This article responds to The Augmented Designer panel discussion, which took place during NYCxDESIGN 2019, and which was sponsored by Augmented Review, ID8TRS, the IDSA, Hardware Massive and Superventures.

Special thanks to panelists Ori Inbar, Founder, Super Ventures and Co-Founder of Augmented World Expo; Marcel Botha, Founder & CEO of 10XBeta; and Leonidas Trampoukis, Founding Partner of LOT and Objects of Common Interest.

The opening remarks were delivered by moderator Stephan Clambaneva

The Inflection Point: Design and AR/VR

Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality have revolutionized product design. Because of capabilities like high-end visualization, infinite capacity for computing, limitless connectivity, affordability, and characteristics like remote collaboration, both the design process and high-level product development are on the verge of significant advancement.

And with mobile-augmented AR/VR, the technology has been made widely, publicly accessible, denoting a turning point the industry has been anticipating for years. As the efficiency of AR and VR surges forward, yet another inflection point is upon us – one whose significance feels as momentous as the internet boom.

Ori Inbar, Founder of Super Ventures and Co-Founder of Augmented World Expo, recognizes why finally, in 2019, these technologies are on the verge of exponential growth. He points to four distinct market indicators:

Tech giants' investment: Billions of dollars of investment from the likes of Google, Apple, Lenovo, and Microsoft have removed previous barriers to usage.

Corporate trend: 70% of enterprises have either implemented AR/VR or plan to do so. Interestingly, they're using it regardless of whether or not they have complete faith in its ROI, because they're recognizing that their competitors use it, and it's become a necessary asset to keep pace with them.

Critical mass: There's an extraordinary base of consumers and usage through mobile-AR. As of today, the grand total of AR-compatible devices is estimated at about 1.05 billion, with just as many users. Even if some interaction is only through low-level platforms such as Pokémon Go or Snapchat Lenses, the education and familiarization is wide-reaching.

Further foreseeable growth: Additional powerful investment has occurred at an all-time record high in new AR/VR technologies. (The sector received $7 billion in investment last year alone.) Analysts only predict the industry's expansion from here, including influence beyond experiential and into real use cases.

Implications and Implementations

AR/VR as a tool and new medium for designers is not only about better, faster, cheaper design; For Product Designers it will mean an opportunity for more empathy – a connective tissue between design, its practitioners, and its community of user-consumers (that is, clients and non-designers). The technology also signals opportunity for more design in context and, last but not least, it will enable non-designers to step in during the course of the design process to engage with it – to even complete it.

Bleeding edge companies are starting to explore even further how their businesses could be disrupted using AR/VR, and have been researching how human-centered design and design thinking can enable the technology to solve problems.

With AR/VR, technology is no longer a middleman, interpreting our intent; there are no longer the limitations of the X-Y movements of a mouse, or those of CAD tools. Your natural hand gestures and the way you interact in the real world become the UI.

These mediums allow for full immersion, enabling designers to operate in augmented contexts that can maintain the nuances of behavior, action, and intent. And crucially, they open up a world of possibility for designers to design, create, innovate and problem solve directly in 3D. What you see in your mind's eye can now take form right in front of you.

A few recognizable usage trends among adopters of the technology are identified as follows:

Augmented communication of business cases: This capability allows companies to support a complex business case by enhancing it with the appropriate contextual information through more realistic visual and other communications systems.

Powerful multisensory experiences: Allowing companies to engage consumers and clients on an emotional level in turn paves the way for deepened relationship and connectivity.

Contextually supported case studies: Similar to augmented business cases, this allows for more robust systems of communication to support disparate stakeholders in their collective decision-making.

For Marcel Botha, Founder and CEO of 10XBeta, the increased possibility for workflow optimization strongly supports another reason for AR/VR implementation in the design process. He provides the example of collaborative design validation apps (such as Augmented Review, listed below), which are easy-to-use workflow tools for customers who are not necessarily tech savvy, thus removing the challenge to train the client to use a new platform.

Echoing a similar point of view, Leonidas Trampoukis, Founding Partner of LOT and Objects of Common Interest, states that the tech's most exciting attributes relate to user efficiency, remote work, and cross-disciplinary versus traditional ways of working. He suggests that in these senses, AR/VR may be a particularly impactful tool for boutique design studios.

For Botha, AR/VR also enables him to put concept into play very early on in the design workflow. He points out that at the preliminary design stage, the technology is highly effective in communicating a vision; a working concept that customers can play with and latch onto may be more efficient and effective, at this stage, than hyper-realistic renderings.

Overall, it's all about which level of precision designers need for each stage of their process. Because although, as we've acknowledged, the tools and technology exist, the next challenge is figuring out which ones work most effectively for each project touchpoint.

The Augmented Designer: Our Role in the AR/VR Evolution

As advanced as these technologies are, they are no doubt in the early stages of their evolution. Anticipating where that evolution will take us, Inbar sees mobile AR as a stepping stone toward the true future of design. It's at its most powerful, he predicts, when it can be experienced hands-free (though that technology is not quite yet widely accessible). A smartphone, then, offers us a window into the AR/VR world, where it's going, and how it can service us.

Additionally, Botha shared that to keep up with the evolution of the technologies and their capabilities, 10Xbeta adjusted its office infrastructure to accommodate experimentation with AR/VR. Also informing that adjustment was the inching of AR/VR into the mainstream. Soon, their usage will be the norm, so the earlier adopters will be advantaged with having become more familiar with them.

Designers – boutique and large studios alike – owe it to themselves to invest moderately and continuously into exploring new apps, software, and hardware, in order to figure out which solutions and services are most beneficial to their operations. After all, this new tech, like most tools for creativity, is not one-size-fits-all, nor are it or its implications completely predictable.

In closing, a key takeaway from the panel was the collective belief that this is the time for designers and content creators to shine. The challenge, then, is to define what "good" design is, and how these new tools can get us there; and to designate what amounts to the best and most just form of interaction in a world which surpasses the keyboard and the mouse. Because the frontier will continue to expand. New AR/VR techniques will continue to emerge, forging paths for new methods of design. With this expansion in mind, the panelists' urgent call to action was for designers to take the lead on this progress. The Augmented Designer is most certainly already here, and it is their – our – time to act.

What tech are the panelists using?

As AR/VR technology continues to evolve, its accessibility ever increases. For now, here are some vertical apps that the panelists have flagged as incredibly productive for designers and product developers, to name only a few of the many available:

Sketching

Gravity Sketch is a platform for ideating, visualizing, and communicating concepts in real-time through VR.

Design reviews

MindeskVR allows for 3D model reviews in VR, operating natively from CAD systems.

Instant collaboration

Augmented Review, a collaborative platform, streamlines the design process using AR.

Feasibility investigations

VRify.io offers a real-time web-VR service for assembly and disassembly.

You can watch the full recording of the panel discussion published on YouTube:

Our industrial designers are exploring the future of Retail and they take ownership over the entire physical product development process. They collaborate with a variety of experts internally as well as with outside agencies and vendors in order to design and prototype new products and experiences, helping to shape the strategic direction for Shopify hardware. Check out the link below for some examples of what our Industrial Designers have worked on in the past and some insight into Retail Har

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

Plastic cups collected on a beach at Jones Beach State Park, Long Island, New York - Photo by Brian Yurasits

While shopping for eggs the other day, I was taken aback by the number of brands that were packaging their eggs in rigid-plastic containers. Why would anyone deviate from the compost-friendly, paper-pulp carton? Have they seen the ocean recently? Upon closer inspection, the wording on the package tried to gently reassure me that the carton was made from bio-PET, a popular "bioplastic" (PET is traditionally petroleum based but a version of bio-PET has been growing in use). Still, I felt uneasy, and I couldn't help but imagine the plastic carton ending up on a beach somewhere.

