This is both a cautionary and inspirational tale of realizing a good idea for a product.

Patrick and Dallas are two Miami-based videogame developers that ship their own products. That being the case, the duo are well-acquainted with packing peanuts, which as every eBay shipper knows, can quickly messy without a good dispensing system in place.

Existing industrial-sized packing peanut hoppers (pictured up top) are too bulky for the pair's business, so they set out to design their own solution. Their resultant PeanutBuddy device is a clear design improvement over the hoppers (though industrial-design-minded nitpickers will take potshots). Presumably excited about their creation, the duo contacted shipping giant Uline to see if they had any interest.

Well, Uline called back, and they were interested. Just one problem: Patrick & Dallas weren't actually ready to produce the thing. (We jaded Kickstarter-watchers know fulfillment is everything, but these guys' expertise is videogames and not industrial design, so we ought cut 'em a little slack.) Newly motivated, the pair are now turning to Indiegogo in hopes of funding the tooling for a production run.

You can see how the device works, and hear their story, in the pitch vid:

Here's another two fascinating pieces of secret-compartment-havin' furniture, these ones built way before Autodesk and even power tools.

Alfred Emmanuel Louis Beurdeley was a Parisian ebeniste, a cabinet-maker, back in the 1800s. He produced this beautiful "mechanical desk" circa 1880, which appears to have a single center drawer. That one works the way you'd think it does, but there's a bit more to this table:

Cool, no? But wait, it gets better—if we go even further back, about a hundred years or so. Jean-Francois Oeben was an ebeniste in the mid-1700s, and he produced this spectacular piece of bad-assery:

We're excited to check out our friend Rob Walker's latest endeavor, an exhibition at non-profit NYC gallery Apex Art. As Real As It Gets is an 'exploration of "imaginary brands and fictional products,' it includes works (including new commissions) by Shawn Wolfe, Conrad Bakker, Dana Wyse, Kelli Anderson, Beach Packaging Design, Ryan Watkins-Hughes, Steven M. Johnson, and the U.S. Government Accountability Office, among others." The longtime culture/design critic is perhaps best known as a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, and Walker has continued to explore consumer culture with the penetrating insight of a modern anthropologist and sometime design observer since he penned "Buying In." This summer saw the publication of "Significant Objects," an anthology of stories from a project of the same name; As Real As It Gets is also an exercise in creating meaning, except with the opposite approach: starting with a fiction to arrive at a final product.

Walker writes:

Tell me about yourself, and you might mention where you're from, the music you prefer, perhaps a favorite writer or filmmaker or artist, possibly even the sports teams you root for. But I doubt you'll mention brands or products. That would seem shallow, right? There's just something illegitimate about openly admitting that brands and products can function as cultural material, relevant to identity and expression. It's as if we would prefer this weren't true...

The underlying discomfort is something I've noted over many years spent writing about brands and products. One reader comment clarifies the dilemma. In a column about products and companies that exist only in the fictional worlds of books and movies, I categorized such things as "imaginary brands." Harrumph to that, this reader replied: All brands are imaginary.

I saw his point, but he'd missed mine. The ambiguity in the relationship between our selves and the brand-soaked world we navigate is exactly what's worth taking seriously, not waving away. When such consideration is filtered through an open and unpredictable mind, anything seems possible (even the wildly implausible). Willfully imaginary brands and products can be considered as a medium, expressive of joy, fear, humor, unease, ambivalence—very real stuff, in other words.

Clockwise from top left: Shawn Wolfe - "Gross National Products Presents" (detail); The Marianas - Installation view of "Montalvo Historical Fabrications & Souvenirs"; Conrad Bakker - "UNTITLED PRODUCT DISTRIBUTION NETWORK"; Ryan Watkins-Hughes - Installation view of Shopdropping Project

The works in the diverse group exhibition—handpicked by Walker—collectively address this issue, from culturejamming projects such as 'product displacement' and 'shopdropping' to what Bruce Sterling deemed 'design fiction.' "Taken together, this collection of imaginary brands and fictional products is not about brands and products at all. In this show, the marketplace is the medium."

