, and with a lot less [exertion].

The other thing is the feet do, is lift the can a little higher off of the ground. One of the funny--or gross--constraints that we had to design into, is making things more rat-resistant. As New Yorkers, we all know that rats are a part of our ecosystem here, for better or worse, and they obviously love to target the trash cans. That's where all the food and waste is. Getting it lifted a little off the ground so there's less rats drawn to it was a big opportunity that we tried to design into.

Do you mean that by elevating it a couple inches you can prevent rats from nibbling at the bottom, or is it somehow an anti-scaling device?

Yeah, it's more of an anti-scaling device. And also the base of our trash can is [an inverted] dome. We created a dome base. The idea is that one, trash is less likely to get stuck at the bottom and two, it's harder for rats to scale it.

What are some design features that came out of the civilian research?

We watched how people interact with trash bins that are either empty versus full, [which led us to] create this kind of halo at the top of our cans. That handle we mentioned earlier, we designed it so that it's 360, a sanitation worker can grab it from any direction that they approach the can from. And by adjusting the height of it and making it a little bit taller, we increased the handle space, which also created this halo. It provides a little more protection for when the trash overfills, it kind of keeps it all intact. It's not a bulletproof solution, but it's a little bit of a preventative measure.

Another big insight that we got from our research was people's understanding of not just trash, but of recycling as well: What can be recycled, what can't be recycled, and so forth. So one of the design elements of our finished design was a modular panel system. The current trash cans have a small sign that warns people of fines for littering or putting in household trash, which can get you ticketed. It's a really small surface area, and we wanted to increase the signage. So we created a much larger surface area for signage so that the city can provide better communication to New Yorkers as a whole.

The way the bars are actually built, those panels are actually modular, so you can add or remove panels, which allows both local neighborhoods or businesses to customize them. So basically you can sponsor a can and turn it into a billboard with panels that snap in and out.

It being just a design competition, were there any cost constraints imposed upon you?

There were so many cost constraints. For a competition, it's one of the hardest projects I've ever worked on. A lot of competitions are based around the future or hypothetical questions: "How do we improve this?" or "What's the future of tech?" This was very much like, "How do we make something real?" So throughout our entire process, we're very fortunate here at Smart to have an amazing team of mechanical engineers on staff.

And this was very much a design engineering project for us. From day one, we were designing and engineering every part to be both durable and affordable because at the end of the day, we pay for these things. Our tax dollars puts these trash cans on the street. Our tax dollars pays the salaries of sanitation workers. So we wanted to be mindful of how we're spending the City's money and residents' money.

We wanted to create something which is both aesthetically pleasing and could physically withstand the elements. So the challenge was durable and long-lasting, but also not cost prohibitive. These elements make for a really challenging design cocktail, but that's the type of stuff that we love. And it's exciting to work on. We always say good constraints equals good design.

Is there a chance that this design will actually go into production if it's chosen?

I sure hope so. That's the scope of the project. So again, a real reason why we had to be mindful of both engineering production and cost is that the winner is supposed to go on to actually replace the trash cans here in New York City. I'm sure some things will have to change because of sourcing, materials and a million other variables.

And just to be clear, the design on the street right now, those are prototypes that we built right here. We did all the welding. We worked with a manufacturer in the end, but all the original prototyping was done in-house, and then we brought it to a manufacturer, who actually put those 12 on the street, just to clarify.

What's a rough estimate of what they might cost?

Unfortunately, with the cost of materials and the potential of these imposing tariffs that we're going to have, there's a lot of question marks, but our goal was to make sure that they were within a certain frame, similar to what's on the street now. And we were very close to that target.

I probably should have asked this up front: What's your background, and how long have you been with Smart Design?

I'm an Associate Design Director here at Smart. I oversee the Industrial Design Department with the other director that was on this project, James Krause. I've been at Smart for just over a year now, so this was one of the first projects that I joined.

Working at Smart Design was always a big personal career goal for me, so it's been a real highlight both to have the privilege of working here, and to be able to represent them on an international stage, on a competition of this scale.

I'm from New York originally, and as an industrial designer I've had the opportunity to work on all sorts of different things over the course of my career. Prior to this, I was the Head of Design at a startup in New York City, BarkBox. Before that, I was a design director for Martha Stewart, overseeing her entire line for kitchen and home. I've designed perfume bottles, and I've designed chainsaws. This will be my first trash can, but it's been a big privilege to work on it.

I feel like that breadth is what makes the industrial design profession so much fun.

It's exactly why I got into it in the first place, and it's the reason why I still do it today.

