Any weary traveller knows that the best way to experience a city is through the eyes of a local. That's where Valet.com steps in. The newest offering from trendspotter Josh Spear, Valet.com is a highly curated member-based program that connects design-driven hotels with the jet-setting creative set.

By booking accommodation through the site, members can save up to 40% on published pricing. But what sets Valet apart are the map-based city guides culled from recommendations by local "tastemakers and influencers." Want to shop where Jeff Staple hunts for goods? Hope to run into Jean Aw at her favorite brunch spot? Up for some urban greenery at Craig Kanarick's favorite outdoor space? Experience a city like a local with restaurant, shopping and nightlife suggestions from people you can trust.

As New Yorkers, we were delighted to see some of our favorite design destinations included and have added a couple of previously unexplored dinner options to our "To-Do" list. Tokyo is in full swing with more curators being added and Shanghai and London are filling up right around the corner. With holiday travel plans buzzing, perusing the site should give you the right amount of wanderlust! And with 100% of Valet's commissions going back to their members as savings, you pack your bags guilt-free and maybe even hit up duty free.

Core77 readers can signup today and receive a special introductory lifetime rate of $199/annually. Skip the waiting line (like the platinum frequent flier that you are) and start booking today! Enter CORE77 promotional code when you register!

"Always go for the Samsonite, son."

Nighttime in downtown Manhattan, about a year ago, and I see this kid tearing down the street on a BMX bike—with a piece of carry-on luggage balanced on the crossbar between his frantically-pumping knees. It looked so un-doable, but the kid was moving so fast, that he clearly had practice doing it. What was weird was that I knew he was probably headed for Baxter Street.

I'd basically just witnessed Phase Two of a common local crime. To explain, I live near several popular hotels, and incautious tourists have been getting separated from their luggage for years. I knew that after snatching the bags, the thief would take them to a quiet street like Baxter or Crosby, rifle through them to take whatever was worthwhile, then ditch the bags. I deduced this by frequently spotting Phase Three—new pieces of some poor sap's luggage sitting in sidewalk trash piles, his clothes strewn about, every zippered pocket flayed open. What I didn't know was that the thief could execute Phase One—the snatching—via bicycle.

In any case, this is my roundabout way of saying I spotted a cool concept for luggage by London-based RCA student Rodrigo Garcia that I'd never dream of using in a city, but I still think the idea has merit. Check it out:

The lovely welcoming committee!

It's definitely fall in Chicago! My morning walk to the Spertus Institute was quite refreshing with the breeze coming off the lake and leaves blowing all around on the ground. Tuesday, October 9th was the first day of the Design Research Conference at the Spertus Institute in Chicago. This is my second year attending the conference so I was anxious to arrive early enough to check out what the planning committee had organized for DRC 2012. Last year, the planning committee did a wonderful job designing an interactive experience for the attendees from beginning to end.

Upon arrival, attendees were greeted by someone from the welcoming committee, who was geared up with Polaroid 300s ready to snap a personal instant photo of each attendee that walked though the door. After receiving the Polaroid picture, attendees checked in at registration and were then directed over to a wall of nametags. Attendees found their nametag on the wall, removed the nametag and replaced their nametag with their Polaroid picture.

Attendees headed upstairs to grab their morning coffee or tea, check out the conference space and mingle before opening remarks. It was great to see people reuniting from last year as well as those new to the conference meeting new people. In the common area, there were plenty of ways to strike up conversation, thanks to many areas of the room being set up to encourage engagement. The coffee and tea station had fun printed materials, strategically placed in front of the rows of paper cups, with the question "last night I slept:" with the following answers "In my own bed," "In a hotel" and "None of your beeswax."

There was also an interactive wall with post-it notes for attendees to capture thoughts, ideas, quotes and such from the talks they listened to throughout the day. Many conversations were struck in front of the wall as well as pictures being taken and re-organization from conference volunteers so the notes can be found under specific topics for easier navigation.

Speaking of insect architecture, a French company called Nidaplast uses honeycomb grids to solve problems both large and small. For 25 years they've been extruding polypropylene into a shape bees would recognize, and have been creating products that capitalize on the honeycomb's key quality: It's strong as heck.

In this quick, 30-second (non-English-language) vid, you can see workers laying down large blocks that are light enough for just two of them to lift—yet are strong enough to support the weight of cars and trucks.

