With our Fast Track to the Mobile App winners, there are two parallel lines of development: those who are working with Microsoft developers, and those who are doing their own implementation/development. In this installment, we'll take you through this initial phase of taking the app from concept to reality, highlighting steps that anyone interested in designing and implementing an app would take, and give you some background on what the winners are doing specifically.

Contestants were asked to submit up to five screens and a description of the proposed app, with the option of adding supporting documentation such as a video or presentation. Starting with a strong conceptual and design foundation for the app, the next step for existing or potential developers is to build out to a workable prototype. This might translate to different actions depending on the circumstances.

For Social Mints, Pratik Kothari's app provides business users the ability to monitor social media mentions of their brand, interests or other pertinent topics (e.g., customer service), that meant considering the judges' feedback on the use of 'Mint' and the visualization choices. In response, he bolstered the metaphor by clearly tying each keyword to a mint; he considered different visualization patterns, and settled on one that he felt would most clearly display the data. To think through the app's interactions, Kothari created wireframes to map out the user experience of the app; these then contributed to the creation of any remaining screens. He's at a point where he can look at the different cloud-based services that allow for Social Mints to fetch real-time data from various social media sites.

Geof Harries and Michael Johnson, the designer and developer behind Cash Hound, a business cash flow management app that quickly determines how specific costs can impact your bottom line, moved towards building a workable prototype by focusing on the back-end first. Their app was formerly named Rhythmatic. When the winning team found an existing iPhone app with the same name. Even though the app had a completely different usage (rhythm/music gaming), they chose to change their app name to Cash Hound in order to avoid confusion and allow for freedom to develop the business app on different platforms. The core functional concepts will remain the same, but the visual design (colors and textures) will change a bit.

A brilliant Quirky object currently undergoing production is the Stem, a quick, novel and efficient way to get that citrus zing without breaking out the knives.

Spray it, don't squeeze it! Stem is designed to allow a cook to spray juice directly from a citrus fruit. No longer do you have to cut and squeeze your fruit to get the juice out like a common cook. With only one finger you can now spray citrus juice on your favorite foods evenly. Let Stem add a little zest in your kitchen and on your food!

Price and release date is TBA, and while you can't do anything about the latter, they're taking a survey on the former at the link above.

Samsung's new Smart Window is a 22-inch LCD touchscreen that can perform a neat trick: It can disappear completely. On display at CES, the Smart Window was rigged up in a booth that looks out onto a miniature of a town, reinforcing the fact that this could be an actual window in your house (or overlaid on one) with functionality that can be summoned and banished with a few taps. Check it out:

Designer George Nelson once said, "There is a silly myth that generals win wars. What the facts show is that designers do." Firearms and design have a shared history extending at least as far back as Samuel Colt and the revolvers he displayed at the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition. The American armory system and the use of interchangeable parts set a manufacturing precedent that would influence the production of everything from sewing machines, to typewriters, bicycles and cars.

Today, industrial designers continue to be influenced by the aesthetics and form of firearms. Just last month, I spotted Philippe Starck's Lounge Gun Floor Lamp in a model apartment on Union Square. Deyan Sudjic, in his 2009 book The Language of Things, discusses how the visual style of the Walther PPK was appropriated in the look of Richard Sapper's Tizio Lamp and the Volkswagen Golf GTI.

Whether one is pro-gun-control or just pro-gun, there is no denying that firearms in America are consumer products, and they're popular products at that. The most recent Black Friday marked the largest number of firearms background checks (and purchases) since they've been keeping track—129,166—nearly 1/3rd higher than the previous record. In October, Gallup revealed that 1 in 3 Americans owns a gun and that self-reported gun ownership is the highest it has been in nearly two decades. Even London's Design Museum recently acquired an AK-47 [PDF], becoming the first contemporary design collection to include a gun.

A friend of mine enrolled in the French Culinary Institute, using my apartment as a locker to store her gear since the school is nearby. The FCI gives students a complete set of cutlery and utensils packed into a traveling case. I eagerly pulled this case open to check it out, but find the design disappointing.

The multiple compartments are neat, and I like the choice of red interior fabric to increase visibility, but the one-size-fits-all mentality applied to the sleeves means certain objects fit snugly while others can work their way loose during travel. Still other objects have no dedicated space at all and simply clang about with other orphans in a compartment with no divisions.