The exhibition opens at the Tribeca gallery tomorrow evening, Thursday, November 15, with two performances during the run of the show: a "Speculative Sound Performance" by Disquiet Junto collective on Tuesday, November 27, and a MakerBot demo with artist Shawn Wolfe, who will be reissuing his functionless "RemoverInstaller" for one night only. (For more on Walker, Imprint Culture Lab recently interviewed him on the occasion of the exhibition.)

As Real As It Gets
Organized by Rob Walker
Apex Art
291 Church Street
New York, NY 10013
November 16 – December 22, 2012
Opening Reception: Thursday, November 15, 6–8PM

Kata Bags creates "lightweight protective carrying solutions
for photo and video equipment," and given that the two founders are ex-Israeli-military guys, it's no surprise that one of their new bags draws its inspiration from a gun.

Their Revolver-8 model aims to solve the problem of an outdoor photographer who needs to quickly and frequently swap out lenses. To that end the bottom half of the bag contains an unusual circular compartment—a "revolving magazine," as they call it—featuring a user-configurable chamber into which separate lenses can be loaded.

During set-up, the photographer can open a flap to access everything at once; while in the act of shooting, they can open a smaller flap to spin the magazine and access the lense they need. And despite the circular bottom, the bag still appears to stay upright when placed on the ground, a nice touch.

The Wright Brothers had a dream that one day, man would fly. Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary has a dream too, which is that one day we'll fly standing up.

In 2010 he proposed the solution you see above, whereby ten rows of seating are replaced by 15 rows of Hannibal-Lecter-on-trial-type apparatuses. These seats—sorry, "stands"—were to be offered at prices so low—just $6 a pop—that passengers would gladly buy them, and probably strap on the Hannibal facemask thingy if they had to.

Choosing between meal options

Airplane manufacturer Boeing shot the idea down, citing European safety regulations. Undeterred, O'Leary then went to the lawmakers. So now he's back in the news, waging a public war with regulators to allow standing-room-only areas on airplanes. His argument is unsurprisingly meeting stiff resistance, probably due to the way he's pursuing it:

Mr O'Leary, the chief executive of budget airline Ryanair, dismissed the notion seatbelts were an essential safety requirement, saying: "If there ever was a crash on an aircraft, God forbid, a seatbelt won't save you."

"Seatbelts don't matter," he proclaimed. "You don't need a seatbelt on the London Underground. You don't need a seatbelt on trains which are travelling at 120mph and if they crash you're all dead..."

...When it came to landing, he suggested, passengers could "hang on to the handle" and would be "fine". "If you say to passengers it's £25 for the seat and £1 for the standing cabin, I guarantee we will sell the standing cabin first," he said. "No question."

The idea of standing on an airplane isn't new; a Chinese airline proposed it in 2009, and frankly, having taken mass-transit in China before, I'm surprised they haven't implemented it yet.

I think it's just a matter of time before someone, somewhere starts doing it. But don't worry, overly-officious flight attendants: While you won't be able to nag them to place their seats upright before takeoff and landing, you'll still have something to fuss about. Passengers will undoubtedly decide to sit cross-legged on the floor and you'll have to harangue them into standing back up.

Web Developer
Studio Mercury
Brooklyn, New York

Studio Mercury, a New York based multimedia design firm, is looking to fill a full-time web development position in their Brooklyn office. The ideal candidate has a BS in computer or a related field, or significant equivalent experience, and five years minimum development experience with a strong knowledge of HTML/XHMTL and CSS. He or she should also have web programming experience, including PHP, Javascript and jQuery, as well as experience working with MySQL.

A couple weeks ago, I was curious to read yet another article about the much-heralded 3D printer revolution, "Crystal Ball Gazing: Amazon and 3D Printing." Only later did I realize that my skepticism from the outset betrayed my own confirmation bias that any remotely bibliocentric 3D printing story is based on the fallacious premise that ABS extruders will someday be as commonplace as inkjet printers. I happen to share TechCrunch columnist Jon Evans' opinion that additive manufacturing will not reprise the rise of 2D printing:

3D printing is not just 2D printing with another dimension added on. Yes, the names are very similar, but their uses are not even remotely analogous. We may reasonably conclude, therefore, that 1) 3D printing will not recapitulate the history of 2D printing, 2) as soon as you make an argument along those lines you lose all credibility and look like an idiot.