These blocks, called Nidaplast EP, are 95% air. They're also an intelligent solution for road drainage: By digging a channel beneath the roadway and filling it with the blocks, you now have a massive void that can soak up a ton of water and slowly disperse it into the soil below. No more flooding.

In June I wrote The English Language Innovation Bias, an opinion piece that Bruce Sterling kindly posted on his blog.

It discussed how the dominance of the English language in innovation discourse carries with it an accompanying perspective of Europe, both in terms of stereotypes and in terms of relevance (or lack of) to the Anglo-Saxon world. This often puts European businesses and countries at a serious disadvantage that they are too little aware of, and are hardly addressing. But it also disadvantages businesses in the English-speaking world, which are perhaps not aware that they are receiving an abbreviated picture of innovation in Europe.

Now Belgian journalist/entrepreneur Raf Weverbergh is doing something about it.

Today he launched Whiteboard, a grassroots, pan-European platform where European entrepreneurs and innovators (and designers, of course!) can exchange views and experiences. A place where, ultimately, people, ideas and money can find each other.

He is looking for 1 or 2 advertising partners, 1,000 contributors and 100,000 unique visitors per month.

Give it a try! We need an initiative like this in Europe.

Visual Designer
Spotify
New York, New York

Spotify is seeking a Visual Designer to will work within the Product Team to create progressive, inspiring, and relevant visual design solutions. He or she will be responsible for creating engaging and attractive experiences by combining rich visual interfaces with visual effects and motion graphics. The designer will develop creative deliverables, working alongside technology experts to uncover and understand technology requirements and capabilities as they relate to deliverables.

Many of us armed with tools and skills have, at some point, seen something we wanted to buy—then decided we'd rather build it ourselves, either to save money or for the fun of it. So, here's a sticky question: With design piracy being such a hot-button issue, how do you feel about someone knocking off an existing design, as a one-off for their own personal use? And does it differ if the design is considered a classic?

For example, let's say you had the capability to create bentwood forms, do metalworking and upholstery, and you decided to make yourself an Eames Lounge Chair for your living room. Your friends would probably be impressed. Versus the stink you might have on you for copying an end table that you saw at this year's Salone.

I ask this because I recently came across this post of a father-and-son team building a desk with built-in cable management. The desk is a knock-off of the Bluelounge StudioDesk, minus the routed cable slot. Similarly, I follow a DIY blog written by a young mother living in the Alaskan wilderness. She frequently blogs about seeing a nice piece of furniture at Pottery Barn, not being able to afford it, and using her skills to build a copy for herself.

Whether or not the coming decades bring the decline of car companies, that industry's contribution to manufacturing, and the trickle-down effect it can have on other industries, is incalculable. We've seen bicycle companies make exciting products using carbon fiber, but it takes a company like Toyota to make that crazy 360-degree carbon fiber loom they've got.

In a special overseas episode of Jay Leno's Garage, the talk show host and avowed car nut travels to Japan, where Lexus gives him an up-close look at the CF loom and their entire production facility. (Leno drops an anecdote we weren't aware of: Toyota actually started out as a textiles company, so in a way the loom has brought them 360.)

The first half of the vid shows workers bolting up the Lexus LFA—which they're not allowed to touch with their bare hands—while the second half has Jay whipping a one-off LFA Spyder around the track at up to 186 miles per hour. (Industrial-design-minded Millenials of the variety so frequently cited in the last series will presumably be more interested in the first half.)

Just a friendly reminder that there's just a few more weeks left to enter The Battery Conservancy's Draw Up A Chair Competition for innovative, portable outdoor seating in the public park. The 25-acre green space on the south tip of Manhattan overlooking New York Habor welcomes six million tourists annually. Juried by MoMA's Paola Antonelli, the Campana Brothers, The New York Times' Allison Arieff, Founder of Design Within Reach and CEO of Public Bikes Rob Forbes, and Co-Founder and Director of Grupo de Diseño Urbano Mario Schjetnan, finalists work will be prototyped and showcased at the Design Miami/ fair. The winner will be awarded a US$10,000 prize and their design will be fabricated for use in the park. As Adrian Benepe, New York City Parks & Recreation Commissioner explains:

New York City is known for its innovative landscapes and we look forward to improving Battery Park with a great new design for outdoor seating. The Battery is New York City's birthplace and as the original waterfront park, it has long served as a social hub and a place of arrival for newcomers. This creative competition will highlight ideas on how we can continue capturing the spirit of one of New York City's most cherished landscapes and meeting places.

