A trommel, also called a rotary screen, is used to separate materials. As the barrel spins, smaller materials are sifted through the screen while the bigger stuff stays in the middle.
This fellow on YouTube needed a way to separate rocks from dirt. Using "a 1/4 HP motor [purchased] on Craigslist for $25, some rusty bike rims, cheap 2x4's and automotive belts," he built this in a single day:
Last year Infiniti produced the Prototype 9, a retro-futuristic concept based on 1930s racecar designs. This year their creative team is again flexing their design muscles with the electric Prototype 10, which continues with the future-past theme, albeit advanced by several decades; this car takes its cues from 1960s roadsters.
Introduced last week at the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance, the Prototype 10 is the first project produced under the direction of Karim Habib, Infiniti's new Executive Design Director. (The Prototype 9 project was led by Nissan's Senior Vice President for Global Design, Alfonso Albaisa, whom we profiled here.) "For us, Prototype 9 evoked the thrill and drama of early open-wheeled racing, and Prototype 10 represents another passion project for our designers," says Habib. "This idea of 'looking back to go forward', and combining the inspiration of an earlier aesthetic with future technology, lets us show how excited we are about the era of electrification."
Speaking of electricity, what's really shocking is how quickly the car was designed and produced--the development time was reportedly just four months. This was accomplished by exploiting time zones and essentially yielding a 24-hour work cycle. Habib is based at Infiniti's design center in Japan where, at the end of the workday there, he could pass the baton to the company's UK-based designers. Fabrication took place in yet a third time zone, at Infiniti's North American design base in San Diego.
As the Prototype 10 shows, it is an exciting time to be a car designer. Cutting-edge digital tools and teammates spread across the world have allowed them to work as never before, and the mandate to create vehicles visually distinct from combustion-engine cars has provided a thrilling leeway to designers. (Read our interview with Jaguar's Wayne Burgess on their I-Pace for more on this subject.) As Infiniti explains:
Where the Prototype 10's unbroken, skyward-facing surfaces reflect the uninterrupted nature of electric motor power delivery, the bodywork itself is punctuated by geometric lines. These lines reference the shock of sudden acceleration enabled by a powertrain, which can instantly deliver 100% of available torque with a push of the accelerator pedal. Straight lines give added definition to the grilles at the front of the car, and the side strakes that plunge into the rear wheel arches. The cooling ducts in the open-air cockpit – one behind the driver, one in place of a passenger seat – are also characterized by their sharp geometry, with their very structure appearing to take the form of an electrical pulse. The upright fin behind the driver's head carves into the rear deck of the car, with razor-sharp forms also evident in the design of the triangular rear light.
"Our electric vehicle architecture represents a turning point for our design teams, a chance to present alternative proportions with different shapes," says Infiniti President Roland Krueger. "This new design language prioritizes clean, efficient lines with which we can articulate a new, confident design language."
My most depressing product design loss happened two years ago, when I accidentally broke one of my Norlan whisky glasses while washing it in the sink. (Borosilicate glass is both fragile, and very slippery when wet.) I paid good money for a set of four of those, and in a moment of carelessness went down to three.
I never got around to replacing it, but perhaps I will with Norlan's latest offering, again designed by Sruli Recht. Whereas the original Norlan was designed for those who like their Scotch neat, they've now released the Rauk, a tumbler for those who want it on ice.
"Both the Rauk's interior and exterior are formed from machine-pressed molten crystal with a five-part mold. The precision-molded base rests on four crystal points, which gives it the illusion of hovering. It was designed to hold cocktails as its multi-chevron cross-shaped extrusions provide friction points for gripping ingredients used in muddled drinks."
This is a good example of design reaching into every last corner of a vehicle.
For most pickup truck designers, the tailgate is just a dumb piece of metal with two jobs: Stay open or stay closed. But for the 2019 Sierra pickup truck, the design team at GMC really took a hard look at how people use their vehicles, then designed this clever six-function MultiPro Tailgate:
Here's a closer look, which reveals a nifty feature not shown in the video above: A flip-out handle that makes it easier to climb in and out of the bed.
So will it actually stand the test of time? We'll have to wait until some long-term reviews come in. But it is refreshing to see auto designers seeking to improve previously unaddressed vehicle areas.
"Character Lab Playbooks" is the winner of the Design Education Initiative Award in the 2018 Core77 Design Awards.
Character strengths like generosity and grit, growth mindset and self-control, curiosity and compassion help children blossom into happy, healthy, productive, and pro-social adults. We know that character development is much needed in the world today—adults without character abuse people and power; they focus on their own interests rather than making the world a better place.
