Every now and again, we see a concept bike that incorporates a hubless wheel, typically a bicycle, which is invariably met with backlash such as: "the hubless wheel is a hallmark of naïvety." Yet idealistic designers continue to pursue the void—hell, we've even seen a prototype of a bicycle with a hubless wheel—and there's no denying that it's a striking form factor. It seems that the judges of the Red Dot Award concur, noting that the hubless wheel "captivates due to its exceptional ergonomics."

Of course, they're not referring to a vehicle but a rather more mundane (or, conversely, practical) object: the Rösle Pizza Wheel.

Thanks to the innovative, patent construction with a rounded, free-running blade, the pizza wheel glides quickly through the fresh pizza, without causing the topping[s] to displace. The stable, stainless steel blade is sharpened on both sides and assures exact and effortless work. The pizza wheel can be easily dismantled for cleaning.

The Pizza Wheel turned up in our forums (in a thread about "Good design you love to have," no less) where member mo-i notes that a pair of Americans—Jessica Moreland & Chris Hawker of Trident Design—came up with the design for the German kitchenware company. Although the hubless blade goes by a different moniker on the Columbus, OH-based consultancy's website, it didn't require much digging to learn more about the Pitzo: Moreland and Hawker are duly proud of the recognition they've received, and the backstory is available on the microsite:

The Pitzo Pizza Cutter was conceived in 2009 by Jessica Moreland, an industrial designer working at Trident Design, LLC, a product design and invention development lab... While on a scouting trip to Bed, Bath and Beyond with Chris Hawker, president of Trident, it was noted that the pizza cutter was a product that could use some fresh eyes.

The plastic version is available at Walmart, among other retailers

Here's what IndyCars have in common with smartphones: both have moved towards a sameness in form factor, with any design differentiation between models limited to fine details. In both categories this is a shame, but perhaps more so in racing, which is supposed to be about innovation, experimentation and risk-taking. "Breakthrough designs seemingly have gone the way of the dinosaur in modern motorsports," is how an article in the San Diego Union-Tribune put it.

But racecar designer Ben Bowlby, having been prompted by IndyCar driver/owner Chip Ganassi, is shaking that category up with his radical-looking DeltaWing design.

To be clear, the British-born, Indianapolis-based Bowlby didn't set out to create a car that merely looked different; it was form-follows-function, as he endeavored to solve a specific problem involving racecars and downforce. Every IndyCar/F1 car has a low-lying wing forward of the front tires. This creates downforce, or "aero grip," as the car whips along and the airflow presses the wing downward, sticking the front wheels firmly to the track surface. But when one IndyCar gets behind another, the turbulent "wash" coming off of the car in front disrupts the downforce on the front wing of the car behind, compromising that car's steering capacity. In broad strokes, it means that as you begin catching up to another car, your ability to overtake it is paradoxically reduced.

Bowlby's solution was to get rid of the front—and rear—wing altogether:

Why? Because his radical design does not require the wings to generate downforce. Instead he designed two tunnels running underneath the car that use the airflow to press the car downwards. This "twin-vortex underbody downforce system" is unsusceptible to wash coming off of a car in front of it, and thus it is stable enough to pass in situations where other IndyCars could not.

Ben Bowlby (left) and blogger James Gurney holding a resin model used for aerodynamic testing. [Image via Gurney Journey]

Our current linear model of 'take-make-dispose' is throwing up major economic and environmental challenges. Risk to our supply chain is increasing, and the cost of materials is rising sharply, putting pressure on businesses to change. We need to shift towards more circular systems and good design thinking is pivotal to this transition.

In order to make this shift, designers need to consider the system as a whole rather than focus on individual components or products. True co-creation is crucial from those involved in these lifecycles: designers and material experts, manufacturers and resource managers, brands and retailers, consumers, policy makers and government, investors & academics all working together.

The Great Recovery is a project by the RSA (the UK's Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce), aimed at building new networks to explore the issues, investigate innovation gaps and incubate new partnerships.

