Say what you want about IDEO, but no one can deny that some brilliant folks roam their open-plan workspaces, including Dave Vondle and Jerry O'Leary. The longtime colleagues at the firm's Chicago office have just launched a side project under the name Central Standard Timing on the occasion of CES 2013, handily surpassing their $200,000 crowdfunding goal for "The World's Thinnest Watch" in a day and a half.

Indeed, the CST-01 comes in at a svelte 0.8mm, and, at 12 grams, "weighs less than five pennies"—the first 500, which sold out in a matter of hours, were available for $99, or about 54.5 lbs worth of pennies. The internal electronics are laminated into the flexible stainless steel band, which accommodates a scant 0.5mm of componentry in its 'face,' "[showcasing] the most innovative qualities of E Ink's SURF segmented displays; ultra-thinness, readability, ruggedness, flexibility, and low power."

Vondle and O'Leary have also wisely chosen to forgo hardware buttons: Users set the time through the charging stand, which is a beautiful object in itself. Of course, considering that it will only take ten minutes to charge the CST-01 for a month of use, the buoy-shapped base might end up in a drawer for most of the wristwatch's 15 year lifetime (our two cents: maybe it could double as a coffee tamper?).

Experience Designer
Moment
New York, New York

Moment is looking for exceptional Experience Designers to join our team in New York. The ideal candidate is a T-shaped designer, with broad skills in business consulting, user research, service design and experience strategy and depth of experience in information architecture and interaction design. Moment relies heavily on critique and collaboration—with each other, our clients, and their customers—in order to ensure successful experiences for the people who use the products that they design.

With our third year in full swing, the Core77 Design Awards is keeping up one of our favorite traditions: the limited edition poster. This year, our intricate poster was designed by the magnificent guys at Zut Alors! in New York City.

The poster offers a fresh new take on the awards program, offering a witty and inspirational tale that will encourage you to Try Hard(-er). It's sure to motivate and inspire; plus it looks awesome. Be sure to check out all the easter eggs—you won't be disappointed!

All you have to do is REGISTER THIS WEEK, and we will send you a poster to display on the wall of your choice. And even better, if you submit your entry before our Earlybird deadline of January 31, you'll receive 20% off your entry fee!

Register today, we only have limited quantites!

This is awesome: Tokyo-based Showta Mori, a businessman turned stage performer from what we can tell, has rigged up a Travis-Bickle-like iPhone contraption using drawer slides. What's funny is that some of the younger generation currently linking to this video apparently have no idea it's based on Taxi Driver. Anyways just watch this, it's worth it:

Judging by the large amount of small, wheeled, floor-mounted robots we mostly saw coming from Asian manufacturers, manually cleaning spaces in Asia will be a thing of the past.

While iRobot is a well-known name in the 'States, in China it's Xrobot (see their machines up top, as well as the one below that looks like it was designed by Cylons) that's all over the "intelligent robot service industry."

Techko Maid's RV102 sweeping mop-bot breaks out of the familiar circular form factor to go with a square.

EcoVacs' Winbot is also square, but can pull a trick the others can't: The window-cleaning robot sticks to vertical glass.

Moneual (the company behind the Touchscreen Cafe Table) makes a "state of the art robot air purifier" in the H800, which chugs around your apartment scrubbing the O2. I'm not crazy about the taller form factor, because unlike the floor vacs, this one looks trickier to flip over and disable in case it goes rogue.

The H800 is not yet sold in the 'States, but once it is, how long until a Star Wars geek hacks it up to look like R2-D2?

I must admit that the startup Designed by m mostly struck me for its cheeky take on Apple's brand identity, appropriating the design cues (including the font Myriad Pro) with a wink and a nod for their website and, to a lesser extent, Kickstarter campaign. In any case, the AL13 aluminum iPhone bumper is a go, handily doubling its $20,000 goal in a week, and it doesn't take an aerospace engineer to see why: it's sleek, lightweight, easy to install and, above all, thinner than its competitors in the bumper category.

