Rumor has it Microsoft will soon be releasing the inchworm-like Microsoft Arc Touch Mouse, which folds flat for storage, then bucks into ergonomic shape when it's time to work.
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Microsoft's physically-innovative touch mouse changes shape
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"Drainspotting" with Remo Camerota: Documenting Japan's creative manhole covers
One of the things I love about Japan is the unexpected places where creativity pops up. As an example check out Drainspotting, a photography book by artist Remo Camerota that documents creative and one-off Japanese manhole covers:
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Sergio Garcia's mind- and frame-bending tricycle
US-based artist Sergio Garcia's 50"-tall tricycle is the kind of thing you give to your kid after they've been bad, as a sort of psychological punishment. What would be really awesome is if your little hellion not only learned to ride it, but powered it down a hill and completed a loop-de-loop at the bottom.
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Nike's "Pro Combat Gear" interface design is pretty killer
After hearing it was fantastic, I started watching Friday Night Lights--and the recommendations were right. I have little interest in American football and the show still sucked me right in.
Watching anything to do with American football, whether real or fiction, you quickly realize that the specter of permanent, career-ending injury hovers over every player, from high school to the pros. After doing a little research, I found that paradoxically, it seems the improvement of football padding design has actually increased the amount and severity of injuries; when players are armored up and feeling secure, they have a tendency to hurl themselves into other players with much greater velocity and ferocity than they would if they were playing, say, unprotected rugby.
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Open for Branding Week 4: The Calm Before the Storm
Continuum continues their series Open for Branding, where they are sharing, from start to finish, their latest branding project for the new, nomadic Design Museum Boston. They're asking for your input, so don't hesitate to leave your feedback in the comments below.
Now, we're in the concept phase. Here's when things begin to take shape--and our weeks of research, discussion, and brainstorming start to come together. The concept phase channels all of this work into sketches, and we create actual designs.
In other words, the work up to this point has allowed us to create rules and parameters for designing so that when we start to develop the brand identity, we'll create meaningful, on-point concepts deeply aligned with the mission and vision of Design Museum Boston.
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Sukkah City winners are announced!
The 12 winners of the Sukkah City design competition have been announced, with their designs to be built at the Gowanus Studio Space in Brooklyn and then moved to Union Square in Manhattan for public display on Sunday, September 19 and Monday, September 20.
"We asked some of the most creative people in the world to re-imagine and renew the sukkah, and the results are truly dazzling and inspiring," said Roger Bennett and Joshua Foer of the cultural organization Reboot, which organized the competition in collaboration with the American Institute of Architects, Architizer, Dwell, the Union Square Partnership, and the City's Department of Parks & Recreation. "This humble structure will come to life in twelve new forms that are bold, beautiful and quintessentially New York."
Check out the press release here, but below are the winners. Core77 is proud to be a partner of Sukkah City. Congrats architects and designers!
Sukkah City 2010 Winners
Dale Suttle, So Sugita, and Ginna Nguyen - New York, NY
Gathering (image: www.sukkahcity.com/gathering.jpg)
Henry Grosman and Babak Bryan - Long Island City, NY
Fractured Bubble
Ronald Rael, Virginia San Fratello - Oakland, CA
Sukkah of the Signs
Kyle May and Scott Abrahams - New York, NY
LOG
Peter Sagar - United Kingdom
Time/Timeless
tinder, tinker - Sagle, ID
Shim Sukkah
Matthias Karch - Berlin, Germany
Repetition meets Difference | Stability meets Volatileness
Matter Practice - Brooklyn, NY
Single Thread
Volkan Alkanoglu - Los Angeles, CA
Star Cocoon
Bittertang - Brooklyn, NY
Bio Puff
SO-IL - Brooklyn, NY
In Tension
THEVERYMANY - Brooklyn, NY
P.YGROS.C / passive hygroscopic curls
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"The Definition of Self" exhibition at Design Sight, Tokyo
Privacy is a hot topic. It wasn't long ago that Facebook was being dragged through the papers as Zuckerberg and Co. scrambled to bring their policies up to scratch. Now it seems that Google are getting, surprisingly willingly, in on the act with Eric Schmidt's prophetic comments last week, forewarning us all of the murky, digital identity dystopia to which we are undoubtedly, irrevocably, and in no small part thanks to his company, heading. It appears that this debate is in no way confined to sunny California, however. We dropped in on "21_21 Design Sight" museum in Tokyo this week to check out their current exhibition on this very theme.
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Humanscale is seeking a Design Engineer in New York City
Humanscale
Design Engineer
New York City
Candidates must possess a strong willingness to learn in a fast-paced production environment. While it in not necessary to have a high level of experience in the field, the successful applicant will have an intuitive understanding of mechanical part design, be well-organized, and have an outstanding work ethic.
The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.
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Pilot's headphones have different design needs than ours
As city-based consumers, what we demand of our rinky-dink headphones is simple: "Block out traffic noise so I can make a phone call and be heard." Worst-case scenario, your girlfriend thinks you said "STD" when you were trying to say "FTP," and you'll sort it out later in a Three's-Company-esque way with little harm done.
Professional pilots, on the other hand, have greater demands for a headset: "Block out the sound of loud, droning airplane engines so I can clearly communicate with the air-traffic controller and not kill myself and all these passengers. Also, make the headset comfortable enough to wear on long-haul flights, and create some way I can hear my nagging co-pilot without removing the headphones." Not to mention they need different plugs depending on if they're flying a Boeing or an Airbus.
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Bulthaup's painfully beautiful "tool cabinet" for kitchens
I live in a converted sweatshop with two dogs, and it is a lot less cool and lot more rough than you think. One particular sore spot is my "kitchen," a pathetic and cobbled-together assortment of cast-off drawers, cabinets and surfaces mostly made out of other people's garbage. So it's pure torture that my dogwalking route takes me past the Bulthaup showroom two or three times a day.