_________________

The BetterBin Design Competition "marks the launch of Van Alen Institute's Product Placed initiative, a new series of design competitions to create innovative civic products that improve urban life." The competition was co-sponsored by the New York City Department of Sanitation, the Industrial Designers Society of America and the American Institute of Architects New York.

Smart Design's BetterBins can currently be seen in use at the following NYC locations:

- Midtown, Manhattan: 9th Ave between 43rd and 45th Streets

- Flushing, Queens: Main Street between Maple Ave and Cherry Ave

- Parkchester, the Bronx: Castle Hill Ave between Newbold Ave and Ellis Ave

Feedback can be provided to the DSNY here.

Grief is forever. It is not temporary, something to be 'fixed' or ignored. How can the loss you feel for a loved one be forgotten after a year? a decade? more? Grief is an expression of the love you hold for another. It demonstrates the depth of emotion you have. There's nothing wrong with that, it's human.

The institutionalisation of death has resulted in a collective misconstruction of grief within our society.

People are unprepared to let the grieving take place and instead, there is an expectation that those grieving hide their emotional depth and avoid showing their vulnerability. This is particularly true for grieving teenagers who are too often treated as either children or adults, when they are not. It alienates them and may discourage them from talking and dealing with their grief in the way that they choose, or need, to do. At a time of enormous physical and mental changes, when they are reevaluating their self-identity and relationship with their parents or carers, the death of someone they are close to is devastating.

This project explores ways in which adolescents are able to experience grief at different times after a close death by proposing the use of storytelling and rituals. In literature, both storytelling and rituals have been identified as a powerful resource for the personalisation of the grieving process. This is further augmented with the exploration of three different grieving rituals; honouring the death, letting go and self-transformation.

These would allow teenagers to experience and deal with feelings of sorrow and grief which can come crashing down with a frightening intensity. Using a human-centred design approach, the project allows the uncovering of the emotional and complex within grief. It allows adolescents the creation of their own journey with the awareness and skills to survive. I believe that design adds value to this area through the use of tools and methods in order to humanise the grieving experience.

ENO is seeking a creative and strategic new member to our evolving and fast-moving Product Team. This critical position will support the development and execution of our product road map to bring innovative and industry-leading products from idea to market. You will also support our manufacturing partners and supply chain

See the full job details or check out all design jobs at Coroflot.

Ted Hunt lives on a houseboat in London. It's a semi-nomadic lifestyle that he says has "pretty drastically" changed his relationship to time.

"I don't have a permanent mooring for the boat, so I have to keep moving it to a new location every two weeks," he says. "The pace of life on a boat is far slower: A journey across London that might take 40 minutes on the tube can take about four hours on a boat; a journey across the country that might take four hours on a train can take more than four weeks on a boat. And I've also become far more attuned to the seasonal changes around me as they happen day by day and week by week."

Developing this alternate perception of time made him think about how "humans don't come equipped with a biological sense of time in the same way that we have eyes to see, a nose to smell, and ears to hear," he says. "That has meant that we talk about time, narrate time, in order to sense it. It's no coincidence that we refer to 'telling the time,' because time is a story that we each tell and we are each told. That story, like all stories, can change over time." As we face an intensifying climate crisis, he thinks it's time to do more to connect that story back to nature.

The Royal College of Art (RCA) alumnus started exploring these ideas through conceptual diagrams and eventually watch faces, and is now translating his art practice into an everyday time-telling app designed for smartwatches and phones. Circa Solar, live on Kickstarter now, replaces traditional numbered watch faces with a digital display of 24-hour light cycles, informed by the season and the wearer's geographical location.

An experimental presentation of time turns to a simpler one: watch faces

When Hunt was at RCA, he recalls Professor Anthony Dunne demonstrating how altering perspectives and differing vanishing points can transform illustrations of space. That inspired him to experiment with similar treatments of time. Hunt created a work titled 10 x time to explore the concept. It illustrates how time can move backward, converge, contextualize, and connect, quoting famous thinkers who have proposed alternative models for understanding time.

When Hunt returned to the idea a few years later, he decided to work with a much more straightforward, quotidian medium: watches. "The watch face would provide the viewer with a familiar frame of reference," he explains, "and the alternative design for time would propose something unfamiliar."

Collaborators and supporters from academia to tech join as early supporters

As a resident at Somerset House Studios, Hunt approached Professor Matthew Soteriou of the King's College London philosophy department with some loose ideas about redesigning time. "Together we agreed to explore the question of 'How does the way we view time influence how we value and occupy time?' as a team of two with a small budget, nine months, and curious minds," Hunt says.

