This is the third in a 4-part series from Cameron Tonkinwise, sharing learnings from a two-year project from the New School's Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability (DESIS) Lab. Amplifying Creative Communities, works to research, promote and amplify community-based solutions for sustainability. Read the first part of this series on Kinds and Products of Social Design here.

In addition to there being a confusion of different kinds of social designing, there are also a confusing set of processes that social designing, whatever its aim, tends to use. What follows is the terminology that the Amplifying Creative Communities project adopted to weigh up how it could best do its work of co-designing social solutions and design-enabled social innovation:

Platforms

Platforms seem to be to 'social business design' what portals were to the first dot.com era. Platforms are areas that can focus social design work. Whether a physical or online location, or a combination of the two, a platform convenes background research, tools and appropriate people, allowing focused work on problem-solving or innovation with particular communities around particular themes.

The rationale for a platform is that other kinds of problems—business innovation, policy formulation and education, for example—have dedicated institutions in which solutions can be developed and applied. Social issues arise when problems manifest that lack an institution which can resource work on those problems. Digital domains and social software have enabled the creation of almost-free platforms—the primary cost is the service system design of the technologies into a productive and elegant platform—allowing social issues to convene a combination of expertise, community knowledge and cognitive surplus.

There seem to be four kinds of problems that platforms attempt to solve:

• Curating Conversations that are otherwise distributed across different social media or in times and physical places that others cannot get to.


• Making Contributing Convenient so that people can quickly get up-to-speed and participate in working on social problems or innovations in timely ways


• Making contributions relevant by allowing unified messaging about a project-managed process


• Providing a historical record that allows cumulative work as well as versioning, ensuring that distributed work not get ephemeralized

Platforms may have more or less designed processes and structures to make contributions convenient or relevant—see Formulae and Toolkits below.

The Amplifying Creative Communities project has, for each of its two years, used an exhibition as a platform. Rather than the exhibition being of completed research, summarizing what has been done, the Amplify exhibition is a platform for the design research. It curates some contextual research and presents it in a way that mobilizes it as the focus for a series of workshops with social service system design experts and local community representatives. As propositions emerge from those workshops, they are incorporated into the exhibition, and only at the conclusion of the exhibition-as-platform are there 'results.'

A project proposing to reinforce distinct aspects of alternative food systems through staged interactions: Aaron Cansler, Amy Findeiss, Mai Kobori, Anke Riemer, Grace Tuttl.

2011 has been a hard year. Global Revolution! Natural disasters! Bankruptcy! What's next? We're not hedging bets for 2012 just yet, but in case things don't turn out the way you'd expected, we've got you covered. Core77's Ultimate Gift Guide has everything you need to get through these hard times and survive through the... end times?

Today's pick is from Matt Wolfe: Matt Wolfe fell in love with the internet at the tender age of 11 and is now an Interaction Designer at Teague.

Secure all your worldly possessions on the front of your bicycle with this flexible, durable, bungee net. Measuring a hefty 14”×15” unstretched, how could this not be useful? Whether you're securing your survival kit or balancing the weekly CSA share, no bike should be without this nifty net. Doubles as a cat hammock when not in use.

See the full gift guide HERE.

A special Thank You to this year's Gift Guide sponsor: Felt & Wire Shop offering a selection of curated paper goods direct from designers.

The Autodesk Sustainability Workshop is a free and vast online resource that aims to teach sustainability strategies, from micro to macro. The simple, easily-digestible series of strategy videos, tutorials and case studies can help students, educators, designers, engineers and architects not only learn about sustainability, but how to directly apply it.

Core77 asked 5 students to take it for a test spin, investigating the workshop and using Autodesk software to incorporate what they'd learned in a re-design of a commonplace object. In the fourth installment of our series we look at San-Francisco-based Marc Levinson (California College of the Arts, B.F.A. in Industrial Design) and his Lili Tea Infuser.

Marc, tell us about yourself.

I'm 23 years old, I was born in West Palm Beach, Florida and I currently live in San Francisco, California.

What made you decide to study industrial design?

Since I was little I've had two seemingly opposing interests in art and business. I really enjoy drawing, inventing and working on entrepreneurial ventures. When I was 16 years old a friend of mine introduced me to Industrial Design and I decided it was the only career for me to pursue.