The Battery Conservancy Americas Design Competition
Draw Up a Chair
Call for Submissions Now through October 30th
Installation of winning design, June 2014

The competition is open to students and professionals across the Americas: Canada, The United States, Mexico, Central and South America and the Caribbean. Download the brief and sign up for competition updates today!

Battery Park Garden of Remembrance. Image courtesy of Battery Conservancy

You'd think two of these would've been axed at a design meeting, but Lenovo's either taking no chances, holding off on making tough calls, or using an appeasement strategy to deal with internal design department beefs. In their experimentation to develop a hybrid laptop/tablet that people will want to use, they've developed no less than three different form factors that will hit store shelves in just a few weeks.

The ultra-lightweight Lynx is the most simple design of the three, as it's basically a laptop where the screen pops off—or a tablet that plugs into a keyboard accessory, depending on how you look at it:

Chemical giant BASF has developed a new type of polyamide containing long glass fibers, and this "Ultramid Structure" plastic, as they're calling it, can then be pelletized for injection molding. After it comes out of the mold, the resultant product is so strong it can be used in vehicle and machinery applications, in areas where the only game in town used to be metal.

Here's what that boils down to in the consumer sector: Robust, yet fully plastic, automotive rims that are 30% lighter than the metal equivalent. As automakers continue trending towards lightweighting technologies to increase fuel efficiency, it's a good bet that these rims will make it into many an engineering meeting. Take a look:

Chris Todd was planning to "walk" from Wales to Ireland across the Irish sea in his personally constructed Tredalo. Burning about 36,000 calories over two days of operating this human-sized hamster wheel, Todd raised money for the Wiltshire Blind Association. Unfortunately, about half-way through his trip, the Tredalo's rudders were overcome by large waves and his journey met its end.

We applaud Todd's tenacity! Check out the full video after the jump.

In the beginning of Yojimbo, Toshiro Mifune's ronin character stands in the wilderness and throws a stick in the air. After it lands, he carefully aligns his feet alongside the stick for several steps, and then he's off for an adventure in the direction the stick was randomly pointing.

What if you've got someplace less random to go? London-based artist Dominic Wilcox's "No Place Like Home" shoes can provide some direction. We've seen GPS-embedded footwear before, made for the purpose of tracking an athlete's progress, but Wilcox has designed his for wayfinding.

After punching in a map destination on your computer and uploading it to the shoes, you click the heels together (nice touch) to activate the GPS link. Then a series of LEDs atop the shoes indicate distance (by illuminating points along a straight line) and the direction you should be traveling in (by lighting up one dot on the perimeter of a circle).

No Place Like Home from Dominic Wilcox on Vimeo.

While the shoes work as advertised, they're not production models; Wilcox designed them as one-offs under commission for the Global Footprint project, a series of events to publicize and celebrate the UK's Northamptonshire-based footwear industry.

You've got your Form Follows Function, but there's also the more interesting (if less alliterative) Designer Follows Tool. London-based furniture designer Max Lamb discovered a tool set for tapping and threading wood, then set about figuring out what he could use it to make. The result is his Round and Round Table:

Within the Passionswege ("pilgrimage ways") craft and design project of Vienna Design Week, Vienna-based designer Valentin Vodev was asked to collaborate with J. L. Lobmeyr, the renowned Viennese glassware manufacturer, now run by the sixth generation.

Vodev developed a series of pictograms to reveal "secret" information about the long-standing Lobmeyr product portfolio—information about the glassware that is never communicated to the buyer, yet passed on verbally from generation to generation to distributors and within the company.

These inside stories are based on technical as well as socio-cultural properties that have been discovered over the past 150 years of the Lobmeyr business. Vodev has brought these attributes to the surface to make them visible. Even though the unobtrusive symbol engravings are not clearly marked at first sight, the delight of discovering them at a second glance is part of the experience when looking through the Lobmeyr glasses.

Senior Product Engineer
BioLite
New York, NY

BioLite, a cutting edge clean technology company is seeking a seasoned mechanical engineer and design for manufacturing specialist to develop home-energy consumer products. This is a unique opportunity to join a fast-moving startup with both a technical and creative environment in the heart of Brooklyn. You will have the opportunity to work on a range of products, inventions, and research programs funded by both our product stream and by grants from global NGO's and sponsoring organizations.