The German high-end kitchen manufacturer produces the stunning B2 kitchen workshop, which I drool over daily. Not so much the ostentatious B2 workbench, but definitely the dual "tool cabinets," which are designed to hold an array of "appliances, crockery, tools and ingredients....[this is a] kitchen for pioneers in the art of thinking and living."
Hit the jump for more shots and info.
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Sundara Rug Collection by Donna Wilson for SCP
UK-based SCP launched the Sundara rug collection this week at the New York International Gift Fair. Designed by Donna Wilson, who has a penchant for thick-spun, hand worked woolen textiles, the richly patterned rugs evoke a range of things, from neapolitan ice cream to autumn leaves, sweater knits to contemporary illustration. The rugs are hand loomed, tufted, and woven in India, all under the same roof.
Pictured above is the Scope rug. Hit the jump to see them all.
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Compete live at the Cut & Paste Digital Design Tournament 2010
We're proud to be a media sponsor of 2010's Cut & Paste Digital Design Tournament. This is the third edition of this international design tournament, unfolding over the next few months in 9 cities around the globe: Bangkok, Tokyo, Seoul, Sao Paolo, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, London and Berlin. There, competitors will vie for 1 of 30 championship spots and an all-expense-paid trip to New York City to compete for the grand prize.
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Dumper by Sam Johnson for Thorsten Van Elten
We love Sam Johnson's Dumper toys for Thorsten Van Elten, made from a solid piece of birch and (this is the best part), an off-the-shelf plastic stacking bin, probably very familiar to you if you've ever organized a garage, a sewing room, or a craft corner. You can order these right off of Thorsten Van Elten's new online design shop, Theo, where he sells products he manufactures among a selection of curated products by other brands.
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Furniture inspired by Brigitte Bardot
Women have served as muses for artists ever since, well, the time of the Muses. But now Calliope has a somewhat surprising addition to her sisterhood, and not for the fields of painting or poetry: Brigitte Bardot, for furniture design.
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KIX's chemical-cut steel eyeglasses
We all know what laser-cut steel is, and you've probably heard of steel cut by waterjets as well; but an even cooler way to cut steel is chemically, whereby you mask off an outline and use etching chemicals to remove the excess material.
As an example of this particular production method, check out Berlin-based design studio KIX's Screwless Eyewear for IC! Berlin. Self-professed lovers of "cutting-edge design technology," KIX used chemical cutting to fashion the IC! Berlin pieces, and designed them to fit together (the eyeglass frames and earpieces are separate) to create a screwless hinge.
Hit the jump for more shots.
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Rejuvenate cities
In a long paper, Reon Brand of Philips Design presents a holistic approach to systemically transform cities into places that positively contribute to human personal development, social harmony and diversity.
"Urban living is the future of the majority. But although urbanization has brought great progress to human civilization, it is also a key factor in compromising the natural balance of the planet; it has become one of the key threats to loss of biodiversity. There are a number of associated macro level issues such as pollution, decline in natural resource, and numerous current and escalating social issues that will increasingly detract from the benefits brought by urban living if we continue to develop cities in their current format. Many approaches to improve urban development are still driven on an issue-based level rather a systemic approach.This paper examines the systemic issues and drivers of change associated with urban development. It explores possibilities for a holistic approach to systemically transform cities into places that positively contribute to human personal development, social harmony and diversity, and the environment and health of the planet at large. The paper concludes that we have to think differently about the role and the function of cities, which will inspire us to develop future cities and urban living in a different way."
> Download paper (pdf)
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Dan Hill on the World Design Congress in Beijing
In a seven part series, designer and urbanist Dan Hill, research leader at ARUP and author of the acclaimed blog City of Sound, reports at length on last year's World Design Congress in Beijing.
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Jason Stevens' "Say Something" project engages designers to help kids aspire
The Say Something Poster Project from DesignIsMyThing on Vimeo.
I first came into contact with Jason Stevens when he was working on his "Design is My Thing" project, a series of micro interviews with 150 designers. Each interview is only three questions, and all are done through facebook.
His new project is called "Say Something", a poster design competition and gallery show created to generate posters for The Home for Little Wanderers (The Home), a non-profit child and family service agency located throughout Eastern Massachusetts.
The goal of this poster project is to support The Home's counseling and educational services by reshaping their surroundings with engaging imagery. Ultimately, posters will provide a source of positive reinforcement that kids at The Home will be exposed to everyday. Keep an eye out for how to participate in the competition, you can also donate through their kickstarter page.
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Professor's solar-panel breakthrough wins Millenium Technology Prize, could lead to solar ubiquity
The sun is like a big spender at a casino, throwing wads of energy-money at the spinning roulette table that is the Earth, most of it turning into losses. The amount of solar energy hitting our planet reportedly exceeds global demand by a factor of 5,000.
Hopefully that will change due to a breakthrough by Professor Michael Gratzel, who won this year's Millenium Technology Prize, the Finland-sponsored competition to develop "life-enhancing technological innovations." The biannual MTP is recognized as "the world's biggest technology prize" and Gratzel's entry could be similarly huge: He's developed solar cells that are organically made, cheap to produce, translucent, and tintable to a variety of colors.
Hit the jump for a video and more info.
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Making "the little sh*t better:" Nixon Watches
We're digging the unusual form factors coming from Nixon Watches, as evidenced here by their Zona, Spree, and Tribella models. The 12-year-old California-based company sponsors skaters, surfers, snowboarders, rappers and actors, and their self-description reveals their casual tone: "We make the little shit better."
The company's website is here, but the website of this online retailer is actually better for quickly browsing Nixon's wide variety of models.
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More Pages to Explore .....
