It seemed like a good bet: Turn waste into biomass fuel. Faced with an enormous surplus of Beetle Kill Pine just waiting to be harvested, Colorado entrepreneur Mark Mathis gambled that pressing them into fuel pellets would be the way to go. The pressed pellets, which are more efficient than burning logs, are used in special stoves and give off little smoke. As a bonus, they could even be used to power the very facility producing them.

Mathis was optimistic in a 2007 article in The Denver Post, which touched on his construction of a $9 million dollar facility for his company, Confluence Energy. "Our intention is to build it and they will come. In my opinion there is opportunity in every natural disaster. You just have to ferret it out." But lest you think the man a mere profiteer, it's important to note that Mathis was trying to find the solution to a problem, not exploit the environment: "It's unfortunate," he said of the situation, "and I'd just as soon have a healthy forest."

What was unfortunate became even more unfortunate. By 2010 the company was open for business—and struggling. Heating oil prices in oil-rich Colorado had dropped, there was competition from other pellet manufacturers, and the winters had not been as cold, further driving down demand. There was demand for pellets in Europe, but shipping product from landlocked Colorado all the way across the Atlantic would eat up any profits.

It was a Canadian company, Viridis Energy, that came to the rescue and acquired Confluence Energy the following year. Mathis still ran one of the largest pellet facilities in the western United States, and Viridis had the distribution muscle to efficiently get the product to ports on both coasts.

Photos Courtesy of Paul Sheetz for DRC.

After being greeted by the welcoming committee, checking in, exchanging my Polaroid photo for my nametag and taking in the introductory conference experience I chugged my morning cup of coffee and headed into the theater for this year's IIT Design Research Conference at the Spertus Institute in Chicago.

This year, the two-day schedule of the conference consisted of 25-35 minute talks from designers and non-designers presenting on Understanding Data, Story Making, Human Behavior, and the Adjacent Possible. Within these topic categories, Interactive Sessions were introduced in place of a day of workshops. There were two interactive sessions in particular, one given by Elliott Hedman on Understanding Data, and the other presented by George and Sara Aye on Human Behavior, which were both informative, engaging and helpful in that the attendees could test their skills as design researchers while experiencing the benefits of a more traditional presentation.

Yet another U.S. city is getting a maker's facility. Seattle's forthcoming MakerHaus is a 10,000-square-foot "creative space designed for fabrication, education, professional services, and co-working," featuring a metal shop, wood shop and digital manufacturing lab featuring a laser cutter, 3D printers and a CNC router.

On the educational side, the membership-based space has a materials library and will offer instructional classes on Rhino, Photoshop, a variety of tools, and even how to navigate Kickstarter.

The best two things about the shop at every art school industrial design department were the array of tools you could never afford, and getting to work with those tools within a community. The worst thing was that you couldn't always work on whatever you wanted, as time was limited and what you built had to fulfill a class assignment. The advent of places like TechShop and now MakerHaus promise the first two things without the hassle of the third.

MakerHaus is scheduled to open their doors on January 7th December 6th, and shop-access memberships start at $299 a month for month-to-month folks, with a cheaper $189 per month rate for those signing up for a year.

In a nod to their community-building aspirations, MakerHaus has foregone a generic "Here's our facility" video and have instead chosen to shoot individual creatives within the context of the space. Here's designer Brandon Perhacs explaining what MakerHaus can do for him:

In the early 1800s most buildings in New York City were made of brick or wood. But sometime in the 1830s the economy started to bustle, enabling people to earn a little more scratch, and this emerging middle class wanted a classier-looking domicile.

Architects of the era kept building with brick, but sought a more refined-looking material to skin the buildings in. They found it in brownstone, a brown-colored sandstone located at relatively nearby quarries in Hummelstown, Pennsylvania and Portland, Connecticut. The Portland Brownstone Quarries had the added benefit of being located on the Connecticut River, which dumped directly into the Long Island Sound and was thus a fairly quick boat ride to building-hungry NYC.

