Now that China has stopped accepting waste from California and lawmakers rejected a bill to phase out single-use plastic containers last September, the city is getting more creative with its recycling solutions. In partnership with Technisoil, the city will soon be testing a new paving material made largely out of recycled plastic. The first test site—at West First Street and North Grand Avenue, near the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Hall—will receive the treatment before the end of the year.

Image of the area near the forthcoming test site via Flickr Creative Commons

As The Architect's Newspaper first reported, Technisoil's "plastic asphalt" is made by converting shredded recycled plastic into an oil that replaces petroleum-based bitumen to become the binder "in an otherwise traditional method of street pavement." The city's Department of Street Services predicts the new material will reduce costs by 25 percent. In addition, Inhabitat reported that plastic roads may be more durable—up to seven times stronger than regular asphalt—and will require significantly less maintenance.

"This is an exciting technology and a sustainable technology," said Keith Mozee, assistant director at the Department of Street Services. "And it's something that we believe going forward could be game-changing if we deploy on a large scale."

In response to environmentalist concerns that the plastic will leach into waterways, the company says they've already performed tests that show it's a safe alternative. Further details about that and just how much recycled material will actually be used are expected after the test run at First and Grand is completed and proven viable.

UC San Diego installed the first road made from recycled plastics in the US last October.

Los Angeles is the first city to consider implementing this material on a wide scale, but the first application of a similar material was done at the University of California at San Diego campus last October. The university partnered with UK-based company MacRebur to test out their patented plastic road material, which has already been implemented in the U.K. and Australia.

"Creating alternative uses for recycled plastic will be a crucial challenge that we all must resolve and maintaining over four million miles of roads in the United States will be an ever-growing problem," said Gary Oshima, UC San Diego's construction commodity manager. "The recent moratorium on exporting recycled plastic to China has had a profound impact on the U.S. recycling industry and it has created an even greater need for viable alternative uses for our plastic waste."

I always think of America as having the right combination of paranoia and funding to ensure that we develop the most advanced military technology. But in this case, we've been trumped (pardon the phrase) by a Canadian company whose website looks like it was designed in the Netscape era.

Canada's HyperStealth Biotechnology Corp., which specializes in camouflage technology, has been working for years on an "invisibility cloak." Just this month, they finally rolled it out and patented it, and it's pretty darn impressive:

In the past we've seen inventions that appeared similar to this, and relied on cameras and projection. In contrast, Hyperstealth's "Quantum Stealth" technology uses no such trickery, according to the company:

There is no power source. It is paper-thin and inexpensive. It can hide a person, a vehicle, a ship, spacecraft and buildings. The patent discusses 13 versions of the material and the patent allows for many more configurations. One piece of Quantum Stealth can work in any environment, in any season at any time of the day or night, something no other camouflage is capable of.

So how does it work? Beats the heck out of us (and all of their competitors, apparently). But they've got over an hour of demonstration footage that you can check out here.

What's the best-looking ceiling you've ever seen in the world? For my money it's the one in NYC's Grand Central Station--and yes, I've been to Rome.

UK-based Catherine McCormack would undoubtedly debate me and my provincial tastes. The art historian and curator, who also teaches at Sotheby's Institute of Art, has been working on a photo book documenting the world's 40 finest ceilings (Grand Central didn't make the cut).

McCormack's "The Art of Looking Up" divides the works into four categories: Religion, Culture, Power and Politics. Here are a few samples from the book:

Religion

Imam Mosque, Iran. Almost half a million colored ceramic tiles cover the Imam Mosque.

Debre Berhan Selassie Church, Ethiopia. The central image of the crucifixion, above which is an image of three bearded men symbolizing the Holy Trinity.

Sagrada Família, Spain. Light floods in through the stained glass windows to illuminate the Sagrada Família's intricate structure.

Culture

Palais Garnier, France. Marc Chagall's rich colors, made up of five symbolic "petals."