I don't know if I've ever received a gift that was so bad that I've wanted to set it ablaze... or if I've ever had to burn furniture for warmth. Suffice it to say that those who can afford to give or receive Supergrau's KLOEZZE probably won't be doing either, um, either. They note that "the cold season is coming and with it the time of pleasant evenings in front of a flickering fire starts [and] the right moment to start the search for lovely Christmas presents. For either situation SUPERGRAU provides the perfect product."

Given the shamelessly simple concept behind the modular seating/surface—in contrast to highly refined previously-seen designs from the German company—it's hard to argue with them:

Born from the unspoilt provocative idea to top off the consumption of the superfluous and to offer a designed firewood, KLOEZZE was created: a loose piece of furniture with system character.

And there is more behind the spare parts of building bricks: Assembled in different arrangements, the product allows creative room to put together the single pieces as wished. Therefore, KLOEZZE truly is an all-rounder: its elements can be stacked up in different seating situations and decoration modules.

The name apparently refers to each individual log, as it comes in an "expandable basic set of six KLOEZZE (3x pine, 2x oak, 1x cherry wood)" for €140; larger sets of up to 44 KLOEZZE are also available. Each configuration is secured with two extra strong rubber bands in yellow or blue. "Whether KLOEZZE ends up in the fire, gets used as rudimentary furniture or emits its decorative charm next to the fireside is sublimely left to the beholder."

Industrial Designer, Jr to Mid Level
NewDealDesign, LLC
San Francisco, California

NewDealDesign seeks an enthusiastic, proactive Jr to Mid Level Designer to join our close-knit, growing team. This is an outstanding hands-on opportunity for the right individual to contribute and develop with a leading design firm. Teamwork and flexibility will be crucial to your success in this role.

The Le Mans organizing body was likely very curious to see what Ben Bowlby's DeltaWing could do, as the design is a car of "halves": It has half of the drag, half of the weight and half of the power of a conventional design—which Bowlby projected would consume half the fuel, half the brakes and half the amount of tires. This was good enough to get Nissan interested, and they committed to providing the engine.

"As motor racing rulebooks have become tighter over time, racing cars look more and more similar and the technology used has had less and less relevance to road car development," said Andy Palmer, Nissan Motor Co.'s Executive Vice President, after sealing the partnership. "Nissan DeltaWing aims to change that and we were an obvious choice to become part of the project."

They subsequently released a sexy video discussing the collaboration. I dig Bowlby's line about "Guilt-free high-performance motoring:"

On race day, the DeltaWing ran well for the first six hours—before tragedy struck, literally. On lap 75, Toyota driver Kazuki Nakajima knocked the DeltaWing into a wall:

To the untrained eye the knock-out appeared pretty blatant, but as you heard in the video, the announcers attribute it to an unintended consequence of Bowlby's wing-less design: The DeltaWing, the announcers claim, is difficult for other drivers to see. Other media outlets, however, called the contact "reckless" and Nakajima later apologized.

As light as the contact appeared, it was disastrous for the DeltaWing team. As reported by Automobile,

Damage was so extensive that DeltaWing driver Satoshi Motoyama was unable to make it back to pit road (crew members can't work on the car outside the pits). Before the incident, the car was running strongly enough to have finished well against the most technically sophisticated prototypes of this era.

The DeltaWing team was out of the race. Bowlby looked on the bright side: "The car did what we had all hoped it would do," he said, post-race. "It ran at the pace the [Le Mans organizing body] had asked us to run. And believe me, there's a little bit of headroom: we can go quite a bit faster."

Undeterred, they returned to the U.S. and rebuilt the car. They subsequently gained approval to run it again, this time in the 1,000-mile Petit Le Mans race at Road Atlanta, where the DeltaWing made its American debut last weekend.

Earlier this week, forum member phil_ posted a discussion called "Better by Design," referring to a UK television show from the turn of the millenium, writing that "I'm sure most of you have seen at least one of the episodes from this series aired on channel 4, 12 years ago now!"

I was around 12yo at the time and it clearly had some impact on me! So basically I've been searching for the rest of the episodes the past few days, I've emailed the design council with no reply as of yet and also tried contacting seymour powell with no luck! So does anyone on here have access or links to the series, it would be greatly appreciated!