Of course, if the AL13 isn't minimal enough for you, we covered a couple of ultraminimal cases about a month ago. Although Alex Karp didn't reach his funding goal via Kickstarter, the campaign apparently received enough publicity to attract outside investors, who have offered to bankroll Bummpies. mod-3, on the other hand, has surpassed their goal for the Radius case by over 50% as of press time, with five days to go.

A little background: while recently perusing the About page of the Below the Boat website, I noticed that the Johnsons punned that they "side launched" the site in December, with a link to this YouTube video:

Wikipedia, the source of the images at top and below, is uncharacteristically uninformative on the topic of side launching, but the Internet, being the oceanic expanse of data that it is, has turned up a quasi-encyclopedic account from a contemporary shipbuilder. As 11th generation Master Shipwright Harold Burnham of Essex, MA, relates in his exhaustive but otherwise enlightening account of his first side launch:

The way a side launch is executed is as follows: First, the vessel is leaned over so that her bilge rests on a short plank and wedges which will ride on the one groundway down into the water. Then a number of greased slabs (the barked edges of logs that are discarded when squaring off timber) are wedged up under the vessel's keel in the spaces between the blocking she was built on. Finally, as the tide rises, starting aft, the vessel's blocking is split out from under her keel. When enough of her weight rests on the greased slabs, the gravity pulling her down overcomes the friction holding her back. It is hard to guess which block will start her. Sometimes it takes a little jacking and jerking to get the vessel going, but once she starts things get really interesting...

This image dates back to 1751

Exactly who developed this method of launching is lost to history, but it is almost unquestionable that the draft restrictions of the Essex River spawned its use. Likewise, it was probably the horrendous angle of the vessels as they entered the water that limited the adoption of the side launching technique despite the fact that it was far easier and less expensive than a cradle launch.

As launchings became more and more infrequent, they went from being regular occurrences to exciting events. People came from miles around to watch. It is amazing how some people find mystery in the most basic of arts, and I am sure that many builders were entertained by the aura of uncertainty they created. I have heard educated people who witnessed the old launchings comment, "You never know what was going to happen"...

A nice short compilation of side launches

Hidden hearing by Cynaps

If everything at CES actually worked (i.e., no concepts) and you won one of those grab-whatever-you-can-in-fifteen-minutes shopping sprees, what would you snag? We've worked out a short list:

The Cynaps Bone Conduction Bluetooth Headset is the perfect way to take noisy calls on a crowded city sidewalk (or CES exhibition hall floor). I tested the device out in person (it was embedded inside a baseball cap) and it's awesome; just push your tragus—that little flap on your outer ear—closed, and you can hear audio coming in clear as day, transmitted through your bones.

The Cynaps is currently up for pledging on IndieGogo, and at $9,000 of $20,000 with 20 days left to go at press time, it could go either way. I should also point out that I'm of the opinion that they need to add a throat mic, though they claim their external mic picks up voices fine.

PiqX Imaging's XCANEX portable scanner was one of the few devices on the showroom floor that actually looked like an industrial design project.

The portable, fold-flat device clips onto your laptop, and can then be used to "scan" (via snapshot) documents, books, receipts, you name it. The included software auto-rotates the image to the correct orientation while OCR sorts out the text, making it an easy, and quick, push-button solution. Also a great way to quickly scan ID sketches. Totally wish I had one.

Graphics Administrator
Perkins Eastman
Washington, DC

As part of a firm-wide Communications Group, Perkins Eastman is seeking a Graphics Administrator based in its Washington, DC office. The position will be responsible for the maintenance, updating, coordination, and distribution for all of Perkins Eastman's and its affiliates' firm-wide printed identity and digital assets. The Graphics Administrator will coordinate printed material including business cards, stationery, and collateral for all marketing departments and offices.

