At first blush, industrial designer Sam Thompson's gently-arched 45-Degree Bowl, above, looks like it might be made from veneers that were steam-bent and laminated together in a form. But flip it over and you'll see it was CNC-milled out of a solid block. If the protruding feet aren't a dead giveaway, Thompson's intentionally had the bit leave kerf marks to remove all doubt:

"The smooth sanded top of the tray contrasts with the exaggerated kerf on the bottom," he writes, "showing the process of CNC routing in an intuitive and surprising manner."

The awesome video below shows an earlier wooden bowl, the Big Square, that Thompson designed and produced via CNC—his tagline is "I make things by hand, with digital tools"—and while it lacks any explanatory narrative, you don't need it. It shows him performing every step of the process, going from prepping the rough-cut lumber to drawing the 3D files to running the CNC mill and the laser engraver:

More than five years ago we first wrote about Geckel, a biomimetic adhesive based on geckos' and mussels' ability to stick to things. But as of this year the material was still "under development."

Perhaps Duncan Irschick and Alfred Crosby, from UMass Amherst, will have better luck. The pair of scientists--one from Biology, the other from Polymer Science & Engineering--have devised "Geckskin," a reusable tape that can reportedly stick something weighing 700 pounds to a flat wall. Manufacturers of wall mounts for flatscreen TVs ought to be worried.

Like Geckel, Geckskin is based on the millions of fine hairs on a Gecko's skin.

Those tiny hairs form attractions to surfaces on a molecular level, creating strong bonds. But that doesn't mean it's sticky, like conventional tape is:

Back when I was a bona fide CAD monkey, I had carpal tunnel like the rest of us. After successfully convincing my employer that they needed to ditch the mice and get Wacom tablets, the wrist pain went away.

For intensive work, the pen is such a superior form factor to the mouse that Swedish company Penclic melded the two to create a new type of input device. It looks a little strange—something like a pen sitting in an inkwell—but that hasn't stopped it from being nominated for "Best Work Environment Product" by the Swedish award of the same name. "The nomination...presents an excellent opportunity to increase awareness about our device's many advantages over the traditional mouse, both ergonomically and precision-wise," said Penclic CEO Stina Wahlqvist.

The Penclic mouse's ergonomic benefits are achieved by eliminating the need for the unnatural, twirling arm movements associated with traditional mice. The pen-shaped design extends the body's natural movements, allowing the user to work with the underarm kept linear, in a rested, flat position against the work surface.

But the advantages go beyond ergonomics. The device not only looks, feels and moves like a pen, but it also has a pen-like grip that provides a level of precision that makes it well-suited for demanding creative tasks such as photography, design and architecture. Advanced technology in combination with the ergonomic design delivers fast and precise cursor movements with minimal effort and hand motion.

The scroll wheel placement doesn't seem ideal—as you can see in the vid, when she uses the wheel, the base moves around a bit, which I can see causing havoc with fine-point navigation—but I'm still looking forward to trying one of these out.

As a media sponsor of 2012's DMI Design/Management conference, Core77 Design Directory is proud to present an exclusive conference preview.

What does the future hold? Designers are said to hold a bit of this magical future dust in their work, but at the upcoming annual DMI conference, the speakers and attendees will grapple with the looming question of What's Next? now that design has earned a seat at the proverbial table and garnered the respect of business leaders.

Edie Weiner, a futurist and one of the most influential practitioners of social, technological, political and economic intelligence-gathering has built a robust business consulting with everyone from the U.S. Congress to Fortune 500 companies on the facts and trends of the present and how they might impact the future. Here, she speaks with Core77 on how design will effect every aspect of business in the future, the importance of competencies over skills and how 3D Printing will disrupt our relationship with products as we know it.

DMI Design/Management Conference, Annual 37
NEW AMBITION: DELIVERING THE PROMISE OF DESIGN

October 23-25, 2012
Museum of Jewish Heritage
New York City, USA

Core77: Thanks for speaking with us, Edie. Can you share a bit of background on what it means to be a futurist and the the work of your firm, Weiner, Edrich, Brown, Inc.?