Is it possible to teach character? Recent scientific studies answer unequivocally: Character can be cultivated.
Teachers know that school can—and should—be a place not only to raise test scores but also to practice goodness. For the 22 million students in middle school and high school, adolescence is a pivotal time to develop character. Yet teaching it can be profoundly difficult.
The challenge, then, is to find scientifically sound strategies to develop character. In other words: to bring the best of education together with the best of psychological science.
At Character Lab, design bridges that gap. The result is Playbooks. Playbooks are suites of resources that cultivate specific character strengths. They include videos, lesson plans, and student activities, all free-of-charge for any teacher to use in the classroom.
Our design process starts with two things. First, scientific findings: the recent studies that have isolated key levers for improving character. Second, user needs: the time constraints, wishes, and barriers teachers face in developing character. We conduct user interviews: How do they think about character development? What resources do they use in class now? Is character development a separate activity or rather, as we heard, "the brush with which they paint" their entire day? We dive into the science to learn the key inclusion criteria. If research is conducted in controlled experiments, how can we package evidence for dissemination in the real world?
Our team blends designers, psychologists, and educators—in house and in the field. Co-founder and CEO Angela Duckworth, a psychologist and MacArthur Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, with co-founder and veteran educators Dave Levin and Dominic Randolph, created the Character Lab vision, where Playbook product design team is led by Design Director Kate Clayton. Our work is supported by the generosity (character!) of the Bezos Family Foundation, John Templeton Foundation, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and other individuals and organizations who are committed to the development of our students, our communities, our nation, and our world.
Character development is not one-size-fits-all. To create Playbooks that serve all types of students and educators, we partner with a teachers in district, charter, independent, and parochial schools. Ethnography led us to co-create downloadable and digital classroom materials. In their first five months, Playbooks have already reached over half a million students.
Martin Luther King Jr. said, "Intelligence plus character—that is the goal of true education." Our goal through Playbooks is to make this vision a reality.
Our first Playbook, WOOP, which stands for Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan, is a self-control strategy for achieving goals. We all have wishes; students wish for things like getting an A, making the basketball team, getting into college. To achieve wishes, popular culture tells us to "think positive" and "work hard," but research by our collaborator Dr. Gabriele Oettingen tells us that we're more effective if we first visualize the positive outcomes of our wishes, then imagine the obstacles that stand in the way, and plan a way to surmount them. In 20 years of research studies, WOOP has been proven to help people accomplish goals.
To translate this evidence into practice, each element of our Playbook either teaches students the key elements of the science or has them experience the character strength, to develop lasting effect. For example, to teach the science, our animation video describes the premise of WOOP. This animation, which we created with the London animation studio that made Apple health's iPhone videos, was shown in a pilot to 100 high school and middle school students. After watching the video, students were 7 times more likely to consider obstacles and plans as key elements to achieving goals.
On the experiential side, the student activity takes students through the steps of articulating their own wish and outcome, imagining the obstacles they'll face, and creating a specific plan. Teachers benefit from the Playbook through an improved student body mindset: "The best part of WOOP is that the students think about their obstacles and "try harder" can't be an answer to their problem. They need to come up with a tangible solution. I'm happy that they are getting into the mindset of figuring out a way to overcome an obstacle. That practice in itself is priceless."
Our second Playbook, Build Connections, helps students develop curiosity. It's obvious that when we enjoy a subject, we're more involved and excited to learn, which creates a virtuous cycle. Why aren't students excited about schoolwork? It's usually that they don't see relevance to their lives. Teachers often try to give examples of relevance, like how cooking and fractions relate; but unless a student relates to that example, this tactic doesn't work. The work of our collaborator Dr. Chris Hulleman has shown that it's more effective when students build their own connections to school—starting with things they're already interested in, like video games, or fashion. The Playbook activities achieve multiple goals: teaching teachers that it's important for the student to generate the connection, and for students to have the opportunity to feel and act on those connections. In research studies, students who built their own connections took more classes in the subject, got better grades, were more likely to major in the topic, and persisted in these majors throughout college. One of the most exciting findings is that the students who benefit most from Build Connections are those who don't expect to succeed. Students who have used the Playbook have said they loved the activity because "I did not think was possible…(that) some of my interests could relate to what we study in class." Teachers additionally benefit from the stickiness of the material through connections: "My students made powerful connections to their future... I was thrilled with the depth of my students' knowledge."