Dalí Theatre-Museum, Catalonia. The viewer is right at the heart of Dalí's Palace of the Wind ceiling, looking up at gigantic feet and into the opened vault in the center.

Power

Royal Palace of Brussels, Belgium. Jan Fabre's Heaven of Delight, occupying the ceiling of La Salle des Glaces in the Royal Palace of Brussels, is made up of jeweled scarab beetles. The wing cases extend down from their entrapment on the ceiling to encrust a grand chandelier.

Politics

United Nations Office, Switzerland. The ceiling represents the geography of the Earth's nations in 35 tons of paint, comprising pigments gleaned from rocks from around the globe.

Sadly, one of the ceilings McCormack wanted to include, as it holds special significance, did not make it into the book "due to an issue with images," she writes. "This was especially sad for me as it was the only work in the book that had been potentially by female artist, so this [blog entry] is the ideal space for a preview. Even more so amid the current re-engagement with the art of Artemisia Gentileschi who potentially painted a large proportion of this ceiling for the Queen's House in Greenwich, which is now installed in Marlborough House, London."

Orazio and Artemisia ( ?) Gentileschi, Allegory of Peace, Marlborough House, London, UK

We suggest you read McCormack's description of the theory that Orazio Gentileschi's daughter Artemisia Gentileschi may have been behind a number of his paintings. "She is better known as the most famous rape victim of art history and proto-feminist artist in an overwhelmingly patriarchal system of art production that only allowed a woman to pick up the tools of her painterly trade because she grew up in a studio of artists with her father and brothers."

"The Art of Looking Up" will be released on October 29th.

Design is a tough racket, and all of us have screwed up at one point or another. But one thing that amazes me is when a screw-up gets all the way to the production stage. Mistakes I've made were always caught by a designer above me or an engineer developing the tooling drawings; but if you're a big-name architect with no one above you, and/or the ill-advised freedom to ignore engineering input, errors can show up in the final product.

Oscar Niemeyer is popularly considered one of the greatest architects of the 20th Century, and a man to whom Modernist architecture owes a great deal. Everyone from starry-eyed architecture students to art critics will wax poetic about his work. From the iconic UN Headquarters in New York to the dozens of standout structures designed for Brasilia, Niemeyer has more than secured his place in design history.

United Nations Headquarters

Cathedral of Brasília

Palácio da Alvorada (Presidential residence)

Memorial dos Povos Indígenas

So you'd think that the house Niemeyer designed for himself in his home country of Brazil would be magnificent, Modernist, experimental. It isn't, and in fact it's rather muted. That's all well and good--"muted" is subjective, after all--but at the very least, you'd expect it to be expertly designed as a functional home.

Instead we find this fact about Casa Niemeyer, as reported by Arch Daily: "The porch drained rainwater into the veranda, leading to flooding on rainy days." The flooding issue was a result of his design for the house which, according to AD quoting a 1961 issue of Habitat magazine, "demonstrated Niemeyer's 'low intimacy with conventional construction procedures.'"

You may be thinking "Come on, is that really an architecture fail?" For an architect to not understand some very basic construction principles, I'd say yes. I understand if you disagree, but I think it's a problem that a giant of Modernism did not understand…drainage. We're not talking about the complicated science of how building materials will hold up after a century--which architects should know, of course--we're talking about the very basic issue of rainwater and gravity.

In my mind architecture should be permanent, given the resources that go into constructing a building, or at least long-lived. Designing a structure that naturally creates flooding seems like a mistake that ought have been made by a student and uncovered in a school crit.

Are industrial designers any better? I can't say so, when I know that hundreds of you are reading this on a phone with a cracked screen made out of fragile glass.

None of us got into ID for the money. So I was not surprised to see, on the Glassdoor Economic Research Blog's list of "Highest Paying Jobs of 2019," that "Industrial Designer" was not one of the categories.

Here's their list, by the way:

From the Glassdoor Economic Research Blog

So I asked myself, which of these could your average industrial designer who wants to make a little more scratch transition into?