CES being what it is, there were of course numerous displays of techno-wizardry; and the business world being what it is, most of the new businesses built around these technologies will fail, while a few will thrive. Here's a few we'd like to see make the cut.

We know that the odds are against Pulse Wallet, because it's one of those technologies that needs to be ubiquitous to work, so we hope they've got a good marketing team. Because here's what it promises: The ability to leave your credit cards at home and pay with your finger. After registering with the service, which is free, the vein pattern in a finger of your choice is scanned and linked to whatever credit/debit cards you'd like. Then (assuming merchant uptake), you can pay for your purchases at a touchscreen register with a finger-scanning device.

Velodyne Acoustics is a high-end audio manufacturing company that, having mastered soundwaves, is now messing around with lightwaves (specifically, lasers). The result is their LIDAR system for realtime 3D scanning. By placing a small, spinning, blender-sized contraption on top of a car, they can generate a CG map of the immediately-surrounding environment in realtime.

Machinery company Caterpillar has already signed up, so we'll reportedly see earth-moving and construction equipment kitted out with Velodyne's system.

Seoul, like so many other great cities of East Asia, bustles and buzzes with life, a modern and dynamic metropolis. At night neon signs and giant digital displays battle for attention, advertise everything from the ubiquitous internet cafes (per capital South Korea is the most 'online' nation in the world) to the all night eateries, saunas and singing rooms. Like Japan and China, Korea and the Koreans are a nation of early adopters. Technology exists to be embraced. The latest digital products, software, systems and means of communication are all readily accepted by a culture which now not only adopts technological innovation but is a world player at its leading edge.

It is against this background that I exit the subway system at Seoul's hip, creative district of Jamwondong before ducking off a busy main highway south of Seoul's Han river. I've travelled on a bullet train from Ulsan's National Institute of Science and technology (UNIST), having recently made the move from the leafy suburbs of South London to start a new life at UNIST's School of Design and Human Engineering.

My final destination is Seoul's young, ambitious and rapidly expanding design consultancy SWBK. Founded in 2008, the firm offers an extensive range of design services from IT-based product design to brand consultancy, service design and their Matter & Matter range of fine furniture. SWBK's global design awards speak for themselves (Red Dot, IF, IDEA, GOOD Design...). They have an ambitious, skilled and highly motivated team, whose knowledge and expertise are sought by a growing list of national and international clients.

Their work also extends to the direction of design and cultural exhibitions. One such expo recently organized by SWBK, is the Sulwha Cultural Exhibition in Seoul. It showcases the work of some of Korea's most celebrated craftsmen, artists and designers; from master Bang Chun Woong's display of Korean Ethnic Earthenware (onggi) to Media Artist Yang Min Ha's virtual, interactive installation reinterpreting the process of making onggi through manipulation of digital content via physical, embodied interaction.

In a way SWBK's Sulwha Exhibition is an apt reflection of Korean society more generally. Traditions of the past live cheek by jowl with a modern tech-savvy culture, creating a hybrid mix of embedded traditions within an emergent, dynamic digital culture.
I pick my way towards the SWBK studios and am greeted at the door by co-founder, Sukwoo Lee. Having worked as an industrial designer for Samsung and then at Teague in the United States, Sukwoo returned to his native Korea in 2008 to co-found his consultancy with fellow designer Bongkyu Song.

I've come on a mission: to find out if, within this tech-driven culture, design firms have decided it's time to finally kiss goodbye to dated, low-tech analogue design tools like hand sketching and model making in favour of a fully digital industrial design process.

We sit down to talk and Sukwoo starts by pulling out one of his sketchbooks...

He then produces a tiny handcrafted scale model of his latest chair design and sets it to rest on a page of thumbnail or thinking sketches of the same design.

"I quite like this kind of sketch' Sukwoo explains as we leaf though his work, 'I feel like I'm freer with this kind of quickly made sketch on paper...just hand drawing. From these sketches we often move to these sketch models," he explains.