Ross McS responded with a link to a atantalizing list of the nine episodes that aired over the course of two short seasons in 1998 and 2000, as well as a short description of the program:

Better by Design presents a uniquely revealing insight into the design process as Richard Seymour and Dick Powell take on nine 'design challenges' to improve everyday products—from the kitchen bin and burglar alarm to the shopping trolley and razor. Produced by leading independent production company, TV6, the programmes reflect Seymour Powell's determination to change manufacturers' perceptions of design from a 'bolt on' after the product has been engineered to an integral part of the process and to improve the design standards of the things we use every day.

Thankfully, Sanjy009 dug up a couple episodes on that massive trove of digitized moving-image treasures known as YouTube—if you've got a few 25-minute blocks to spare this weekend, we recommend watching Seymour and Powell tackle the shopping cart and razorblade.

Hit the jump for the other one:

Whether you're a global corporation or a Bond villain, a good way to convey to shareholders—or enemy spies you're lecturing—that you intend to take over the world, is to have a metal representation of it in your headquarters.

Fair enough, you say, but on what page of the Staples catalog do Dr. Evil & Co. find these things? They don't. They contact Matt Binns, the British designer/fabricator who founded Giant Globes Inc. Binns' Chicago-based outfit produces aluminum representations of Earth ranging from three to ten feet in diameter, as well as flat, wall-mounted varieties up to ten feet wide.

The globes can be custom-ordered with built-in motors to rotate them, so you don't have to stroll around to the back while explaining your plans to 007. And they're naturally corrosion-resistant, which comes in handy if you want to place them outside (or for when Bond eventually gets out of his handcuffs and causes an explosion in the compound, triggering the sprinklers and/or blowing the roof open).

Fabricating these things isn't easy, and takes a team of craftspeople about two weeks per, depending. But Binns, who refers to himself as a "Creative Generalist" and has a background in everything from furniture design to special effects work to our fave, building and running a beach bar on the Gulf of Thailand for two years, figured it out:

Medium and heavy machine guns are "crew-served" weapons, requiring two and even three soldiers working together to operate it at maximum efficiency. While it's one guy pulling the trigger, the other two carry and feed the bulky ammunition belts into the weapon.

Having to rapidly re-position the weapon therefore brings challenges. According to an article in Soldiers magazine, after a 2.5-hour firefight in Afghanistan, an American infantry combat team started discussing "how three-man teams manning crew-served weapons struggled to stay together over difficult terrain in fluid battles." It goes without saying that a machine gunner separated from his ammo is not good. It would be better if the gunner were self-contained, but that gun's not gonna feed itself.

Or could it? As a joke, one of the soldiers brought up Jesse Ventura's character in Predator, who runs around with a minigun fed by a box on his back. A simple one-person solution, as envisioned by some Hollywood propmaster.

What Ventura's character had was one long, continuous belt feeding uninterruptedly from the pack into his gun. But without that arrangement, the best a lone machine gunner could manage would be to carry individual 50-round belts to load himself—and stopping to reload every 50 rounds. That leads to lulls in fire, and the more times you reload, the more you increase the chances of the gun jamming. This is a design flaw with potentially life-or-death consequences. And so, following the "Predator" discussion, Staff Sergeant Vincent Winkowski thought about it and figured a back-mounted ammo rig might actually be doable.

So Winkowski grabbed an old ALICE (all-purpose lightweight individual carrying equipment) frame, welded two ammunition cans together—one atop the other after cutting the bottom out of the top can—and strapped the fused cans to the frame. To that he added a MOLLE (modular, lightweight load-carrying equipment) pouch to carry other equipment.

"We wondered why there wasn't some type of [system] that fed our machine guns [like the] mini-gun as portrayed in the movie," Winkowski said. "So, I decided to try it using the feed chute assembly off of [a vehicle-mounted weapons system]. We glued a piece of wood from an ammo crate inside the ammo cans to create the decreased space necessary so the rounds would not fall in on each other.