Edie Weiner: We study the future and we have been studying the future for over 40 years. I've had my own firm since 1977, and the way we do it is we do a lot of reading. We read a lot of things on a regular basis. It used to be all print publications, but now, of course, many of those have migrated over to online. So we read a lot of carefully vetted online publications, print publications, plus a lot of additional sources that come along. And we look at social, economic, political, technological, demographic and environmental content.

We abstract somewhere between 60-100 articles every month—they can deal with anything so long as they meet our criteria about somehow affecting the future. Every three months we stop the world and we save all we know about the future with the prior three months' worth of readings and we develop six new themes every quarter. We present those six themes at a quarterly meeting here in New York, which many of our clients and a lot of other interesting invited guests attend. We generate probably a thousand article abstracts a year and 24 new themes a year.

In more recent years, have you seen that things are shifting more rapidly within those 3-month cycles?

There's no question about it. In fact, one of our recent papers covered something that I'm going to talk about at the DMI conference, which is a concept that we call templosion, the implosion of time on an escalating basis so that even the biggest things now take very small amounts of time.

The ubiquitous plastic boxes collected by MoMA and preferred by Andy Warhol have made a giant leap—from your desk to your living room. AMAC Plastics recently introduced their first venture into furniture, the AMAC Slot Table. The acrylic side table is inspired by the classic M Series boxes. The Slot Table is designed by Eric Pfeiffer, who also created AMAC's Rhombins. Pfeiffer's furniture work ranges from a collection of outdoor furniture for Council to the 2000 MAG Table for DWR. For more history and fun facts about AMAC Plastics, check out the great interview we got at 2011's International Home and Housewares Show!

Today Tumblr and Paddle8 will announce their upcoming exhibition and call for submissions to Moving the Still, which will examine the GIF as an art form. If you've been making GIFs since their emergence 25 years ago, now's your chance to present your best mini animations to a selection council that includes Michael Stipe, the Rodarte sisters, Ryan Trecartin, Vinoodh Matadin & Inez van Lamsweerd, and James Frey, who will review the submissions when the open call ends on November 7, 2012, and decide whose work to include in the group exhibition scheduled to open in Miami in December for Art Basel Miami Beach.

Not sure what a GIF is? Patrick Davison of MemeFactory defines it as "an image that's been encoded using the graphics interchange format, where it has multiple frames encoded into a single image file and a web browser or other piece of software will play those images back in animated sequence automatically." The GIF has gotten a bad rap throughout the years, thanks to unfortunate pop culture icons like AOL's You've Got Mail icon and the infamous Dancing Baby, but it's recently reemerged as a viable art form of its own, thanks to people like Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg, who created the Cinemagraph (above). You can use their smartphone app to make your own GIFs. Get inspired with this PBS mini doc and submit your own to "Moving the Still" via Tumblr or Paddle8.

Alan Gibbs is an entrepreneur from New Zealand, and for years he's dreamed of mass-manufacturing an amphibious car. He knew it would work; he successfully built a one-off for himself, the Aquada you see below, nearly two decades ago. But after setting up a company to mass produce them, he ran into problems ranging from engine supply to U.S. automobile laws.

The American auto laws were the tough thing to get around, as they require airbags for passenger cars; while in the water, waves slapping harmlessly against the vehicle's hull would constantly trigger the sensors.

So Gibbs changed tack. By creating a smaller, ATV-like vehicle not subject to automotive laws, his dream vehicle was realized, albeit at a slightly smaller scale.

His new product is called the Quadski, and it's going on sale later this year. Here's Gibbs himself narrating a demo:

They're calling it "The world's most versatile camera," and it's hard to disagree. At midnight yesterday/today GoPro began selling their new model, the Hero3.