At this point Sukwoo scuttles off across the studio to return armed with a large plank of balsa wood. "When I touch this wood," he continues, "and I even smell this, it feels much freer than digital work." Sukwoo speaks of an emergent design language that is explored and considered through the use of sketches and scale models. Like the master craftsmen of his Sulwha Cultural Exhibition, there is something honest in the way he describes his expression of form through hand sketching and hand making. From the start, the impression is that these analog processes are integral to SWBK's working culture and design process; to their ability to explore and develop design intentions?

We move on.

"After this," Sukwoo explains, indicating a wall filled with sketches, illustrations and 3D digital models "we start to sketch a little more of the aspects of the form."

At this point Sukwoo describes how CAD tools (Illustrator and Rhino) are employed to test the potential of the concept. "The CAD model is quite rough" he explains, "but gives the team a better idea of proportion and curvature."

Congrats to ClayVon Lowe, our 1HDC December Winner!

Over the last few years we've done a monthly challenge hosted on the discussion forums for a 1-Hour Design Challenge. For December, we asked our talented pool of forum participants to redesign Santa's Sleigh.

Congratulations to this month's winner from "Somewhere Over the Rainbow":

BIG COUNTRY, aka ClayVon Lowe
Our first official entry for this 1HDC grabs the prize with some classic rapid viz techniques by allowing the viewer a chance to fully understand the thought process behind his ideas.

The 9 reindeer have been replaced by 4 reindrones...and we've changed a couple of key names...Rudolph...no more...he's Drudolph...Santa Claus changed his name to Santa Draws, and he now has a full staff of industrial designers to help the elves with product development.

Instead of tending to 9 reindeer all year long, Santa can now tweet, facebook, and join in all the human games. That's right. The ReinDrones are now in charge of keeping an eye on who's naughty or nice all year round. They see you when you're sleeping, they see you when you're awake, and they monitor your status updates....lol.

ReinDrone features
-electromagnetic ball and sockets all for linking and connection to the sleigh
-LED headlamps mounted on front of engine.
-Wing mounted skis for water landings (designed with global warming in mind)
-All wheels in landing gear snap in (just for old times sake)

Sleigh features
-Lead Headlamp Assembly
-Automatic sliding doors
-Step incorporated in the skis
-Navigated by an iPad app.

And our special mentions:

Mike Serafin
While the judge believes a Santa sleigh with tank treads could add to the mystique of how Santa delivers all those toys in one night, it is already hard enough for parents to explain flying reindeer. His quick visual skills, however, deserve some mention!

Santa's Arctic Cat with train-like trailer capabilities, candy candy navigation, and peppermint exhaust.

Choto and Petl
These two got a little carried away with the amount of time on their entry, but both showed a silhouette technique on their concepts that deserves a second look.

CHOTO - The SANTA MANTA. Long story short Santa is getting sick of NORAD's yearly Santa Tracker

PETL - Anakin sold his pod racer forward turbines to Santa, who wanted to have something with a little more torque & volume than actual Skis+Reindeers.

Drilling holes into wood at an angle is a pain in the neck. To avoid deflecting the bit you need to set up some kind of angle jig, which means clamps and more time. Or you can try free-handing it: I had a buddy who could drill pretty decent pocket holes by initially using a too-large bit to make a shallow crater in the surface of the wood, then going into the crater at an angle with a smaller bit, but I was never able to do this consistently well.

A Rhode Island-based company called Bad Dog Tools has developed an innovative drill bit that can start out drilling straight, and then drill at an angle, during the same action. It's called the Rover Bit and it's freaking amazing:

Portland-based industrial designer Tory Orzeck has careers at both GE Plastics and Nike under his belt. He also founded his own ID firm, Fuse, which has done projects for the likes of Herman Miller and Gerber. But for his latest project, Orp, Orzeck is turning to Kickstarter to create a safety device for cyclists.

