Photography by Brit Leissler for Core77

Vienna Design Week celebrated it's fifth year with exhibitions, venue-specific installations, talks, and workshops throughout the capital. In an effort to differentiate itself from the numerous design festivals taking place in Europe the same month, Austrian organizers focused on showcasing emerging local designers and the flourishing scenes of Central and Eastern Europe.

The theme of food dominated this year with several installation/performances exploring topics of food waste, food design, and urban gardening. On a similar tangent, we loved the theater behind Alfred Burzler and Thomas Exner's ice stool Ljod (Russian for ice) presented in a refrigerated room where visitors borrowed jackets to enter and viewed the piece with flashlights.

Many of Austria's old school manufactures—often family-run businesses that have operated for generations—took the opportunity to invite contemporary designers to reinterpret their products for exhibition. The most successful of these collaborations was designer Philippe Malouin's Hourglass for Lobmeyr. His piece features a series of measurements; the amount of time it takes for the sand to reach each increment mirrors the exact amount of time it took the artisan to engrave the line—nice!

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Milan-based designer Gabriele Diamanti's "Eliodomestico" solar-powered eco-distiller was recently selected as one of 12 finalists for the Prix Émile Hermès 2011. The small, vat-like still is made entirely from terracotta and zinc-plated metal sheets, and, in keeping with the Italian designer's intention for "Eliodomestico" to be completely open source, "it's designed to be produced (and eventually repaired) by local craftsmen."

The project is conceived like an household: it works autonomously during the day, just in front of people's houses. Its design is inspired from archetypal forms and materials, because it has to be highly recognizable: as a matter of facts, one of the biggest problems in delivering technologies to the developing countries, is that usually the people doesn't understand them.

The device can produce up to five liters of drinking water per day through a direct solar-powered distillation process—i.e. no filters or electricity—making "Eliodomestico" nearly three times as efficient as existing solar stills of equal size.

The distiller is very easy to use: in the morning, simply fill the water tank with salty or dirty water from a local source, and in the evening collect clean, evaporated and re-condensed water in a portable recipient placed underneath the tank.

Image courtesy of the UN Population Fund. Article by Beth Comstock, Senior Vice President & CMO, GE.

According to the United Nations, today we celebrate the birth of the world's seven billionth person. This is both awe-inspiring and terrifying. Awe-inspiring when we consider the new ways that technology will connect those seven billion people and the tremendous opportunity it creates. Terrifying in that it raises some serious challenges for society. How do we feed, clothe, treat, educate, and supply power to seven billion persons, all while not destroying this beautiful planet?

There has never been a better platform upon which to showcase the power of design thinking than this moment. The complexities of our expanding world require innovations that go beyond simply adding more to meet the growing demand, but that identify the true roots of the demand, consider the context surrounding the need and apply creativity and empathy to defining the solution. In short, design thinking is the answer to managing the growing global community.

The good news is that brilliant designers around the world are already hard at work creating these solutions. Consider—how would you house seven billion people, when two billion are surviving on less than one dollar a day? You'd need houses that were both safe and functional, and that cost only a few hundred dollars. Sound impossible? Patti Stouter, founder of Simple Earth Structures, proved us wrong. She recently won Vijay Govindarajan's and Christian Sarkar's $300 House Challenge with a home that would cost $293 to build.

Or, think about the challenges we face delivering water and sanitation, when already one billion people lack access to clean water. IDEO is doing some incredible work with the people of Ghana to create better access to sanitation services via portable, low-cost, functional toilets that will reduce spread of disease while preserving the dignity of the Ghanaian people.

And I'm not the only one lauding the power of design. Across industries we are witnessing an increased focus on solution-centered designs. Design with the Other 90%: CITIES, a Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum exhibit at the United Nations in New York City, is filled with real-life examples of how designers are addressing major world challenges. I encourage everyone to check out the broad range of powerful designs on display, such as the Millennium School Bamboo Project that addresses the large number of Typhoons in the Philippines and bePRO motor-taxi helmet for motorcycle taxis in Uganda.

Industrial Design Intern
frog design
San Francisco, California

As a renowned "global innovation firm," frog design should need know introduction to our readers. They're searching for people who understand human behaviors, brands, trends, perceptions and overall interactions; people who can tell stories and who can creatively synthesize analysis and put themselves in the minds of both the consumer and the client. The Industrial Design Interns will support the general needs of the product design department, providing backup to all levels of designers, developing and seeing through design from concept to final deliverables, working with entire ID staff on projects and seeking out feedback whenever possible.