The "Sense of Time" exhibition explored several different depictions of time, including Circa Solar.

He reached out to smartwatch developer Krishna Prajapati to turn GIF sketches into working technical prototypes within the Wear OS platform. Digital watch company Mobvoi gifted them 10 Ticwatch E devices for testing and displays, and London Design Biennale and Studio Wayne McGregor supported project development. Having these wearable prototypes at Somerset House and King's College London exhibitions, Hunt says, "allowed for a suspension of disbelief and active consideration of what it might be like to live your life according to each of those perspectives of time."

Making the conceptual compatible with widespread use

The perspective the team is most eager to bring to life is Circa Solar. It's a watch design that removes numbers from the affair entirely, and instead represents daytime and nighttime as light and dark wedges that fluctuate with the season and the wearer's geographical location. It "relaxes time to approximates rather than exacts," Hunt says, and realigns the wearer with natural circadian rhythms.

If the Kickstarter campaign reaches its goal, Prajapati will be developing the next iteration as a cross-platform app for open release on iOS, Wear OS, Android, and Apple Watch, so that anyone might adopt this interpretation of time into their routine.

Why Hunt thinks it's time to ditch time

"When we ask 'What is the time?' we're supporting the presupposition that time is an absolute, that there is always going to be a single and correct answer to this question," Hunt says. "This is not only an extremely human-centric view of time, but it is also a significantly Westernized and industrialized mindset. Many cultures have very different perceptions of time to the version dictated by the ticking clock and international time zones all organized around Greenwich here in London. By re-questioning time, we can begin to acknowledge the multiple toxic delusions that are embedded within the notion of 'the time.'"

The "toxic delusion" that weighs most heavily on Hunt is our anthropocentrism.

"We now know that humans make up just 0.01 percent of the entire biomass of Earth. The other 99.99 percent of non-human living things have little purpose for '9 am Monday morning,' as it is entirely a human construct," he adds. "Adopting the same temporalities of day-night cycles and circadian rhythms as the life we coexist with might allow us to begin to consider ourselves a part of nature rather than apart from nature. This could form the beginnings of an awakening of consciousness that we need to address our broken relationship to nature, and in turn act upon the urgency of the climate crisis. It's an ambitious aim, but as a species we're facing a radical threat, so we need pretty radical shifts to our understanding of our place in the world."

Circa Solar is live on Kickstarter through August 15, 2019.

Welcome back to the Core77 Design-Athlon, we are mid-way in our series of skill-based challenges and want YOU in the game! Pro and novice designers alike – we want to see what you can dream up and model for this brief:

A Planter for Your Desk

Make a quick physical model of a planter (a container for a plant) that would fit on your desk (at work, at home, at school.) That is it! It doesn't need to be pretty, and it doesn't need to be a resolved design - creating a sketch model or mock-up is about beginning that transition from concept to thing!

Post your work to Instagram by Sunday, August 4, 2019 – 11:59PM Eastern, tagged with #c77prototyping & #c77challenge

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Go for it, and good luck !

Also; for our prototyping leg of the competition we have special guest-star judge Julie Arrivé of Map to help us pick winners!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Official Details ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

How To Enter

1. Follow us on Instagram

2. Make a physical model of a "Planter for your desk" and take a picture of it.

3. Post your picture to Instagram, posting must tag us, @core77, and include the hashtags #c77prototyping, #c77challenge

Rules

• The contest ends Sunday, August 4, 2019 – 11:59PM – EDT . Winner and runner-ups will be announced within 30 days of close.

• Multiple entries are permitted but a participant can not have more than one winning entry per challenge.

• Winning entries will be selected by a panel of design professional(s) and Core77 staff based on skill, presentation and ideas.

• The contest is hosted by Core77 and there are no eligibility restrictions.

• This contest is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Instagram.

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To learn more about our entire Summer-long design skill series, check out our announcement of the Core77 Design-Athlon.

Photo by Sanni Sahil

After three years of development, today IKEA and Sonos are announcing a collaboration to be released next month: the SYMFONISK WiFi-connected sound system, which includes a bookshelf speaker and a sleekly designed speaker/table lamp hybrid. The speaker collection is also priced with IKEA customers in mind: the table lamp is going for $179 and the bookshelf speaker at an impressive $99.

When initially considering a partnership with Sonos, the IKEA design team knew they wanted to create a product line that would diversify the perception of where a speaker belongs as well as how it looks. IKEA Global Business Leader of the IKEA Home Smart division Björn Block said they asked in the ideation process, "how can we come in [and build a speaker with Sonos] as IKEA with a different perception of home furnishing and not coming in from a tech-y point of view?"