Playbook elements include Pixar-style animation videos to give the teacher and student a joint understanding of the science; overview descriptions, to give the teacher the nuggets of the science in soundbites that they can easily share with their principals and other teachers (the best methods of sharing resources, we discovered, is through teacher word-of-mouth); prep activities that help teachers discover the baseline of student knowledge and abilities, and student activities wherein students can experience character development. We iterate each of these elements again and again with different teachers and different classrooms of students. Sometimes they give us large, structural redesign suggestions, and sometimes specific comments, like word choice and cultural examples that resonate in their classrooms.
Teachers also helped us understand the important criteria that Playbooks need to be adaptable and modifiable. Some teachers want to download plug-and-play materials; others want to make it their own, with personalized nuance. We think about our designs as guardrails: What elements are important to keep to be allegiant to the science, and which parts are OK for a teacher to riff on? Eventually, we hope that our materials are just a launch pad: eventually the teacher won't have to refer to them, as they master the elements of the research and can integrate it as their own.
After each Playbook release, we continue to add additional resources to support teachers in their work. Later phases of Playbooks include additional examples that how students use elements in a range of classes, like in Algebra I, World History, or AP Biology. We also continue to add foreign language translations: Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, Portuguese, and French to date. To continue educator engagement in refining and creating new Playbooks, we have a Slack community for teachers to communicate with us and each other, and a call to action through our Playbook Educators group on our website, which enlists teachers to prototype and be interviewed and shadowed by our design team.
One of the most exciting aspects about Playbooks is that they focus on behavior change: the thoughts, actions, and intentions that students can learn in school and carry throughout through their lives. We plan to continue to roll out multiple Playbooks each year, and as new scientific insights arise, designing knowledge into usable materials to benefit all children.
NiCE Ltd. is seeking motivated industrial designer to join our family. We are an internationally renowned branding and packaging design studio with a foundation built on design mastery and a passion for delivering creative solutions. The ideal candidate has to be best in class with
View the full design job hereThe last time we heard from British bike-rack makers back in 2016 we were in two minds as to whether their super light-weight, easy-fit, carbon-frame pannier system was an ingenious innovation or an answer to a problem that shouldn't need solving—should we really be carrying luggage on lightweight bikes not really designed for the task? Fast-forward just over two years and it seems that the Bristol-based brand have proved their concept with a successful Kickstarter campaign, numerous 5-star reviews and awards (hello RedDot 'Best of The Best') and a business that now appears to be shipping globally.
We couldn't help notice that Tailfin have returned to the crowd-funding arena this summer with a new product that actually seems to answer some of the questions we had for the original concept. If Tailfin's original 'T1' system was the reimagining of pannier racks for bikes across the spectrum, the new Aeropack—currently smashing it's £20,000 goal on Kickstarter (already up to over £140,000 at time of writing, with a couple of days still to go)—is the same principle applied to the seat post-mounted 'seat-pack'. In a similar vein to the first launch, the new product provides what looks like an exceptionally stable, secure and streamlined way to carry the essentials. The new product seems to have the same precision engineering and attention to design detailing that characterized its predecessors.
Whilst right-tool-for-the-job purists might still discuss whether this new launch is just another attempt to fit storage in places where it might not be best suited, the product's Kickstarter campaign shares the helpful (if quite extreme!) use-case of trans-continental racer Ben Davies (interesting longer form interview with the man here). The story goes that Ben was regularly switching between Tailfin's pannier systems and smaller, but less sturdy seat-packs—the latter being practical, but prone to lolling and 'tailwagging' when filled. He approached Tailfin with the idea of making a product that was the best of both worlds and found that Tailfin founder Nick Broadbent was already on the same wavelength.
The Aeropack comes in three flavors. The 'carbon' and 'alloy' racks offer the complete package with bag and rack integrated in one (below)—the carbon, of course, being the lighter and pricier of the two. The 'trunk' is bag only package, complete with gubbins that allows it to connect to the original Tailfin T1 rack.
We look forward to seeing if Aeropack lives up to the promise. In the meantime, there might still be time to back the product on their Kickstarter.
This interview is part of a series featuring the presenters participating in this year's Core77 Conference, "Now What? Launching & Growing Your Creative Business" , a one-day event aimed to equip attendees with tangible skills and toolkits to help produce and promote their products or services.
From one-off product launches to marketing for small firms, crowdfunding has become a norm in the design world. If you've ever wondered where the Kickstarter bug first bit the design community, look no further than Chicago-based designer and illustrator, Craighton Berman, who was one of the first designers to ever launch a product on the platform. What started with the launch of a single product eventually lead to the Kickstarter launch of his full-fledged design brand, Manual. Now, Craighton has a multifaceted relationship with Kickstarter that even includes a published informational zine. In addition to his Kickstarter endeavors, Craighton also does illustration work that's been loved by the design community for years, including past work for Core77 and more recently his Instagram account, @no_commercial_value.