For designers, bioplastics can appear to offer a sustainable material option, with many of the physical benefits of plastic. With the spectacular ecological fallout of petroleum-based plastics, it is no surprise that many young designers have made it their mission to reform material practices. In the search for more sustainable options, bioplastics have played a major role. Bags, desk lamps, 3-D printed installations, straws, bottles, plastic piping, phone casings, car insulation, medical-implants, even Legos. Bioplastics are now ubiquitous, and they will only become more so. By 2024, the growing bioplastic market is projected to be valued at over 68 billion dollars. (source.)

What actually makes a plastic worthy of that "bio-" prefix? According to a study from the University of Hannover, there are over 300 different types of bioplastic, "bio-based plastics can be made from corn, sugar cane, starch." While to be officially labelled a bio-plastic, the material must be made from at least 20 percent renewables, "many bio-based plastics contain also a significant amount of petroleum, often 50% (for the bags) and sometimes up to 80%" . That may not sound like such an improvement, but in a 2017 study, it was determined that switching from traditional plastic to the corn-based PLA bioplastic would cut US greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent. (source.)

For however sustainable many bioplastics may claim to be, there are no shortage of concerns about their long term effects. Recently, some alarm has been raised about the presence of fluorinated "forever chemicals" such as PFAS in molded fiber bowls. Sparking concerned about whether byproducts from the bowls might contaminate waterways with cancer-causing agents. (source.)

Additionally, for proper disposal of most bioplastics, it is required that materials be sorted according to whether they should be composted or recycled. This would be fine if there were a waste management system that would do the diligent work of making sure everything is in its proper place. Alas, in most places this is not typically the case, especially in the US. Turns out people typically won't end up composting their compost-friendly Sweetgreen bowl. If bioplastics like the very popular variants PLA and PHA, end up in a landfill, they can end up releasing Methane, a green-house gas worse than carbon dioxide.

Plus, with almost all bioplastics, if they end up in the ocean they will typically breakdown into microplastics and at that point are actually no better than fossil-fuel produced plastic. In 2015, the UN released a report on bioplastics saying that, "complete biodegradation of plastics occurs in conditions that are rarely, if ever, met in marine environments, with some polymers requiring industrial composters and prolonged temperatures of above 50°C to disintegrate." The report went on to say that there are some concerns that the use of biodegradable plastics might feed peoples inclination to litter.

In sustainable design work, some designers have turned to using recycled plastics, as opposed to using bioplastics. Alexander Schul's "substantial chair" is made from recycled plastics, specifically, high impact polystyrene - (via http://alexanderschul.com)

Among designers, the debate has become all but ideological. At this year's Design Week in Milan, Dezeen reported that Arthur Huang, CEO of Miniwiz, a company that engineers products from recycled materials, spoke out against the use of bioplastics, "If we use them the same way [as conventional plastics] they are just as bad if not worse". While Jan Boelen curator of the 2018 Istanbul Design Biennial has stated that designing with reclaimed plastic is "bullshit" and that designers must turn to better bioplastics for the future of sustainable material.

While emptying my trash this morning, I found my plastic-anxieties had been justified. My roommate had mistakenly thrown a non-biodegradable PET plastic egg carton in with the compost. Whether you're a believer in a bioplasic future or not, what's most pressing is a design for a clearer and more ecologically-sound system for users to dispose of material. Whatever that material might happen to be.

Nutrient pollution is one of the lesser-known but most pressing environmental challenges we face. Nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium are all essential for plant growth—they're known as the "Big 3" primary nutrients in fertilizer—but when they enter the environment in excess, they can cause a lot of damage. The Big 3 have another thing in common: they're all found in our urine. But since these nutrients aren't extracted at sewage treatment plants, they build up in streams, rivers, lakes, and other bodies of water, where they cause large growths of algae called algal blooms. Algal blooms reduce the amount of oxygen in water, killing fish while elevating toxins and bacterial growth.

The wall-mounted save! toilet looks like a conventional, rimless WC and can be used normally.

Austrian design firm EOOS and Swiss ceramics manufacturer Laufen have partnered up to propose a solution that's rather simple. By extracting urine from wastewater, we can reduce water pollution and simultaneously tap into an alternative source of essential nutrients for fertilizer production (as another example of this, consider the Rich Earth Institute's "pee-cycling" efforts in Vermont.) Continuing EOOS's submission to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's 2011 Reinvented Toilet Challenge, the companies partnered with the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology to develop a urine-diverting toilet.

Schematic section illustrating the different flows of urine, feces, and greywater.

According to the product website, the Save! toilet features one key innovation, a patent-pending "urine trap"' invented by EOOS Design, "which directs urine towards a concealed outlet using only surface tension." Laufen applied this concept to a new toilet design featuring a ceramic bowl whose inner geometries are "optimally shaped to guide the water flow" based on computational fluid dynamics simulations developed by ETH Zurich. The low-tech, out-of-sight solution means the toilet looks like any other WC, and for the most part, it doesn't require any changes to user behavior, save for one catch: you have to urinate in a sitting position in order for it to hit the trap.

The Toilet Revolution! An installation by EOOS, commissioned and curated by MAK - Museum for Applied Arts, Vienna, XXII Triennale di Milano 2019.

Designed for use in Europe, save! Is the first urine-diverting toilet that meets all industry standards. It received wide acclaim during ISH Frankfurt, a leading plumbing trade show, and was Austria's contribution to the XXII Triennale di Milano where it was exhibited as part of a multimedia installation investigating "the ecological interaction of coastal waters, sewage systems, and agriculture."

To make a real dent in the issue of nutrient pollution, cities would have to rethink urine collection on a large, infrastructural scale. Save! represents a promising design solution that just might steer that conversation in the right direction.

Felt Good is a research and exploration into pine needles, an overabundant natural forest waste to develop products using its fibre. The pine trees constitute of the majority of the forest in the northern hill states of India. Every year from fall till summer, they shed their leaves that cover the forest bed choking the earth beneath. Since pine needles are an excellent fuel to the fire, thousands of forest burn every season in North India itself.

Felt good is about extracting fibres to create products of everyday use for the masses using the felting techniques(no binding agent, pure fibre). The fibres also have been dyed using natural dyes extracted from the local, flowers and spices. Moreover, It aims to root itself as a local craft in the hill states to sustain not only the ecosystem but also the economy.

Each product has been handmade by local artisans and dyed using local natural forest products. The end result: a collection that has been made locally, using local raw material, to sustain both the local ecosystem and the economy. Furthermore, all the pine needle waste generated during the process was processed into paper using natural binding agents with the potential to create a unique packaging material.

By maximizing the utilization of this abundant material, felt goods aims to minimize the harm pine needle does to the environment. The entire production process is designed to be self-sustaining to generate zero waste and to bring forward better solutions.

Scrubbers

Pine needle body scrubers and dish washers that can easily last for a month

3d felted pine needle toys

Fibre felting Tool

Natural Dye sample

natural dyes extracted from local forest products

Indoor slippers

Micro green Felt Pads

Felted micro green pads help seeds to grow faster with their moisture absorbing properties that doesnt let the top soil dry.

The emphasis of the role is on conceptual development activities including sketching/ideation, 3D modeling, prototyping, documenting the development process, and acting as a liaison between sales, marketing, engineering and suppliers. The position will also expose the individual to the business side of design, so flexibility in work routine, to support multiple projects simultaneously, will be the key to the their success.

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

Years ago, I stumbled into an old storefront in rural Virginia with some friends and encountered one of the thousands of rocking chairs that have been inspired by Sam Maloof. It was a dramatic example of the form with a huge sweeping back and long rockers. But most amazing was the seat itself.

It was a massive chunk of walnut that had been deeply scooped out – perhaps a 2"-deep saddle. And the pommel of the seat was tall – almost 2" high.

One of my friends said, "Do you know how come that's a lady's chair?" The rest of us shrugged.

"Because that seat 'lifts and separates.'"