"No expense was spared during its development," the company writes. Sadly they don't elaborate on what that development entailed, as I'm sure more than a few designers and engineers are curious. I don't know what kind of black magic they've got going on in their labs, but the thing is 30% smaller than the previous model and weighs just 2.6 freaking ounces. Then there are the tech stats:

Waterproof to 197' (60m), capable of capturing ultra-wide 1440p 48fps, 1080p 60 fps and 720p 120 fps video and 12MP photos at a rate of 30 photos per second.

If the numbers don't dazzle you, the footage probably will. The best part of a new GoPro release is that we get a new video of people doing crazy ish in some of the most beautiful places on Earth:

Per my preference for modernist, minimal design that reflects attention to detail from concept to execution, I was quite impressed to see that many pieces from MoreLess met my taste to a tee. In keeping with their mission to synthesize good design from the world over, the Shanghai-based furniture and lighting company focuses on any number of dualities, from the eponymous pair (which also means "How much?" in Chinese) to the concept of Yin & Yang.

"Field" sofa

"Three Walkers" coffee table & stools

The "Nest" pendant lamp resembles Konstantin Grcic seating

"Bench Monk" shelf with "Buddha Palm" sofa in the foreground

The pieces themselves, designed by an in-house team that includes several Chinese designers who work alongside an Italian and a Frenchman to create highly refined works in North American Walnut, glass, bamboo and textiles, among other materials.

"Bat" chairs & "Julius" table—notice that the table only has three legs

The Plan Desk, by London-based industrial designer James Tattersall, provides something most desks don't: A super-large drawer, nearly the width of the entire desk, capable of holding A1-sized prints. (That's roughly equivalent to the 22x34-inch size for us Yanks.)

The desk is designed to sit on trestles on either side, meaning you could conceivably swap them out with sawhorses or stands of your own; to get around the lack of side support for the two smaller drawers, Tattersall has them hanging directly from the larger drawer above.

Tattersall, who has a background in cabinetmaking, has s Tumblr that provides some neat (if sparing) shop shots where you can see the Plan Desk in various states of construction.

Industrial Designer
fuseproject
San Francisco

Our studio works with amazing brands and companies from all over the world. We are a full-service agency, which offers strategy, industrial design, graphic and digital design, and packaging. We also partner with start-ups and participate in philanthropic and artistic design endeavors.

You will have fun, be challenged, and the majority of the projects you work on will be manufactured and sold, discussed and debated by the design community, and be nominated for international design awards.

Senior industrial designers are responsible for leading a project from kickoff through completion. In addition to great design skills (research, sketching, form/detail development and CAD modeling/rendering), you need great internal and client-facing communication skills. If you have world-class talent, passion and a desire to work on a wide range of products in a creative and multi-disciplinary collaborative studio, we'd like to meet you.

Reporting by Joey Zeledón and Jóse Gamboa

Costa Rica is quickly becoming one of Central America's hubs for all things design. There are a growing number of design education initiatives that have seemed to gain some momentum in the past few years by the local creative community.

This year, Costa Rican designers have launched a national sketching workshop in their home country. They call it Sketching Lab Costa Rica. It's a 3-day, intensive workshop that focuses on the development of rapid visualization and the most effective ways to visually communicate your ideas as a creative. The workshop follows the principles of the sketch aerobics that uses music and the very basic elements in drawing to promote learning by doing.

The 3-day workshop kicked off at the end of August and brought in 70+ participants. The event was led by Costa Rican designers Jóse Gamboa of Slingshot Product Development Group and Joey Zeledón of Smart Design and was organized by Mario Ramírez and David Melendez of Plex Studio.

The first day of the event was focused on rudimentary form development and drawing in perspective. It was held at the National Museum of Gold "Museo del Oro" in San José, Costa Rica. The museums exhibit features many ancient artifacts and objects from the pre-Columbian era that gave the participants inspiration during sketching breakout sessions.