One solution to this idea was the table lamp, which Block notes originated from IKEA's extensive research on home furnishings: "we know many people want to have a lamp next to their bed, they want to have a lamp in the living room, and you want to have a sound element. But if you think of it from an aesthetics point of view, many partners in a relationship don't agree on where you want to have speakers. So by combining it and making it a home furnishing, then it's maybe allowed it a space where it's normally not allowed."

The other design is a sleek, mountable speaker that doubles as a bookshelf for small items or fits snugly in a bookshelf. When designing double-purpose objects like this, materials are often a high concern; the speaker itself is not waterproof, but the outer shell's form is built to help resist spilled liquids from reaching the speaker's hardware. The table lamp's exterior is wrapped with a 3D knitted exterior, which helps improve audio quality and results in a soft, more inviting feel than a traditional speaker.

It was important for the IKEA team to both hit a reasonable price point while also not sacrificing sound quality, as Block mentioned, and this meant giving Sonos full access to IKEA's manufacturing capabilities: "We said if we do this, we have to go all in. If we don't expose ourself and give [Sonos] access to everything we have, we're not going to achieve the price points and we're not going to achieve of the sound of the Sonos. The speakers we create together need to be fully-fledged members of the Sonos family."

The ultimate goal of achieving a well-designed home furnishing and excellent quality speaker required push and pull between the Sonos and IKEA design teams. Sonos helped provide IKEA with material and manufacturing advice on how to create an high-quality audio system, while IKEA tackled creating a hybrid product that didn't lack in either the style or sound department. Block adds that this lies in the subtle, internal details: "Initially we said, well, you can't have glass this close to a speaker because it will rattle, so we had to come up with a bayonet fitting that is super snug so it never comes loose and that will solve it."

In terms of other design details, its worth noting that this low price does come with some trade-offs: while the SYMFONISK collection is compatible with AirPlay with WiFi capabilities, it doesn't allow for voice assistant integration (but perhaps a perk depending on your opinion on Alexa and Google Assistant).

So if you're curious to experience what this involved design development has led to, you don't have to wait long: The SYMFONISK collection will be available in stores starting Thursday, August 1st.

Editors Note: While the SYMFONISK products don't have microphones built in,

Tom Steyer 2020 aims to run an inclusive presidential campaign. We practice the progressive values of diversity, equity, and inclusion via our hiring practices, and we welcome candidates of diverse backgrounds - including people of color, women, LGBTQi, differently abled, formerly incarcerated, and those with a non-traditional education to apply.

See the full job details or check out all design jobs at Coroflot.

Using algorithmics, digital fabrication, and hacking & making methods, The Common Thread examines the ties between East and West Jerusalem by transforming Jerusalem's Hansen House workers' likeness into portraits made from a thread, the length of which matches each of the workers' commute from their homes in the Arab East to their workplace in the Jewish West.

Hansen House, home of Jerusalem's annual Design Week

The Common Thread - Part of Jerusalem's Design Week 2019

The Common Thread project is a site-specific work which was made for the Jerusalem Design Week 2019 and its theme - "East".

Credit: Amir Zobel

A worker's daily journey

Each Hansen House worker's daily commute was measured, and a thread of that length used to make each worker's portrait

Custom tools at work

Using a CNC milling machine fitted with custom hardware, the 471 points between which the thread will be drawn were placed

Credit: Amir Zobel

Credit: Amir Zobel

Credit: Amir Zobel

Credit: Amir Zobel

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:

Hannah Fink is making flat-pack furniture that's built to last. Her Fink Side Table is made of three slotted steel panels that ship completely flat and require zero hardware to assemble. Finished with a scratch-proof coating, you can disassemble and assemble it as many times as you need.

Riding the Sony Walkman nostalgia wave, NIMN Lab's IT'S OK cassette player combines the retro technology with Bluetooth capability. You can listen to your favorite tapes and perform all the typical cassette player functions, with the added benefit of using your wireless headphones or linking to a Bluetooth speaker.

Plants let us know how they're doing via subtle changes and clues but it's not always easy to figure out what they're trying to say. The Lua planter aims to bridge that communication gap and turn your houseplant into a "virtual pet." Sensors within the planter measure several factors—the soil's moisture, light exposure, temperature, humidity—and display what your plant is feeling via cute little animations. When it's dry and thirsty, it will stick its tongue out and pant; if you put it by a drafty window it will express its dissatisfaction by shivering; and when it's doing just fine it will smile contentedly and wink at you.