We sat down with Craighton, who will be leading one of his popular Kickstarter Project Jam workshops at the 2018 Core77 Conference, to learn about starting his own firm, how he manages multiple creative platforms at once and what Kickstarter can mean for the design community.
Working in innovation opened my eyes to the diversity of what designers can do. We were basically doing design thinking consulting work, so sometimes I was doing work that resembled industrial design, but other times I wasn't. That opened my mind to the fact that designers don't always need to be doing hardcore product design, unless that's what they absolutely want to be doing.
I also realized that drawing in my certain style didn't always match with what is expected in the industrial design world. But when I was in innovation, it made a lot of sense because I was able to bring ideas to life really quickly and visualize ideas that weren't even products—like services or experiences. At the end of the day, it's all visual communication, right? It's about taking an idea and quickly communicating it. When I realized I have a skillset that is desired across a lot of different industries, it opened the door for me to make it a consulting business.
When you work in an innovation firm, you're not necessarily doing a lot of physical design work, so I ended up entering a lot of design competitions and working on stuff for New York Design Week on the side. I launched a ceramic salt and pepper set on Kickstarter in 2010 while I still had a full-time job. Over time, I went independent, and then I formed this brand called Manual. Now I pretty much only make products for Manual. I find designing for my own brand super exciting because there's always so much to do.
Having a brand name and not my name on Manual is one of the most obvious separations. I realized I had to do that at a certain point. For the first two years I was independent, I produced objects, did my consulting work and my cartoon work all under my name. There are arguments either way, whether you should keep everything under the same umbrella and embrace it, or whether you should split it up. I decided after a while that it made sense to split it up. That way, Manual could eventually work with other designers and produce products as a brand instead of under my name.
And then vice versa, by having Craighton Berman not necessarily tied to Manual, I can do some projects where I criticize design and consumerism through No Commercial Value. To keep that distance from Manual is probably healthy. I don't know how healthy it is for my clients on the illustration side, but I think it's all in good fun, and I think the bigger story with No Commercial Value—at least if I'm going to spin it towards something that's a little more commercial—is the idea of ongoing ideation. I pretty much work on ideas for No Commercial Value every day. This kind of outlet has been super exciting, and I think a whole new side of my practice is finally opening back up again.
I was actually the first designer to launch a product on Kickstarter, so at the time, there wasn't a lot of orthodoxy about what you're supposed to do. I launched the ceramic salt and pepper set i mentioned before, and it ended up being super successful. Then things kind of blew up from there.
"I don't want to become a financial strategist, but as a designer it is super exciting that you can very directly play with numbers and make a project or maybe even a business that works."
You learn a lot of valuable information through successfully launching something and shipping even two dozen or even a hundred of something. I knew I was addicted right away because from the beginning, Kickstarter felt like it really worked with the way I've always wanted to work in design. It's immediate in that there is a lot of design work in preparation—getting suppliers, all those kinds of things set up—but once you've done that, there is the whole communication part of it and making a budget that works. I'm not afraid of a spreadsheet—they're like a prototype to me. If you make them right, you can play with them and learn from them. I don't want to become a financial strategist, but as a designer it is super exciting that you can very directly play with numbers and make a project or maybe even a business that works.
When Manual's first coffee maker had a super successful launch, that caught the attention of University of Illinois Chicago who offered me a Kickstarter class to teach. I'm really interested in applied design and don't have a master's degree, so it was perfect. The class is called Entrepreneurial Product Development. Instead of talking about what entrepreneurship is, we would just fucking do it. Within the first semester, the students would conceive an idea, find a way to get it manufactured locally, get quotes, build a business model, document, take photos, create the storytelling, the video, all the stuff for the campaign, and then get it all ready to go. As soon as they come back from winter break, they launch the project. Most of them were funded within 30 days. For the rest of the spring semester, they worked on manufacturing and shipping. We met once a week, so you literally had to come up with your idea within two or three classes, and then you had to have a manufactured product within six or seven classes. It was intense.
Through doing that class, I got to know some more folks at Kickstarter. They had a thought leaders program, and they asked me to be a part of it. That was pretty low key, but it also had some pretty cool opportunities come out of it. I took a break from teaching this year just because I had too much on my platter, but it's a lot of knowledge to waste away, so I put together a 52-page zine that explains how you should go about launching a Kickstarter as a designer. Kickstarter helped fund and promote that, which is awesome.