Evans' rant is a fair assessment to be sure, but it has little to do with the gist of the opinion piece, which postulated that Amazon is uniquely positioned to pioneer an on-demand 3D printing business model. VC Theodore F. di Stefano writes:

I'm not sure if Amazon would venture into manufacturing, but we do have a new industrial revolution on our hands today... Why would Amazon be interested in 3D printing? My guess that Amazon might be interested is because it is currently adding warehouses throughout the United States with a not-so-long-term goal of being able to offer same-day delivery to its customers. With warehouses strategically located throughout the country, it would be able to set up 3D printing facilities within them, thus making three-dimensional products (manufactured products) conveniently available to major population centers.

From the outset, di Stefano clearly states that he admires Amazon not for selling boatloads of books but for extending its business model to include virtually every consumer product imaginable, and for investing in physical infrastructure in kind, citing their network of warehouses as a viable spaces for local fabrication. Jeff Bezos' billion-dollar idea, after all, has far surpassed its original domain of books, and as a web company that deals in physical inventory, Amazon's economy of scale marks a unique opportunity for distributing 3D-printed white label products... assuming, of course, it's profitable. This, of course, is di Stefano's hypothesis, where Amazon is less a bastion for publishing (2D or three) and more a massive online marketplace.

And to bring the argument full circle, design veteran Kevin Quigley actually made a similar point in an excellent essay contra blind optimism regarding 3D printing for the masses (which I've referred to before). Quigley recapitulates a personal history of digital fabrication to arrive at the conclusion that 3D printing will never be efficient (read: inexpensive) enough to come anywhere near the adoption rates of 2D printers. Rather, he speculates that the technology might be best suited for a megaretailer like IKEA... reaffirming di Stefano's case for Amazon.

Yet Evans' point stands: "...use cases, adoption rates, economic impact, etc., will be nothing like those of the 2D printers you know and love (or, more likely, hate). Yes, even though the names are so similar... please stop using that ridiculous and thoroughly inaccurate analogy." In this sense, Amazon's unmatched scale is precisely why it doesn't make sense for them to pursue 3D printing, which is far more suited to small batches of niche or otherwise custom production runs. A far-reaching distribution network is not perquisite... rather, accessibility is paramount.

Which leads us back to Phillip Torrone's suggestion that we ought to "rebuild and retool public libraries and make 'TechShops,'" per the title of a March 2011 blogpost on Make. "To me, public libraries—the availability of free education for all—represent the collective commitment of a community to their future... a commitment to educating the next generation. [As such,] the role of a public library should also adapt over time, and that time is finally here." While reality has been slow to catch on—Make subsequently noted that Cleveland listened, as did Reno; we recently reported on Adelaide following suit—it's worth reading, as Torrone certainly makes a very thorough argument for repurposing the public stronghold of the printed word.

Woke up this morning and this video had a million more hits than it did yesterday, so I had to find out more. Just a few days ago, a gent from Brisbane named Ray Liehm posted this:

Liehm was a bystander at Australia's Supanova Pop Culture Expo, and the brilliant costume above delighted YouTube viewers and used car salesmen alike, to the tune of three million plus at press time.

So what's the story behind it? Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm Flailing Tubeman, as he's officially known, is actually one half of a couple; together with his blue companion, they are the official mascots of the Gold Coast Roller Derby League, a bunch of bad-ass broads with names like Nikki Nitro who "hit hard, skate harder, turn left & do it again" at tracks in the Queensland area.

Nothing crushes the exhilirating experience of driving a fast car quicker than hearing that siren, then glancing up to see flashing red and blue lights steadily getting larger in your rearview mirror. It's undoubtedly much more fun to see a police car on the sheet of paper or computer monitor in front of you, where it's coming out of your pen or your Wacom. Those who agree will dig the theme of this year's industry-only L.A. Auto Show Design Challenge: To envision a police car of the future.

Though the brief calls for highway patrol vehicles in the year 2025, it also calls for vehicles that can "effectively navigate dynamic urban environments," perhaps explaining why Mercedes' Ener-G-Force concept looks more like an off-roader:

Honda's concept is multi-faceted, consisting of wicked-looking motorcycle units...

