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Masters of the Cutaway Part 3: Yoshihiro Inomoto

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I discovered the work of Yoshohiro Inomoto in a Japanese book from 1986 called Illustrated Transportation that I found buried in the stacks at The Strand Bookstore. While there are a variety of artists featured in the book, with each given about a page, Inomoto has most of a chapter devoted to his photorealistic cutaways of cars, motorcycles, and engines.

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Inomoto was mainly a self-taught artist who in 1952 began working for the Toyo Kogyo Company, which would later become Mazda, working on designing new cars. In 1957, he left for Nissan's advertising branch and about two decades later started his career as a freelance illustrator. He has apparently been named "The Cutaway King" by Road & Track magazine.

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Innovation Gets Tired, Part 2: The Energy Return Wheel

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Inventor Brian Russell's Energy Return Wheel is another non-pneumatic tire, but whereas Resilient Technologies' NPT is passive, this one active absorbs and releases energy. As its name implies, the ERW spins shock absorption events into a modicum of forward motion. And interestingly enough Russell came up with the idea while designing sneakers whose soles would deliver energy returns.

Here's the intro video, which is too long by half, but scanning through it will give you the basic idea:

The following video, which I'm guessing was produced by tire and rubber manufacturer Britek after they licensed the ERW technology, uses a little more CG to give you an idea of how the thing actually works:

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Core77 Year in Review 2011: The Best of Core77

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In case you missed it, we've been looking back at 2011 this week in our Core77 Year in Review series. Besides our coverage of this year's news and milestones, we also looked at the cycling movement and visual communication with more trend watching to come. Today, our look back focuses on the best of Core77 features and resources from 2011.

2011YiR-Bestof.jpgOur top 10! Drumroll please...

CORE77 TOP 10
10. Moto Undone, a stripped down motorcycle concept.
9. Quadror, a new structural joint supporting everything from furniture to housing by Dror Benshetrit.
8. UPenn Engineering Students Present "Alpha": Possibly the Most High-Tech Bicycle Ever, featuring a switchable integrated free-fixed transmission.
7. Rapid Prototyped Dicemaster, intricately RP'ed dice for the Dungeons & Dragons set.
6. Bertelli's Biciclette, beautifully built using a mix of found and new parts.
5. I Have Seen the Future, and I Am Opposed, Don Norman reflects on the future of our technologies and warns about propriety controls.
4. Jeff Tideken's Gravity Bike Gets Up to 60 miles per hour.
3. Light Light's Sublime Levitating Lamps, skeuomorphic LED lamps.
2. CoreToon: Sixteen Ways to Use Your Wrist now that Watches are Obsolete.
1. A Mindbender for Craftsmen, who knew a piece of wood and a nail would be our top post of 2011?

Click to see if you can figure out how the nail got here?

FAVORITE FEATURES

Since our storied beginnings 16 years ago, the heart of Core77 has always been learning and making. 2011 has been no different. From Paul Backett's series on rethinking design education, Craighton Berman's introduction to the art of Sketchnotes to our Sustainability in 7 video series with Designers Accord, taught us that whether you are still in design school or have been designing for 40 years, it's always exciting to learn something new.

From Sketchnotes 101, by Craighton Berman

In 2011 we learned about the full lifecycle and applications of cork—from harvest to industry—while being mesmerized by the alchemic art of peinture decorative to transform one material into another. Our favorite case studies from 2011—whether it was frog's work on new electric vehicle ecosystems, Continuum's Leveraged Freedom Chair for mobility in developing countries or Ziba's work on creating a digital identity for TDK Life on Record—were also a testament to the transformative nature of design. Our Core77 sponsored competitions also yielded incredible case studies. Aava Mobile saw two distinctly different prototypes in Thomas Valcke's Blackbox and Alberto Villareal's Twist. And who could forget our Autism Connects winner (and student winner for the Core77 Design Award in Design for Social Impact), GoBug, an interactive toy for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Blink, a new line of electric vehicle chargers for ECOtality

And as we celebrated the history of industrial objects through the design history of icons (like the American fire helmet) and even stamps, we also spent time this year exploring the changing terrain of making. Willem Van Lancker challenged the idea of making physical things in a digital object culture in "O Pioneers." The persistence of the Open Design movement is becoming more evident as it becomes embraced by a wider audience of designers and consumers. Hand-in-hand with the rise of Open Source design, we saw 3D printing reaching past prototyping into the world of direct consumption with affordable 3D printers, multiple materials and made to order businesses.