Where did you decide to study, and why?

I decided to go to California College of the Arts in San Francisco. I was very excited by San Francisco's renowned design community and its proximity to Silicon Valley. I went to CCA during high school for a summer program and was impressed by the faculty, facilities and student work.

What areas of industrial design are you interested in focusing on?

One of my favorite things about Industrial Design is having the opportunity to learn about and design all types of products. I am however particularly interested in the materials and manufacturing processes involved in each project.

Tell us about your project, the Lili Tea Infuser.

It began as a student project. Brewing loose-leaf tea is an age-old custom, but its popularity in the United States has been growing quickly over the past few years. My objective was to design a simple, elegant household object so this seemed like a good choice; the tea infuser, although relatively simple, is unique and leaves room for very elegant, detail-oriented refinement. I also saw this as a good opportunity to learn about tea and the rituals involved in preparing it.

What background do you have with Autodesk products, and how were you first introduced to them?

My dad is an Electrical Engineer and taught me how to use AutoCAD when I was a little kid, so I have known about Autodesk for as long as I can remember. Now I use SketchBook Pro often for product ideations. I've also played with Alias, 3DS Max, Mudbox, Maya and Photofly.

Please describe which Autodesk products you use or used for this project, and what you like or dislike about them.

I used Autodesk Inventor Fusion in order to alter my original design. I then rendered and animated it in Inventor Publisher. Fusion was very easy to transition to from Solidworks. Relative to other rendering software, Publisher made it very easy to make animations and communicate my ideas. On the other hand, I did think the interface in Publisher was a little fussy and hard to control with much accuracy.

What things did you learn from the Sustainability Workshop that you didn't know before?

I was not aware of how big the impact of certain manufacturing processes can be—one little change can make a big difference even if the materials stay the same. I also learned how to better balance cost and sustainability.

Please describe your design process.

At first I was planning on starting back at the end of the concept phase, redesigning the form of my tea infuser from scratch with sustainability as the focus from the beginning. The workshop rightfully explains that this method is ideal, but in the end I decided it would be better to refine my existing form, which had already taken some product lifetime elements into consideration, as well as a significant amount of research and form finding. This being said, there was still lots of room for improvement.

Luxo did well out of the licensing arrangement for the Anglepoise lamp, selling an estimated 25 million L-1s and branching out into the full-fledged lighting company they are today.

John and Simon Terry, the current generation of Terrys to run the company their great-grandfather founded, struggled up to the millennium, constrained by their Commonwealth-only licensing deal mentioned in Part 2. In 1975 Terry Lighting had been spun off as its own company separate from the Terrys' springs business. In the early 2000s, as sales sank to just 50,000 a year, the Terrys brought in industrial designer Kenneth Grange to revamp the Anglepoise line. Grange created the more modernized Type 3, seen below, which met with acclaim and sales success. The company is now called Anglepoise.

In 2004 a Giant Anglepoise, like the one seen up top, was produced as a one-off for the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre. Tim Burton then famously purchased a second one created for a charity auction. Following that, demands started coming in, and the Giant went into production.

The Museum of Modern Art welcomes Portugese architect Pedro Gadanho as it's newest Contemporary Architecture and Museum Design curator. Best known for his curatorial work and jewel-colored architectural spaces, Gadanho is a prolific writer and serious thought leader in the world of contemporary urban architecture. His bold writing reminds us that architecture is powerful, transformative and should be centered in public dialogue. His nomination is a statement from the institution on the importance of challenging and addressing about our rapidly urbanizing world.

He is the editor-in-chief of Beyond, Short Stories on the Post-Contemporary —a bookazine started in 2009 through Sun Architecture, and he is the author of Arquitectura em Püblico (Dafne, 2011).

He teaches at the Oporto Faculty of Architecture, and from 2000 to 2003 he was a co-director of ExperimentaDesign. He was the curator of international shows such as Space Invaders, for the British Council, London, and Pancho Guedes, An Alternative Modernist, for the Swiss Architecture Museum, Basel.