With Kickstarter Project Jams, I have people come out to my studio, and we talk high level about some of the stuff to think about when launching a project through Kickstarter. We spend the majority of the time taking people's ideas and playing with them, brainstorming and critiquing them. A lot of people graduate from design school and lose that crew that you can shoot ideas around with. Maybe you get feedback online or have some friends that are designers and still want to do that, but a lot of people "grow up" and don't want to do that anymore. They want to go to bars and watch sports or whatever. But it's still a lot of fun to just shoot the shit about ideas that could maybe be something.
Some people show up with prototypes and are definitely going to make them happen. Some people just have a half-assed idea they want to think through with people. It's been a super cool, really supportive environment. Everyone really wants to help each other out and share resources, so I'm excited to keep doing them.
Especially getting feedback from people who aren't your friends. If I don't know someone, I'm willing to be a little bit more honest with them. A lot of times I'll post something on Instagram, and of course I'll get a lot of likes and people say, "That's so great. I'd totally buy that." But when it comes down to it, they may, or they may not.
I think the biggest one is that people expect it to be a pit of money—that you just go there, throw up your project and money rains on you. Every time I run a campaign I remind myself that you have to have people that are interested in your work ahead of time and that outreach is crucial as soon as the campaign starts. It's your life for 30 days, but a lot of people might not even know about it. You have to work hard to rise above all the noise on the internet and really get people to pay attention.
Tied to that whole notion of a money pit, a lot of people overreach for their first Kickstarter and think they want to do something really audacious. I'm a big fan of trying out something small first. It doesn't make it any less of a project if it's not $100,000 or half a million. You can learn so much from raising $5,000 to $10,000, and it inspires you to reach a little further the next time. The goal for my Kickstarters is to always break even in a way. I profit in product, meaning I'll have product to sell afterwards that's in inventory because I want to keep producing a line. I think too many people look at the model of the grand slam million dollar project as if that's the way it has to be, but I'm a big fan of low and slow.
I like to remind people that the cool thing about Kickstarter is that you can not only fund a project but also learn and do research. Essentially you are doing a more intense focus group where instead of just asking, "Would you buy this for $30?" and you get a bunch of people that say, "Oh yeah, sure," you actually have people following through by using their credit card if they like the project enough. Taking risks or just trying things out is okay because if something doesn't work out, you can always relaunch it. It's like that stupid ass cooler that I think is still the biggest project ever funded on Kickstarter. I love it from a design perspective, but it failed the first time, and then they relaunched it and did really well.
Designers love to test things out and prototype, and if we think of a Kickstarter the same way it can become something a little more experimental. Just recently, Oscar Lhermitte started Quickstarter, which had a similar manifesto tied to it. Basically, cut the bullshit. Come up with a creative small project, get it together really quickly and get it out there. Let's go back to the core of just trying to get creative projects out there and keep it real simple.
Manual focuses on design for slow food, so I'm interested in ways to celebrate rituals around food, repetition and things we do every day—thinking about food, where it comes from and how you work with it. We've been focused on that for at least five years, so I had the itch to broaden that vision a bit.
I've done furniture in the past, but I've never had the right outlet for it, so Stool Nº1 is a design I've had for a while. I found a way to make it locally at a pretty good price, and it's a good chance to experiment with launching furniture on Kickstarter. It's a good test to see how much I can stretch the brand that way. It's going pretty well.
I worry a lot because it's very different from all the other small consumer product campaigns I've done. My past products might be a little expensive, but you still get the whole experience for around $100. In this case, you generally need more than one stool. If you're going to put them at a breakfast bar or something, you'd have at least two, and if you have a bigger home you could have four. They're a little under $200 a piece, so they're quite a bit more expensive. It's way more than I've ever asked for in the past.
Learning how people engage with that has been interesting. My approach to marketing this has been a little bit different because I don't think blasting every single influencer and blog and media outlet is the way this is going to grow. I think I need to nurture relationships with people I know that would be interested, including restaurants. There's a coffee shop locally that's about to open up that's going to have six of them in their shop, so it's about exploring new avenues. This may or may not be the same audience as some of our other products. Like I said, the cool thing about Kickstarter is the chance to try out ideas and see how they sit and how they fit. If it goes well, and I think it will, then I think it's something that could grow within Manual. It may not end up always being a Kickstarter launch for different variation, but launching this way is a great chance to learn.
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You want to start a creative business. Now What? Come to our 2018 Core77 Conference to learn more about launching & growing a product line or design studio of your own, October 25th, in Brooklyn!