Underwear jokes aside, the guy was right. Sitting in the chair felt like I was being prepped for a medical exam that few people enjoy. The seat looked gorgeous, but you don't sit on a seat with your eyeballs. So, you have to think hard about the human rump (and other body parts) when designing a chair.

Chair design is a topic that can fill an entire book. We don't have the space for that here, so I'm going to write about how I design the all-wood chairs that I build. Some of my guidelines are at odds with modern rules for chairs, but that's because my chairs aren't entirely modern. I take many cues from ancient chairs.

The seat of a Sam Maloof chair. The saddling is deep, but Maloof left some room for the legs to move. People who copy his work tend to make the saddling deep and without much room to move. Ouch.

Start with the Saddle

One of the most important principles in chair comfort is that "sitting" and "sitting still" are not the same thing. And we rarely sit still.

"One of the major difficulties in the design of seating is that sitting is…viewed as a static activity while, in actuality, it is a rather dynamic one."

— "Human Dimension & Interior Space," by Julius Panero and Martin Zelnik.

This is the problem with deeply saddled seats. We sit in them and they feel amazing at first – they support and cradle the bottom in a pleasant way. The only problem is that we can't often sit still. Here's why. In a typical chair, the sitter's weight is confined to about four square inches of buttocks. The pressure on that small area requires us to shift our weight, even just a little, to remain comfortable.

But a deeply saddled seat doesn't allow us to move much, if at all. So, these sorts of seats become agonizing in short order.

I have yet to see an ancient chair that is sculpted as dramatically as our modern Jell-O moulds with legs. I'm sure they are out there, but they've never been the dominant form. Instead, many old chairs had shallow saddling (maybe 1/4" to 1/2") or even no saddle whatsoever. A shallow saddle gives you some curve but also allows you to reposition yourself with ease. (Oh, and they are easier to make.)

I also suspect that many all-wood chairs would be draped with an animal skin or a small cushion. I've put sheepskins on all my chairs and can attest that even the minor cushioning they provide makes a world of difference in the department of butt comfort. (You'll see this cushion concept again when I sneak it into a discussion of seat height.)

For some reason, some modern chairmakers are masochists and seek to make a chair as comfortable as a La-Z-Boy recliner via the magic of curvy valleys. This strict attitude reminds me of people who insist that a single scrap of sandpaper in a shop is an abomination. Lighten up, Francis, and go fetch a cushion.

Seat Height

How far is the front of the chair from the floor? The typical modern chair height is 18" – that's almost inviolate. Sorry to say, I think that is too high to be a general rule.

Tall seats are punishing for shorter sitters. If their feet cannot rest flat on the floor, the front edge of the seat will constrict blood flow in the thighs and produce agony.

Slightly shorter seats, however, are just fine for tall sitters. Their feet can still sit on the floor and their thighs hover above the seat – allowing blood flow. The only downside to a tall person sitting in a shorter chair is the short chair is a little more difficult to dismount.

(Side note: This is true for a table's height as well. Standard table height is 30". A high table is a pain for a shorter people. But a slightly shorter table [29" or even 28"] is no problem for a tall sitter.)

So, if 18" is too high as an overall rule, what should the height be? The answer is not cut and dried with a custom chair. Here are the questions I ask to calculate the seat height:

1. What is the sitter's "popliteal height?" Some people call this "stool height." It's the distance from the bottom of the foot to the bottom of the thigh of a seated person. It ranges from 14" to 19-3/8" in the general population.

2. What sort of footwear will the sitter use? Work boots, 3"-high heels and moccasins all can change the equation.

3. What is the chair to be used for? If it's for dining or keyboarding, it should be a little higher so it is easy to mount and dismount. If it is for relaxing, it should be lower. How low? Seats can be as low as 12"-13" for lounging. Low seats allow you to stretch your legs – a luxury. Low chairs are harder to get out of – but that's the point.

4. Will there be a cushion or other seat cover? Cushions can add 2" or more to the seat height, so you should subtract that when making the chair's frame.

You might be wondering how to determine the seat height for the general populace instead of for a particular person. When I need to do that, I typically use 16-3/4" or 17" for a dining/working chair. And 15" to 16" for a lounging chair. These are on the low side, but they aren't radically low. Tall people will hardly notice. Short people definitely will, and they'll be grateful.

The seat of this Welsh chair is less than 13" deep. Yet it sits just as well as a chair with a 16"-deep seat. That was a revelation for me.

Seat Depth

A typical seat depth for one of my chairs is 16". Once you get deeper than 17", you risk cutting off the sitter's blood flow behind the knees. Surprisingly, shallow seats work well. I have made seats as shallow as 12" and they sit just fine (unless you have an epic backside or the seat is too high. Having both is a disastrous combination). A shallow and low seat also prevents the blood in your thighs from being constricted.

In general, I don't mess with the seat depth too much. If it's between 14" and 16" I know it will work in most cases. This slight flexibility allows me to build using narrower boards. If I have to glue up my seat from two 7"-wide boards, I'll do that and call the 14"-deep seat done. I won't glue on an additional 2"-wide strip of wood to get to the magic 16" depth.

We're not done with the seat quite yet. But to understand the last bit of seat data, we need to first understand the chair's armrest (sometimes called the "armbow").

Armrest Height

Biometric data suggests the top of the armrest should be about 7" to 10" from the seat, depending on the sitter. I usually shoot for 8" to 9" (or less). People have asked for 10" – this height makes some people shrug their shoulders, and you can feel it in the neck after a while. My rule of thumb is 8" for shorter people and 9" for taller ones.

Backrest & Seat Tilt

The small of the back – sometimes called the "lumbar" region – is where I do a lot of work to make a chair comfortable. If you build a chair that supports the lumbar spine, you will make friends – as well as chairs. The lumbar is about 7" to 9" above the seat. This is why I keep my armbows at 8" as much as I can and add a "doubler" above it (and sometimes below it) to increase the thickness of the armbow so I can support the lumbar.

Chairs that lack lumbar support are fatiguing to me. I squirm to push my lower back against the chair's back, but my shoulders and buttocks prevent it. I guess this is why we have low pillows. Nothing wrong with a pillow.

One of the oft-overlooked aspects of chair design – the seat's tilt – can help the lumbar region get to its destination, which is the armbow in my chairs or a lower slat in ladderback chairs.

Most chairs tilt a little toward the back. A seat that is flat to the floor can feel like you are being thrust forward and out of the seat. Adding some additional tilt can encourage the sitter to slide backward and put their lumbar directly on the armbow.

But how much tilt? I like Welsh chairmaker John Brown's method of using his fingers and a spirit level. Put a level on the seat's pommel so it runs from the front to the back of the chair. Raise the spirit level at the rear of the seat until it indicates it is level. If you can get one finger (plus a little more) under the level at the back, that's a chair that's for dining or other proper things – keyboarding etc. Two fingers and you have a chair that is good for lounging. Three fingers – alcohol consumption. Use that information to cut the legs down to get the tilt you want.

Here is the Irish Gibson chair I finished up in May. The back is angled at 25°. Surprisingly, it sits like a fairly normal side chair.

Back Angle

For me this is where the rules get blurry and surprisingly flexible. Most modern chairs have the chair's back tilted back about 5° to 7° or so. That's fine. But adding a couple degrees can also encourage the body to touch the chair's armbow and doubler.

So, I tend to tilt the back about 9° backward, but I will tilt it a little more at times. And I will continue to play with different angles as I think there are some discoveries to be made. Earlier this year I built a copy of an Irish chair that had its back tilted at 25°. That's about three times as much as normal. As I built the chair I imagined that sitting it would be like visiting the dentist. I was wrong.

It wasn't as different as expected. This chair – called a Gibson, hedge or famine chair – was historically used as a kitchen table chair. Even though it looked more like a chair for sunbathing. Your eyes and expectations can deceive you. So don't believe them, this book or your vicar. Work it out yourself.