From "Q+A with Thomas Lomm&eacutee and the Open Structures Project"

Looking towards 2012, we'll continue with our Apocalypse series, kicked off by Jon Kolko's appeal for sensemaking and the humanizing power of design in an uncertain and disjointed world. The urgency of these current times was also addressed in Michael Sammet's "Building Adaptive Capacity: Towards a Design for Sustainability 3.0", Dave Seliger's Redesigning International Disaster Response and Panthea Lee's ongoing series, The Messy Art of Saving the World, a look at the role of design in international development.

CORETOONS

A perennial favorite, Coretoons are the incredible work of lunchbreath and fueledbycoffee, our Core77 artists-in-residence. Besides our 2nd most popular post of the year, here are three of our favorites from 2011:

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Nokia is seeking a Senior Visual Designer in London, UK

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Senior Visual Designer
Nokia

London, UK

Nokia is seeking an exceptional design talent to build a UX Design team for Smart Devices. The Senior Visual Designer is responsible for the creation of all online visual design, including typography, visual concept, logo and icon design for the Internet and interactive platforms. They effectively communicate and coordinate with the information architect, writer and production artists to ensure that the visual design communicates the desired message, and functions successfully for varying technical and performance specifications. The candidate must be capable of leading the creative aspects of a project and have demonstrated strong business acumen.

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Masters of the Cutaway Part 4: Stephen Biesty

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In this post, I'll look at the cutaways of British illustrator Stephen Biesty, whose love of cross-sections was inspired by the work of L. Ashwell Wood (featured in Part 2). Where many cutaway artists might just show the insides of a machine in a very static way, Biesty slices and dices, exposing vehicle internals like a cut loaf of bread. Biesty garnered fame in the early 1990's with his series Incredible Cross-Sections through DK, with 3.5 million copies sold.

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What I love about Biesty is how fearless he is with his subjects for cross-sections; he's done everything from vehicles to castles to the entire human body. But he's not just illustrating static diagrams, he's telling stories through the cross-sections. He has a cast of hundreds of characters you need a magnifying glass to find, winding their way through a daily routine in medieval England or aboard a Spanish galleon. For example, in the case of Castle, there's a spy who starts outside the castle on the title page, then works his way through the castle as Biesty slices it up, and eventually leaves on the last page.

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Jake Dyson's Desk Lamp of the Future

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Following our series on the story of the modern desk lamp, we now look at what Jake Dyson intends to be the desk lamp of the future—literally: His CSYS LED Task Light is designed with "thermal management" technology designed to prolong the life of its bulb for some 37 years. Unsurprisingly for a Dyson, the technology consists of a vacuum that sucks the heat away from the bulb.

But while that's cool, the far cooler feature is the way the lamp articulates, versus the traditional desk lamp. I myself own a variant on the Anglepoise, mine being a cheapie imitation from IKEA that I use to illuminate the workbench where I do motor repairs and the like. I have it mounted to a fixture in the wall to provide added height, and I find the swing-arm invaluable for getting light into projects from various angles. Unfortunately, the springs wear over time, losing elasticity and necessitating the ugly rubber band fix you see here.

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Dyson's CSYS, in contrast, operates with these wicked rollers combined with rotating and telescoping actions.