When we first saw the Leap gesture control interface for the Mac, we were blown away. Earlier than that, gamers and hackers were taken by the Wii and the Kinect. Now a new group of creators is working on the latest in gesture-control interfaces, which ought to have an advantage over the current competition: It's software-based and requires no separate pieces of hardware, instead relying on the cameras now built into virtually every computer, tablet and smartphone.

PredictGaze is the brainchild of Aakash Jain, Abhilekh Agarwal, and Saurav Kumar, three computer scientists and friends based in California. Using a series of algorithms, their software analyzes images captured from your device's camera—even in low light and near darkness, conditions that have stymied their competition—to deliver useful results. Face recognition, gesture control and eye-tracking are all things we've heard of before, but PredictGaze is wrapping it all into a single package, and making it scaleable as per the device it's installed in.

Their system holds rich promise: Imagine being able to sit in front of your computer, or hold up your phone, and it knows its you through facial recognition, so unlocks itself with no need for a password. Or watching your television, and when you get up to go to the bathroom, it pauses; it resumes play when you've sat back down. Or being able to silence the audio by bringing your finger to your lips. And the eye-tracking-controlled browsing, while still a bit clunky looking in their demo, will be a godsend for paraplegics once it's perfected.

Here are a few videos to give you an idea of what PredictGaze is currently capable of. In this first one, "Gaze Enabled Browser Demo," you don't need to watch more than 10 seconds of it to "get it." (The remainder of the two-minute video has the test subject perform the same up-down scrolling while they gradually dim the lights.)

When it comes to casting bugs' nests, looks like Walter Tschinkel's not the only game in town; scientist and SUNY biology professor Scott Turner also produces "endocasts," though he does them of aboveground termite mounds rather than undergound ant colonies, and uses plaster rather than molten aluminum.

The results, which display a similarly alien architecture to Tschinkel's ant hives, give me the heebie-jeebies:

Turner's endocasts take months to complete, as you'll see below, and obviously he's not putting in the time just for fun; he's after specific answers. Writes Turner, who refers to the physiology of social insects as "my current obsession," on his website:

Social insects, specifically termites, cooperate to produce "emergent physiology" at a scale much larger than the individuals in the colony. How do they manage the trick? How is it that swarms of termites "know" to build a structure that functions as an organ of physiology at a scale much larger than themselves? Just how do termite mounds work in the first place? These are questions we have long thought we understood, but in fact understand little.

In this video of Scott's process, be sure to peep the bugged-out (sorry) sequence that runs from 3:34 to 4:26, where they animate the layer-by-layer slicing open of a mound:

Industrial Design students of the Northeast...UNITE! The students at Rochester Institute of Technology are holding their annual Thought At Work conference this October 26-28th.

What forces are shaping the future of the field? Engage with keynote speakers and practitioner-led workshops over three days at RIT. Professionals and academics representing a broad range disciplines will share their experiences with attendees. It's great to see Core77 contributor Don Lehman (MORE/REAL), Sam Aquillano (Design Museum Boston), Sarah Feingold (Etsy) and Jeff Smith (Reflex Design) on the speakers list. The conference aims to, "furnish students with diverse inter-collegiate perspectives of future paradigms for industrial design outside of the university bubble."

Coroflot, our sister site, is a proud sponsor of this year's Thought at Work. By providing designers a simple, direct and FREE way of connecting their exceptional work with employment opportunities, we hope to provide students and recent graduates a reliable resource from university and beyond!

THOUGHT AT WORK
October 26 - 28, 2012
Rochester Institute of Technology

We have four passes for Core77 Readers! Post your Coroflot Project in the Comments with a one-sentence explanation of the design brief! Our editors will pick four winners and contact you directly through Coroflot!

Here's a very different take on the folding chair: The OSSA, created by Vancouver-based design duo Johannessen & Clarke. The pair (Solveig and Krystin, respectively) met while they were third-year ID students at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and drew inspiration for the chair from skeletal structures of indigenous animals:

It is constructed to evoke surprise and delight with an expressive folding motion through its center spine. OSSA is the Latin name for bones which tributes the fifty bone elements required for the spinal hinge and equally points to our inspiration of anatomy and Canadian wildlife such as venison or wild goats.