...a copter...

...that deploys this beast...

...inside which an officer can remotely have the motorcycles, in pilot-less "Drone Squad" mode, do his bidding:

As a design freelancer, you can be pretty divorced from the effects of your work. I've done many a project where after e-mailing in the files, I never heard again about that object or knew if it even got made, although I'd continue to correspond with the client about future projects. I imagine it's the way a hit man for the mob feels, disconnected from the rewards or repercussions experienced by his capos in the inner circle.

But if you're a design firm staffer or an in-house, you get to see more of the process and hopefully the aftermath. It has to be gratifying to hear that your design work increased the client's sales/yield/efficiency/safety rating, et cetera. And it is people like you whom the IDSA is interested in hearing from.

Starting today, the IDSA's Catalyst Case Study Program needs success stories about the impact of design.

Design firms, client companies, academic institutions or any other interested parties may nominate a design success story worthy of study, documentation and preservation. There is no restriction on dates in use, production or distribution. Above all, the submission must clearly demonstrate the positive impact of industrial design and how it raises the visibility of design's global effectiveness in delivering value to businesses, communities and society.

If you're one of the lucky few that's got a good story, you have until January 18th to get the submission in. I'll pretend I'm not jealous as I sit here doing the design equivalent of making foam cut-outs to hold sniper rifle parts in a briefcase and waiting for my fax machine to go off.

That there is a John Deere 7760 Cotton Picker, which harvests the stuff your T-shirt is made out of and wraps it up in fat, cylindrical modules comprised of several bales.

Here's an introductory look, before we get to the cooler video:

Today's global financial and social crises demand innovation not only in public services, but within the whole bureaucratic, administrative system of public governance. In order to respond effectively to a changing context of complexity and uncertainty, governments and other public service organisations need to consider innovating the processes and practices of public policy itself.

There is a consistent need for actively bringing creative processes into policymaking and focusing more on creating valuable outcomes for citizens than only on projected and programmed outputs. Yet innovation introduces a different way of knowing (or not knowing), exploring and planning into governance which create tensions with the status quo.

This paper by Nesta (UK) and MindLab (Denmark) aims to frame the discussion between policymakers, researchers and practitioners around the dilemmas and challenges involved in developing policymaking practices that can respond productively to the current crisis, state of uncertainty and wicked character of public problems. This creates the need for exploring and establishing new principles of decision making inspired by digital technology, social sciences, scientific experimentation and the creative arts in order to frame different possibilities and expectations of what governments can and should achieve.

They identify this as a part of an emerging paradigm in public governance that is still interacting uncomfortably with existing administrative systems. The question is: what kind of processes are needed in order to create synergy rather than conflict between existing and new approaches to public governance?

Nesta is the UK's innovation foundation with a mission to help people and organisations bring great ideas to life. MindLab is a cross-ministerial innovation unit in the Danish Government that addresses public problems through a human-centred approach.

I bet André Breton himself could not have foreseen the 'consequences' of inventing Exquisite Corpse: four score and seven years after he popularized the collective writing/drawing game, designer Chloe Lee Carson has resurrected the surrealist pastime as a collection of playful tableware.

For her "Exquisite Cups," Carson came up with a total of nine characters—further refined by an illustrator—divided into three sets, which loosely adhere to the themes of "Folk," "Wild," and "City." (The pun is less successful in French, as the game is known as cadavre exquis. C'est la vie.) In homage to the game, each cup "displays different body parts that stack up to form a complete image. Once stacked, they can be twisted to create amazing cross-breed creatures."

Principal User Experience Researcher
Motorola Mobility
Sunnyvale, California

Motorola Mobility is seeking a Principal User Experience Researcher to join their group of leaders and listeners, scientists and storytellers who make an impact of the lives of millions of consumers around the world. The researcher will further the quality and influence of our research practice as well as Motorola Mobility's general understandings of consumers to inform future products, software, services and ecosystem design. He or she will be a primary contributor to the identification of opportunities for research explorations, including what questions need to be answered both tactically and strategically.