In 2007, a young cyclist and art student was killed in Orzeck's home base of Portland. She was in the blind spot of a cement truck, stopped at a red light. As the light turned green and both began to move, the truck made a right turn, towards the cyclist, who was crushed and killed.

That got Orzeck thinking about the problem of bicyclists' relative invisibility on the road, and what he could design to solve that. But thinking outside of the box, he realized increasing visibility was only part of the solution; he ought to incorporate sound—loud, high-decibel sound—to alert a motorist to a cyclist's presence in the event of an emergency.

Here's Orzeck himself explaining his resultant design solution, the Orp:

At press time the Orp had clocked $38,000 out of a $90,000 target, with 27 days left to pledge. Get in on it here.

Just over a week ago, the NYC Department of Transportation announced a much-needed update to street signs throughout Manhattan, an ongoing effort to simplify the unforgivingly opaque verbiage of current signage.

The 6,300 signs that DOT will replace in Midtown and Lower Manhattan include 3,300 commercial parking signs and 3,000 other signs for nighttime and weekend parking for the general public, hotel and taxi stands, street cleaning and no standing areas. The new signs reduce the number of characters needed to explain the rules from 250 to about 140, making the sign appear less visually cluttered while reducing five-foot-high signs by about a foot. The new design also places the day of the regulation before the hours of the regulation, eliminating abbreviations and retaining all necessary parking information while making it easier to read.

Once again, JSK—Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, for the uninitiated—turned to Pentagram for their graphic design prowess as the DOT hopes to build on the success of their previous collaboration with the design firm, the previously-seen "LOOK" campaign... or, as Pentagram Principal Michael Bierut speculates, perhaps they were just chagrined by this Louie C.K. non sequitur:

(Fans can watch the second part here.)

I'm kidding, of course—longtime New Yorkers are well aware that it can take years for initiatives to work their way through the bureaucratic labyrinth of lobbyists and legislators. It so happens that this particular proposal dates back to 2011, when City Council Member Daniel J. Garodnick asserted his commitment to "syntactic clarity" in the public sphere; of the new signs, he dryly notes that "You shouldn't need a Ph.D in parking signage to understand where you are allowed to leave your car in New York."

If you were to hear the phrase "glass floor," you'd probably picture something like this, right? Like a glass-bottomed boat, except that you're actually inside, and you're not sitting next to someone's seasick cousin, and you mostly just have a view of your downstairs neighbor's mismatched furniture and it's kind of awkward to see them hanging out all of the time, especially when you catch them looking at the bottom of your feet or the loose change and dust bunnies under your couch. In fact, it sounded cool at first but now it doesn't seem like a very good idea at all. And that's not even considering the corollary that "one man's glass floor is another man's glass ceiling," which seems vaguely related to the fact that skirts and dresses wouldn't be options for women who live in houses with glass floors.

But wait: you assumed that by "glass floor," I meant "clear floor," which isn't necessarily the case. Indeed, a new flooring product from Germany's ASB Systembau GMBH boasts a semi-opaque ceramic finish to the effect that "the floor does not reflect too much to be a distraction but still gives a slight reflection which compares to the effect marble has on the eye." Billed as "the most advanced flooring system in the world," the ASB GlassFloor is a system in which reinforced glass panels are set on an aluminum substructure that can be embedded with lighting elements.

Originally designed for squash courts, the surface is designed to emulate hardwood courts with the advantage of flexible lane lines and markings for multipurpose gymnasiums, meeting European regulations for a variety of indoor sports, from badminton to volleyball. However, I was most interested to learn that the ASB GlassFloor can display video as well. "Video messages or scoreboards under the floor are only the beginning. The whole surface can be turned into one big screen. The possibilities for presentation and advertising are as versatile and innovative as ever seen before."

But the visual aspect isn't the only selling point of the flooring system: the company duly notes the durability of the panels, developed by longtime glass manufacturer Kinon Porz.