The high headrest on this chair is comfortable but looks disproportionate to the chair's other elements.

Lowering the back by a few inches greatly improves the look of the chair without sacrificing comfort.

Headrest Height

How high should the crest (aka headrest or comb) be? That depends. For customers who want to be able to pass out in their chairs I want to have a high comb to cradle the head during unconsciousness (after reading a good novel, of course). So, I measure to the base of their skull. I think these chairs look too tall, but some customers like the anthropomorphic appearance of these chairs.

What I prefer in a chair is to have a crest that supports the shoulder blades without the crest digging into them. This is about 22" above the seat.

But this location can be tricky depending on how beefy the sitter is. Broad-shouldered sitters can feel the ends of a significantly curved crest rail push into their shoulders. Thinner sitters of the same height cannot.

The easy way out is to simply raise the crest rail a couple inches, however this dramatically affects the way the chair looks. I prefer a compact chair. Another way out is to make the crest rail so it doesn't have as pronounced a curve. My crest rail typically has a 10" radius. That's tight, but it keeps me from over-bending my chairs' spindles. The crest can be curved less, such as a 14" or 16" radius (which is OK). Or it can be flat (which fixes one problem but causes another by reducing support for the curve of the shoulder blades).

Here's the good news on the crest rail: You can do it at the end of the construction process and experiment with different crest rails – different curves and stick spacing. Dry-fit a prototype crest rail and see how it feels to your back. Make some changes and see how they feel.

When all else fails with your chair's design, add a sheepskin. Or pillow.

Nuclear Sheep

When I talk about chair comfort with other chairmakers, it's inevitable that someone will say: Ah heck, just put a cushion on it and call it done.

Me, I like sheepskins – a traditional Welsh chair covering. They don't add much bulk to the seat, and they won't make the seat too high. But they do add some cushioning and warmth. (And they give me an excuse to go to IKEA without a disguise.)

So do your best to make your chairs comfortable. But know that it's never a bad idea to become a man (or a woman) of the cloth.

Christopher Schwarz is the editor atLost Art Press and one of the founders ofCrucible Tool. He works from a restored 1896 German barroom in Covington, Ky. You can see his furniture atchristophermschwarz.com.

Special thanks to the New York Public Library Picture Collection for its generous supply of visual references

In the late eighteenth century, when American colonists established detainment centers for criminals, they borrowed what they knew from Europe. Jails were disorderly, unsanitary, and lenient regarding regimen. People with means could purchase their way out of the discomforts of incarceration, buying or bartering for – among other comforts – clothing.

An illustration from 1860, depicting incoming prisoners' transitions from their street clothes to the striped uniform.

An act put into place in 1790, which was part of a so-thought progressive new system of penology proposed by a Philadelphia-based consortium of prison reformers, instituted a consistent manner of dress for incarcerated individuals. Introducing clothing manufacturing as a new system of labor within the prisons and jails themselves, the actual clothing that was being produced and worn now mimicked the general, modest style of the times: plain gowns for women, two-piece outfits of linen in the summertime for men, and of wool in the winter, with access to jackets and coats (source).

Incarcerated men in an Arkansas penitentiary working in the laundry facility. From Few Comforts or Surprises by Eugene Richards (1973).

Instituted in Philadelphia, the benevolence of this act didn't quite translate to other prisons in the U.S. at the time. In New York, for example, the introduction of a more consistent prison outfit shifted from a focus on normality, to a focus on explicit differentiation. In the later 1790s and through the early 1800s, uniforms were introduced to loudly call out the convicted nature of the incarcerated: they were colorful or other otherwise categorically differentiating, and were deliberately humiliating.

A group of incarcerated men photographed in 1895 in Utah. From Hoaxes, Humbugs and Spectacles by Mark Sloan (1990)

This uniform trajectory evolved into, by 1815, the black and white striped suits that are calcified into the history of incarceration in the U.S. by their widespread referencing (and, at times, their parodying) in visual media. In other words, we know these uniforms. We can picture them. We can picture, hypothetically, who's in them, what they're doing, and maybe even what they "did." Conspicuous enough to discourage escape attempts, the boldly, starkly striated uniform clearly and humiliatingly distinguished incarcerated persons – and, as clothing historian Juliet Ash identifies, took advantage of an inexpensive pattern that "symbolically represented prison bars", in essence rendering incarcerated citizens doubly caged.

A still from directors Joel and Ethan Coen's fiction film O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)

A pair of incarcerated citizens waiting for their respective visitors at New York State's Sing Sing Prison, photographed in 1904.

Although the black and white stripes were abandoned in most facilities across the U.S. throughout the early to mid-1900s, with federal acknowledgement of their dishonorable associability with nominally outdated chain gang labor, the evolution of the uniform's design has since clung to the ideal of dishonoring its wearer.

In early February 2019, when temperatures in New York City were falling below freezing daily, the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn was reported as suffering from a power outage, leaving its detainees without heat. Rachel Bass, a Brooklyn paralegal who was communicating with some of the jail's incarcerated citizens at the time, shared with the New York Times that, among other harmful disallowances, they didn't even "have access to the commissary to buy an extra sweatshirt."

Rewind more than twenty years to the mid-1990s, when former Arizona county sheriff Joe Arpaio notoriously instituted pink underwear for incarcerated citizens of Tent City jail in Maricopa County (which is now closed). A long time coming, in 2012 a federal court ruled that "'the dress-out in pink appears to be punishment without legal justification,'" noting that "it's fair to infer that the selection of pink as the underwear color was meant to symbolize the loss of prisoners' masculinity."

Former sheriff Joe Arpaio with a pair of the pink underwear he notoriously introduced to the men's uniform at Tent City Jail, in Arizona. (source)

Although it's likely problematic to entwine legality with the maintenance of masculinity, not to mention to tether masculinity to a particular color, the importance of the ruling was the legislative positioning on the side of the detainees, in support of their psychological and physical comfort. The press attention and public outcry in response to the Metropolitan Detention Center's lack of heat functions in the same way, positioning parties in alliance with incarcerated communities and their comfort (or discomfort) through the uniform's clothing.

A mix-match of styles and garments worn by this group of men, photographed in 1983 at San Bruno Jail in California, exemplifies the drastic variety, between penal facilities, of access to uniform materials. This jail offers more lenience, allowing denim, cotton, and other more traditional materials and pieces of clothing to be introduced to the State-given uniform. From Black in America, Eli Reed (1997).

Even from this brief snapshot we can recognize that what's offered to incarcerated populations in terms of officially sanctioned clothing differs from facility to facility; but there's in fact an overarching regulatory statement all facilities of incarceration are technically required to adhere to. It's The United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, drafted in 1957 and which, since its revision in 2015, is known simply as the Nelson Mandela Rules. Its rule number 19, under the heading of "Clothing and Bedding," states:

(1) Every prisoner who is not allowed to wear his own clothing shall be provided with an outfit of clothing suitable for the climate and adequate to keep him in good health. Such clothing shall in no manner be degrading or humiliating.

An anonymous photograph of a man in his striped prison uniform, captured in the early 1900s. From Prairie Fires and Paper Moons, published by David R. Godine (1981).

Institutions, in fact, often echo this regulation in their incoming detainee handbooks, stating that it is an "inmate right and responsibility" to have "proper bedding and clothing." Expectedly, however, many if not most facilities inarguably fall short on delivering this cited human right.

Perhaps this is an economic decision: it's cheaper to buy cheaply, to buy without the take-a-step-back criticality that allows empathy to slip into our systems and product design processes.

Perhaps this is an ideological decision: like back in the day, the collective, institutional "we" still thinks that prisoners deserve to be othered and humiliated (clearly, voting rights, facilities themselves, etcetera signs point to Yes, but entertain the rhetoric with me for a moment!).

Perhaps this is a decision of pure negligence; an indeliberate decision, so to speak, that's the result of trickle-down bureaucratic myopia.