Learn more about Stool Nº1 here. The campaign still has 4 days left to pledge!
Casper is seeking a passionate, creative and human-centered Senior Industrial Designer to join our San Francisco studio. We’re looking for someone who wants to help build our brand vision by crafting delightful objects with great form and function. We have a broad and ambitious development pipeline that spans soft goods,
View the full design job hereA buddy of mine used to work for the MTA, and he had a special Metrocard for MTA employees that was in a different color. It was so cool, like a talisman that only behind-the-scenes folks were awarded.
Now there's something similar for Citibike's assisters. To redistribute bikes around the city, the bike share program relies on some 35,000 volunteer Bike Angels, who contribute their time in exchange for riding credit. Citibike administrator Motivate contracted Tomorrow Lab, a hardware innovation studio, to provide these Bike Angels with their version of an exclusive Metrocard:
"Every Bike Angel gets a key to unlock bikes at the stations. The original key is a white plastic tag, but Citi Bike wanted to upgrade to something more special. Over the past few months, the redesigned key has gone through several iterations.The final design will be sent to hundreds of Bike Angels who have accrued enough points through volunteer service. The keychain has a sleek engraved steel base, featuring unique portions of the New York City street map in the trademark Citi Bike shade of blue. We're calling it The Steel Angel Key."
The Steel Angel Key is emblazoned with segments of a map of New York City over an engraved steel base. Want one? Sign up for the Bike Angels program here.
It's easy for us industrial designers to have love/hate relationships with engineers. We want them to clean up our tooling drawings, sure, but we hate when they make changes without telling us, and we often dismiss them as not "getting" design, or UX, or aesthetics. If engineers had the final say, we tell ourselves, every housing would have sharp corners, every mechanism would be overly complicated, every operation would require three times as many steps.
But those are all broad, sweeping generalizations. There are plenty of design-minded engineers out there, and we should know--we recently met one out in the wild. Here's our Q&A with David Kleeman, Belkin's Director of Mechanical Engineering, on what the interplay of design and engineering was on their TrueClear Pro project (which we got a great look at here).
David Kleeman: An industrial designer wastes my ti--just kidding. We're a very design-centric company, which I really appreciate because I consider myself closer to that side than engineering in some respects. And we really do work very closely together, and very well together, I think.
[The design group's] role is helping us aspire to that greatness that we all want to achieve. We're all going for that kind of Apple aesthetic, seeking perfection, and they really help us define that. They're really good with identifying the usability issues of our mechanical designs.
I really want to stress that even on the engineering side here, we are very design-focused. There's a lot of surfacing stuff that we do here that I haven't really seen anyone else do outside of Apple. Things like curvature continuity, C2 surfacing, that kind of thing. The engineers here are very highly skilled at that--which makes it very hard for us to hire people, because that's not a very common thing for people out there.
A lot of our products are things we've either made before and are updating earlier versions; or we've made things similar to them; or at least have some idea of how to go about making it. For instance if you're making a wireless charger, you know what the electronics are going to be, that kind of thing. But with this particular use case--of an easy-to-use screen protector applicator--no one had any idea of how to apply this thing very precisely onto another thing. It seemed like a very significant engineering challenge, so it fell to us to come up with a mechanism.
[The Design group] is really good at keeping us aware and bringing us in early to provide some quote-unquote "reality" to their concepts, but for us to actually be leading was a new thing for us. It was a big challenge, so that was stressful, but at the same time, kind of a relief--there were no size constraints, no constraints on surfacing, shapes, costs. It was totally an open book, which was pretty exciting.
Yeah, that was a big part of our initial concept development, ideation sessions and brainstorming. We purchased and had all those products. We were very cognizant of patents, investigating what details of those things were patented in case we wanted to go down a similar road. But they all were really not very good. There were a lot of usability issues, the alignments were terrible. Studying these was more like "These are the things to not do."
We also did really high-in-the-sky concepting, crazy ideas like "It goes into this black box, and all this stuff happens on the inside, and it's under a vacuum, and there's a laser…." then we slowly dialed it down to more realistic directions.
So on a high level, the whole reason we went with four in the first place was because we didn't know if any of them would work. We had a fair amount of confidence in all of them based on engineering intuition and that we've been doing this for a while, but we really didn't know if they would work.
We quickly resolved around a way that the overlay itself would be constructed; we had as a team coalesced around this concept, and all four prototypes utilized the same overlay basis [for applying the protector], which really helped bring a cohesive nature to all of those designs.
Once we had that, it was really a matter of different ways to pull out that release liner bit, that extra plastic bit that applies the screen protector, and different ways to hold the phone in place, how to get the alignment perfect.