Brownstone was relatively affordable, aesthetically pleasing (at least to our eyes; Edith Wharton reportedly found it an eyesore), and best of all, easy to carve. Manhattan and Brooklyn became dotted with the earth-colored townhouses.

The Hummelstown Quarry shut down in 1929, victim to declining demand and the looming disaster that would become the Great Depression. The larger Portland quarry soldiered on until the 1940s, when a major flood knocked them out of business. Parts of it are still filled, to this day, with the water from that flood.

In an earlier post I'd alluded to the design philosophies of Ayse Birsel, which included living life to the fullest both inside and outside of the studio. Industrial designer Birsel, who hails from NYC by way of Turkey, is part of Herman Miller's Why Design video series. In her installment, "Your life is your most important project," she describes part of what she had transmitted to us wide-eyed Pratt ID students so many years ago. At less than four minutes it's a pale shade of the richness of her three-hour design classes, but hopefully it will give you a taste:

It's taken a summer's worth of exploring the Chinese design scene, but BUNDSHOP, a new online platform that will bring Chinese design to the rest of the world, is nearly set to launch next month. We recently had a chance to stop by their Shanghai office to meet their core team: Founder Diana Tsai, Marketing/PR Lead Stephanie Zoo, Operations Manager Donnie Yu and Designer Michael Cignarale. The binational team hails from both sides of the Pacific, as the Chinese-Americans boast Shanghainese heritage—an advantage for navigating the rapidly-changing city—while longtime friend Yu is a savvy local.

Earlier this year, Tsai was inspired to see China's burgeoning design culture yet frustrated to learn that most Chinese designers have few opportunities to exhibit or sell their work at home or abroad. But beyond the simple retail proposition, BUNDSHOP is also delivers exclusive editorial content as well, sharing the stories behind the products and the individuals who create them. Their mission statement is a good place to start:

There is serious interest around the world in creativity and design from China. We're at a cross-section of history. We are marking the transition of one of the world's fastest growing countries from industrial to creative, from producing to innovating... from Made in China to Designed in China.

We've watched this trend for the last decade as we visited family, studied, and worked in China. With our eclectic backgrounds in social enterprise, logistics, exports, marketing, philosophy, diplomacy, we have all united around a single vision, we stormed straight into the frontlines to create a platform to showcase something the world had never seen before: emerging design and independent brands, Designed in China.

Design Director
Bloomberg.com and Businessweek.com
New York City

Bloomberg Businessweek is hiring a Design Director. The person in this role will lead design and data visualization for Bloomberg.com and Businessweek.com. This individual will be a key member of the executive management team of both sites and will also represent Bloomberg to the digital design community. Must have experience in the information design space, relevant design management experience with designers and developers, and a success track record with news or data design, preferably both. We're also looking for someone who's passionate about interactive design and can bring new and innovative ideas to product development.

Whether you were aware of it or not, if you live in Boston, NYC, Philadelphia, Baltimore or Washington D.C. you officially reside in Boswash territory, a 400 mile swath home to more than 53 million people. If you commute between any of those cities then you're especially aware of the Boswash problem, namely the poorly developed transportation connections between the five cities. While each city may offer great public transportation on their own, so far there's no easy way to travel between them apart from buses and trains.

Boston-based Höweler + Yoon answered this year's Audi Urban Future Initiative with an ambitious proposal that would reimagine "the highway as a "Shareway" that unifies the 1-95 corridor between Boston and Washington D.C. into a megaregion called Boswash" by 2030. Their Boswash Shareway, which just won the Audi Urban Future Award as well as €100,000 (about $130k), would expand upon each city's existing modes of transportation and create a throughway to accommodate them all, meaning commuter trains, freight trains and cars would ride side by side with bikes and pedestrians along a multilevel track.

The definition of what it means to be a "designer" has greatly evolved over the past few years. From building systems to creating new economies, the role of designers in today's world has expanded to include all aspects of human interaction. Joe Gebbia's story epitomizes this shift, and his experience was the topic of a talk he gave last Friday, as he kicked off the second annual RISD Entrepreneur Mindshare.