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You've got to see it in video to appreciate it:

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The Genetics of Design: Juan Enriquez, January 5th @ RISD

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On January 5th, the Rhode Island School of Design will be kicking off their inaugural Presidential Speaker Series "Shared Voices" with a presentation from Juan Enriquez, who researches the impact of genomics on society. His talk "Decoding with Life Code" will explore the newest innovations in digital fabrication: building with genes.

Some principles of design are timeless, but a new language, that of digital code, has fundamentally changed how we make, spread, use drawings, paintings, sculpture, music, photos, video, and film. Now a vast new programming language is becoming increasingly available and widespread, that of life. We can now read, copy and re code life, and this too will fundamentally change how we think of, and how we execute, design...

The rest of the "Shared Voices" line-up currently includes Lisa Randall, a particle physicist at Harvard and an advocate for the "art-science connection in our lives," and Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired magazine. Each of the speakers are "a master of his or her domain but is also ready to transcend it." Group discussions will take place after the lectures.

Juan Enriquez's talk is at 7:30pm on Thursday, January 5th in the RISD auditorium, so be sure to reserve your seats here!

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The Joys of Earthquake-Free Architecture

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Admit it: That's the most bad-ass conference room you've ever seen, and one that you'd never see in California. Designed by Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects and constructed in tectonically-stable Copenhagen, it's part of Danish bank Nykredit's headquarters, which features a total of three such rooms cantilevered over the atrium.

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Core77 2011 Year in Review: Fine Furniture, Brilliant Lighting and Design from Around the World

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Furniture and lighting are more or less the bread and butter of an industrial design blog (though these days, we might extend the metaphor to include other grains—products = pasta, technology = rice, etc.)... which is to say that they're always there, even when, say, Apocalypse dominates the headlines. Besides the major furniture and design fairs (more on that below), the Year in Furniture included a Standing Desk Shootout and a comprehensive six-part interview with Brooklyn-based manufacturers (literally hand-makers) Hellman-Chang... in addition to the usual weird and wacky designs that are fit to publish.

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The age-old material of wood is as good a place to start as any: in 2011, it served as a medium for left-field commentary, a subtractive panton, a crazy curve, a plywood pod and nest-esque warping. Similarly, reclaimed materials took on various forms: preserved to polished, de-militarized or simply turned sideways.

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Lighting

Lamps, more than any other object, looked like "other things"... including the lampshade itself, which inspired several skeuomorphic lighting designs: the cluster-like "TamTam" ceiling lamp, the futuristic "LED Shade Lamp," the humble "Sympathy for the Bulb" and Light Light's ever-popular levitating lamps. (We also saw functional abat-jours in glass and steel, among other materials.)

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As for other other things, some of our favorites lamps took the form of an open-ocean predator, a pair of fly kicks and a maritime marker. They also took more abstract biomorphic forms, 3D printed or otherwise.

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Indoor lighting also converged with upcycling in 2011: designers reinvented plumbing fixtures as steampunk lighting (twice over), while some designers transformed recyclable materials into elegant pendant lamps and minimalist desk lamps.

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Still, the truly illuminating Liter of Light project, developed by students at MIT, is probably the most significant—i.e. socially impactful—lighting designs we saw in 2011.

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Chairs

The chair, on the other hand, was subject to dozens of material explorations: aluminum wire, cork, laser-cut steel, Twintex, recycled PET bottles, piano keys, circuit board, salvaged signage and even empty space itself. A chair made of discarded candy wrappers turned out to be as tasteful (if not as tasty) as one made of candy.

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Core77 2011 Year in Review: 15 Things to See Before the End of the Year

"How to Deal with Slow Walkers" Solution for Common Urban Woe

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Urban pedestrian traffic is all about flow, and those who interrupt the flow cause a ripple effect of irritation around them. Here in New York I've seen people board a subway car and stop just inside the door, despite the four behind them who'd also like to enter; have seen the same happen at the bottom of moving escalators; but by far the biggest offenders are the slow-moving texters staring into their phones, or the oblivious tourists walking four abreast on the sidewalk, moving about as fast as a crying child. I always want to ask them to interlock their arms and have the two on the ends hold their arms out to the side, making it totally impossible for anyone to get around them.