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Industrial Design Intern
frog design
San Francisco, California

As a renowned "global innovation firm," frog design should need no introduction to our readers. They're searching for people who understand human behaviors, brands, trends, perceptions and overall interactions; people who can tell stories and who can creatively synthesize analysis and put themselves in the minds of both the consumer and the client. The Industrial Design Interns will support the general needs of the product design department, providing backup to all levels of designers, developing and seeing through design from concept to final deliverables, working with entire ID staff on projects and seeking out feedback whenever possible.

» view

The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.

Images and reporting by Ciara Taylor

There was much conversation about tools for design researchers during the first day of talks at the Design Research Conference, held at the Spertus Institute last Tuesday. The day consisted of twelve twenty-minute talks broken down into four subject groups: Cultural Implications of Design Research, How Social Implications Guide Our Use of Technology, Collecting Research, and What is Our Data. Two speakers that explored common themes were Jay Melican from Intel and Tom MacTavish from IIT.

Jay Melican is a research scientist in the Interaction & Experience Research (IXR) lab at Intel. IXR investigates the future of computing power ten to fifteen years out. His talk, "Stories of Tomorrow's Users," touched on the ways that technology has changed the stories designers tell about the user, the means by which we collect that information and the retelling of those stories. Melican reminds us that stories connect design research. He introduces three user storylines or groups: Makers, Machine Interlocutors and Cyborg Superheroes. Makers are a user group that creates their technology with resources such as app developer programs, open source development environments, and online maker communities. Machine Interlocutors are a user group who want their technology to be a smart or informed assistant. Cyborg Superheroes are a user group who want to extend their capabilities through technology. The key takeaway from this talk is knowing the users relationship with technology allows the researcher to know how to engage that user group. He closes by asking the audience: "Imagining 'users' of tomorrow's consumer technologies as Makers, Machine Interlocutors, and Cyborg Superheroes... What are their stories?"

I'd been meaning to wait until I finished Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs before committing to an entry, but I'm only 1/3rd of the way through and feel compelled to tell fellow ID'ers what they might glean from this book that's relevant to our field. Whether you're an Apple user or not, this is a story of a man with a powerful appreciation for industrial design that has affected and will continue to affect the industry that makes for worthwhile, if flawed, reading.

What I mean by the "flawed" part is that author Isaacson is not well-versed in design and makes, thus far, at least one gaffe I consider pretty egregious:

As Jobs's design sensibilities evolved, he became particularly attracted to the Japanese style and began hanging out with its stars, such as Issey Miyake and I.M. Pei.

I.M. Pei? There's no doubt that he's a star architect, but a Modernist one with no particular attachment to "the Japanese style." After reading that I thought Holy cow, is it possible Isaacson actually doesn't know the difference between Chinese and Japanese people and lumped Pei in with Miyake based on geographical ethnic proximities? To me this is akin to calling Le Corbusier a German architect.

Last week, the so-called "Porscheberry" generated quite a bit of (mostly negative) discussion as to whether or not it could save Research in Motion. As one commenter pointed out, the sunset wallpaper was an apt metaphor for what most regarded as what might well be RIM's swan song. (I, for one, saw the P'9981, with shallow curves and sleek gunmetal finish, as a belated echo of Yves Behar's iconic Jawbone... which, of course, dates back to late 2006.)

But you don't need to be Porsche or fuseproject to come up with a buzzworthy comms device (though an internship at IDEO doesn't hurt): recent interaction design grad Michael Harboun—a runner-up for the Speculative / Conceptual category of the first annual Core77 Design Awards—recently collaborated with fellow students Thomas Chabrier and Antoine Coubronne on "Angle," a clever new take on the Bluetooth headset.

People protect their phones with cases but only a few think about protecting their ears with headsets. With Angle, fixing a bluetooth headset gets as intuitive as picking up a phone...

Everything lies in the move. In an easy gesture, you activate the conversation by sliding the phone on your ear. The movement naturally lays down Angle on your ear and you can now benefit from the hands-free communication.

Angle proposes a new move—quick and easy—for a new, safer attitude.