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"That's a great question! The answer is, I don't know where the inspiration for my designs come from. Sometimes I'm standing at the bus stop and an idea just comes to me."

"I only wanted there to be a 1-in-20 chance that you'd place these on the table with the right side up."

"I am NOT getting in that thing. Ciao, jackhole!"

"We have a deal with a leg manufacturer where if we move a lot of legs, we get a kickback."

"I think the best position to fall asleep in is to pretend you're riding on the back of your lover's motorcycle."

"As a designer, my job is to identify what you don't yet know that you need. In this case, what the client needs is something metal, pointy and sharp that they can bang their head into if they store anything beneath these stairs."

"My seating designs are fun and make novel use of the material. The trip hazard aspect won't bother you, or will bother you less I should say, if you follow my specifications and install these on a floor made of ice. I'm calling this the Least-of-Your-Worries collection."

"After it rains and the bench is wet, you can crank the handle to reveal some fresh slats. I mean they're wet too, since water tends to obey gravity, but turning the crank is pretty fun."

"This bed was inspired both by suspension bridges, and by the joy I feel when someone runs their bare foot into something sharp (preferably with metal connection points) as they're getting in or out of bed."

"Please, call me Sal, Mr. Dali is my father. Anyways as I was saying, this didn't come out exactly how I wanted it to--originally I was going for a frown, but people kept falling out of it."

Designer Pupul Bisht entered her graduate program at OCAD in Toronto to obtain a masters in design and left with a mission. Since finishing her thesis on decolonizing futures using design (in which she developed one of the first and only non-western foresight, or future studies, methods), Bisht has taken what she learned in her extensive research using storytelling as a means to reframing future scenarios and has traveled the world to help others learn from her findings.

During her recent talk at PRIMER Conference in New York City in June, she discussed how she laid the groundwork for the Decolonizing Futures Initiative she founded, the research that is still ongoing, and why storytelling is such an excellent vehicle for changing the way the future will operate using design.

Pupul Bisht

Core77: Could you briefly explain the concept of Foresight?

Pupul Bisht: I think Foresight is a domain that is still finding its feet in the mainstream. What I mean is that there are a lot of floating names for a very similar kind of practice. There's speculative design, which comes from a more particular design practice. Then there is future studies, which I think is mostly used as an umbrella term. What I studied, Strategic Foresight, is actually a post World War discipline, which was really designed to systemically study historical trends in whatever is happening in the present and gain insight on weak signals of change.

It's a study of change so that you can you understand what are the many possibilities of what might be coming in the future. It's a way of identifying risks but also opportunities that can be leveraged to the person—whoever is commissioning the study—to their advantage. Traditionally, it's been used mostly by big corporations and governments. But what we're seeing right now is that with the onset of more creative disciplines like art and design coming into the speculative space, this practice is really moving outside of its organizational confines and it's engaging more and more people about what are our collective futures and how can we build them. That's exactly the space where my practice is situated.

What kind of research initially fueled your drive to delve into this topic and can you give a summary as to what it is that you have been researching?

I call my project "The Decolonizing Futures Initiative". It really began during my time when I was doing my masters. I did a masters in design in Strategic Foresight and Innovation at OCAD University in Toronto. I left India to study for the first time and I think as a student in a foreign culture, my experience was perhaps a very interesting one. I think what happens when you come from previously colonized cultures is that you tend to have two sides of your identity. There's one part of you that's trained in the western part, that comes from the more institutionalized education that you receive growing up, but then there's this other part of you that's shaped from a social and cultural upbringing that has a very different way of thinking.

I think my personal experience with studying Foresight was that the part of me that was conditioned in the more technocratic, western way of thinking was thriving in studying Foresight. But then I always felt like there was a part of my identity, a part of my world view that I was having to check at the door to meaningfully participate in most of the conversations in class. Even my reading list, for example, did not have anybody who looked like me or came from the same part of the world as me.

I think my research really began with those personal experiences of, how do people who come from the same culture as me think about the future? Because I knew that they wouldn't think organically in many ways that are prevalent in future thinking. That's where it all began. For me, storytelling has always been something that I'm deeply passionate and curious about. Storytelling is extensively used in future studies because the future doesn't exist yet so you build stories about those possibilities to engage people to think about it.

"If we want to change the future and how we act towards the future, we have to change how we talk about the future."

What my research looks at it is, how do different cultures tell stories about the future differently and how can we bring out some of those marginalized expressions as a way of both balancing as well as challenging some of the hegemonic ideas that colonize our understanding of what the future might look like?