RISD Entrepreneur Mindshare is an initiative started by Greg Victory, Director of the RISD's Career Center. The event aims to inspire students to be more entrepreneurial—providing the studying artists and designers with the tools and resources they need to launch their own entrepreneurial endeavors, getting advice from people who have done it themselves.

Joe Gebbia's CritBuns, which "support creativity where others can't."

An example of a scenario that could use some CritBuns.

Gebbia is perfectly suited to be the commencing speaker: he works in the magical intersection of design and entrepreneurship as a self-described "designtrepreneur." His work covers a wide spectrum, ranging from Ecolect.net, an online database of green materials, to CritBuns, a product whose appeal anyone who has enjoyed the pleasure of an 8-hour critique can understand. Hitting upon each of these ventures, Gebbia shared the secret behind his successes.

"Some will, some won't, who cares, move on."

He summed it up in four words: "Take the next step."

We all owe Bill Moggridge more than we think we do. In fact, anyone who uses a laptop has Bill to thank for being the first person to design one, blowing minds when he brought portability to computer hardware for GRiD Systems in 1982. It was Moggridge's idea to create a display that closed over the keyboard. At the time it retailed for $8,150, a selling price that kept it from becoming commonplace in most homes, but didn't deter NASA, who used it in every Space Shuttle mission from 1983 to 1997.

Moggridge later founded IDEO with David Kelley and Mike Nuttal in Palo Alto, California, a design practice that was groundbreaking in its human-centric approach. "He really saw that we would get ideas from understanding people," said Kelley. Moggridge put empathizing with people at the forefront of his design process, and even brought psychologists into IDEO to help further that understanding - all before he tackled the design of the product or system itself.

Moggridge left IDEO in 2010 to accept the role of Director of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, a move that might also be considered groundbreaking as Moggridge was the first museum director without a museum background. There, Moggridge made a huge effort to make design accessible to visitors and his educational initiatives brought design into elementary and middle schools in New York City. The fantastic Bill's Design Talks series were always free for students to attend, and his ultimate goal was to make design a viable career choice for children to consider once they reached high school.

On Thursday, November 1, 2012 join Tim Brown, John Maeda, Bruce Nussbaum and Ellen Lupton in conversation with Helen Walters at Symphony Space as they discuss the monumental career and life's work Moggridge has left behind.

Yesterday Apple released the much-anticipated iPad Mini, and the company's talking points were clear: They do not consider it a shrunken iPad but instead, a separate device in its own right. It delivers the same amount of pixels (1024×768) as the iPad 2, but in a more portable size, coming in at just under eight inches tall and just over five inches wide.

While everyone knew the smaller tablet was coming, what surprised some analysts was the starting price point of $329. Industry watchers had assumed the iPad Mini's raison d'etre was to wipe out competitors in the small-tablet space, like Amazon's $159 Kindle Fire or Google's $199 Nexus 7.

If Apple had taken the traditional route, where a bunch of marketers determine that competitors are undercutting them on price, they surely could have manufactured a tablet selling for less. But it probably wouldn't have that beveled edge meeting the glass, or the A5 chip, or the 163 ppi screen resolution, or two cameras (including one that shoots 1080p HD video), or it wouldn't have been made with an aluminum unibody and absurdly thin 0.2mm-thick glass, et cetera.

No, the $329 price they've set conveys a clear message: We are not competing with anybody. The company has earned a position where they can pretty much design whatever they want. And those end up being things that consumers want. While competitors envy Apple's financial success and market share—at yesterday's presentation, Tim Cook made the startling announcement that last quarter they sold more iPads than any manufacturer sold PCs—designers have to envy the fortunate circumstances Apple's design department has worked themselves up to.

photo via Natural Wood Design

As we've seen in the previous entries, the mountain pine beetle problem is so widespread that no individual designer or craftsman can really make a dent. Beetle Kill Pine is so widespread and ever-increasing that it will be broad policies, like British Columbia's wood-content building mandate, and mass-manufacturing, like Confluence Energy's pelletization, that hold the only hope for a large-scale solution.