I like watching craftsman and maniac Ronald Walters' woodworking videos for two reasons. Number one is his skill. Number two is because he sounds enough like Parks & Recreation's Ron Swanson that I half-expect him to say things like "Turkey can never beat cow" or "Kendra, I think I will have that third steak."

In any case, if I showed you a bunch of plywood gears like the ones pictured above, you'd probably ask where I had them CNC'd. But Walters cuts his teeth the old-fashioned way: With a freaking scroll saw, following along on a pencil line. His accuracy is pretty nuts—if he were off by a millimeter here and there, he probably wouldn't be able to rotate his pin gear and ring gear assembly at this speed:

The deadline for the Design for (Your) Product Lifetime Student Challenge is one month away!

The challenge, sponsored by Autodesk and iFixit is Core77's second in this series created for students and recent graduates worldwide. Although many of the entries are coming in through class activities, there are plenty of online resources to help you envision and design a new "smart" product that's also smarter environmentally on your own or with a team of friends.

In addition to Autodesk Software (available free for students), check out this video series that outlines and explains sustainable design principles for engineers and architects.

• With Improving Product Lifetime, you can learn how to decide on the right strategies for optimizing a product's life and end-of-life.


• Design for Durability explores how you can make your product durable—not only by resisting physical damage and wear, but also by staying relevant


• Design for Disassembly and Recycling offers tips and tricks for making your designs easy to take apart and recycle


• Design for Repair and Upgrade will help ensure your products can keep living even if some of their components don't.

There are underlying patterns to how we all interact with our environment and with each other. To get a better sense of how you can incorporate strategies to shape and influence behavior in your project, check out the Design for Intent Toolkit—which was created by Dan Lockton, one of our judges for this second challenge. The Toolkit includes 101 of these strategies and is organized in a series of method cards that can be used to prompt your creativity and inspire you toward success.

And, iFixit's Troubleshooting Forum is also a great place to share ideas, ask questions and think through your project.

Wherever you are in your design process for this challenge, check out these resources for inspiration, education and practical support.

Deadline for entries is November 15, 2012!

Xiaodong's Raindrop bowls and Reeds

Hong Kong-based design gallery, ILIVETOMORROW, presented a vibrant exhibition with a focus on ceramics during Beijing Design Week. The gallery, established in 2010 by French designer and architect Nicola Borg-Pisani, represents a diverse roster of designers in the Asian market.

Jesse McLin and Julie Progin's Fragment(s) collection developed from their trips to the Chinese porcelain capital of Jingdezhen. For those unfamiliar, the city has been the center of porcelain production for over 1700 years. While visiting Jingdezhen, McLin and Progin noticed discarded molds and began salvaging them. After reconstituting the molds, they were able to create new vessels from these fragments, "each piece is different, each piece contains a memory," explained Progin.

The Campana Brothers for Spectaculu

The Brazilian artist Vik Muniz has enlisted some of his talented friends—The Campana Brothers, visual artist Mark Bradford and director Carlos Saldanha—to raise awareness for the arts and technology organization Spectaculu. The organization provides educational opportunities for at-risk youth in Rio de Janeiro including filmmaking, audio/visual arts, and carpentry workshops.

The limited edition T-shirts created by friends of Vik are available online and at select Levi's stores across the Americas.

Last May, ten young artists were chosen to participate in a special 4-month intensive workshop with Vik Muniz and his friends. The "Friends Of" program, connected the students with professionals working in the field.

They were given lessons in Art History (Eduardo Machado), Fashion and T Shirt Design (Lylian Berlim), Silk Screen and Print Techniques (Evandro Harlabey), Design Notions and Digital Technology (Heberth Sobral) and Image Treatment Techniques (Marcello Rosauro). To add further knowledge to the course, they had workshops with Vik Muniz, with Levi's Latin America Marketing Director, Mauricio Busin, as well as with the fashion editors Lu Catoira, Iesa Rodrigues and Melina Dalboni. They also gave the course insights into the client's universe, the fashion world and the creative process.