Why do you feel that storytelling is such an effective approach here in tackling this issue of decolonizing futures?

Stories that we hear and we tell matter a lot because they ultimately shape our sense of reality, our world view. If we talk about something with a sense of urgency and fear, then our attitude towards that thing is going to be shaped by those emotions versus if we talk about something with a sense of hope and believe that we have urgency in this; it will shape our attitudes. If we want to change the future and how we act towards the future, we have to change how we talk about the future. One way of changing how we talk about the future is through stories because that's the format in which traditionally the humans civilization has made sense of this world.

Because I was looking at more Western cultures for my research, the mode of knowledge sharing and instruction tends to be storytelling-based in most of those cultures. That was another reason why this was an organic choice for me because that's the kind of intervention that I was trying to make. If I want to make room for indigenous knowledge, for non-Western knowledge, then I have to give importance to storytelling because that is the way that those cultures understand the world, share that knowledge and have an inter-generational dialogue. Those were some of the reasons why storytelling was just so important.

I'm curious what elements of design or the design process at present feel particularly Western to you and maybe negligent of non-Western perspectives.

For me, it all really began with time, the shape of time and how it's visualized. I think this is one of the most invisible epistemologies in futures work is that a lot of times when I would talk to people about how this might be culturally non-intrusive the way we're practicing Foresight, I was always met with the question of, "What do you mean? Is that something that is solvable by just involving more non-Western participants?" But I think what inclusion looks like when we're talking about decolonization, it goes beyond who is invited into the group because if the methods are limited in seeing reality and seeing time, if they're defined in a certain way that are in accordance to a particularly historically dominant world view, then any other definition that's brought into the room is going to be rejected.

For example, a lot of frameworks in Foresight visualize time as a linear entity and establish a very uni-directional, sequential relationship between past, present and future. But a lot of storytelling that happens in India, for example, tends to be shaped more to a cyclical understanding of time where at any given point, past and future, are almost expressed as two sides of the same coin. If we hold the more linear understanding of time, then we won't even be able to engage in the material and the content of a lot of these stories because it won't fit our scaffolding of making sense of those conversations.

I think another thing that's really key over [in the West] is that because Foresight comes from an industrial, militaristic, historical background, even today, the future is really treated as something that is unknown and something meant to be studied and understood so that we can then then "conquer" it. Well, "conquering" is very, very colonizing language as well as a lot of the ways in which Foresight or futures projects are structured; they talk a lot about preparing for a future, they talk a lot about preventing a certain future that is not desirable.

But I think something that I found that is not given enough importance is this focus on opportunity and the focus on building the futures that we want rather than thinking too much about what we want to prevent, what is so constructive, what is disruptive, narratives about the future.

The workshops that you do in conjunction with your research are quite personal; they help facilitate this opportunity for people to share their stories and, in that, help other people understand those perspectives and maybe visualize how that perspective is different. But I'm curious how you envision what you're researching being applied on a grander scale.

That's a very interesting question because that's exactly where I'm at with my project right now. With incubating it for the past year, I'm past that stage of ideas and prototyping and really at the place where I'm testing application now. What I mean by that is, I'm testing application of how this radical, critical, self-reflective process of dialogue and story creation can actually be used to inform and inspire inclusive decision making and innovation efforts. Because ultimately the decisions are being made in certain places in our system and that's what ends up shaping the future for the majority on this planet.

For me, as a designer and as a facilitator, the role that I see for myself is as that bridge, as somebody as who can help translate visions that belong to the communities into insights that can then plug into actual efforts that shape the futures of those very communities. That's exactly where I'm at and I think with any process like this, scale in terms of numbers is always a challenge. I think that is something that human-centered design and qualitative research, even in the more traditional senses, struggles with.

"My ultimate objective is in making people think about the futures that they want to have them see themselves as active shapers of that future rather than passive spectators of someone else's vision."

I don't know if we're there yet as a discipline to immediately scale this. For me, it's always an integrative process. If I get all this right now in a real world scenario with a complex stakeholder environment of a hundred actors on-ground and communicate that to another five hundred actors who are sitting at higher level positions, then to me that is scaling of this process. At this point I'm really working at micro levels with villages as well as local urban communities. I think once you understand what are the processes that are required for translating narratives into decision making patterns, then I think that understanding can help us scale something like this. But I'm not there yet so maybe in a few months I will have made that discovery.

You're working over the next few months on this research back in India. I'd love to hear more about what you're up to.