Whatever the reason for the general, modern bureaucratic position that the contemporary prison uniform need not be all-encompassing comfortable – nor even safe, necessarily – we, as citizens and as designers or design thinkers, have the responsibility of consciousness.

A spread from the Bob Barker, Incorporated 2019 catalog – an ordering service and the nation's largest supplier of detention materials, ranging from security and disciplinary equipment to food and games to uniforms. The catalogs supply to correctional facility bureaucrats and superintendents directly, versus the incarcerated individuals themselves.

Photographed here in 1963, the final group of inmates was chaperoned off Alcatraz Island as its infamous prison shut down. They are pictured here in plain, two-piece outfits, a style denoting the move away from the striped uniform. From Inside the Walls of Alcatraz, Frank Heaney (1927).

Approaches to reforming the penal system, including its uniform, began before the ink on the nation's Declaration of Independence dried. They continue today, more than 200 years later, out of equally as urgent necessity. And so today we have the responsibility of the awareness that this piece of material culture – the design object of the prison uniform – is present and affecting; that it's one of the many products of design that's within the neglectful prison-industrial maelstrom; that it unignorably belongs to the day-to-day experience of being incarcerated, and that it has the power to be navigated from arenas of negligence, to arenas of progress. Progress, in this sense, means the right to corporeal comfort and safety, to retention of identity, and – perhaps paradoxically the most basic and the most difficult to institute – acknowledgement of humanity for those currently or once incarcerated.

Emily R. Pellerin recently graduated with her MA in Design Research, Writing and Criticism from SVA. Her thesis, Style on the Inside: Understanding power dynamics in the carceral environment through its clothing, focused on the prison uniform and its relation to identity and power.

Having owned both a 2001 VW Golf and a 2019 VW Golf, I'll say the experience of driving basic-transportation cars has not changed much in eighteen years. Aside from the nav system and some minor refinements, my current car feels much the same as my 2001 did.

Trucks, however, have changed a shit-ton in the same time period. They've become more capable, more comfortable, easier to drive, safer, and have been lavished with the design attention a highly profitable object deserves. When I reviewed the full-size GMC Sierra last winter, I found it a tough vehicle with sophisticated features, and it was perfect for doing work around our farm. It does things that a car can't, and that a truck from even ten years ago couldn't.

Dodge, Ford and GM have been competing ferociously for their respective shares of the massive full-size truck market (2.4 million sold in 2018), and in this market, design is a big differentiator. As one example, look at the innovations in tailgate designs across the different manufacturers. The modern-day truck owner wants to maximize the utility of their purchase, and the designers are listening.

Honda's two-way tailgate (admittedly not a full-size pickup, but an innovative tailgate nonetheless)

Ford's tailgate step

Dodge's two-way split tailgate

GMC's MultiPro tailgate with step and loading stops

And just as the desirability of trucks has grown among consumers, so too have transportation designers' desires to work on them. "I've been here almost 28 years," says Carl Zipfel, GM's truck studios Design Manager, Exterior Design, "and when I was hired, most car designers coming out of college wanted to work on a show car, or something like a Corvette. Back then, if you got put in the truck studio, it was almost seen as a punishment," he laughs. "It wasn't as glamorous, right? Designing this utilitarian tool, while the Corvette gets all of the attention.

"But now," he says, "the truck studio is the biggest, busiest studio in the building."

So what are all of those designers working on, what problems are they solving? As with the design of most things, the first thing that needs to be done is research: What problems do the end users need solved?

The Research: Needs and Wants

"Feedback is super important," Zipfel says. "The architecture of the new Heavy Duty Sierra, for instance, is larger and completely different than the architecture of the Light Duty; this is the first time we've done that, and it was completely driven by heavy duty truck customer feedback."

2020 Sierra AT4, Light Duty at left, Heavy Duty at right.

I ask how that feedback is gathered and transmitted to the designers. "In all of the design programs in our building, whether it's car or truck, we go through a process, and it starts with the customer," Zipfel explains. "If it's an all-new vehicle, where we're designing it from the ground up, we meet with customers--owners of our vehicles or competitors' vehicles--at these events that we call clinics."

What goes on at the clinics? "In the beginning, basic questions, and things like putting them into seating bucks to ask 'Is this enough legroom in the rear seats, do you want more?' For the exterior design, we show them a lot of stimuli, our different trim levels, for instance. Part of the challenge is that there's not just one formula for us; we have a lot of different trim levels, so we're taking input from folks who have different tastes."

Zipfel explains that this all-important customer interaction is a multi-step process. "We hold these clinics three times during the design process. The first one is held early on, then we have one in the middle, then a final one that we call 'Confirmation,' by which time the design's pretty much locked up. That final one is to confirm that we've got it all together and got it right."

Design changes, however, can still be made after Confirmation. "As I was doing my design lock on the Heavy Duty, we added a step in front of the rear wheel. That step helps the customer get up to the front of the box, so they can hook up a gooseneck trailer, or slide cargo to the front, or just reach the tiedown hooks from the outside. And that step was added from direct customer influence."

Aside from prompting the designers to develop specific features and tweaks, the clinics also help the designers connect the dots, so to speak, by understanding how the customer's mindset and experiences drive their purchasing decisions. "Especially at the clinics for the Denali brand, we'd try to get to the root of, 'Why are you willing to pay $80,000 for a brand new pickup truck?' A lot of these folks would say 'I love my truck, I spend more time in it than I do my house.' These guys are earning a living in their trucks and they're in them all day.

"Others have said 'Yeah, my truck might be 80 grand--but I'm pulling $250,000 worth of value on the trailer behind it.' When you hear some of these stories, you totally get it right away. They start describing how they're hauling a couple of show horses in a 30-foot-long trailer. They're hauling out of Texas and heading to a high-end equestrian show in Colorado. So they're relying on their truck to safely transport their prize possession, and passion of life, to a place far, far away from home.

"And the truck is also going to be their base camp for the whole time they're there. So we incorporate power outlets, USB ports, all kinds of convenience features that you've come to expect. They need the power to pull a heavy trailer up and down a Colorado mountain pass road, so we've got the DuraMax engine with the diesel set-up and the ten-speed Allison transmission. Hearing those kinds of stories is why we develop all of these features."

Up Next: To check out these features in person, Core77 traveled to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, as part of a contingent of primarily automotive journalists. Stay tuned!

The Job: The Junior Designer will work amongst Studio teams to assist in developing production data under the direct supervision of the Production Design Studio Lead. The Jr Designer will be playing a supporting role for production designers and will be required to produce deliverables for multiple

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Core77 readers are no strangers to BioLite, the company who's mission of bringing "Energy Everywhere" has resulted in a variety of products from outdoor stoves to off-grid energy solutions. Their R&D team has been using a process of parallel innovation to develop technologies for both the outdoor camp market and emerging markets in the developing world, but with climate change and natural disasters on the rise, the team realized they were missing a key part of the market: emergency preparedness. In honor of National Preparedness Month this September, BioLite has just launched a series of emergency bundles for families and homes of different sizes.

The need for emergency kits first occurred to them when Biolite's offices lost power during Hurrican Sandy in 2012. "We set up charging stations around New York with our camp stoves," BioLite's VP of marketing, Erica Rosen told Fast Company. "We would boil water so people could have a cup of tea and charge their phones using our solar chargers. It was a little moment of humanity, but it was also this moment when we said, 'Holy shit, we've been thinking about off-grid energy for outdoor recreation: We're totally missing the ball on emergency readiness.'"

The new bundles are designed to meet the needs of anyone during a power outage and include a Solo Kit (designed for 1-2 people), an Apartment Kit (for 2-4 people), and a larger Family Kit. Each bundle contains solar-powered lights, chargers, headlamps, and water filtration straws. Check out more details below:

The kits will only be available for sale during the month of September.