So yes, it's essentially a Bluetooth headset that's been integrated into a charging case... and if the form factor isn't quite as elegant as, say, the Jawbone, the user-friendly design might just represent the sort of subtle behavioral shift that makes a big difference. Instead of fumbling with headphone cables or fishing for elusive earpieces, the "Angle" is more like a natural extension of a smartphone case—specifically (and tellingly) for the iPhone.

The gesture itself looks a bit absurd at first—something like leaving your coffee mug on top of your car and driving away—but who knows, maybe the "Angle" will set a new standard for the Bluetooth earpiece. After all, we've now come to assume that anyone who seems to be mindlessly chattering into thin air is actually attached to a discreet hands-free device and, in turn, a similarly-equipped conversation partner on the other end.

Though it's been live for less than a week, this alluring "Productivity Future Vision" video already has north of a million hits. Produced by Microsoft's Office Division, the concept video displays ideas currently under discussion at Redmond. Writes MOD President Kurt DelBene,

All of the ideas in the video are based on real technology. Some of the capabilities, such as speech recognition, real time collaboration and data visualization already exist today. Others are not yet available in specific products, but represent active research and development happening at Microsoft and other companies.

...We see technology moving from a passive tool to a more active assistant, helping us get things done, and strengthening our interactions with one another. You'll see how people can stay productive using a variety of devices from slates and PCs to mobile devices where they can access their information regardless of their location or the device they are using.

Collaborating on projects with remote colleagues gets easier. Information can be interacted with and manipulated using touch and voice commands to create beautiful and useful documents. Better decisions can be made faster with information that is contextually relevant to where you are and what you are doing.

Happy Halloween! As this year's falls on a weekday, the little 'uns are most likely at school. Which wouldn't be so bad if they had a Science teacher like Mr. Bergmann of Kinard Middle School, Colorado, who here demonstrates one very bad-ass way to make a Jack O'Lantern:

We're not sure how this one slipped by us—the trailer has been online for nearly two weeks now—but with the (limited) release less than three weeks away, the trailer for Eames: The Architect and the Painter is sure to generate a bit of buzz for "the first film to be made about Charles and Ray since their deaths."

The husband-and-wife team of Charles and Ray Eames are widely regarded as America's most important designers. Perhaps best remembered for their mid-century plywood and fiberglass furniture, the Eames Office also created a mind-bending variety of other products, from splints for wounded military during World War II, to photography, interiors, multi-media exhibits, graphics, games, films and toys. But their personal lives and influence on significant events in American life—from the development of modernism, to the rise of the computer age—has been less widely understood. Narrated by James Franco, Eames: The Architect and the Painter is the first film dedicated to these creative geniuses and their work.

Filmmakers Jason Cohn & Bill Jersey tapped a never-before-seen "cache of archival material, visually-stunning films, love letters, photographs and artifacts" from over 40 years of work and collaboration to present "a definitive and unprecedented cinematic foray into the private world of Charles and Ray Eames' [studio]." In any case, it's as good as reason as any to listen to the dulcet tones of James Franco's baritone narration for just under an hour and a half.

Eames: The Architect and the Painter premieres in New York, L.A., and a handful of other cities on November 18, with over a dozen additional one-off or limited runs in other locations throughout the U.S. both before and after the official release date. See the full schedule of screenings here. (Kottke also notes that the DVD is already available for pre-order on Amazon, just in time for the holidays.)

Charles and Ray Eames posing on a Velocette motorcycle, 1948, as seen in James Cohn & Bill Jersey's documentary Eames: The Painter and the Architect, ©2011 Eames Office, LLC.

When first walking into the exhibition space, one encounters a mysterious, optically-fuzzy, impressively colorful, wedding dress. Upon closer inspection, the dress is composed of small seemingly-floating, wildly colorful round spokes. Emmanuelle Moureaux is a Tokyo-based architect who visits Design Tide each year, with a keen eye for evolving architectural design.

The title of the piece, "Toge," means 'thorn' in Japanese. Each individual block is composed of a small metal ball, with a net of long, thin pine-needles, made of piano wire, and painted with a glossy paint. Moureaux says that the design for "Toge" marks the latest evolution of her exhibition pieces.

The folks from Graffiti Research Lab, an online resource for digitally enabled, open-source tools for "urban communication," recently posted a video for an Arduino-enabled project called the Near Tag Quality or NTQ. We've been a fan of the Lab's work from early on, reporting about their LED Bomb Throwies, their High Writer, electro-graf, L.A.S.E.R. Tag and of course Zach Lieberman's Eyewriter.