"My Mark 48 gunners, Spc. Derick Morgan and Spc. Aaron McNew, who also had input to the design and evaluation, took it to the range and tested it, and even with its initial shortcomings, it was much better than the current TTP (tactics, techniques and procedures) we employed. On Feb. 26, 2011, our prototype 'Ironman' pack even saw its first combat use by Spc. McNew when our squad was ambushed by up to 50 fighters in a river valley, and it worked great!"

"I'm not impressed!"

Hear hear for cross-disciplinary education. Doris Kim Sung was a biology major who switched into architecture, and her combination of the two interests has now led her, as an assistant professor at USC, to experimenting with building systems inspired by everything from human skin to grasshoppers' breathing systems. "[Skin is] the first line of defense for the body," she says. "Our building skins should be more similar to human skin."

To that end Sung has been experimenting with thermo-bimetals, two thin layers of metal that expand and contract, in response to temperature, at different rates. Laminating two like-sized sheets of different material together and subjecting them to a temperature change causes the sheet to curl up—and this phenomenon can be exploited to create a building that ingeniously shades itself as needed, requiring no external power.

Check it out in Sung's "Metal That Breathes" TED Talk, released just yesterday:

Custom Playground Designer
Landscape Structures
Delano, Minnesota

Landscape Structures is hiring a custom playground designer! Their custom design team creates one-of-a-kind playgrounds that become community gathering spaces. These innovative designs are created using various methods of sketching, Cad and 3d presentation software that bring the idea to life.

Hidden Forms explores Franco Clivio's obsession with objects, particularly those considered banal by most. He finds considered design and innovations in what he refers to as, 'unremarkable, everyday things.' These anonymous objects have had a remarkable impact on design, culture and technology.

Clivio assembles his beloved artifacts in collections, creating poetic juxtapositions that tell stories about their manufacturing processes, their functions, their scale and their interaction with each other. Each collection has been harmoniously arranged and photographed by Hans Hansen. Clivio prefaces each individual collection, explaining the significance to him and then comments on a few select items or processes that exemplify his reasons for collecting them. Pierre Mendell and Annette Kr&oumlger developed the layout and complimentary illustrations.

Although Hidden Forms was released in 2009 in the United States, it's clear that it went well under the radar. At press time Hidden Forms' page on a major bookseller's website is neglected: it remains unreviewed, and the official description has fragments of visible html in it. We wanted to give it a second look as it's been a steadfast favorite here at Hand-Eye Supply.

Perhaps the most interesting exhibition I came across at the Interior Lifestyle China show was tucked in a quiet wing of the Shanghai Exhibition Center, opposite the Talents section. Where all of the dozen designers in the latter section manned their booths for most of the show, "Shine Shanghai" was acutely underdocumented: when I asked a hapless staff member for information about the special exhibition, he dryly noted that "there is no explanation."

Hou Zhengguang

Thankfully, the exhibition guide was slightly more helpful, denoting that this was the fourth time around for "Shine Shanghai," featuring well-known Shanghai designers who were invited to persent new work for the theme "built to last." Based on the designers' "independent research," the majority of the projects incorporated stainless steel, "this year's material," reflecting—often quite literally—the theme of enduring quality. Designers Hou Zhengguang Hou and Ding Wei, credited as producers (curators?), are among the 18 designers who participated in the (presumably) annual group show.

Ding Wei

Yet the cursory background information only goes so far: I still have no idea why each piece is accompanied by a childhood portrait of the designer—with details aboutw here he/she attended elementary school—alongside the designer bios, which greatly varied in length. Only a few included passable English translations with the Chinese wall text, which was often a bit poetic for my rudimentary language skills (and Google translate as well).

Even so, the work was strong enough to make an impression sans exegesis, and "Shine Shanghai" was an unexpected highlight from the predominantly commercial tradeshow. All in all, the special exhibit was a remarkably consistent showing from the rising and established stars of the Shanghai design scene.

In the interest of comprehensiveness, I've included images of every piece in the show, though I've only included as much additional information as I can reliably offer.

Hou Zhengguang - "Beautiful Mountains"

Hou Zhengguang completed his Masters in Furniture Design in the UK before returning to Shanghai, where he's currently a designer at Moreless (he's behind the "Three Walkers" stool, which we saw in Milan this spring, among other designs). While the "Beautiful Mountains" turn up in some of his other designs for Moreless, the "Collective of Individuals" is actually an array of 81 IKEA ashtrays.