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:

These magnetic speakers come in a set of four that can be combined into a larger unit or used separately to create a surround sound experience wherever you are.

LiteCans is a modular system designed for the outdoors that starts with a base flashlight module and offers four possible add-ons, including a module with essential fishing gear and a canteen.

LOOG is back with their fourth Kickstarter campaign for a new electric guitar that comes with a built-in amp and speaker, an Augmented Reality app, and a deck of custom flashcards with easy-to-read chord diagrams. There are three available sizes so kids as young as three can get started learning how to play, but beginners of all ages will find the system very user-friendly.

The Wingback is a handsome mechanical pen that's built to last. You can snag the regular pen machined out of brass or stainless steel, customize it with a personalized engraving, or get a limited-edition version featuring illustrations that are laser-engraved onto the body with astounding detail.

This book is the first comprehensive publication dedicated to the typographic work of K.H. Drescher, a largely unknown graphic designer who worked for the Berliner Ensemble—the theater founded by Berthold Brecht—for almost 40 years in addition to creating work for other theaters and cultural organizations. The tome gathers together 400 of Drescher's poster designs and includes a series of essays about his life and work.

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"Because no modern home is complete without at least one lamp that looks like a laundry detergent bottle on a stool."

"Yes, I do have the time, just give me a minute to puzzle it out."

"This long, steel door pull really gives you maximum leverage against the two screws holding it in place."

"As rendered, no, the car does not fit in the back. But renderings are just about, you know, the vibe."

"I found a clever way to use twice as much metal without conveying any benefit to the end user."

If I lived with a roommate who had this chair, I'd never not be hanging my dirty socks on those bars.

"I'm pretty good at drawing circles in CAD, but I haven't figured out how to get other shapes yet."

"Most shelf brackets can accommodate a variety of board widths. Using the power of design, I have removed that versatility."

"I wanted it to occupy the footprint of a loveseat, while only offering accommodation for one person. It is a metaphor for loveless marriages."

"Over time, using these chairs may put some wear on the steel edges. If that happens, call me and I'll swing by with an angle grinder to resharpen them."

POSITION SUMMARY: The Product Manager will be responsible for managing key aspects of product development work including coordinating and executing development plans, driving brainstorming and development activities, conducting market research and helping establish development goals, building and maintaining product development procedures and processes, managing timelines and collaborating with

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Twice a year the Cooper Hewitt stages an installment of its Selects series, for which various types of creators, from Ellen Degeneres to David Adjaye, are invited to curate a show from the museum's vast 210,000 object collection.

Intended to accompany the museum's ongoing Nature design triennial, the current Selects show was put together by the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. Their theme looks to the early twentieth-century Futurists for inspiration as it aims to define a new, Biofuturist agenda for the future. Drawing from the museum's collection as well as some of their own projects, the Wyss Institute explores how artists and designers have long been inspired by natural forms and how biologically-inspired design might change our world.

Hanging, 1973, by Peter Collingwood. The piece combines rigid wefts (the horizontal element) with flexible warps (the vertical element) to create a textile that echoes tensegrity structures.

86T Rocking Stool, 1954; Designed by Isamu Noguchi and manufactured by Knoll Inc.

Don Ingber, the founding director of the Wyss Institute was the show's chief curator, joined by his colleagues Joanna Aizenberg, Jennifer Lewis, Radhika Nagpal, and Pam Silver. The institute was founded in 2009 and currently has more than 375 full-time scientists and engineers working in a broad range of disciplines who collaborate to develop "nature's design principles" into new technologies and solutions for healthcare, energy, architecture, robotics, and manufacturing.

Wall Sconce, 1996, by Dale Chihuly.

Vegetal Chair, 2009; Designed by Erwan Bouroullec (French, b. 1976) and Ronan Bouroullec (French, b. 1971); Manufactured by Vitra AG

The show unfolds over four thematic sections: Natural Forms, The Architecture of Life, Synthetic Biology, and Biofuturism. Natural Forms focuses on the spiral, a motif that has appeared in virtually every medium of art and design; Kenneth Snelson and Buckminster Fuller's tensegrity structures are interrogated in The Architecture of Life; Synthetic Biology takes a closer look at artistic objects that mimic biological forms; while the Biofuturism section looks forward to a future of biologically-inspired engineering that will go beyond mimicry to "seamlessly integrate with our bodies, restore lost functions, and even provide superhuman capabilities."

Flex-Foot Cheetah® Xtend Running Blade, designed before 2000, manufactured 2013, by Van Phillips. This prosthetic sprinting foot, which acts like a springboard, is based on the shape of the rear leg of a cheetah

Bioimplantable Device for Reconstructive Shoulder Surgery, 2004, by Ellis Developments Ltd. The embroidery on this implant mimics the natural fibrous arrays of ligaments and acts as a scaffold for new tissue growth.

"We hope that the broad range of objects that we have selected for this exhibition convey the potential of biologically inspired design to have an enormous impact on nearly every aspect of human life, and encourages people from diverse fields to look to nature for fresh ideas to both existing and new problems," said Ingber in a statement.

Robobee, 2012, by Kevin Y. Ma and Robert J. Wood. Inspired by the honeybee, this flying robot has potential applications for search and rescue missions and environmental monitoring.

Kilobots, 2012, by Radhika Nagpal, Mike Rubenstein, and the Self-Organizing Systems Research Group. These Kilobots demonstrate how thousands of simple robots, with no leader, can self-organize complex shape and behavior.

One of the highlights of the show is seeing some of the Wyss Institute's own projects, examples of which are also on display in the parallel triennial. These include Robobees (2012), an autonomously flying microbot system that's being investigated for a long list of potential uses, including crop pollinations, search and rescue missions, and environmental monitoring, and Kilobots (2012) an algorithm developed by Nagpal that studies self-organizing systems in simple robots.

Organ-on-a-Chip, 2009, designed by Donald Ingber and Dongeun Huh.

Perhaps most provocative is Ingber's Organ-on-a-Chip, which he co-developed with Dongeun Huh in 2009. Made of clear silicone rubber and no bigger than a thumb drive, the device has two channels cut into it that are separated by a porous membrane. The channels contain human cells from specific organs and essentially function like "living, three-dimensional cross-sections of whole living organs." They allow a way of modeling human diseases in vitro—drugs or bacteria can be introduced to test reactions—and may provide an alternative to drug testing on animals while also reducing the time and cost of bringing new treatments to market. The patented device (the patent is also on view in the exhibition) is now in the process of being commercialized.

"Through these efforts, the boundaries between living and nonliving systems are beginning to literally break down," Ingber writes in the exhibition catalogue. "As the methods used by artists, designers, engineers, and scientists converge, the Biofuturist palette that we have to paint the future becomes broader and deeper than ever before; it is up to us to decide what we make with it."

"Wyss Institute Selects: Works from the Permanent Collection" will be on view through March 8, 2020.

We recently covered an event in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to evaluate the trailering capabilities of GMC's new light- and heavy-duty Sierra pickups.

The event started with an accident.

GMC's designers and engineers have developed a clever, comprehensive camera system to help avoid accidents--but they can only help if you're using them. Prior to the group briefing on how to use these features, one of the automotive journalists wanted to try towing a massive camper trailer that was already hooked up to one of the trucks. He misjudged his spacing and made contact with a building, damaging an awning.

This didn't bode well for me. As we lined up to be assigned a truck, a GMC coordinator asked me "How much trailering experience do you have?"

"Zero," I said. Meanwhile, the journalist who had had the accident was a truck owner who did have trailering experience. What hope would I have of safely trailering the multi-ton loads on hand, up and down the narrow mountain roads around Jackson Hole? I was pretty damn nervous.

They paired me with David Ames, the Assistant Chief Engineer for the ten-speed Allison transmission in the Heavy Duty Sierra AT4 we hopped into. (Allison makes well-regarded medium- and heavy-duty transmissions that you'll find in buses, fire engines, construction vehicles, military vehicles, et cetera.) While I'd be the one driving, David would walk me through using the camera system.