Wish I could make it out to Cali for this one: Rapha San Francisco Cycling Club is pleased to present All Chips On the Table: The Bicycle Art and Design of Garrett Chow, an exhibition featuring Chow's work as Lead Graphic Designer at Specialized, as well as his graphics for MASH, the urban cycling brand which he co-founded. Per Rapha:

From the co-creation of MASHSF to bicycle paint schemes for cyclocross star Zdeneck Stybar and Tour de France winner Alberto Contador, Garrett has been a continual inspiration in the bicycle industry with designs, illustrations and paint jobs over the years. The exhibit is your chance to see all of this live and direct.

While the exhibition opened two weeks ago, a couple image sets hit the web earlier this week—shots from Mike Martin of MASH (reproduced here with permission) and Bike Rumor as well—a welcome dose of pure bike porn to supplement the tantalizing teaser photos from Rapha.

We had the chance to talk to Garrett about his inspiration and what drives him in the studio and on the road.

Core77: You're clearly as passionate about cycling as you are about design. Which came first for you, bikes or design?

Garrett Chow: The tired cliché that as a designer, one's job never really "shuts off" sadly holds more truth than a lot of us would prefer to admit. Devoted cyclists seem to hold a similarly unflagging sense of commitment and allegiance to their two-wheeled pursuits—whether it's through constant training, watching one's diet, or wrenching on bikes, it seems like there never enough hours in the day. I'd say that both pursuits intertwine to occupy the larger focus in my life, and seemingly in equal measure.

I've been doing both for as long as I can remember. I grew up riding and drawing and making/publishing a skate 'zine as a kid—these inclinations precipitated in my study of Illustration and Graphic Design in college. I was tangentially involved in the bike industry for many years having worked on corporate-identity and branding for a friend's bike shop, Wrench Science, but it wasn't until MASH and then Specialized that I 'formally' entered the industry.

Toronto-based design group Castor gets called a lot of names, especially sustainable—that S word whose egregious misuse irks us so. Not that Castor isn't sustainable, there are just so many better ways to describe them. Founders Kei Ng and Brian Richer say their furniture and lighting collection has a "sense of irreverence," a sentiment echoed by their highly irreverent and really kind of awesome head shot, above.

As far as their actual products are concerned, we suggest descriptors like recycled, or perhaps upcycled. The short doc, Castor is French For Beaver (it is—we checked), recently made by Carling Acthim and Lana Mauro, takes a closer look at two of Castor's best known lighting designs, the Tank Light and the Tube Light, both of which repurpose cast off materials like old fire extinguishers and burnt out halogen tubes and turn them into hanging light fixtures whose final form is completely removed from their previous lives.

At the risk of getting in trouble, I'm going to tell this story because I think any industrial designer would be interested to hear it.

The brilliant and prolific Bruce Hannah, a former IDSA Designer of the Decade, was a professor of mine at Pratt. And years before teaching us, he accidentally invented a certain famous children's toy—the design of which was stolen from him, earning other people millions of dollars. I couldn't find this story anywhere in print, and I realize that's probably for legal reasons, so I will not quote anyone directly. Also bear in mind I'm going off of an anecdote I heard only once, about twenty years ago, so the details aren't perfect.

Sometime circa 1970, Hannah would invite friends over to watch pro (American) football. During the games they'd toss a football around the house, but one day things got out of hand, and an errant pass either went through a painting or broke a lamp (I just called a classmate of mine, we can't agree on which it was).

At the time, Hannah and fellow designer Andrew Morrison were working on the Hannah Lounge Chair for Knoll, which came in both single-chair and seating-row configurations for airport lounges, waiting rooms and the like.

It was made from a cast aluminum frame, and between the crossbars was slung two pieces of polyurethane foam (one for the seat, one for the back) encased in wool or vinyl upholstery. We had one at Pratt Studios and the thing was super-comfortable, I slept on it more than once. Anyway, the foam was molded into a tapered shape, as you can see in the photos, pinching off at the front/rear edges for the seat, and the top/bottom edges for the back.

As the designer, Hannah had access to the factory and the production machinery, so after the roughhousing incident he created a football-shaped mold and cranked out a soft, polyurethane foam football. He and his buddies could now toss the thing around the living room without fear of drawing the missus' ire. It was a great idea for a product, but Hannah only made it for him and his friends; he was occupied with perfecting the chair design and wasn't thinking about children's toys.