Most recently, he integrated the Advisory Panel for the British Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2010, and was the co-organizer of the 1st International Conference on Architecture and Fiction—Once Upon a Place.

For portugese speakers, you can watch Gadanho's recent TEDx presentation in Covilhã after the jump.

Seattle-based designer, maker and Coroflotter Christopher Flechtner runs Speed Shop Design LLC, a design firm "dedicated to the design of all things fast." Flechtner's wicked-looking Beezerker motorcycle just won both the People's Choice award and First Place in the Freestyle category at the 2011 Ultimate Builder Custom Bike Show Seattle.

The Beezerker's tank and seat area consists of hand-beaten aluminum, and it's safe to say Flechtner's comfortable working with metal: In addition to holding degrees in metalsmithing from both Cranbrook and the Massachusetts College of Art, the designer studied antique sword restoration in Japan.

LEGO was a vital part of my childhood and is definitely one of the reasons I'm an engineer/designer. I remember drooling over the LEGO sets in TV ads back in the 1990's and I was always so envious of the kids who got to build the sets in fast-motion.

Advance, a Danish ad agency, has been in charge of making LEGO TV spots for decades now. They recently dug some ads out of their archive and added some amusing commentary. I've always been fascinated by movie magic and, well, throw in some LEGO for the perfect combination. Watch Advance's YouTube page for more great videos over the coming weeks.

From Christian Faber, art director at Advance:

We shot this in London or LA, I can't actually remember! It was one of the first motion control spots we did. At 0:15 we used a kind of 'magic building' technique where the bricks are held on the end of metal rods and then pulled apart. And if you look closely at 0:00 you can actually see the edge of the studio in the top left corner.

The set filled a whole studio and we used a lot of analogue techniques—the planet is just painted cardboard and the backdrop is just a screen with little holes in it and a big light behind it. The hands you can see moving the sets at 0:05 and 0:21 secs are actually wax hands. I had quite a lot of explaining to do when customs asked why I had a bag full of fake arms!

Senior Industrial Designer
Ziba California
San Diego, California

Ziba California is looking for a Senior Industrial Designer to join our small San Diego based team in designing a range of commercially successful and emotionally compelling consumer and medical products. The ideal candidate is looking for a challenging and rewarding position that enables personal growth while living in beautiful sunny southern California.

A suitable candidate will have sufficient design experience to be comfortable leading the process for small and large industrial design projects by communicating expectations with clients, providing guidance to less-senior staff, and confidently making and articulating design decisions with the creative director—in addition to taking an active role in the design of each product.

People fit for this position will be skilled at developing and articulating industrial design concepts, ideas, and directions and the hands-on design of complex parts, systems, and products. In addition, the right designer will have a good understanding and appreciation of how research enriches the design process and an ability to design with the user in mind.

» view

The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.

Hard to believe, but Pixar Animation Studios was once an unheard-of upstart. In the mid-1980s no one knew who they were, and they'd developed a computer graphics technology called RenderMan that was capable of producing the most photorealistic graphics of the time. They needed something to show the technology off, and animator John Lasseter was tasked with producing a short film for the annual SIGGRAPH computer technology expo.

Lasseter had, on his desk, a Luxo-branded Anglepoise lamp; the exact model was never revealed, but I'm guessing it was either the Luxo LC or LS. In any case, Lasseter had actually been doing films with lamps since his student days, so he set to work with the lamp as the centerpiece of his story, as told in this 1990 interview with Harry McCracken:

I started working on doing lamps. I modeled one Luxo lamp, and then a friend of mine came over with his baby. And then I went back to working on the lamp, and wondered what the lamp would look like as a baby. I scaled different parts of it down: the springs are the same diameter, but they're much shorter. The same with the rods. The shade is small but the bulb is the same size. The reason the bulb is the same size is because that's something you buy at the hardware store; it doesn't grow.

The resultant two-minute film, called Luxo Jr., is below.

It looks cute to us now, but you have to realize how mind-blowing this was in 1986. As Ed Catmull, Pixar's then-CTO, told Computer Animation: A Whole New World author Rita Street in the mid-'90s:

Luxo Jr. sent shock waves through the entire industry—to all corners of computer and traditional animation. At that time, most traditional artists were afraid of the computer. They did not realize that the computer was merely a different tool in the artist's kit but instead perceived it as a type of automation that might endanger their jobs. Luckily, this attitude changed dramatically in the early '80s with the use of personal computers in the home. The release of our Luxo Jr. ... reinforced this opinion turnaround within the professional community.