There's job #5, "Enterprise Architect," but I hear that Star Fleet has a toxic work culture. Plus who wants to be drawing these lame things all day:

No, your best bet would be job #18, "UX Manager," with that sweet median base salary of $102,489.

So how do you become a UX Manager? First you'd have to find work as a UX Designer (duh), to put the "experience" in "user experience." Luckily for you, the Coroflot Job Boards has dozens of job listings seeking UX people, in all parts of the country--as well as those coveted "remote" gigs. Click here to check 'em out.

And if you just want to see how your current salary stacks up against the salaries of your peers, be sure to check out the Coroflot Design Salary Guide.

Okay guys and gals, thinking caps on. What are these photos of:

Need some more help?

If you said "fish farms," ding ding. These overhead shots were captured by German photographer Bernhard Lang, cruising over the Grecian coast in a helicopter.

Lang took these photos in 2017, the same year that fish farms began drawing scrutiny following "The Fish on My Plate," a PBS documentary series investigating the health of the ocean and its denizens.

This year saw the release of another documentary looking at fish farms called "Artifishal: The Road to Extinction is Paved With Good Intentions." Produced by Patagonia, the doc provides an eye-opening look at how fish hatcheries and farms, once thought to be eco- and animal-friendly benign environmental solutions, are actually leading us down the road to disaster. If you watch this, I bet you'll drop farm-raised salmon from your diet immediately.

If you're interested in the topic but are not able to view either of these, Nat Geo reviewed "The Fish on My Plate" here, and The Revelator has a good write-up on "Artifishal" here.

When a 50,000-ton ship carrying 2,800 cars sank in the English Channel, it was the Dutch who figured out how to retrieve it. (They cut the ship into nine slices using this clever method.) Now nerds from the Netherlands have devised another solution that escapes most, and that's how to make airports quiet for the sake of local residents.

"The residents of Hoofddorp-Noord have experienced extra inconvenience from ground noise since [additional runways] opened in 2003," explains Schiphol Airport's website. "Ground noise is the low, rumbling sound that aircraft make when they take off. That noise can travel even further in winter, when the ground is often wet or frozen."

Enter the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (abbreviated TNO in Dutch), an independent organization formed by the government to science the shit out of pressing problems. Working together with H+N+S Landscape Architects, the team learned from local residents that the runway noise was mysteriously quieter at certain times of the year, independent of traffic. Investigation revealed that whenever nearby farm fields were plowed, the volume level went down.

They then realized that the furrows cut into the ground were helping to redirect the majority of the soundwaves:

Their resultant solution was to reshape the land into precisely-measured ridges and valleys, and arrange them in a calculated pattern to best absorb the noise:

It's pretty brilliant, as the bulk of the solution uses existing earth: Digging a trench naturally provides the soil needed to build a ridge. A less-enlightened solution might have seen them bringing in monstrous manmade reflectors.

Rather than being a mere sound sink, the area was then turned into a public park with playing fields, cycling paths and art installations. "[The solution] created an extraordinary landscape, which was so remarkable that we have built the Buitenschot Land Art Park around it to create a space where you can walk, cycle and relax." Chalk another win up for the Dutch.

Software engineer and Etsy-dabbler Akiva Leffert has designed and is selling a deck of Tarot cards…

…based on Ikea.

"Ikea contains the universe," Leffert explains. "Harness that power to understand your own life with these cleanly designed Ikea themed tarot cards. They'll go great sitting on your BILLY bookcase or on the table next to your MALM bedframe."

"The deck contains the four suits of the minor arcana: sofas, lamps, dowels, and allen keys as well as a full set of major arcana."