But that doesn't mean there's nothing you can do. For those of us living in democracies, we all know that our single vote cannot change the tide of an election, but we participate in order to exercise our freedom. By participating in a design sense, we have the added bonus that our work may inspire others to get involved, and with any luck, with a domino effect.

Ideally you would design, build, spec, or market products made from Beetle Kill Pine. To do that you'd need to find a local supplier of the material, which will be a lot easier if you live in Colorado, British Columbia, or other affected areas in the western United States. We have not been surprised to find that lumberyards in those areas do not put an emphasis on website development, so you're probably going to have to get on the horn, or find Craigslist-style local ads like target="_blank"this one on Backpage.com.

As a distant option for those not in that region, Beetle Kill Pine can actually be purchased on eBay, with current prices running at $0.54 per lineal (not board) foot, not including shipping. eBay being what it is, the link in this paragraph will probably be dead in a week's time; but the relevant seller, a guy named Wes, has listed his phone number as (303) 420-3331.

We're very happy to announce the results of our recent collaboration with Portland's Red Clouds Collective, so much so in fact that we are putting together a launch deal for it: These high-quality, hand-tooled leather sheaths deliver the value at our list price of $25—but when paired with a $38 Otter-Messer Anchor knife for a combo price of $45 they become the ultimate October Deal!

The result of our recent collaboration with Portland's Red Clouds Collective, the Red Cloud Sailor's Knife Sheathe is a high-quality, hand-tooled leather sheath that combines a pared down utility with a rich, warm look—one that will only get better with use and age. It is embossed with both the Red Clouds Collective mascot and the Hand-Eye Supply monogram. The riveted belt loop ensures it will never fall off. It is custom made to snuggly fit the Otter-Messer Anchor knife but will accomodate most pocket knives up to 1-1/4” wide and 4” long.

Red Clouds Collective individually hand stamps each sheath.

OTTER-Messer, which translates to OTTER "Knives," was founded in 1840 by the Berns brothers in Königsmühle, Solingen, a region of Bergisch Land. They manufactured simple and strong pocket knives finished with wooden scales, all of them hand made—grinded, stropped (straightened with a leather strap), and polished in their small factory. The otters who lived in the streams and brooks next the little factory inspired the both the logo and the name. Today OTTER-Messer knives are fitted with C75 carbon steel blades, but the knives are still manufactured and stropped by hand. The knives are renowned in Solingen for their many applications and industrial quality.

This anchor inlayed sailor's knife is a great example of the quality of Otter-Messer knives. Boasting a broad curved blade for control, a weatherproof hardwood handle and the iconic brass anchor inlay, it is functional for a number of applications due to it's broad "Sheepsfoot Blade" which is ideal for nautical conditions. The absence of a straight pointed blade makes stabbing incidents less likely which is useful both for the turbulent nature of the sea and the turbulent demeanor of shanghai'd or indentured sailors.

Where some see beauty, others see firewood

Up above is the restored staircase at the Caroline Ladd Pratt House, an 1898 neo-Georgian mansion owned by Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. When Core77's founders and myself attended Pratt in the early '90s, the restoration had just been completed; prior to that the house had been abandoned and had fallen into disrepair. The crackheads of the '80s, it was said, had broken up the bannister spindles to use as firewood.

To take someone's painstaking, historical lathework and break it up for something to burn is a shame, but one that Pratt was able to reverse. The city of Detroit, on the other hand, is facing a much larger-scale defacement with no solution in sight.

Here's what's going on there, as uncovered by Detroit-based photographer Robert Monaghan and the website DetroitUrbex.com: Their city is filled with beautiful and abandoned old buildings. Those buildings are filled with ornate, Art Deco wooden carvings around doorways, staircases and the like. And someone is stealing them, as revealed in this surprising series of before/after photos.

From Danish office furniture company Holmris comes the XTable, designed by KiBiSi. The height-adjustable desk is powered not by a motor, but manually, via elbow grease and a handcrank:

XTable is a piece of office machinery that accommodates multiple working positions and daily reshuffling. XTable uses manual kinetic power instead of electricity for height adjustments—saves energy and keeps users active. All technical features are constructively integrated in the table top. It uses a century old principle known from carjacks, ironing boards and other iconic tools.