The Luxo Jr. character was subsequently turned into Pixar's now-familiar 13-second opening sequence for every film. An entire generation of kids who perhaps did not know the Anglepoise lamp before certainly knew it now, at least by sight if not by name.

By the way, Pixar not only mascot-ized the already iconic lamp; they actually developed a maintenance improvement that George Carwardine and Jac Jacobsen could never have imagined. Pixar designed a solution for what to do when the bulb burns out, and the technology is seen below.

2011 has been a hard year. Global Revolution! Natural disasters! Bankruptcy! What's next? We're not hedging bets for 2012 just yet, but in case things don't turn out the way you'd expected, we've got you covered. Core77's Ultimate Gift Guide has everything you need to get through these hard times and survive through the... end times?

Today's pick is from Allan Chochinov: Allan Chochinov is the editor in chief of Core77 and Chair of the new MFA in Products of Design graduate program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Even in hard times there's so much to celebrate! Break out the bubbly (without the guilt) with this Cristalino. According to Allan, "this under-ten-dollar fake champagne rivals almost any genuine article in the $60-$80 range, including you're famed Veuve Clicquot." You will need to toast to 2012 at the start of it, and then again on the last day of it (read, Armageddon), so stock up with a dozen of these and enjoy this final year right to the last drop.

See the full gift guide HERE.

A special Thank You to this year's Gift Guide sponsor: Felt & Wire Shop offering a selection of curated paper goods direct from designers.

Of all the reasons to be named one of your city's Top 100 Most Influential People, Melbourne-based designer and Coroflotter Dean Benstead's got a cool one: He's developed a motorcycle prototype, called the O2 Pursuit, whose only fuel is a scuba-diving tank.

That's right, no gas, no electricity, just compressed air. "A solar panel and a compressor now becomes your refinery," Benstead told SmartPlanet, "and without huge battery packs to dispose of, we now have a low-cost to free powered bike with minimum impact on the environment."

Benstead designed his air-powered 02 Pursuit motorcycle around the "Engineair" technology developed by fellow Melbourner Angelo Di Pietro. The Di Pietro Motor is an astonishingly brilliant rotary-piston design that uses far less parts than a conventional motor, can deliver instant torque, and provides a friction-free environment for the piston to turn by cushioning it with air.

We were only half-joking when we suggested that Poler Stuff's "Napsack" might be well-suited to Occupiers looking to hunker down for the winter. The international sociopolitical phenomenon recently crossed the three-month mark, and while the movement hasn't made headlines lately, at least a couple of designers are taking sides.

Max Arstig and Maximilian Gebhardt go by "Max and Max," a Swede and German who work at R/GA by day and design subversive furniture by night. "In Case of Riot" is a coffee table that the Maxes have designed in "response to recent troubles in the world," featuring a removable plexiglass plate atop a "welded square steel pipe frame base."

Thus, the tabletop functions as a riot shield—courtesy of the Stockholm Police Force—an aegis hiding in plain sight for easy access, the frame a sort of shield rack.

I don't know about you, but I'm beyond sick of the seemingly endless supply of iPad accessories coming out of Kickstarter. It's really making me wonder what doesn't make it past Kickstarter's review board. Anyways, it's nice to see a graphic designer featured here on Core77 find some success with the crowd-sourcing website. We did a spotlight back in August on Chris Piascik's mission to create 1000 typographic drawings, one per day for four years.

Now Piascik is releasing a book filled with his beautiful creations and he's already reached its Kickstarter goal with 26 days still to go. Besides the fact that I could stare at his typographic drawings for long periods of time, his great rewards are most certainly helping his cause. From a custom drawing of your name to an illustrated quotation to one of Piascik's sketchbooks, there's something for everyone.