Leffert, by the way, has recently announced he's running for President. I wonder if he saw the outcome in the cards.

via BoingBoing

"I was too stubborn to accept that these analog technologies that I loved so much should be killed by digital [ones]," says Florian Kaps. The Vienna, Austria-based entrepreneur, who just goes by "Doc," is best known for saving Polaroid. Dubbing the effort "The Impossible Project," Doc and his collaborators took over the last remaining Polaroid factory in 2008, saving the beloved instant film for a new generation of analog photographers. Now Doc is focusing on analog sound. He is one of the creators of Phonocut, a desktop machine that lets you produce a vinyl record with the push of a button. The Polaroid camera democratized photography by making the complex process of developing film instantaneous. Doc hopes the Phonocut will do the same thing for making records.

Two days after launching Phonocut on Kickstarter, Doc and his collaborator KamranV, a Los Angeles-based music tech specialist, are in New York, demoing their prototype in a room at Manhattan's Ace Hotel. When I arrive, the musician Greg Fox is in the middle of recording, twisting knobs on a small modular synth rig as the Phonocut's diamond-tipped needle transcribes his electronic squiggles and bleeps onto a spinning red disc. A few minutes later, we stand around a record player, listening to the freshly cut disc and grinning. Of course, we've all heard records before, but seeing one come to life so quickly is something new.

KamranV, who has worked with events like Moogfest and artists like electronic music pioneer Suzanne Cianni, says musicians immediately understand why being able to cut your own records is a big deal. He recalls a recent session they did with the artist Cuco and his band: "The drummer walked in, put on the headphones, and literally fell to his knees and started screaming. Immediately he was like, 'Can I record some drum samples?'"

David Bohnett (right), KamranV (left) and Doc proudly celebrating first PHONOCUT test cuts

Turning an industrial process into a desktop device

In contrast to Phonocut's simple immediacy, traditional record production is a notoriously complicated—and lengthy—process. As KamranV summarizes the many steps involved, Doc, exhausted after a long flight, can barely keep his eyes open. Finally, he interjects, "Man, just listening to this description I almost fell asleep! What makes me angry is nobody knows how vinyl is made. The industry doesn't want to reveal it or talk about it. Compare it to food—how can I eat anything without having any idea how it is produced?"

To distill that complex process into a device that creates a record with a push of a button, they worked with Flo Kaufmannm, one of the world's leading experts on vinyl cutting machines. And they've been actively courting the opinions of hard-to-please audio experts, like those they've come to meet in New York at AES (the Audio Engineering Society's annual convention). The verdict? "They love it," KamranV says. "This is a very good prototype and they can already see the possibilities of where this will continue to go."

"We have been in some of the most famous and iconic studios," Doc says. "You can't do anything innovative without some people being skeptical. We want to win their respect."

To be fair to anyone who remains skeptical, the Phonocut doesn't produce the same results as professional machines, which can cost 10 times as much. This initial model cuts records up to 10 inches wide (LPs are typically 12) and, like any analog recorder, it imparts its own character to the sounds it captures—think of the immediately recognizable quality of a Polaroid photo. But for Doc, the project's significance lies beyond technical specs. It's about reclaiming something that we've lost in our switch to digital media.

Pulling analog memories from the digital stream

In some ways, digital technology has exponentially expanded the DIY empowerment the Polaroid camera introduced. The smartphones we carry in our pockets are compact production studios, letting anyone capture photos, videos, and sound that they can immediately share. But Doc thinks digital formats' limitless nature actually makes them less powerful. He mentions a study that shows that our memories of childhood are closely correlated with photographs we repeatedly look at in photo albums. "Now these albums don't exist anymore. So this will have a huge impact on our memories, on our past," he says.

When photos or sounds are part of an endless digital stream, they're just a blur—stripped of their power to mark moments in time. Doc and KamranV see Phonocut as a tool for plucking those moments out of the ephemeral stream and giving them a physical presence—turning a musical performance, an audio diary, or even an online playlist, into an artifact that could be put on a shelf to be rediscovered years later.

Despite his interest in how we make memories, Doc insists that his love of analog media is not rooted in nostalgia. He says, "When I bought the Polaroid factory, everybody said, 'This is romantic. This is nostalgic. blah blah blah.' But it's not. It's really about the future. We finally have to start thinking about how can we combine the advantages of digital with the incredible possibilities of the analog."