Hou Zhengguang - "Collective of Individuals"

Carl Liu - "Eames"

Throughout the two day Design Research Conference the frog design team wandered around interviewing attendees and encouraging them to fill out the cards they received at registration check-in. The top card stated, "As you listen to the speakers, engage with other conference attendees, and think about what you hear, we'd like you to capture some notes. Please fill out these cards and bring them to Monday's 3:30pm interactive session." The other cards had questions such as "What are the biggest challenges facing design research today", "What superpower do you wish you had when conducting research", and "What problems in the world should design researchers tackle". Attendees had no idea what the frog team had up their sleeve, but attendees played along anyway. The frog team planned two activities for the end of each day of the conference, which required attendees to put their design thinking hats on, to interact with other attendees, teamwork, and of course fun.

Attendees gathered at 3:30pm on Monday ready to find out what role the cards would play in the first interactive frog activity. Everyone was asked to split up into groups of five people and to grab a worksheet. I joined a group of people, took a look at the worksheet and was really excited to find out that we were being asked to put together a Design Research Super Team! The worksheet had questions that matched the cards so we could collectively jot down the answer to the questions in one place as a team. It also had a space for the group to draw characters on the super team as well as name the group's super team.

Industrial design is a broad profession, which is a good thing for the Core77 Discussion Boards. No matter how deep your area of expertise, at some point you'll run into an issue that someone with expertise in a different area under ID's broad umbrella can help answer.

We first caught wind of Matt Binns (he of the Giant Globes) when he popped up on the Core77 boards inquiring about how these things are produced:

Those are a series of gardening tools sold by the UK's V&A Museum, each covered in a William Morris print from 1864. Any idea how they got the pattern onto the steel tools?

Reader Greenman's best guess is dip coating, a/k/a hydrographics. Hunters and the military-minded call it "camo dipping," as it's the best way to cover the complex surfaces of a firearm with a camouflage pattern. Here's one manufacturer, "EZ Dip Kits," showing you how it's done:

Pretty neat, no? Perusing their site, or others like Campbell Custom Coatings' or Camo Dip Kits', reveals all manner of objects that hydrographics can be successfully applied to...

Industrial designer Jean-Marc Sheitoyan is currently a Project Manager at Quebec's Mawashi Protective Clothing, Inc., where he's designed several 'personal equipment' products since he started working there over five years ago. In keeping with the company's commitment to developing "new solutions and made significant enhancements to existing products for law enforcement, corrections, military and industrial personnel," Sheitoyan's portfolio includes protective gear as well as apparel for industrial applications.

The Tactical Knee and Elbow Protection is perhaps the most explicitly biomimetic of Sheitoyan's designs: in order to improve the flexibility and range of motion of knee and elbow pads for tactical situations, he started by 3D scanning a lobster tail and refining the model for manufacturing.

Similarly, the Blunt Trauma Protective Suit, for which Sheitoyan was responsible for product management and marketing, took "inspiration from an Armadillidium Vulgare to develop articulated rigid armor plates to enhance the mobility and flexibility of protective suits."

The Industrial Load Transfer Belt, on the other hand (or torso, as it were), is an adjustable, one-size-fits-all belt that is designed to "transfer the load of a wireless crane controller onto the body's musculoskeletal center axis." Specifically, Mawashi created the belt for an industrial aluminum client—"molten metal transfer crucibles" were the cargo in the original brief. "The system features two telescopic arms with adjustable angle, and a quick-release mechanism."

2012 has been an incredible year for design! We just wrapped up our season by shipping out 29 trophies around the world to our awards winners. The Core77 Design Awards celebrates the collaborative nature of the design process with our trophy—a mold designed by New York-based design studio Rich Brilliant Willing. Their approach was to design an artifact that could be employed in the creation of multiples, honoring the kind of group effort that designers and their clients engage in every day. As RBW explained, "We were inspired by a 'mold' as an image and symbol of manufacturing and design."