ShelterBox, disaster relief in a box, from Michael Sammet's "Building Adaptive Capacity: Towards a Sustainability 3.0"

2011 has been a year marked by the extreme winds of mother nature, political upheaval and economic uncertainty. But in this time of unpredictability, design has emerged as a voice of reason, offering elegant solutions for inelegant problems and championing the sheer magic of human resiliency.

March 25th, 3:40PM EST, from Haiyan Zhang's Geiger Maps

In March, the world was gripped by the tragedy of the Tokhoku earthquake and designers responded immediately with fundraising efforts, disaster relief assistance and information systems to show support unbound by geography. The ebullience of the Arab Spring was tempered by reality as newly liberated countrymen and women looked towards building a brighter future together with designers on the ground, lending a helping hand. Closer to home, designers helped write a new chapter in the lives of disabled American veterans returning home from war.

From Panthea Lee's series on the role of design in international development, "The Messy Art of Saving the World: After the Egyptian Revolution"

Designers changed the world. 2011 welcomed the world's seven billionth person—designer's prepared for this milestone with innovative and empathetic solutions for managing our growing global community. Cooper Hewitt's Design with the Other 90% exhibition is the most comprehensive and wonderful example of some of these solutions—a computer station made out of an oil drum, bicycle phone chargers and sandbag architecture, just to name a few. In other design exhibition news, The Museum of Modern Art took a look at the communication between people and objects in their phenomenal crowd-sourced exhibition, Talk to Me, sparking what we hope will be an ongoing public discussion about interaction design.

PHOTO GALLERY: Talk to Me exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art

Designers made this year fun. This year, we painted with light, made rainbows with circuits, watched a man fly and saw a new world of possibilities in the best art project ever. We made printing exciting again—whether it was printing solar cells, making mini letterpress printers, 3D Printing Stephen Colbert's head, printing food or printing your digital feed.

Big Idea, Little Printer: Exclusive Q+A with Matt Webb of Berg
Jeb Corliss, wingsuit flyer

At Core77, 2011 marked our 16th year as an online resource for the design community. And what better way to celebrate than to reward our collaborators, old and new, with a trophy. The Core77 Design Awards trophy, to be precise. We kicked off the Core77 Design Awards program with 15 categories of design excellence judged by a distributed jury representing 8 countries. In our inaugural year, we had over 600 entries (including 250 video testimonials). And did we mention the live broadcasts? Another first for the Core77 family is our recently released Hand-Eye Supply catalog, our first printed catalog and the Hand-Eye Supply x Vanport American Craftsman apron, our very first Hand-Eye Supply product collaboration.

Hand-Eye Supply x Vanport Outfitters American Craftsman Apron

Core77 Design Awards 2011

Sadly, last night designer Sori Yanagi passed away. The Japanese industrial design pioneer was 96 years of age.

After founding the Yanagi Industrial Design Institute in Japan in 1952, Yanagi and his work started gaining international notice in the mid-1950s. His Butterfly Stool, above, combined the cutting-edge bentwood technology of the time with a Japanese aesthetic (as anyone who has seen the gate to a Japanese shrine can attest), providing a decidedly Eastern counterpoint to the Western work of the Eameses. The stool gained notoriety after winning an award in the 1957 Milan Trienniale and now resides in both the MoMA and the Louvre.

His stackable, fiberglass Elephant Stool, from 1954, was another early international hit. In the 2000s Vitra brought it back in injection-molded form, and the then-88-year-old Yanagi--who was still working in the same humble backyard studio from the 1950s--developed a new color range for it.

Over the years the prolific Yanagi designed, well, just about everything: Furniture, lighting, kitchenware, toys, motorcycles, cars, subway stations, working right into his 90s. But it's likely he saw his decades' worth of design labor as bringing these objects into the world rather than creating them; he was quoted to have said

True beauty is not made; it is born naturally.

In Part 1, I took a look at Hans Jenssen, a modern master of cutaway illustration. In this part, I'll spotlight two illustrators from the 1940's and 50's, back when cross-sections were the method of choice for explaining all of the war-era and post war-era technological innovations to the American public. This was the time of science and innovation, mass optimization and industrialization.

British artist L. Ashwell Wood's cross-sections of machines and factories initially appeared in Modern Wonder in 1937. He eventually drew center page cross-sections for the magazine through 1941. Apparently the British government even handed out Wood's illustrations as information leaflets during WWII!