I started casting about for a better-designed knife case and found many with pretty exteriors; but from a functional and interior perspective, even the rolls designed to fit all tools snugly seem to suffer from another design problem, stemming from the shapes of the knives themselves. Most of the knives have similar handles but very different blade sizes and shapes, as per their function. If you design a roll to hold knives by the blade, which obscures them, you're then looking at a series of more or less uniform handles, slowing down the selection process.

As you can see above, PC manufacturer Thermaltake USA makes PC towers with pretty bold designs. The most notable of these is probably their BMW-DesignworksUSA-designed Level 10, shown in the large hero shot above. Back in 2009 we wondered whether such a radical concept would ever see actual production; by 2010 it had, and scooped up a Red Dot Design Award.

Thermaltake has also engaged BMWDWUSA in accessories design, resulting in the Level 10 Mouse, shown below. Love or hate the aesthetic, it's interesting to see how the designers have managed to make an ergonomic device that looks so unergonomic.

Details on the device are light; the press release is mostly fluff, so all we've got for now is this beauty shot and a promise that the mouse will be released this Spring.

No, that's not a typo: Korean artist Seo Young-Deok's latest series of nude sculptures is made entirely from lengths of chain of both the medium-gauge household variety and bicycle chains.

The color evokes traditional materials, i.e. bronze, yet the chain imparts a distinct texture even as it constitutes surprisingly detailed human forms, life-size and larger still.

If the use of chains seems too easy a metaphor for human reality, Young-Deok transcends any gimmickry with his masterful command of his craft: he achieves a remarkable level of verisimilitude and aesthetic refinement. The bicycle chain sculptures are particularly impressive, as Young-Deok takes advantage of the articulation of the roller chain by creating sculptures in which the links face outward, like scales (above), as well as ones in which the chain appears to be wrapped around a figure (below). The latter variation strikes me as a riff on 3D-printing, where it is possible to discern distinct 'layers.'

Video walkthrough of his 2011 solo show "Dystopia" at Seoul's INSA/Arko Art Center after the jump...

At Design Miami, we had the opportunity to sit down with Alessi's President Alessio Alessi and his son Giovanni Alessi Anghini, an industrial designer. Traveling with their family, they were on the last stop of a U.S. trip to celebrate the opening of a new retail space for Alessi in the Miami Design District. Giovanni is one of four children and the first of the fourth generation to start working for the family business. I was surprised to learn that there are no in-house designers at Alessi, just five engineers who work with a pool of 200+ external designers that are either commissioned, invited to participate in workshops, or have approached the company with their product idea.

A family affair
Being born into a family like Alessi and choosing the path of a designer is both a blessing and a curse, on the one hand your exposure to design thinking and the design world is infinitely better than any schooling could provide but the expectations (both personal and public) that come with the territory could easily be debilitating. Giovanni however seems totally at ease with the challenge and it's no accident. His father and uncles (the third generation) made a rule that their children had to prove themselves working outside the company before joining, and even then they have to apply, this also ensures they have the opportunity to explore other career options before entering the business.

Abatjour, 2011 by Giovanni Alessi Anghini and Gabriele Chiave

They look like Japanese snacks, but can you guess what these things really are?

Creative Director
Blurb
San Francisco, California

Blurb, a creative publishing and marketing platform, is looking for a Creative Director to serve as an idea generator, a strategic partner for internal clients, a leader and a touchstone to help assure creative excellence at Blurb. The ideal candidate is passionate about the future of digital media and ready to build out a global brand. This is a senior-level role with significant responsibility, creativity, leadership, and business sense required. Working cross-functionally and in partnership with external agencies, the Creative Director is responsible for the vision, quality, and consistency of all creative.

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Today is the day! We are excited to announce the launch of our second annual Core77 Design Awards! We are officially open for entry and we want to see your most original and impactful design projects from 2011.

It's great to be back as we further our celebration of excellence, enterprise and intent. Last year, we launched a unique program that addressed many of the challenges of the typical design award paradigm. Our second year builds upon the successes of our inaugural year and we're excited to bring you our our line-up for year two. The same values persist—leveraging online scale, increasing transparency and decreasing plane fuel—but we've refined the recipe to make the awards program more inclusive and celebratory.

Along with a brand new jury, we have some exciting plans for this season:

• Progressive Categories: Celebrating 17 categories of design endeavor from beloved standards to several newer fields, adding 2 new categories to the stable: Writing & Commentary and Food Design.


• Dedicated Student Fields: We have always honored student work and the awards offers student entry fields for 15 of our 17 categories.


• Distributed International Juries: We've assigned a Jury Captain (or Co-Captains) to each category, giving each the opportunity to select their own team members from their home city. Check out the line-up below.