For this first drive, I was trailering this thing:

That's a 14,000-pound camper, and the first thing I had to do was get out of the campgrounds we were in, down a narrow, unpaved road lined by landscaping features and rental cabins. As luck would have it, another pickup truck was coming down the road towards us. This was going to be a very tight fit.

Ames hit a button on the screen in the center of the dash, pulling up the cameras. (Because I could not take photos and drive at the same time, I'll use stock photos here to illustrate how I was able to use the system.)

First off, when sitting in the driver's seat of a vehicle with such a large hood, it can be difficult to judge exactly where the nose and sides are. The "overhead" view--which software cleverly stitches together from footage shot by multiple cameras located in the nose and side mirrors--made it easy to guide the truck within tight confines. As the approaching vehicle nosed towards me, I could see it in the overhead view, too, and thread the needle with confidence.

For terrain features that don't show up well in overhead view--for instance, a shallow ditch that would be a big problem to drive into with a trailer attached--Ames showed me this split-screen side view, which provides a more detailed angle.

As the oncoming truck and I began to pass each other, I realized the trailer we were towing was a bit wider than the truck, presenting a potential problem. Ames showed me the following camera view, which allowed me to see backwards down both sides, so I could course-correct:

You can even choose to see two views at once:

Finally we reached the T-intersection to pull onto the main road. Ames explained that with a trailer this long, I wanted to pull straight forward until the truck touched the double-yellow line (which was perpendicular to us), then turn the wheel sharply to enact a 90-degree turn. This would give the trailer enough clearance to make the corner. For safety, I could check using this camera view:

There really is no substitute for being able to see things clearly from all angles, and I was grateful for the technology.

Once on the road, the truck's DuraMax diesel engine had no problem getting up to speed. In fact after we'd cruised for ten or fifteen minutes, uphill most of the way, you could even forget there was a trailer back there--which Ames warned me was, of course, dangerous. The irony of producing a truck powerful enough to pull something that heavy, without struggling, is that it can lead to complacency, so the driver must remain vigilant.

From a sensorial perspective, there were only two things that made me aware we were hauling this 14,000-pound thing. The first is that, since we were using what's called a gooseneck or "fifth-wheel" trailer, it's attached to a connection point anchored in the center of the pickup bed itself, not the ball hitch. So when you go over bumps at speed, the truck's suspension absorbs it for the truck, but the trailer bounces up and down a bit. That transmits a temporary, residual juddering into the bed of the truck, which reminds you that you're attached to something.

The second thing is that whenever you come to a complete stop, or take off from a stop, you feel a definitive "CLUNK" as there's a little bit of play in the hitch connection. I found it initially jarring, but Ames assured me it's normal, and after a while I simply welcomed it as a haptic reminder of our load's presence.

The 10-speed transmission was remarkable, and I'm not just writing that because the guy who helped develop it was in the truck with me. The shifting is smooth and practically imperceptible. It never struggled or shifted abruptly, but always seemed able to find the correct gear, even uphill or when I gave the accelerator a little extra, and it never wanted for power.

Then we got to the downhill part. Ames pressed a button on the dash marked "Exhaust Brake." As we cruised downhill, he asked me "Do you feel that?"

Planted firmly in the driver's seat, I tried to detect whatever sensorial anomaly he was referring to. But I didn't feel anything different in the road feel, steering, braking, et cetera. "No," I said.

"Exactly," he said. "In a truck without Exhaust Brake, going downhill like this, you'd really feel like this 14,000-pound trailer is pushing the truck downhill, and you'd be riding the brakes pretty heavily."

I could imagine that, but had no such sensation; the braking didn't appear particularly challenging. "What does Exhaust Brake do?" I asked. Ames explained how the feature forces exhaust gases back into the engine, and followed with a detailed engineering explanation, but: Long story short, it uses the power of the engine, rather than the brakes, to slow the vehicle down. The result for the end user is that it doesn't put a greater load on the driver or the brakes when going downhill.

Next we come to my almost-accident, which was entirely my fault.

The mountain roads we were driving up and down were two-lane, meaning one lane running in each direction. A fair amount of the traffic is large tractor-trailers or trucks towing stuff. Because of the weight and the road curves, these heavy vehicles are often driving at or below the speed limit. To allow zippier cars to pass them, the road periodically sprouts a short-run second lane on the right. Heavy vehicles are supposed to pull into this right lane, so that cars can pass on the left.

Ames had pointed this convention out to me, but at one point I became so engrossed in our conversation that I failed to notice one of these extra lanes had appeared. By the time I realized it, and turned my blinker on to get over to the right, an apparently impatient driver--whom I had not seen behind me--had unwisely decided to try passing on the right. Completely in my blind spot.

So here's what happened: I turned the right blinker on; the camera view--which is linked to the turn signals--automatically switched to the right rear camera view, presenting a clear view of the blind spot. Where I was alarmed to see that a Subaru wagon was about to accelerate around the right rear of the trailer just as I was drifting into that lane.

The Subaru driver backed off and leaned on the horn angrily. As I completed the transition into the right lane, the Subaru whipped around on the left, accelerating quickly to draw even with my window. The woman driving the Subaru rolled the windows down and spent, I'd say, ten seconds yelling some unprintable things at me. I tried to apologize but she wasn't having it. She zoomed off.

The woman was furious, and I get it. She was angry because she'd been frightened, my fault for not remaining vigilant that I'm towing around a potentially deadly amount of weight that could knock a car right off of the road. I told Ames I'd pay better attention and that I hadn't even realized the car was behind me. While there was a camera mounted to the back of the trailer, which gives you the option to drive with this view on screen…

I had been driving instead with the side-rear view on-screen…

…so that I could ensure the trailer wasn't wiggling outside the road lines.

Ames pressed another magic button, showing me this view:

That's called "Invisible Trailer," and as you can see, it renders the trailer functionally transparent. Pretty darn brilliant.

I made it back to base camp without further incident. Overall I was impressed at how manageable this combination of design and engineering elements--the truck's power and transmission, the camera array, and the all-important UX that tied it all together--had made this daunting task so manageable for a first-timer like me. Having no prior experience with trailering, I cannot imagine how people do it without the situational awareness conferred by GMC's system.

LaCrosse Footwear, Inc. is looking for a Senior Designer to join our creative team to produce and oversee digital and print creative projects. This person will need experience creating all forms of graphic design: digital/online, print and in-store, creative concept and campaign ideation, and the ability to move from big ideas down to detailed production executions. Part of this role will be to ensure that high quality creative pieces are on-brand and delivered on-schedule. Candidates should ha

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The first posthumous exhibition dedicated to Wendell Castle opened at Friedman Benda last week, offering a rare opportunity to see the sculptural masterworks in person. Wendell Castle: A New Vocabulary is comprised of rarely seen work from the first and last decades of Castle's 60-year career, a curatorial focus that creates fascinating connections between his earliest and final works.

The show brings together formative examples such as Walnut Sculpture (1958-59), seminal works such as Environment for Contemplation (1970), and new works that have never been shown before. The selections highlight his stack lamination process, a technique he was first introduced to as a teenager. Notably, Wendell never shied away from new technologies, and he embraced the possibilities of more efficient and accurate production through 3D scanning and CNC milling in the latter part of his career. He even affectionately nicknamed the six-axis CNC milling robot in his Scottsville, New York studio "Mr. Chips."

"My vocabulary has always been organic; sometimes I think of it as actually growing from a seed or idea," he reflected in 2017. This constant reinvention allowed him to continuously "produce furniture that makes life an adventure." As design critic and contributor to the Wendell Castle Catalogue Raisonne Glenn Adamsonsays, his ability to invent new formal vocabularies and find ways of actually bringing them to life "in the seemingly restrictive context of furniture design makes his achievement all the more remarkable."