As part of this manufacturing story, we worked with our partners at Proto Labs to tell the story of creating this year's trophy. Working with the engineers at Proto Labs, each trophy is CNC-milled from a solid block of alumnium—we had boxes of trophies in our office within a week of submiting the final CAD files!

Here's the Proto Labs mill that made our trophies!

In the opening minutes of zombie fare like The Walking Dead and 28 Days Later, the protagonist awakens after a long sleep with no knowledge of what has recently transpired. As the protagonist wanders his immediate surroundings, the filmmakers must effectively use visuals to let him, and the viewers, conclude that something has gone awry.

If you woke up this morning in downtown Manhattan and had no knowledge of the impending "Frankenstorm," it wouldn't take you long to figure out something's up. The moment my eyes opened this morning, my disquiet began, ironically prompted by quiet. The jackhammering construction crew that has so relentlessly been waking my neighbors and I for the past month had fallen blissfully silent, with the Mayor calling for a complete construction halt.

Stepping outside to relieve my two dogs, I was greeted with a visual difference on each corner: The garbage cans that usually serve as curbside sentinels have all been upended and placed against walls by sanitation crews, in hopes of minimizing them being picked up by high winds and turned into projectiles. Whether or not that's effective remains to be seen, but it probably can't hurt.

Wandering further afield we find abandoned SoHo streets near Core77 HQ, bereft of shoppers, with everyone closed for business. With NYC having taken the unusual step of shutting down the subway last night, both shoppers and shopkeepers are not making the journey in. The only other folk I saw on the street were fellow dog owners making the rounds with their pooches, and the occasional disappointed tourist family that had wandered out of nearby hotels in search of something still open.

Are you kidding me?

Heading over this morning to the high-end shopping strip of West Broadway, where every store seems to have huge windows, we see what's in the photo above. I have a hard time believing a few lousy strips of blue painter's tape can hold a window together. In fact meteorologist Chris Landsea, who is the Science and Operations Officer at the National Hurricane Center, writes "[taping windows] is a waste of effort, time, and tape. It offers little strength to the glass and NO protection against flying debris."

While I think whomever did the blue tape job was wasting their time, I think Landsea might be misguided—not in his stating of what tape won't do, but in his understanding of why people tape their windows. I'd always assumed people taped their windows—with sturdier duct or gaffer's tape, that is—in an effort to keep the glass itself from disintegrating into shard-like projectiles upon shattering. I never understood it to make the glass stronger or somehow serve as a protective net from flying debris impacting the glass.

That being said, I still suspect tape doesn't work at all; the paragraph above is my interpretation of what window-tapers think they're accomplishing.

So the question is, how did window-taping start? Clever marketing from 3M or a local retailer? Interestingly enough, the taping of windows was done by the Brits in World War II as part of ARP (Air Raid Precautions) measures during the German bombing Blitz. As you can see from the images below, the taping was rather more thorough than the half-assery pictured up top.

Explains a gent named Peter Johnson writing on a UK website about life in the 1900s,

[During the Blitz] each house was given some rolls of gummed brown sticky paper about 3 inches wide. These were for sticking to the inside of all the windows from corner to corner in a diagonal pattern to prevent shards of glass from flying into the rooms in a bomb blast.

What no one mentions, however, was whether this actually worked.

Inspired by the boom poles used on film productions, the brand new Boom Lamp by Hackney-based studio, Group Design, is an oversized floor lamp born from a series of experiments in adjustability and scale. Richard Wells and Jeremy Scott, the studio's founders, applied their backgrounds in product design and architecture to develop a functional, efficient light that is both pared down and a stand-out centerpiece.

At its full height, the lamp is six and a half feet tall, but can slide down to four feet for a more intimate space or concentrated light. When we saw it in London last month, Wells and Scott were still working out a few kinks, like how to finish the felting on the shade and how to make the adjustable arm slide more smoothly, but their design was mostly complete. The finished piece will still be made from melamine-faced plywood and a 97% wool felt shade with a contrasting cloth cord—considerate touches that allow Group Design's furnishings to retain their minimalist aesthetics, "free of unnecessary visual and structural clutter" while still calling attention to form and materials.

Contact Group Design for pricing.