Absolutely. It's not finalized to the extent where I can give you names, but I'm basically in close dialogue with the government at both the national and sub-national levels. When I say sub-national that means state level. And really trying to understand what are some of their ongoing efforts, especially when it comes to marginalized communities. In India there is a program called "Aspirational Districts". These districts were traditionally called the most backward zones in the country, but recently, I think about a year ago, the government decided to flip the narrative and flip the language on that. They said that because we want to focus more on the hope and the opportunity rather than the problems and the challenges, instead of talking about these places as the most backward places, we want to talk about them as the most aspirational places.

For me, that is a project that I'm trying to work in because that's exactly what my method does is it helps to reframe the narrative around how we talk about the future and bring back that sense of hope and agency into the community members. Through most of the work that I'm doing, really my ultimate objective is in making people think about the futures that they want to have them see themselves as active shapers of that future rather than passive spectators of someone else's vision, because a lot of times that's what happens in a developing world context is that the future of what is desirable is imagined somewhere else and then it's just shipped over and copy/pasted without any regard of context.

The aspirational districts are one place that I'm working. I'm also going to be working with high school students that come from economically challenging backgrounds in my city, which is New Delhi. Those are some of the threads that I'm pursuing and I'm also really, really interested in looking at futures of India through the eyes of women and girls because I have grown up as a woman in India and it can be something that... I don't know if a lot of women have a voice and feel like they participate in envisioning what the future of their community, their family, their city, their village, should look like.

"I think a big component of this work is that in envisioning visions of their preferred futures, the communities too can identify how to translate their own narratives into change-making initiatives and actionable insights that they can do at their own level."

But there's a lot of wisdom there, especially when we talk of sustainable development. Women traditionally are the ones who have worked with land, who have worked with resources. They have so much knowledge and we really need that knowledge right now and we really need to learn how to listen and respect that knowledge right now.

If you boiled it down, is your work about this idea of making more marginalized voices understand that they have the power to bring these new perspectives into the world, or is it about convincing organizations that they need to have more voices involved?

I think I'm a very ambitious person so I'm trying to do both. But if the process can legitimize marginalized definitions of what is desirable in the future and what counts as progress and what counts as growth, for me that is a very important piece in doing all of this is that a lot of communities might not have a desire for a certain development model, but a lot of times it just gets handed down to them and disrupts their entire life and living systems, destroys their knowledge and destroys their way of life. I think that is a really unsustainable way of doing this and of building futures because there is all this talk around leaving no one behind and inclusive, sustainable development that we're all engaging at a mass global level. But if you're really serious about leaving no one behind, we have to then include people even at an envisioning level. Futures growth cannot be imagined by a few and so the people whose lives we seek to improve through any work, we need to listen to them because they are exports of their conditions and we need to respect that.

What are some ways that any designer can take elements of your research and start contributing to the conversation of decolonizing design and what steps can they do to enact change within their own circles and organizations?

I started in a very traditional design space. I'm trained in visual communication, my background is in graphic design. I think a lot of these questions that I'm now exploring through my research actually began during my undergrad days in design school. I think for anybody to contribute meaningfully to a conversation towards decolonization, for me that that starts with exploring cultural duality in contemporary practices.

Designers, specifically those that come from non-Western cultures, for them to really embark on a journey of exploring their identities through their practice, I think becomes the first step. Most of the people that I know who are doing good work, really for all of them this comes from a very personal space because this isn't an easy domain or easy journey to be on because there is no precedence. A lot of what you're doing, there aren't preexisting examples for that, so your reason of why you started doing it has to be solid and you need to remind yourself of why you're doing what you're doing, because a lot of this is just going to be so much self-learning. When I started doing this work I didn't even have most of the language around everything that I'm seeing right now, it really began at an integrative level. The more I read the more I learned, and the more I learned how to talk about it as well.

"When it comes to research methods, when it comes to design methods and when it comes to design expression, one size fits all is the thinking that colonizes our work and that's exactly what we need to challenge."

In terms of the particular work that I'm doing and how people can start talking about it, I think for me it really all boils down to the seven principles of inclusive storytelling, that is the foundation of my work. I think it isn't so much about someone just taking the methodology that I'm using and then trying to apply that, because I think the reason why this methodology makes sense for me or the people I'm working with this because it's contextually relevant.

Wherever I travel to [share] my work, afterward people are like, "We want to do this exact thing." I don't encourage that because I think that that's a noncritical adaptation of something and that's exactly what I'm advocating against. What I'm seeing is that when it comes to research methods, when it comes to design methods and when it comes to design expression, one size fits all is the thinking that colonizes our work and that's exactly what we need to challenge. I think for me, value sharing is then a more meaningful way of ally sharing. If you agree with the same values, if you understand inclusion in the way I understand inclusion and if you understand inclusive storytelling in the way that I understand inclusive storytelling, then I see you as a collaborator. But the manifestation of that could be very different for me than it is for you.