• Entrant Video Testimonials: With the ability to submit short, low-tech video testimonials as part of their entry, we give entrants the opportunity to tell their story directly to the jury and share what jpegs and text cannot: their intent and passion.


• Live Jury Announcements: Through our 1-week live results period, our juries will reveal their choices and we'll broadcast these through the awards site so you'll get to hear first-hand who they picked and why.


• An Awesome Trophy: All Winners will receive our amazing Core77 Design Awards trophy, which celebrates design as a team sport.

Here's our full list of entry categories: Consumer Products, Equipment, Soft Goods, Furniture & Lighting, Interiors & Exhibitions, Visual Communication, Packaging, Interaction, Service, Transportation, Social Impact, Educational Initiatives, Strategy & Research, Writing & Commentary (NEW), Speculative, DIY and Food Design (NEW).

But our categories aren't the only thing to write home about. We have a new global line-up of 20 Jury Captains (with one more to be confirmed). Not only are they true experts in their fields, but they represent 13 cities across 8 countries. Stay tuned as our jury captains announce their full jury teams.

Consumer Products
Jury Captain: Nicolas Roope
Founder and Owner of HULGER / PLUMEN
Founder and Owner of Poke
Judging Location: London, United Kingdom

Equipment
Jury Captain: Renke He
Dean and Professor at School of Design at Hunan University
Judging Location: Changsha, Hunan Province, China

Soft Goods
Jury Captain: Michael DiTullo
Creative Director at frog design
Judging Location: San Francisco, CA, USA

Furniture & Lighting
Jury Captain: Zoë Ryan
Chair and Curator of Architecture and Design at the Art Institute of Chicago
Judging Location: Chicago, IL, USA

Interiors & Exhibitions
Jury Captain coming soon.

Visual Communication
Jury Co-Captains: Min and Sulki Choi
Co-Directors of Sulki and Min
Professors at U. of Seoul / Kaywon School of Art & Design
Judging Location: Seoul, Korea

Packaging
Jury Captain: Laurent Hainaut
Co-Founder and Partner of Raison Pure Design Group
Founder, President and CEO of Raison Pure NYC
Judging Location: Paris, France

Interaction
Jury Co-Captain: Matt Webb, Jack Schulze and Matt Jones
Principals of BERG
Judging Location: London, United Kingdom

Service
Jury Captain: Panthea Lee
Co-Founder and Principal of Reboot
Judging Location: New York, NY, USA

Transportation
Jury Captain: Jay Rogers
President, CEO and Co-Founder of Local Motors, Inc.
Judging Location: Chandler, Arizona, USA

Social Impact
Jury Captain: Tasos Calantzis
CEO of Terrestrial
Judging Location: Pretoria, South Africa

Educational Initiatives
Jury Captain: Mariana Amatullo
Founder of Designmatters at Art Center College of Design
Judging Location: Pasadena, CA, USA

Strategy & Research
Jury Captain: Lorraine Justice
Dean of College of Imaging Arts and Sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology
Judging Location: Rochester, NY, USA

Writing & Commentary
Jury Captain: Alice Twemlow
Chair of MFA in Design Criticism at School of Visual Arts
Judging Location: New York, NY, USA

Speculative
Jury Captain: Bruce Sterling
Author of "Beyond the Beyond" at Wired
Judging Location: TBD

DIY
Jury Captain: Becky Stern
Founder of Sternlab
Judging Location: Brooklyn, NY, USA

Food Design
Jury Captain: Marc Brétillot
Food Designer
Judging Location: Paris, France

All results will be posted in our 2012 Awards Gallery and Winners, Runners-up and Notable entries will receive recognition in the Core77 blog, as well as a spot in our awards print publication. To see who won last year, check out the 2011 Winners Gallery and also see the range of video testimonials that were submitted.

Register early and we'll send you the limited-edition 2012 call-for-entries poster/wall calendar. If you enter by our Earlybird deadline of March 13, you'll also save 20% on your entry fee.

Visit the Core77 2012 Design Awards website to register today.

To stay up to date with the program and developments, join our Facebook page and Twitter. And get cracking with those entries to be part of the most inclusive and celebratory design awards program of the digital age.

Core77 2012 Design Awards
Identity and Poster Design: Studio Lin
Website Design: Studio Mercury
Trophy Design: Rich Brilliant Willing
Awards Video Direction: Virtual Beauty

"Co-Creation Community" Local Motors continues their fostering of geography-specific vehicle designs with their DRIVEN design competition, which begins today. The Design of Relevant and Innovative Vehicles for Energy Needs competition is the result of a collaboration with fuel giant Shell's GameChanger branch, which provides funding for alternative energy projects.