One of our concepts was a sort of pulling machine, that was derived from the thought that it would remove any sort of variability in how you pulled on this thing. So that a user who isn't familiar with the machine could just kind of rip on it from the side, not really knowing what it does. So that machine had a track on a rail with gearing, completely eliminating any kind of variability. There also, to be honest, was a bit of showmanship in that--it looked cool to operate, and whether that's necessary or not is up for debate, but we liked the whole action of it.
We had a smaller machine, the clamshell MX, that eventually ended up in the Apple Store. That was really about "How do we have a bespoke machine for a single phone that's as small as we possibly can get it." Get rid of all this gearing--can we figure out another way to pull this liner out, manually, while retaining the alignment?
Your favorite, the blood pressure cuff one, was definitely the craziest one. That one was about, "We don't wanna do any of this pulling stuff, we don't want to have any kind of sliding mechanism, we just wanna go with trying to mechanically recreate the 'taco' method that people do naturally while trying to apply a screen protector, but in a much more accurate way." Holding everything in a fixed position also worked really well.
The fourth concept was a sliding credit card type of a thing. That one worked really well, but there were some potential patent issues with a sliding roller deal, so we didn't really pursue that one further than our little prototypes.
It had batteries in it, powering a little motor in there that would cause it to inflate.
Well, we had those four, we got them all the way to a testable, prototype-able condition. Then there were a few key areas we needed to look at, alignment and getting rid of air bubbles under the screen protector and all that stuff. So we did a whole testing series on all of those. They all passed--which was a surprise. To be honest we were kind of depending on some of them not passing, to make it easier to eliminate some.
But they all passed. So then it really came down to, "What would be more appropriate for a store environment?" The air bladder, for instance, was great but it took a long time. It was cool to watch, but it was a lot of hitting this button, and watching it inflate, and waiting.
That credit card thing I alluded to earlier, it involved a lot of weaving this overlay within the machine--we didn't think it was as intuitive as some of the other ones, so we eliminated that.
So that left two concepts. One was the larger machine with the moveable cradles and the big pulling-action deal. That seemed to be really appropriate for a large telco. And then we had this smaller one that seemed appropriate for a phone supplier that only had a few phones. That's how we ended up with those two.
So from that point, we did a beta-alpha test out in the field. ID started to get more involved and it was about making this more palatable to a consumer, aesthetically anyway. We got into the tool and manufacturing aspects of it. ID was responsible for the look and the UX, and the consumer experience, which is a huge part of this, of course.
[Squinting] This one, if I look at it...should be…Yeah, it looks like it's within 0.1 millimeters. Zero-point-one millimeters, nine out of ten times, is what we're going for. And all of our testing has born that out.
We engineers all have calibrated eyes, and if I put my fingers together like this--I'm joking. We have an optical machine that measures it. But we do have these [eyeballing] nerd contests between ourselves.
Couple things. One, it seemed achievable. Zero-point-one millimeters is the thickness of a sheet of paper. We considered machining tolerances and figured we could get there nine times out of ten. We felt 0.1mm as acceptable for the size of the cutout around the home button and around the cameras and the speaker and all that. Prior to this machine, the tolerances were much larger because of the variability in human application. And we figured with 0.1, the consumer would be like "Okay, this fits very tightly around the home button, very tightly around the camera hole," that kind of thing. So it was partially engineering intuition and partially aesthetics.
When we did the alpha and beta testing and asked for negative feedback, we didn't get any, which was really surprising. This is a fairly low-volume product--it's going into stores, not directly to consumers--so a lot of it is machined to high tolerances, so there's not a lot of tooling errors.
But from our perspective, one thing that we did struggle with, and that I would like to see improved, is the sound of that little latch.
Yeah, it's a little bit too clacky. It'd be great if the sound of it was just a bit softer. And there is some stuff that we have fixed over time, like the opening of the flip lid--at times it's been too hard or too slow.
It's purely for the consumer impression of the experience. There were early samples that opened too fast and made the whole thing jump. That didn't make any difference to the functionality of it, but it did to the experience of it. We wanted this to be magical.
Yeah, I've definitely drank the Kool-Aid.
How much time do we have? This goes back to the whole ME vs. ID fight thing. They'll design something impossible, then we'll try to make it reality, then they'll be like "That's too big" or too whatever, and back and forth, back and forth.
Surely life would be easier if we just did what I told them to! But I definitely see the benefit of the ID-driven approach.
I'm still using those stupid white dongles to connect my minijack headphones to my iPhone 7.