From what you've experienced so far in the professional design world, what do you feel like is the reality in terms of the progress that that can be made in the near future?

I think this is very, very subjective depending on geography and also industries are fast-evolving in different countries in different ways. But given my personal experience, I would say that definitely I feel that this is the right time to be doing this kind of work because there is a lot of interest, there is a lot of reception and there is a lot of openness everywhere that I've had an opportunity to speak. So far everywhere that I've been invited to speak are contacts where I would never in a million years imagine that that's the kind of audience that wants to hear me speak about it because in all of those cases, I'm actually challenging the very foundation of their practice.

But the fact that those audiences are interested in engaging in this dialogue with me or seeing a different approach to things through my work is definitely a very positive sign. But I don't know if we're at a point where that interest also translates to work opportunities for designers. I think everybody likes to hear these radical ideas and thoughts, but from a distance, and I don't know how many organizations are actually willing to open the doors to those thinkers and let them come and change their practice from inside.

What would your advice be to anyone who wants to take an idea like you did of tackling a system and not just turning it into an academic query or fascination, but also action into the world and potential to bring an idea like this to larger audiences?

I'm interested in creating things and so, not that I'm aggregating reinventing the wheel, but I think for me it actually depends on why you started doing something. For me, this research really began with an India practitioner of Foresight, I identified a problem and then I wanted to practice differently and there weren't enough methods or tools that I felt allowed me to practice differently. For me, that [operated as] the North Star of everything that I was doing is that I want to critique and I want to bring attention to the gaps, but a lot of people before me had done that. For me I was like, "okay how can I take it one step further so that whoever is doing this after me has at least that one option of doing things differently?"

For me that's why I always find the double diamond of divergence, convergence, divergence, convergence, to be very, very helpful—this idea of building something and then prototyping it and putting it out, then having the humility to learn from whatever didn't work and going back into that cycle of working again on your design. I think research questions are also valuable. Second point research questions are very important because I think, for me, I consciously built a methodological bias into my research question because when you undertake such a vast study, scope creep is a real thing, mission creep is a real thing and you can get lost in in the narrative and the talk and the critique. If, instead, you have a question to hold you accountable to your initial intent, then I think it becomes easier to keep sight of that.

What I found really helpful, and this is something that I completely owe to the experts that I interviewed during my work, is that if you want to build something, don't be afraid of looking at ways in which it has been done before, maybe in a completely different context. Even though I was building a Foresight tool, ultimately I found inspiration in an indigenous storytelling method that's practiced in a very, very small community in one part of my country. Do not discount that wisdom and look at stuff that's been done before you and acknowledge the greatness of that work and and then see how you can learn from it and what you can learn from it without, of course, appropriating.

Orchestrating complex geometries and mathematical relations, the kinetic installation samsara drives 252 individual parts with only one source of energy. A system in which, even a small input of energy can evoke big changes.

kinetic installation samsara

Credit: studio rlon

kinetic installation samsara

Credit: studio rlon

kinetic installation samsara

a pattern emerging from the cyclic movement of the installation

Credit: studio rlon

kinetic installation samsara

a pattern emerging from the cyclic movement of the installation

Credit: studio rlon

kinetic installation samsara

a pattern emerging from the cyclic movement of the installation

Credit: studio rlon

kinetic installation samsara

a pattern emerging from the cyclic movement of the installation

Credit: studio rlon

kinetic installation samsara

The kinetic installation's 252 white triangles are driven by a singular energy force, the rotating black disc in the center.

Credit: studio rlon

kinetic installation samsara

Three sliders running in the three intersecting rings of the disc transmit the circular movement of the energy source. The energy is then passed on from triangle to triangle - resulting in a mesmerising choreography of all the parts.

Credit: studio rlon

kinetic installation samsara

sa?sara: "The cyclicality of all life, matter, and existence" - ancient Hindu and Buddhist teaching.

Credit: studio rlon

kinetic installation samsara

synergy: The interaction of two or more agents or forces so that their combined effect is greater than the sum of their individual effects.

Credit: studio rlon

Build-A-Bear Workshop, Inc is looking for an experienced Senior Product Designer who has extensive illustration skills and experience designing a collection of Girls toys and/or children’s products to work in our St. Louis headquarters. This particular Senior Product Designer will handle the design responsibilities for the Girls consumer group along

See the full job details or check out all design jobs at Coroflot.