Five cities have been chosen as the context for the competition's designs: Amsterdam, Bangalore, Basra, Houston and São Paolo. Hit the jump to see the promo video and the "unique challenges for the future of mobility" presented by each city.

Reporting & Photography by Barbara Eldredge; images courtesy of Slide Fire

After a day of firing guns at the SHOT Show's "Media Day at the Range," one invention sticks out in my mind: the Slide Fire.

The result of good ol’ American ingenuity, the Slide Fire was conceived by Jeremiah Cottle as a legal way to increase the speed of fire for semi-automatic rifles. Fully automatic weapons have been heavily controlled in the US since gangsters' use of Tommy guns in the late 1920's, but many models like the M-16 or AK-47 can be owned in semi-automatic form.

When one pulls the trigger of a semi-automatic's trigger, it shoots a single bullet (as opposed to a fully automatic weapon where bullets are fired continually until the trigger is released or the bullets run out). Cottle's invention is a more sophisticated form of a technique called 'bump firing' that enables automatic-like firing speed. Bump firing typically means inserting a thumb through the trigger guard, hooking it on a belt loop and then pulling the firearm forward to engage the trigger. The recoil from each shot disengages the trigger but the forward pull of the left hand ensures fast, automatic-like fire. Shooting from the hip in this way is highly inaccurate and (let's be honest) steeped in machismo recklessness.

Replace a rifle's stock with a Slide Fire and one can get the same shot speed as bump firing but with all the control of shooting from the shoulder. The stock features a finger rest for the index finger to extend through the trigger guard and a stock butt with half an inch of give. When the trigger finger is properly placed, the left hand pulls the gun forward so that the trigger is engaged. The gun is able to recoil that half inch of give so the trigger resets with the next loaded round before the forward pull from the left hand causes it to fire once again. It is a simple and elegant solution which, Cottle estimates, can enable someone with an AK-47 to shoot between 400 and 800 rounds per minute.

I love Billy Wilder and I Iove Charles and Ray Eames, but I never thought those two loves would ever unite in a meaningful way. For Eames-o-philes, however, Wilder's unlikely influence on the brand is the stuff of lore. The famous Hollywood director, best known for Sunset Blvd. (1950), Some Like it Hot (1959) and The Apartment (1960), was introduced to Charles by graphic designer Alvin Lustig, who was using the garage at Wilder's Beverly Hills house as a studio. The two hit it off so well that the Eames were in Wilder's wedding ceremony.

"We asked them one day whether he would like to be the best man and she the maid of honor, and they said, 'Okay,'" Wilder said. "And then the four of us took off to Nevada, where you can get married for two dollars in three minutes."

Soon after, Wilder commissioned the Eames to build them a house similar to Charles and Ray's own home. Plans were later abandoned, however, when Young objected to the upkeep of washing all that glass. Still, they remained close friends. Charles even produced a montage sequence for Wilder's 1957 film, The Spirit of St. Louis. In fact, it was during the shooting of Spirit that Wilder unknowingly made his first contribution to the Eames legacy. He used temporary benches made from plywood beams and sawhorses for quick naps throughout the day. After shooting ended, he asked the Eames if they could make him something similar, albeit more comfortable, for his office.

"A man of my reputation simply can't afford to have something that looks like a casting couch in his office," Wilder said. "It's too obvious a symbol of lechery." Charles and Ray designed an 18" wide leather and aluminum bench, large enough to sleep on but narrow enough to prevent long snoozes. Wilder would sleep with his arms crossed; As he sank into deeper sleep his arms would fall to his sides, gently and naturally waking him up. And it wasn't lecherous at all, unless, Wilder quipped "you had a girlfriend shaped like a Giacometti, [then] it would be ideal."

The Eames' and Wilder gave each other gifts—often times furniture—for sixteen years before Charles and Ray sent him the infamous rosewood and leather lounge chair and ottoman in 1968. The Eames had no intention of making more until they were approached by Herman Miller. "You design for someone in particular," Charles said, "and then you find out that other people have more in common with the object of your affection than you realized." A note to any furniture designers reading this: like Billy Wilder, I too love chairs. I like to sit in them, read in them and nap in them, and, luckily for you, I'm currently accepting prototypes as gifts.