He explains that humans are "analog creatures," and he poses a curious question: "This young generation who grew up digitally, why are they suddenly so interested in analog technologies?" He thinks the recent resurgence in interest in vinyl goes beyond the quality of the sound. Citing a BBC report that nearly half of all vinyl records sold never get played, he imagines an alternate narrative for why people enjoy records as objects: "They sit at home, listen to the [digital] stream and hold the record, reading the song text and smelling it. Only analog technology tickles all five senses. And you need all five senses to fall in love, to trust somebody, to really build a connection."

Recording as a personal ritual

Phonocut's makeshift studio at the Ace Hotel is a few blocks south of the Empire State Building. In the 1940s and '50s, visitors could take the elevator up to the tower's 86th floor observation deck, step into a booth, deposit a coin, and record a message directly onto a five inch disc—an audio postcard to send home or just a memory of standing on top of the world. The Phonocut team imagines people using their device in a similar way—enjoying the ritual of recording analog love letters or committing personal memories to vinyl. KamranV recalls one particularly poignant use: "We had a woman who had a recording of a memorial for her son—it was quite emotional."

But for all their ideas about how people might use it, the most exciting thing about the Phonocut is its blankness. "The best thing about the Polaroid is a white frame," Doc says. "You bring it to life, you wake it up." And the same goes for his new creation: "That's why we created this machine. This is not us as a company telling you what to do. It's the other way around."

Phonocut's campaign is live on Kickstarter until November 14, 2019.

The story of Analog Watch Co. started in 2012 when founder Lorenzo Buffa was a senior in the Industrial Design program at Philadelphia's University of the Arts. "Most of my undergraduate work was research-focused, but before finishing school I wanted one portfolio piece that was a physical product and mock brand," he explained to us in a recent email. "I saw a trend of wood watches emerging and decided to explore an alternative to wood links for the band." Over the course of his thesis year, Buffa explored different types of wood, veneers, substrates, and adhesives, before ending up with four watches featuring soft, remarkably pliable bands made out of wood. A year and a half later, that original line of watches was successfully funded on Kickstarter and Analog Watch Co. was officially born.

When we last caught up with Buffa, he had just launched that first Kickstarter campaign, and today, he's back for a second round of crowdfunding for his latest product release: Bandly.

Each of the four designs comes with a matching background optimized to compliment the Series 5 Apple Watch "always-on display."

Buffa adapted his thesis technique—for which he received a utility patent in 2017—to create a range of wooden straps that are compatible with the Apple Watch and Fitbit Versa. The organic grain of the wood gives the bands a warmth that traditional tech accessories made of plastics and metals are too often missing.

"Bandly aims to be a micro-change that brings a little bit of real nature into your experience of tech," Buffa says. "Technology fatigue isn't going anywhere, so we decided to combine the well-known benefits of nature with everyday tech items."

Four years in the making, developing Bandly presented a distinct challenge. "The original design was treated and had specialized coatings for wear, but the average watch wearer doesn't wear their watch 24/7 like smartwatch users do," Buffa explains. "I had to account for the fact that the watches go through much more rigorous use and wear. This meant changing wood species to ones that are more crack resistant and finding a matte finish that was also truly sealed so it could handle all of the moisture from sweat." We don't have more details about their proprietary process, but it renders the pliable wood virtually waterproof.

Available in dark teak, light teak, maple, and rosewood, the engineered wood is backed with soft vegan leather. The campaign page boasts that the bands withstand up to 10,000 bends, 500 stabs, and 1000 smashes. At press time, just a few hours after their launch, Bandly had raised almost 50% of their $2,500 goal.

Today at the 2019 Tokyo Motor Show, Lexus unveiled their LF-30 Concept. The BEV (Battery Electric Vehicle) is their vision for what they'll be putting on the road--not anytime soon, but circa 2030. Here are some wraparound views of the car (and a few interior shots) to help you parse the unusual form, along with Lexus' descriptions of what they're going for.