Tim Jahnigen is a multicreative, Dean-Kamen-like inventor who has created "systems and technologies with patents pending in a diverse range of industries, from construction and banking to science and medicine." In recent years he turned his attention towards what initially appeared to be a smaller problem: Redesigning the soccer ball.

During the last World Cup we looked at the soccer ball's design history, and complained about the pure evil that is the Jabulani. But Jahnigen was interested specifically in soccer balls as they're used in developing nations. Your average Adidas will last just fine in the back of a minivan or on the well-manicured pitch at Springfield Middle School, but dirt tracks in Darfur and rocky fields in Afghanistan chew the balls up in no time.

So it was that Jahnigen observed a documentary about kids in Darfur kicking around, rather than a ball, a rough sphere of garbage tied up with twine. It was their only option, as balls donated to children in situations like these simply cannot withstand the rough terrain. "The millions of balls that are donated go flat within 24 hours," Jahnigen toldThe New York Times.

After doing research he discovered a materials company called PopFoam, whose tagline is "Soft Toughness" and whose titular product is made from EVA (ethyl vinyl acetate). As the company describes it, "PopFoam will improve durability, tear strength, tensile strength, flexibility, color availability, chemical resistance, cold weather resistance, sound protection and abrasion resistance while offering the cushioning comforts and the complement of design ascetics [sic] to your products."

However, Jahnigen calculated that tooling costs to produce PopFoam in a spherical, soccer-ball-sized shape would cost a small fortune--about $300,000, money that he didn't have. Here's where it gets a little crazy: The multi-talented Jahnigen is also a music producer, and counts Sting among his list of buddies. When Sting, no stranger to charitable giving, heard about the project, he insisted on funding it.

Designer Kenya Hara of Muji and Haptic fame, among other things, has curated a collection of small-scale, DIY architecture projects created by the likes of Konstantin Grcic, Shigeru Ban and others. And you can download the blueprints and watch the accompanying videos of each project to learn how to build them yourself. The only thing is, all of the projects are designed specifically to be used and inhabited by...dogs.

Architecture for Dogs, invented by architects and designers, is an extremely sincere collection of architecture and a new medium, which make dogs and their people happy. By looking at the diagrams or pictures or watching the videos, people all over the world can make these themselves.

Dogs are people's partners, living right beside them, but they are also animals that humans, through crossbreeding, have created in multitudes of breeds. Reexamining these close partners with fresh eyes may be a chance to reexamine both human beings themselves and the natural environment.

As our first project, we present 13 pieces of architecture. Please take the time to carefully examine the details of these elaborately designed ingenious structures, and because it's free to download the blueprints, if you find one you like, make it yourself for your dog.

Objects range from rocking dog houses to platforms designed to bring short pets up to human eye-level to cooling platforms for hot weather. Some of the project descriptions are filled with that architecture-speak and have concepts that seem a bit of a stretch, while others are outright clever: Torafu Architects' concept solves the issue of dogs that enjoy burrowing in their owner's clothes, by incorporating the master's old shirts into the frame of a furniture piece.

One warning: At press time the website was acting a bit wonky. Grcic's entry, for instance, refused to load. I'm thinking a dog somewhere has chewed through a server cable.

The Bavarian Forest National Park recently built a towering, egg-shaped vantage point called the Tree Top Walk, a 150 foot high open air lookout built around three massive fir trees each measuring 125 feet around. From the top, visitors can take in sweeping views of the surrounding mountain ranges, including the northern Alps on a clear day, but the really significant part of the structure is its accessibility. Yes, there's an elevator to shoot children and those with disabilities straight up, but because the circular walkway winds at a steady, smooth incline like the Guggenheim's rotunda, everyone can amble around the 4,250 foot long path to the platform that sits above the tops of the fir trees.

For those craving a little more adventure, there are three stations with unprotected, unscreened wooden bridges, rope bridges and other challenges. And because this is in Germany, there's a restaurant and beer garden at the top where you can wash down a plate of wiener schnitzel with a pint or warm up on a winter's day with a cup of a tea with rum. A scenic treetop walk followed by a crisp beer in the middle of the woods - Germans do hiking right. Good thing there's an elevator for the way down.