The floor is made from tempered security glass and can withstand enormous impact. The panels are made from two specially-treated glass plates held together by a 2mm PVB safety layer. The glass panels can be produced to a size larger than 2×2 metres and make the floor longer lasting than any conventional floor. This is why in 2007 we have been able to install the first open air squash court on a cruise ship, withstanding the impact of sea water and perpetual movement over years.

The surface of the glass undergoes several special treatments to achieve ideal elasticity, friction and reflection of light. After years of extensive testing we have reached a result where the floor does not reflect too much to be a distraction but still gives a slight reflection which compares to the effect marble has on the eye. Also deflection and friction of the floor achieve equal or better results than conventional sport floors. The floor is ISO and EN certified. The same treatment that ensures the dim reflection also causes scratches to remain invisible. The surface can be in almost any colour you like. The colour of the floor is determined by special foil coat applied to the bottom of the floor and can be changed even after years.

Design Director
E. & J. Gallo Winery
Modesto, California

E. & J. Gallo Winery is seeking a Design Director who will serve as a creative leader and mentor to conceptualize, develop and implement innovative design strategy that sets or adheres to brand equities (Packaging, POS and all supporting creative functions) for an assigned business unit. He or she will support the overall efforts and strategic vision set by the creative services department leadership team by directing the creative team designers (designers, design managers and design director), establishing budgets and presenting high priority projects to senior management.

With the EARLYBIRD Deadline only 2 weeks away, we are excited to unveil this year's Core77 Design Awards Jury Captains! Although these individuals need no introduction, we are honored and thrilled to have them lead the charge for this year's design awards program!

Enter your project by JANUARY 31st and receive 20% off for the Earlybird Deadline!

The Core77 Design Awards proudly offers 17 progressive categories honoring the richness of the design profession and its practitioners. From Consumer Products to DIY, Service Design to Writing & Commentary, the Core77 Design Awards provides designers, researchers and writers a unique opportunity to communicate the intent, rigor and passion behind their efforts. We also offer 15 designated student sections within our 17 categories. And with globally distributed jury teams, the individuals who will be considering your work are expert practitioners in the field.

Today we're announcing jury captains from FIVE more of our categories. Stay tuned in the next week as we share our full Jury Captain lineup! Without further ado:

Don't forget to Register today for updates and ENTER by January 31st to receive 20% off in our EARLYBIRD DEADLINE!

In Part 1 of The Quest for an Affordable Dust-Collecting Cyclone, I got one of the facts backwards; luckily Stuart Deutsch (newly-minted PhD in Materials Science and Engineering, congrats Stu!) over at ToolGuyd wrote in to set the record straight. I'd incorrectly stated that "most of the dust (and particularly the fine particles) gets sucked away by the vortex," but in fact it's the reverse. As Deutsch points out,

Generally, cyclones are more efficient at separating out larger and heavier debris and particles. In terms of woodworking, they're better at trapping chips, shavings, and coarse particles, than lighter and finer dust that often continues on to the dust collector or shop vacuum anyways. Still, separators do greatly cut down on dust collector/shop vacuum maintenance.

Deutsch has also written a more extensive explanation of how dust cyclones work, and in our correspondence, kindly pointed the way towards two other DIY dust cyclone options:

The first, which is pictured at the top of this entry, is the Mini Cyclone Bucket Dust Collector, an Instructable written by a guy named Steli. Parts will run you about US $25 and it's "easy to build in a weekend." Steli lives in Europe, and when American readers commented that they couldn't find the common-in-Europe funnels in the size specified by Steli's design, he came up with an interesting suggestion:

"Buy an emergency street/traffic cone, and cut it down to your diameter size and length."

Industrial design students and pros alike will appreciate Martin Esteva's form studies: Like his endlessly imaginative kindred spirit George Yoo, Esteva conjures compellingly three-dimensional abstractions from pixels, flexing his software prowess in generating science-fiction-y yet organic forms.

However, Esteva actually brings the renderings to life, going so far as to actually make 3D models of the abstract forms.