"In taking up the challenge of expressing a new design that could only be achieved with a BEV (Battery Electric Vehicle) powered by in-wheel electric motors, Lexus visually articulated the LF-30 Electrified's unique energy flow."

"The vehicle form is meant to visually express the energy created by the wheels set at the corners of the vehicle body streaming toward the vehicle cabin and past the driver to directly flow onto the road surface."

"Taking advantage of a hoodless vehicle shape made possible by being a BEV, Lexus' signature 'spindle' form has been further evolved to span the entire vehicle architecture."

"The window glass, which continually stretches from the front to rear, the muscular fenders, and the wing-shaped headlights form the contours of the Lexus iconic spindle."

"The shape of the body is fashioned with an elegantly flowing front which transitions into a linear and sharp rear."

"In addition to the wing-shaped headlights, the sharpness of the rear lights and side air intakes combine to achieve both excellent aerodynamics and cooling performance, resulting in styling fused with function."

"The opacity of the side windows can be freely adjusted, providing occupants with expansive views of the surrounding scenery and a high level of privacy at night and in other situations."

"The color of the front face of the vehicle and luminescence patterns help identify from the outside whether the vehicle is being operated in its normal mode or in its autonomous driving mode, reflecting Lexus' pursuit of both a high level of styling and functionality."

"For its exterior styling the advanced image expected of a BEV has been channeled into artistic qualities that result in a futuristic form, and an interior that assertively weaves in autonomous driving and other new technologies aims to manifest Lexus' distinctive worldview."

"To manifest in a higher dimension Lexus' fundamental human-centered philosophy, the cockpit was designed based on the new Lexus concept of 'Tazuna.'"

(A photo gallery of Lexus' new, electric LF-30 concept is here.)

Part of my job is to post news of design concepts. And while I'll play ball and show you the video, I also can't help subconsciously captioning various scenes.

Here's Lexus' promo video of the LF 30:

And some thoughts that occurred to me while watching it:

"Since I have to draw the brand's logo on the mirror every time we want to summon the car, I'm glad we didn't get a Subaru."

"We had to get rid of Puddles because he kept attacking the luggage drone."

"Jesus, Sharon--are you using Tinder right in front of me? That's so disrespectful."

"Here's my impression of every religious basketball player after they score the game-winning shot."

"I like the autonomous driving part…"

"…until the conversation gets dull. Then I grab the wheel and pretend to be concentrating on the road."

"Best thing about the future: Zero traffic, even in the middle of the day in a bustling metropolis."

"There's also no pedestrians, thanks to that zombie apocalypse."

"Hey, that car in front of us has something stuck to the bumper. Should I alert them?" --"No, honey, I think that's part of the design."

"Here we are, at the Lexus Secret Escape. Out back there's an area where you can crush Mercedeses with a hydraulic press and push the crumpled forms into a ravine."

"Hey Gisele, I just thought of something…"

"…Why are there four of us, but only Dylan and Sharon got to bring a suitcase? Are you and I not allowed to stay overnight?"

Typography nerds among you: What is the Helvetica…of video game fonts?

According to London-based typeface designer Toshi Omagari, it's the 1970s creation known as "Atari Quiz Show:"

"It was a standard-looking sans serif originally designed in 1976," Omagari told the Better Letters Co. blog, "and went on to be the most frequently used typeface in video game history."

Omagari, who works at Monotype UK, should know; he recently published a book documenting the typography of arcade games from the 1970s, '80s and '90s. "I was always sensitive to video game graphics in general when I was young," he says, "but it was when I started typeface design professionally that I noticed the artistry of pixelated fonts, especially coloured ones, which were virtually unknown among the professional designers." Omagari gathered 250 such fonts for his book, Arcade Game Typography:

Arcade Game Typography can be purchased in either softcover or hardcover.

Buy the softcover here.

Buy the hardcover here.