A New Seeing, 2015

By focusing on the early and late work, the show juxtaposes "the two extended moments in Wendell's career where he's employing essentially the same techniques and essentially the same methods of making, but the outcomes are very different philosophically, technically, and formally," gallerist Marc Benda explained to Architectural Digest. "Showing the vastness of Wendell's thinking from two very specific periods should make everyone pause and realize just how big a contribution he made over 60 years."

"Wendell Castle: A New Vocabulary" will be on view through October 12, 2019.

You may remember one of the most viral internet memes of the decade, known as the dress. On February 26, 2015 a faded photograph of a dress went vertically viral, meaning its popularity went well past the typical bell curve virality. A galvanizing debate flew across the globe: Some said the dress was white and gold was others swore it was black and blue. Viewers were adamant that their perception was factual reality. No one was exempt, Kim Kardashian saw it as white and gold, her husband Kanye and his frenemy Taylor Swift saw it as blue and black. Within one week of posting on BuzzFeed the article received 37 million views. The dress, purchased by Cecilia Bleasdale at Roman Originals for a wedding in Scotland, is in fact blue and black. But the actual dress was not at issue, it was the photo that launched the debate, and it was the photo that everyone either saw as one color or the other.

The original photo of "the dress."

As designers it is worthwhile to understand how people perceive objects. And to understand why no one perceives the same object the same way.

It turns out that reality and fact is tied to perception, and perception is linked to the way an individual brain receives information. And it is within visual illusions where we get an idea of just how differently we can perceive the very same thing completely differently.

And this when we become obsessed, and unnerved. As Taylor Swift tweeted when she heard about the dress debate, "I feel like it's a trick somehow. I feel confused and scared." It is scary when we learn that our reality is not shared. It behoves us as artists and designers to understand that everyone brings their own individual view to everything they perceive, and we need to keep that fact in mind as we create. In line with this, we need to respect that others will hold their point of view as reality. As the saying goes, "seeing is believing." So what is really going on when we perceive?

The first thing we must know is that our perception of the world is not accurate nor factual. There is a lot we cannot sense. For instance, we can only detect part of the electromagnetic spectrum.

It used to be thought that things in the world present themselves to our brain as they are, but in fact our perceptions are made of conclusions that our brains construct. Meaning, we bring our experiences and thoughts and selves to the moment of perception just as much as the object does. This might remind you of the age old question, "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?" We do know that color doesn't exist without someone there to see it. What seems real is in fact something our brain constructs based on prior experience.

In many ways the brain learns to understand its environment much in the same way machine learning--artificial intelligence--does. That is, the brain makes best guesses about an object based on its prior experience as well as the sensory inputs coming to it. If the guess is wrong, the brain corrects itself and stores that new knowledge. This is why our prior life experience is so influential and important -- it literally helps us predict and construct our current realities.

So, instead of objects--their color and shape--reaching us as sensory input that we then absorb, we are constructing a prediction of the object within our brain first, and then quickly judging or perceiving the object. There is a terrific example of how this works, noted by Anil Seth in a recent Scientific American article. Take a look at the image here.

You might see random black and white patterns.

Now look at the photo near the bottom of this article.

Now you will see that the black and white pattern is an object, a toddler. The sensory input (i.e., the black and white image) is exactly the same but the way the brain sees it has changed dramatically. The brain is now making a different set of predictions about what is causing the pattern. As Seth notes in his article, "All that has changed are your brain's predictions about the causes of these sensory signals. You have acquired a new high-level perceptual expectation, and this is what changes what you consciously see."

Some scientists and experts refer to this theory of perception as "controlled hallucination" and Seth also notes our reality might be what happens when we agree on our hallucinations. We generally consider most things in our worlds as being "real" even if they are constructions (hallucinations) created by our brain. In order to function normally in our day to day we have to regard things and people as "real."

And this is precisely where we get tripped up. We assume that our reality is everyone's reality. And when a visual illusion like the dress comes along we are suddenly thrown into the realization of just how differently we see things. And how closely our perception is tied to our past experience. According to Seth, the explanation for the dress debate is that those who spend more hours in sunlight see the photo of the dress as white and gold, and those who spend more time awake at night under artificial lights experience the photo as black and blue.

Photo credit (includes black and white photo above as well): Teufel, C et al. Shift towards prior knowledge confers a perceptual advantage in early psychosis and psychosis-prone healthy individuals. PNAS; 12 Oct 2015

I think recognizing that we hold onto our individual realities tightly because they are a part of our own personal experiences will help us acknowledge and respect the idea that people will not always perceive things the same way as we do.

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Header photo credit: Fiestoforo - Own work, CC. The contrasting colors of the header image give the illusion of motion.

Our species takes up a lot of space. All over the globe, cities are expanding to house our growing population, but where does that leave the multitudes of other beings trying to live alongside us? What chance is there for a swallow or a butterfly to adapt to these intricate spaces that we have so specifically developed for human habitability? In this global competition for room, finding safe spaces for nesting and reliable food supplies will only get more difficult for almost every other species. Unless they get a little bit of help, that is.

Designing habitable spaces for birds, lizards, bats, butterflies, and all sorts of other creatures is exactly what Thomas Hauck, landscape architect, has spent his time doing for the last few years. In his efforts to design interspecies habitats, Prof. Hauck has developed an ongoing research project called, Animal-Aided Design. The goal of which, is to establish a set of standards that architects and designers can use to integrate animal habitats into urban developments. On rooftops, in courtyards, and in all the little spaces of buildings that are otherwise under-utilized, Prof. Hauck has found space for some of our more compact animal friends.

Detail from "Animal-Aided Design"

As great as it is to design a striking birdhouse, just building physical enclosures for animals is not quite enough to make sure that they will be happy and healthy in their human-made homes. Designing a space for another creature also comes with the task of ensuring that the animal has a supportive ecosystem; food-sources, nesting places, areas for breeding, and other species-specific amenities. To help designers to better understand the needs of urban animals, Prof. Hauck has worked with biologist Wolfgang Weisser from the Technical University of Munich to develop over 40 species-specific profiles as a part of the Animal-Aided Design project.

In cities like Ingolstadt and Munich, housing and architecture companies have already begun to implement Animal-Aided Design into their projects. Buildings have included designs to help species like European hedgehogs, house sparrows, and red admiral butterflies.

Detail from "Animal-Aided Design"

Designing for other species is nothing new of course, in recent years the decline of the honeybee (a still pressing issue), has led many designers to approach apiary design in new and innovative ways. Similarly, recent studies revealing the shocking decline of insects in Europe, has inspired many to try their hand developing designs for "insect hotels". The movement for non-human design appears to be growing, and the principles that Prof. Hauck and Prof. Weisser continue to develop, are helping to elevate animal focused design to a more serious level of discourse. Animal-Aided Design is a step towards helping designers address growing biodiversity issues that are plaguing urban environments, where ecosystem services for both animals and people are suffering dramatically.

Insect hotel (source) photo by Tony Hisgett

Whether you personally like animals and insects, or you find some of them weird and gross, the decline of biodiversity is badfor everyone. Across the planet, the acceleration of extinction is a growing crisis, in the US, the weakening of protection for endangered species has made the issue even more dire. For designers, by merely acknowledging that we live in an ecosystem with other species, as Animal-Aided Design does, we can begin to shift design practices towards more environmentally healthy practices.

So perhaps, as you find yourself working through your next project, be it a sound system, an apartment building, or a pair of boots, you might consider the hedgehog, or the butterfly, or the black bear. You might consider that perhaps whatever you're creating, at some point will likely interact not just with the human user-group you designed it for, but with another species entirely. It is the opportunity for the designer to make that interaction a positive one.

(You can find out more about Thomas Hauck's Animal-Aided Design here. )

Title image is of a European Hedgehog, Photo by kallerna (source)