Like knife rolls, tool rolls are a great way to transport a collection of implements in a compact and secure package. There seems to be a greater variety of tool rolls than knife rolls on the market, perhaps due to the broader categories of trades that need to carry the former. Here we'll look at some of the styles available.

The Mopha Tool Roll (available at our own Hand-Eye Supply) seen up top is great if you have just a few tools to transport, like to make a few quick and specific types of repairs on your bike. Those with more expansive tool collections would probably gravitate towards larger rolls like these:

These two tool rolls look like they'll do an excellent job of keeping their wares secure in transit, and the socket pockets on the green one are a nice touch, but neither well addresses the problem of how to store objects with similar handles and yet still make them visually distinct (so you can quickly grab the one you need). Those of us with legacy tool collections are not going to want to purchase new ones with color-coordinated handles. We could take the time to put differently-colored strips of electrical tape on the handles of different tools, but I want the object to suit my needs, not the other way around.

One way to visually expose the tools is to minimize the securing mechanism, as seen in this replica of a 1914 Brooks Motorcyle tool roll. However, given that it lacks sides, I'm not sure how confident I'd feel about the screwdriver and one-sided wrench on the left remaining securely in place during transit.

I've been a fencer for nearly 12 years (DCFC, represent). The thing that's always bugged me about the sport is how little or poorly fencing is portrayed on TV and in the movies (Sunshine being the one exception). Sure, we got to see women's sabre at the Beijing Olympics in 2008, but you know there's something wrong when there are entire TV channels dedicated to poker.

Luckily, Holly Buechel (who happens to be the #5 women's epeeist in the US) took matters into her own hands and filmed this absolutely gorgeous fencing short. The film shows fencing at full speed, then slows down to show the underlying beauty of the sport. Although spectators never see fencing at this speed, fencers often see their opponent's actions in slow-mo. Buechel has figured out a way to show what fencing truly looks like. Moral of the story: let Buechel film fencing at the next Olympics (unless she's in it)!

Watch her in action:

Currently at nearly 3.6 million hits and counting, this YouTube vid on a Rube Goldbergian contraption that's not afraid to break glassware, employ open flame, and inconvenience a hamster would be the best thing to happen to your office in a long time:

The contraption is the work of Joseph Herscher, whom the New York Times has dubbed "Brooklyn's Rube Goldberg." There's a breakout of the device here, and a video interview with the man here.

See also: Melvin & 2D Photography.

Dutch designer Rogier Martens is pleased to present a new series of hand-blown glass fruit bowls that take their final form based on (what else?) bowls of fruit. He notes that Leerdam, "the Glass City of the Netherlands," is also a major producer of fruit:

The idea of the 'Fruit Bowls' arose during one of the many trips made ​​through the blooming orchards between Utrecht and Leerdam. Mold-blowing has two major disadvantages. each product is identical what takes away the exclusivity and it is a costly affair. I developed many interesting shapes by experimenting with glass and using fruit as a stamp or mold. After several experiments with different types of fruit, it proved to work best with the 'normal' Jonagold apple. This apple grown less than 100 meters from the glass furnace.

Where Athansios Babalis & Christina Skouloudi's fruit bowls took the shape of abstracted fruit, Martens' version is at once more and less idealized: the concept of a bowl that is 'fitted' to its precious cargo speaks to the notion of design for a specific purpose, yet reality dictates that each and every instance of a fruit will vary from the archetype.

Thus, the fruit bowls capture a unique amalgam of the general and the specific, both the idea of a fruit and the infinite variation of its real-world manifestation—in other words, how natural objects are perfect for their imperfections.

The production video, set to the dulcet tones of Radiohead, is also pretty badass:

This Alfred Dunhill leather case construction spot is one of the best "objects being made" videos I've seen recently, and I've sat through a lot. The recent rash of such videos makes it harder for good ones to rise to the top, as the videos take on a kind of sameness—shallow field of focus lovingly lingering on tools, poignant voiceover with a few piano chords in the background, off-center subject slowly coming into focus while staring earnestly into the camera—but this one gets right down to business and lets the work, and the sounds of work, do the talking:

Graphic Designer
APCo Worldwide
Washington, DC

APCO Worldwide, a global corporate advisory, public affairs and strategic communication firm headquartered in Washington, DC, has an opportunity for a graphic designer to join its business development/marketing team. The ideal candidate is a creative team player who will be responsible for designing and developing materials for client business development initiatives. As a core member of our domestic and global business development teams, the designer will play a critical role in how APCO visually positions itself with current and potential clients.

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The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.