Kikkerland is the world's leading gift brand. With renowned designer collaborations and a strong in house design team, Kikkerland creates a wide range products that make life more enjoyable. We're looking for a talented product development & Product designer to join our team. See requirements below: REQUIREMENTS - BFA

In the 1936 movie Modern Times, a blindfolded Charlie Chaplin rollerskates around on the fourth floor of an under-construction department store. As he skates backwards and hits the staircase trim, he nearly topples to his death.

By reconstructing the entire scene in CG, this GIF reveals the camera trick--called a "glass shot," as that's what the painting substrate is--the filmmakers used to pull the shot off and keep Charlie safe:

How's that for clever?

What does the International Space Station have in common with Dave Hakkens? Both can recycle their own plastic. Actually, while Hakkens has been doing that for a while, the ISS will only gain the capability on November 2nd. That's when they're due to receive delivery, courtesy of a Cygnus cargo spacecraft launched from an Antares rocket, of this thing:

That's a plastic recycler produced by California-based Made in Space. The machine can take plastic waste (from the astronauts' food packaging, for instance), crunch it up, break it down and convert it into feedstock that they can then use with their 3D printer.

Yes, the astronauts have got a 3D printer onboard, and have since 2014, also courtesy of Made in Space.

Having both machines onboard means that astronauts would be able to print, say, a specialized tool for a one-time task, then throw it into the recycler, harvest the feedstock, and be able to create something else with it. "It will facilitate the reusability of materials to solve new problems as they arise," says Made in Space, "whether on the international space station or in future manned space exploration missions. The invention will improve the autonomy and sustainability of long-duration space missions, while also helping to reduce the cost and weight of payloads carried from earth."

The plastic being used is Green Plastic, a bio-based thermoplastic resin derived from sugarcane, developed by Brazilian company Braskem.

The following excerpt features an interview with lighting designer Ingo Maurer from Twenty Over Eighty: Conversations on a Lifetime in Architecture and Design by Bryn Smith and Aileen Kwun, published by Princeton Architectural Press, 2016.

Parsons School of Design, a college of The New School, invites candidates for eleven full-time faculty positions in areas including: Animation, Art and Design History, Communication Design, Interior Design, Textiles, Social Justice/Community Engagement, Fashion Design Technology, Fine Arts, Photography, and Industrial Design. Visit: https://tinyurl.com/y2r73pfm. The New School is

What's one of the most influential lessons you learned in design school? For me it was "It's all about the transitions." Nailing the overall form of an object is important, but how you handle the transitions--the areas where different surfaces and materials meet--is where you can manifest the pro-level design considerations that separate good work from great work.

It's true of architecture too, of course. Everything from window flashing to door trim to interior molding is an opportunity to demonstrate excellence and a love of design.

How best to inculcate this in kids?

Lego! And while the most basic version of the interlocking blocks from Denmark have always been good at helping kids master the gross form, Legos now come in such a variety of detailed parts that Lego transitions themselves have practically become their own playground.

Lego expert Alice Finch--whose incredible work includes complicated compounds like Harry Potter's Hogwarts and Lord of the Rings' Rivendell--understands detailed Lego work well.

To help spread her knowledge she's written The LEGO Architecture Idea Book, which focuses heavily on design details: Columns, doors, windows, walls, towers, roofs, archways, trim, all of those areas where different surfaces meet. Here are some sample pages:

You can pick up a copy here, and you can see more of Finch's work here.

"Skatelab" received a Student Notable Built Environment Award in the 2019 Core77 Design Awards.

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"I am not a skater," clarifies designer Reina Imagawa. So when she devised of a project intent on challenging how the institutional space can relate to local skateboarders, she quickly recognized the importance of incorporating the skaters themselves. As a part of her designer residency at Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, a contemporary art museum in Mexico City, she conceived of and launched Skatelab (Laboratorio de skate): a design project temporarily appropriating an unused pavilion in the back of the museum, creating a space dedicated to play and skating to explore and offer agency to the contemporary skateboarding subculture. Both technically and culturally, she relied on skaters and their existing community in Mexico City to steer her project, its design concept and elements, and its programming and engagement with the city and the museum space.