In 1950, Wood began producing illustrations for the comic book Eagle, featuring Dan Dare, for its very first issue. Over the course of two decades, he produced hundreds of cutaways for the comic book, many of which were later collected into a series of books called Inside Information.

Remember Ron Arad's spring steel wheel bicycle? Wisconsin-based Resilient Technologies, a company that develops "advanced mobility products," makes something similar for motor vehicles: The Non-Pneumatic Tire.

But while Arad's bike wheels are designed to turn heads, the NPT is designed to survive military conflicts; the U.S. Army Research Laboratory is current testing them out on Humvees, as "the NPT will not go flat if shot or hit by shrapnel from a roadside bomb."

While there's no public footage of the NPT under attack, here's what the wheel looks like in milder testing:

And here's what it looks like on a civilian vehicle:

Welcome to the third chapter of our 2011 year-end wrap-up, in which we focus on visual communication, including a full range of graphics, identity, packaging and otherwise visually-driven content from the past year. Without further ado:

Eye Candy

2011 was as visually stunning a year as any in recent memory: our minds were blown time and again by stencil art; artists' graphic styles were just as often informed by their method as vice versa; maps reimagined as portraits and dancers; and old Volkswagens elevated into art.

We also saw some good ol' fashioned trompe l'oeil; data visualization turned into abstraction; there were lights, camera and action.

The global street art movement continued its conquest of the design world, from Matthew W. Moore's angular foray into housewares to Geoff McFetridge's collaboration with Heath Ceramics. Barry McGee (sometime cohort of the latter) exhibited "New Work," as did his kindred spirit Scotty Albrecht, while Boston's Bodega hosted "Human Powered Works," a group show.

Techniques

Just as ketchup packets got a little more manageable, so too did graffiti: we'd love to see a combination of the Robo-rainbow and Arduino-enabled NTQ.

Designers also dreamt up (and created) a couple drawing machines large (á la complex harmonic motion) and small (á la computer numeric control). We also came across a Finnish artist named 'Tomi' who turns everyday MDF into physical halftone images.

On the other hand (or is that 'in the human hand'?), we were also glad to see the handiwork ofsurgically-precise pinstriper and a faux-pixel homage to the late Tobias Wong. Thanks to artist Frederick McSwain and Gallery R'Pure for letting us capture the process on tape.

On the same day as Sori Yanagi, another design giant passed away. Modernist architect Andrew Geller, who worked at Raymond Loewy and Associates for 35 years, died on Sunday at the age of 87.

One of the most quirky and groundbreaking projects for which Geller was known were the Leisurama Houses, begun as a project to design a typical American house that was exhibited at the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow, at the height of the Cold War. The pre-fabricated cottages contained every modern convenience and proudly displayed American manufacturing might.

Most interestingly, Macy's began exhibiting and selling Leisurama homes in their department stores in the 1960s. The video below is an excerpt from a 2008 PBS documentary on the subject:

A website dedicated to archiving and preserving Geller's work is here.

In July 2012 General Motors Advanced Studio will cut the ribbon on their new Shanghai design facility, which will be headed up by Wulin Gaowa (pictured above). Gaowa is GM's first female design studio chief, having been appointed Design Director of GM China Advanced Studio in September of this year.

A press release from this morning features a Q&A with Gaowa, who previously worked for the Mercedes-Benz Technology Center in Germany and Italdesign Giugiaro in Italy, on the new facility. Here's an excerpt on the "crewing up" process:

Q: How is it going with the hiring process? What kind of talents are you seeking to hire for the Advanced Design Studio?

A: We have found some qualified candidates here in China. We're looking for people that have a passion and superior talent in the area of car design, and are willing to challenge the status quo. Hiring locally is important for us as the designers' Chinese cultural background will help us better understand how to design mobile products that meet the needs of our customers in China. Overseas experience will be a plus and good support to achieve global standard.

I've been visiting design universities and colleges all over China and the U.S. since I arrived in September, looking for designers who will fit into our organization. I've been to Beijing, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Detroit and Los Angeles so far....

Read the rest here.