NTQ uses Arduino to program 7 spraycans to "write" full sentences, similar to the dot matrix-inspired technology we saw in Beijing Design Week's Water Calligraphy Device. The project took two months to complete and cost around €200. The NTQ debuted during the This Place Has No Atmosphere exhibition at the IMOCA Dublin. Watch a video demo after the jump and while you're at it, check out Graffiti Research Lab's arduino-enabled low-cost project, Laser Knuckles, a POV text writer.

Senior Accessories Designer & Developer
John Fluevog Shoes
Vancouver, British Columbia

The Senior Accessories Designer & Developer at John Fluevog Shoes will drive the accessories development process from concept through to product confirmation, ensuring brand integrity and outstanding product quality. The ideal candidate will possess a thorough understanding of the accessories business and marketplace, a strong design aesthetic, high level of creativity, and a broad understanding of construction and materials.

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On the west side of City Hall in Philadelphia sits Dilworth Plaza; a public space designed in the mid-1970s as an urban renewal project. The plaza received funding through the federal Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) grant program and is in the midst of a major makeover.

Philadelphia's Dilworth Plaza lies above several levels of transit infrastructure and is known to those that use it as a labyrinth of granite walls and stairs as well as a home for the homeless and the current site of Philadelphia's Occupy Wall Street tent city. In fact—since the beginning of the Philadelphia Occupy Wall Street protests in October this is possibly the most Dilworth Plaza has ever been used in its 40 years.

Dilworth Plaza hosts a number of aesthetic and logistical issues which include: surfaces cladded in stark granite, various level changes confusing to everyone and impossible for those with disabilities, no clear entrance to the transportation center below and vacant and isolated arcades commuters must walk through to get to the concourse.

In the 1600s, the space that Dilworth Plaza (formerly known as Center Square) and City Hall currently occupy was envisioned by William Penn to be the cultural, social and commercial hub of Philadelphia. Failing to meet any of Penn's wishes in its current incarnation, Philadelphia-based architecture and landscape architecture firms OLIN and KieranTimberlake have teamed up with the City of Philadelphia Office of Arts Culture & the Creative Economy (OACCE) and the Center City District to rejuvenate this historic civic space as the cultural, social and commercial hub it was meant to be.

Construction on the new plaza will begin this fall and is expected to be completed by early 2014. The new Dilworth Plaza will feature amenities such as: a cafe with indoor & outdoor seating, a large lawn, a kinetic fountain, tree groves, space for events and a new gateway to and from the transportation center below.

Thanks to evolution, nature has balance designed into it, and it is us humans who typically muck that balance up with our deforesting and overfishing. It's in our nature to build things and overtax them, whether it's schools, slums or cell phone networks. So it was surprising to see, during this past weekend's flash snowstorm in the American northeast, a sort of design failure on nature's part.

Perhaps "failure" is not quite the right word, but the situation I'm referring to has to do with the design of leaves and their annual cycle of disappearance. Leaves are "designed" with a broad surface area, like a solar panel, to maximize photosynthesis and water collection. When the seasons become too cold for photosynthesis to be viable, the leaves die and drop off. Once it starts snowing, a leafless tree is much better able to hold snow on its bare branches without any ill effect.

But in this weekend's case of snowfall in the Northeast, the leaves were still on the trees, and when the unseasonal snow started falling, it started piling up on that broad surface area, turning a canopy of leaves into an enormous source of deadweight. Branches designed to hold a certain amount of weight were suddenly struggling under the load of many times that number, and the result was many incidents of catastrophic structural failure. Branches and trees collapsed, blocking roads and downing power cables in unexpectedly high numbers, leaving more than two million people without power and causing far more devastation than a leafless-tree winter storm might.

The failure, of course, might be our fault; it's possible that the early snow came as a result of something we've unwittingly done to the environment.

Thomas Thwaites opens his recent book with a quote from Mostly Harmless, the last book that Douglas Adams wrote in his Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy series: "Left to his own devices he couldn't build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that's it." The protagonist, Arthur Dent, finds himself stranded on a planet of limited technological sophistication and after initially hoping to impress the locals with his technical knowledge, he rapidly realizes that all of his knowledge is predicated upon preexisting technology. Somewhere between a travel romp and an investigation of the modes of production in a modern capitalist society, The Toaster Project tracks his quest to build an entire appliance "from scratch." The sad little toaster he built appears on the cover and looks more like a poached egg than a modern convenience, but by the time the narrative is finished, it's pretty clear that it was a quickly-scrambled quest to get it to look like anything at all.