This one's fresh off the presses and not yet up on Holmris' website; they launched the XTable just two days ago. While the European and Scandinavian markets will surely be targeted, there's no word as to overseas availability. Hopefully they'll make their way stateside—I'd get one just so I could force an intern to satisfy my every work-height whim.

Seeing as our sister site Coroflot hosts portfolios from the world over, It's always interesting to see where members hail from. Karl Mynhardt is a perfect example: he's one half of Cape Town, South Africa's K&i Design Studio, which he and his wife Ida (hence "K" and "I") launched last year. They've since won a Design Indaba Emerging Creative award alongside a growing list of local clients, as well as campaigns for international brands.

The photography highlights the tactile qualities of Mynhardt's work, as in the art direction for Wawa Wooden Surfboards and the Open publication, which won a Sappi Think Ahead Award.

Web Designer
Sprint
Overland Park, Kansas

Sprint is seeking a Senior Designer to step into an already active, evolving and successful .com creative team. This role requires an individual with a high level of creativity with the ability to quickly and accurately meet fast-paced deadlines. Designers are responsible for the look and feel of the sprint.com web property, web banners, micro sites, landing pages, device launches, brand development, mobile design, and digital promotion for Sprint products and services. Oh yes, and having fun with your fellow creative co-workers is an absolute must.

Earlier this month at the annual User Interface Software and Technology Conference, a four-person Autodesk Research team presented the Magic Finger, a fingertip-mounted input device "which supports always-available input."

A couple of things distinguish it from a mere finger-mounted mouse: One, it contains a tiny camera that can distinguish different textures, enabling context-aware actions; for example, the device could be programmed to send different commands depending on what it was touching, i.e. swiping your cotton shirt answers your cell phone, touching your face triggers the voice-rec, et cetera. Two, as far as we can tell the user is meant to wear it constantly, like a ringer, providing a persistent means of both scanning and providing gesture-based input to the device of your choice. (As one example, Engadget points out that it could make up for Google Glasses' lack of an input device.)

As the team writes,

Recent years have seen the introduction of a significant number of new devices capable of touch input. While this modality has succeeded in bringing input to new niches and devices, its utility faces the fundamental limitation that the input area is confined to the range of the touch sensor. A variety of technologies have been proposed to allow touch input to be carried-out on surfaces which are not themselves capable of sensing touch, such as walls, tables, an arbitrary piece of paper or even on a user's own body.

...To overcome [other input devices'] inherent limitations, we propose finger instrumentation, where we invert the relationship between finger and sensing surface: with Magic Finger, we instrument the user's finger itself, rather than the surface it is touching. By making this simple change, users of Magic Finger can have virtually unlimited touch interactions with any surface, without the need for torso- worn or body-mounted cameras, or suffer problems of occluded sensors.

In the video below, the team demonstrates their projected real-world applications. (We don't know what the budget for this project was, but we can tell you they, um, didn't spend anything on actors' fees.)

Connecticut-based designer Tim Byrne has my dream job: He founded and runs Get Back Inc., a company that scours the American countryside gathering up U.S.-built furniture from the Industrial Revolution era and onwards. Gems like this Aseptic Metal Dental Cabinet, this unusual Stock Rack (any guesses on what the "stock" is?) and this old-school Garment Rack will make it back to Get Back's NYC or Connecticut showroom (shown above), where discerning designers and architects can snap them up for their projects.

While some of you will be waiting on line to buy the iPad Mini, a portion of our readership will of course be designing cases for the device, whether for business or pleasure. Apple's now made the CAD files ready for public download, for those of you who'd like to warm up the MakerBot in advance of launch day.

On the "Designing Cases" section of Apple's Developer site, by the way, they've got no less than 45 CAD files available, including every generation of the iPad and iPhone alongside old-school iPods. Weird to think there was a time when that latter device was 19mm thick. There are also downloadable guidelines for designing cases as well as a neat "Flash Test Target" you can print out. The idea is that you slap your case on and take a photo of the target with your iDevice to be sure your design isn't interfering with the flash.