In this video undoubtedly bound for the YouTube stratosphere, one clever Tokyoite has discovered a way to clear a path without having to push anyone into an open manhole (the chief solution in my sidewalk fantasies):

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Flotspotting: Super Duty Construction Truck Rendering Porn, Part 1

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Jon Pope's eponymous design firm helps companies such as John Deere, Timberjack, and Gehl create cutting-edge cabs and exteriors for a whole range of construction equipment. Their renderings, though, are the true gem.

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Among the more standard pieces of super duty construction equipment, Pope Design also has some really great (and out-there) concepts, like this scissoring Straddle Carrier for shipping containers.

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There's also this walking crane...

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Masters of the Cutaway Part 5: Graham Bleathman

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Graham Bleathman is nearly synonymous with Gerry Anderson, pioneer of a plethora of marionette "supermarionation" sci-fi children's shows in the 1960's. But Bleathman did not get involved in the worlds of Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, and Stingray until three decades later when he started to provide illustrations for their revival comic book series.

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Thunderbirds made a bit of a comeback in the 2000's, including a film with Ben Kingsley that is best forgotten, but also with a fantastic book of cross-sections all by Bleathman. He soon followed this up with another book featuring cross-sections of vehicles from the whole range of supermarionation shows.

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Graffiti Pen Art Zen

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In a promo video for Ironlak, the Australian spraypaint company that's currently dominating the street art scene, Dutch artist Does absolutely demolishes any preconceived notions you might have about what can and can't be done with markers and paper.

I don't know about you, but I'd love to see some kind of face-off between a tagger and an industrial designer. Or maybe designers should start tagging walls with life-size renderings... but we're not encouraging that! Anyways, Does's walls are equally stunning:

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Ikea's Cardboard Pallets Intrigue

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In just a few weeks, Ikea will enact a massive design change that will be largely invisible to consumers: They're ditching wooden shipping pallets in favor of cardboard ones. The furniture giant has designed a way to fold corrugated cardboard into a structure that is far thinner than a traditional wooden pallet, yet can still support the 1,650 pounds necessary to transport their goods. According to Bloomberg Businessweek,

One-third the height of wooden trays at 5 centimeters (2 inches) and 90 percent lighter at 2.5 kilos, they'll save thousands of truck trips and cut transport bills by 140 million euros ($193 million) a year at a cost of 90 million euros for paper purchases and new forklifts, Ikea says.

As Ikea uses some 10 million pallets a year, if the experiment is a success it's a good bet that other retail giants will take notice. But the thing that has analysts skeptical is that the pallets can only be used once. While they'll surely be recycled afterwards, perhaps on-site at each facility, this bucks the industry trend of "pooling," whereby used wooden pallets are collected by companies dedicated to the task who then redistribute them to other retailers, prolonging the pallets' lives. We're curious to see how the green balance shakes out on this one.

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Workbench Videos, Part 1: Allan Little's Push-Through Drawers

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No piece of furniture fascinates me more than the workbench. They need to be durable, functional, flexible, long-lived, and they serve as both the birthplace and operating table for many a craftspersons' creations.

I've been wading through dozens of workbench videos on YouTube, ranging from simple step-by-step DIY instructions to more show-and-tell-style presentations, to find some standouts to show you. In the process I've found that sometimes the most humble innovations are the most profound.

A good case in point is this workbench by Allan Little, a.k.a. The Woodman, a Texas-based mathematician who "went rogue" and turned to woodworking after bailing out of a cubicle job. The succession of push-through drawers in his simple table solve the problem of 180-degree access. You'll also notice that they're function-follows-form, as opposed to the other way 'round: Their axes, and accessibility, are determined by the obstructive surfaces of the sawhorses.