Henry Petroski's The Pencil is the most well-known examination of a seemingly simple technology, but Petroski catalogued the manufacturing process rather than actually mining and building a pencil. Thwaites is more ambitious, though his enthusiasm leads to compromise before nearly every insight. He begins simply enough, by reverse engineering the cheapest toaster he can find (3.94 British Pounds), only to find that it has 404 different parts. He catalogues those parts into 5 different materials (steel, mica, plastic, copper and nickel), and then sets about making a comparable appliance with a clear set of rules. The remainder of the book reads as a travelogue of the resultant exploration.

The following pages could just as easily be read as a comedic exposé, a mad quest towards a seemingly unattainable goal, or a philosophical indictment of the complexities of modern life. Thwaites's voice is most suited to the first two, and those are the pieces most likely to captivate most readers. Industrial designers may find themselves wishing for slightly more technical insight, particularly at the end, but even with those compromises towards the lay audience, for those of us who cobbled together foam models and PowerPoint slides for our thesis projects (like myself), it's pretty tough to cast the first stone at someone who actually explores what it means to make something.

Yesterday I tried going through my cell phone bill to check some usage stats and isolate costs, a completely maddening experience made unnecesarily slow through poor design. Whomever "designed" AT&T's billing statements was apparently tasked with flummoxing the customer at all costs. Any page you click through has several dozen if not hundreds of clickable options, most of them completely irrelevant, making the four or five things you'd like to see on your bill just about impossible to find. The language is vague, the usage of color seemingly arbitrary, the sizes of various elements in no way corresponds to their importance, and the layout is nonsensical.

Column Five—perhaps a twist on the "Fifth Column" trope?—is a California-based infographics, PR and strategy firm that put out the following informational video, simply titled "The Value of Data Visualization":

It's easy to say that letterpress printing leaves an impression, but perhaps the most remarkable thing about the process, which dates back to Gutenberg's original invention in 1440, is that much of the equipment in use today dates back to the first half of the 20th Century. L.A.'s International Printing Museum is home to the largest collection of printing equipment in America, "emphasizing the history of letterpress printing and typecasting from Gutenberg to Vandercook."

They've turned to Kickstarter in an effort "to rescue a collection of approximately 100 full fonts of antique Ludlow Typecasting matrices, [and] catalog & organize the fonts into our working collection & digitize Ludlow Type Specimen books with notes on available fonts for letterpress projects."

Along with the Museum's other metal, wood type fonts, these matrices will be available for casting type to be used by museum patrons, graphic designers & letterpress printers nationally for all kinds of projects including letterpress poster and business card printing, invitation and greeting card printing projects and creative jewelry making and art projects. We will also develop and offer training and classes on Ludlow operation and maintenance to ensure Ludlow's legacy. The success of the project would make this the largest active collection of hot metal type in the world available to the public.

The beautifully-executed video is absolutely worth watching. On one hand, I wish every Kickstarter project put half as much effort into producing their videos; on the other hand, it would stand out as a nice promotional piece in any context.

Had I lived in the 1920s, when personal possessions were sparse, I'd never have foreseen that in the future we'd own so much stuff that we'd pay other people to keep it for us. Or that there would be a big company called The Container Store that essentially sold boxes to hold all of our stuff. And then there's what I saw last week:

Two guys pulled up in a truck outside the building next door. It said BOX BUTLER on both the side of the truck and the thing they pulled out of the back, which looked like a big ABS safe on wheels. I thought it might be some kind of cool robot with a voice module like Carson from Downton Abbey or at the least Mr. Belvedere, but was disappointed, after asking the truck guys, to find out it was just an empty box. Apparently you pay the Box Butler guys to show up, load their boxes up with your crap and lock 'em up, then they drive them back to their storage facility. The misnamed company essentially provides self-storage without the self, not a British dude who measures the distance between your salad fork and soup spoon.

Back to this 1920s thing. I would not have been able to imagine having a collection of objects so vast I'd require storage back then, largely because I have the imagination of an indigent blogger. But I just read in the Times that the Box Butler concept was in full effect as early as 1928, patronized by the wealthy. A storage facility company called Day & Meyer, Murray & Young launched their proprietary Portovault system, a sort of six-sided dumpster on wheels, that year.