In the years since we first caught wind of Eric Austin, a pioneer of videography via remote control helicopter, the man's business and client list have exploded. The following year we saw a similar pioneer capture footage of the Warsaw riots, earlier this year a third shooter rigged up a camera/airplane, and nowadays a company called Quadrocopter is selling RC whirlybirds ready-to-go.

We're excited to see design advancements in this field, which was virtually nonexistent just a few years ago. Danish shooter Ebsen Nielsen has made the latest advancement: After cobbling together an octo-copter from several different manufacturers' kits, he rigged up a way to send a live feed from the camera to a pair of goggles he wears, enabling him to fly it from a first-person POV.

Heli showreel late summer 2012 from Esben Nielsen on Vimeo.

If realtime video-to-goggles becomes standard kit, that ought to open these helicopter drones up to a whole 'nother level of applications. Imagine being able to inspect your leaky roof, or a building inspector checking out the antenna at the top of a skyscraper, using one of these things. If you could work out the safety/piloting issues, I could even see these used for recreation: I'd pay to see self-controlled POV footage from flying over Manhattan or the Grand Canyon.

In high school my friend crashed his '68 Rambler, which I remember well because I was in the passenger seat. We hit the other car twice. I'll put the full story down at the bottom so we can get right to the point of this entry: That crash left me with the distinct impression that older cars were better-suited to handle impacts because they were built more solidly. But that simply isn't true. My friend and I had just gotten lucky.

The technology, analytical capabilities and manufacturing techniques that automakers have today completely trumps the construction methods of old; overbuillding by using thicker, heavier parts would prove no match for modern-day crumple zones and airbags. Here's the best video I can find that illustrates this: It's a 1959 Chevrolet versus a 2009 Chevrolet in one of the nastier types of impact, the front offset crash:

Is it not nauseating to see how completely the A-pillar buckles on the '59, and how far the impact penetrates into the passenger cabin? On the other hand, the cabin of the '09 seems largely intact, and the in-cabin camera views show much less interior disturbance in the latter car. In keeping with the technologies of the time, the '59 was clearly not designed to handle shear forces or offset crashes.

My buddy's Rambler was built in 1968, the same year GM was running the crash tests you'll see in this next video. (Warning: If you're not able to firmly remember that these are dummies and not humans, particularly the child-sized models, you'll find the footage disturbing.)

Industrial Designers
Johnson Health Tech North America
Madison, WI

Johnson Health Tech North America is a leader in the fitness and wellness industry; we are seeking a Junior Industrial Designer and a Mid/Senior Level Industrial Designer.

As a member of the Johnson team, you will be an integral part of our industrial design & development group located in Cottage Grove, Wisconsin. We are 10 minutes away from Madison, a city consistently ranked as one of the best places to live in U.S.

Our work is international in scope; we provide industrial design services and support for U.S. based development teams as well as our international business units. As a designer for Johnson, you will come into contact with people from all over the planet. As well, you will travel to China and Taiwan on an as-needed basis.

Remember Joshua Harker? Our interwebs-trawling editor Ray spotted one of the Chicago-based multicreative's projects last year, this nifty 3D-printed skull, and posted an entry on it. It subsequently became "the #1 most funded Kickstarter Sculpture Project," reminding us that if you've got a cool object, a low target and a low price point, buyers will come.

I came across Harker's name again this morning while Coroflot hunting. Didn't realize the guy had a page with us. In any case, the guy's "industrial design" section is loaded up with beautiful renderings—and while I can't tell what the heck any of them are, as there's no descriptive text, I can't take my eyes off of them. Anyone want to take some educated guesses based on the form factors? That globe-looking thing up top, I wouldn't know where to begin. As for these:

A remote control designed to confuse my parents?

No idea, but if you were wearing some kind of space suit and pointing this at me, I'd move away from you.