DIY architecture - One of the best skaters in Mexico City, TJ, rips on a DIY skate spot that he and other skaters made in Museo Tamayo. The skateable objects were provided by SK8SCAPES, Monkey Skateboards and Ucanskate, and all of the materials used in the DIY portion of Skatelab were sourced and chosen by the skaters themselves. Photo credit: Miguel Rojas Rea

Skatography workshop with Anónima, 1 - A skater shows a photo on his phone in response to the brief, "skateparks that are not skateable." This collaborative workshop with Anónima aimed to map the geography of a skateable city through stories, photos, and experiences, as well as understanding the lesser-known geography of skate that exists outside of the city's borders in Estado de México. Photo credit: Reina Imagawa

Skatography workshop with Anónima, 2 - Skaters talking with Erik Carranza of Anónima about skate spots in Estado de México. Anónima is one of the key players in the landscape of publicly funded skate park construction in Mexico City, and their participation was a huge plus in understanding and collectively discussing the changing contemporary landscape of play. Photo credit: Reina Imagawa

New dynamics in the museum - Just by skating, skaters created a whole new dynamic and sets of socio-spatial relations with the passersby, such as people on bikes, people walking their dogs, children playing, and museum-goers. Photo credit: Reina Imagawa

Skatelab was ultimately an access point for looking at larger urban sociocultural relationships, and seeking to develop symbiosis between institutional and public entities. By challenging the customary intents of large-scale urban design initiatives through appropriating their sites and objects, Imagawa forged new channels through which non-institutional actors (skaters) were able to enter and creatively occupy institutional spaces.

The process was research-driven, with Imagawa poring through skate literature, doing firsthand interviews, and connecting with other skate-interested researchers or conceptual thinker-designers like herself. She then began to collaborate with the Mexican firm Anónima on its architecture, "a deliberately minimalistic vision," she says – "an alternative, if not an antithesis, to the rise of skate park construction in Mexico City," which "create[s] highly scripted and programmed play spaces." Their finished design was modular and adaptable, encouraging experimentation and appropriation of the objects themselves, with only a few stationary elements involved.

Curated museum visit for skaters - Andrés Valtierra of Museo Tamayo leading a specially curated museum visit for skaters. We merged the themes from the Trevor Paglen exhibition with issues of surveillance and decreased agency in public space that skaters experience on a day-to-day basis. Photo credit: Reina Imagawa

Making the museum skateable, 1 - Skaters using maps of the museum to speculate and identify opportunities for skating to appropriate the architecture of Museo Tamayo. Photo credit: Reina Imagawa

Skatelab's concept was reliant on engagement. So, in addition to the transformed spatial-relational opportunities the project offered, it also incorporated museum-led programming catered to the skating community, such as discussions, markets, art and grounds tours, offsite exhibitions, and workshops.

Skatelab continues to explore how contemporary practices of play in urban settings are shaped and informed by institutional modes of design practice. In the long run, this programming ultimately also serves to spur other productive explorations of – and challenges to –the separations between institutional spaces and the larger public.

And to think such an important conversation could be facilitated through play.

Making the museum skateable, 2 - One of the maps produced as a result of skaters going around the museum and meticulously analyzing it for skateable opportunities.

Festival de Cine Skate (Skate Film Festival) - The skaters who participated in the first skateboarding film festival in Museo Tamayo, which included 9 local brands from Mexico City and the showing of "Build Ramps Not Walls" from Shore Skatepark in Punta de Mita. The event was produced and organized by Malina, the founder of the all-female skate group Mujeres en Patineta. Photo credit: Reina Imagawa

As Imagawa says, "gracias skateboarding" for its impassioned communities that made the success of the Skatelab project possible.

Check out Skatelab in more detail on our Core77 Design Awards site of 2019 honorees