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Rebranding Heroes Part 1: X-Men and Jared K. Fletcher

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There are definitely some standout designers in the comics industry, ones who really know how to make comic book cover pop, but it's still kind of sad that a well-designed comic cover is so infrequent in such a design-heavy field. And usually it's the less-mainstream books that have more room to be creative with their cover designs, away from the stereotypical smorgasbords of superheroes. So imagine my surprise when I saw the cover for one of Marvel's newest flagship titles, Wolverine and the X-Men, which looks like someone actually made some conscious design choices here!

That person is Eisner-nominated comic book letterer Jared K. Fletcher. Fletcher was tasked with corralling the plethora of Marvel's X-Men titles under one central logo that could be tailored to fit the specific X-title, creating a family of X-Men logos. This is a sharp change from the past standard of each X-Men title having its own logo and branding, leading to confusion about which of the various X-titles fit into the overall X-Men universe.

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Fletcher tracked down every old X-Men logo he could find, from comic books to video games. The general trend in the history of the comic's logo was to separate the letter "X" from the "Men" and really emphasize the hyphen. Titles on the periphery, such as New Mutants or Wolverine, eliminated the "X-Men" entirely. Perhaps the most clever and iconic logo was Richard Starking's New X-Men logo that reads the same upside down (i.e. it's an ambigram).

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Eva Zeisel Passes Away at 105

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I used to frequent a downtown restaurant called Junno's, which I remember both for their fusion food and because the interior featured a large ceramic room divider designed by Eva Zeisel. I knew Zeisel's name not only from my History of Industrial Design classes, but also because I had scribbled down phone messages from her; my college roommate, also an ID major, worked for her in the early '90s and she would occasionally call for him when he was out.

Eva Zeisel passed away last Friday at the age of 105. She was a giant in the design business with an amazing life story: She began her career in the 1920s designing ceramics in Germany, before eventually moving to Russia, where she was imprisoned after falsely being accused of plotting to assassinate Joseph Stalin. After being released she was deported to Austria, where in the 1930s she fled the Nazis by reportedly catching the last train out of town. She subsequently married Hanz Zeisel in England and boarded a ship to New York City, where she eventually taught ceramics at Pratt Institute, me and my roommate's alma mater, in the ’40s. And in 1946 she broke new ground for female designers by having the first-ever one-woman show at the MoMA.

In the many decades since then Zeisel designed furniture, ceramics, tableware and kitchenware that now resides in the Met, the MoMA, the Cooper-Hewitt, the British Museum, the V&A Museum and others around the world. She released new designs for a lounge chair and salt & pepper shakers through her website as recently as 2010, when she was 103 years old. In the video below, as she communicates with an assistant, you can see how she continued to produce designs even when she could no longer physically manipulate the materials:

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Frank Lawlor Solves the Motorola Solutions Problem

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No one really seems to actually know what the vaguely named Motorola Solutions does, but Frank Lawlor is working to change that. As Global Brand Creative Director, Lawlor is taking Motorola Solutions from misunderstood anonymity to a company known for developing cutting-edge public safety and industrial communications... as well as bad-ass police cars.

Judging from Lawlor's case study, he had his work cut out for him when rebranding Motorola Solutions. The old identity was centered around cheesy, staged photographs that look culled from a stock images website, while the supporting graphics are more like sci-fi interpretations than reality.

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The new collection of videos and photographs supporting the rebranded identity works quite well. Lawlor describes the goal as developing a "design language that tells a powerful story of a company that has been 'helping people in the moments that matter' for over 80 years." The working man/woman is the centerpiece of the campaign, focusing on real situations, not sexy ones. Likewise, communications and radios are not terribly sexy technologies, so it makes sense to play them up as the backbones of public safety departments.

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Hewlett-Packard is seeking a Global Creative Lead in Houston, Texas

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Global Creative Lead
Hewlett-Packard

Houston, Texas

Hewlett-Packard is seeking an exceptionally talented designer to join the award winning Mobile PC design team. This individual will play a major role in research, planning, conceptual design and production development for HP Business mobile PC lines, in addition to PC related accessories.

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