Companies like Apple, with their outsized influence on the product design space, set the tone for the future direction of user experience. But because the company takes such leaps and bounds--getting rid of first floppy discs, then CDs, and ditching various connectors--consumers are always left in the lurch during that transition, where they need to mate old technology with Apple's latest gewgaw.
Into this breach rush third-party companies whose designers are tasked with making our lives easier, not in two years, but right now. A good example of this is Twelve South's PlugBug Duo, which piggybacks that all-precious traditional USB connectivity to a MacBook or MacBook Pro adapter.
The PlugBug Duo comes with five different plug adapters, so you international jetsetters will be covered no matter what weird configuration your latest destination has in their outlets.
I'll concede that Apple is usually ahead of the curve when it comes to their ditching of old technology and connectors--but it still irks me every time they make a change and leave me stuck. So I'm thankful that companies like Twelve South are there to fill the gap.
The Role A CMF Designer at Tesla’s Design Studio is responsible for the color, material, and finish design of future Tesla vehicles. As part of this team, you will be creating and executing world-class products in terms of form, function, and luxury.
View the full design job hereSomething every designer knows is that having less makes you more creative. In fact one of the first things we do when beginning a new project is to figure out what the constraints are; having those boundaries to bump up against forces us to innovate.
A particularly profound example of this, which every industrial design student should study, is how TPS--the Toyota Production System--and their kanban, a/k/a lean manufacturing/just-in-time manufacturing methodology, has influenced how things are made all around the world. Not just by Toyota, that is: I witnessed kanban practices during my visits to German power tool manufacturer Festool as well as Jonathan Ward's amazing Icon facility, and everyone from Pixar to Boeing to IBM has borrowed from TPS.
So what exactly is TPS, and why does it work so well? In this video, Bloomberg succinctly explains not only the system, but how it came about--as a result of having less resources:
What's more frustrating than having paid a premium to own an all-wheel-drive vehicle, and still getting stuck? Spinning all four wheels in either snow or mud is maddening, and you could often get free if just one or two of the wheels could get some purchase.
For this problem a simple, low-tech device exists: The Trac-Grabber Traction Device. It's portable, relatively quick and easy to install and looks quite effective:
The Trac-Grabber is sold in two-packs and four-packs, in both standard and XL sizes, the latter for oversized off-road tires.
This product should be a case study for first-year Industrial Design students: What useful item could you make out of webbing straps, a D-ring, some Velcro and a chunk of rubber? I call this good design.
I was organizing some stuff in the shop the other day and I came across one of my old sets of chisels. As a tool collector, I have lots of tools that I have never used. The the four sets of bench chisels detailed here are different. They reflect different times and my evolution as a woodworker.
The very first set of chisels I bought - back in the early 1980's - was for my first or second class at The New School (then known as The New School for Social Research, then New School University - some consultants said search engines would be more impressed by the name - and now simply The New School). This was before I met Maurice Fraser, my woodworking mentor. This chisel set very much reflected a beginner's needs. I bought the set of four Marples bench chisels at Garrett Wade, the legendary woodworking store on Spring Street in Manhattan.
I quickly got disenchanted with the Marples chisels. I am not sure why, but in retrospect I bet it's because I could not sharpen them properly. I just didn't know how; what might have seemed obvious to others was beyond my comprehension at the time.
Pretty soon after getting the Marples chisels, I went back to Garrett Wade and bought a nice set of twelve Iyori Oire-Nomi. I chose Japanese chisels because I had just read Toshio Odate's great book, "Japanese Woodworking Tools." It was pretty obvious that (in accordance with the old saying about being a poor workman) it was far easier to find fault with my tools than to actually figure out how to sharpen efficiently. The Oire-Nomi were my most expensive tool purchase up to that time. I carefully stripped the oak handles and then sanded and refinished them with Watco. I also stamped the size on each handle. Of course difference sized chisels have different width blades, but when I had stripped the handles I also removed the sticker on each chisel identifying the respective size, and I thought it was vital that I replace the sticker with another method of identification. To this day I have a memory of stamping the sizes on each chisel - and I did a pretty good job. I should probably acknowledge that I had bought a number stamp set at a local flea market and was most certainly just jonesing for something to stamp.
In the mid-1980's I started studying with Maurice Fraser. He had a set of Stanley 750's, possibly the most iconic of American style bench chisels. Naturally studying with Maurice made it clear that it was time to do some shopping. As Stanley 750's went out of production in 1962, this was a fine time to awaken my collecting gene. The assembly of my set took years, but as you can see all the chisels are in new or nearly new condition. One problem with the Japanese set I had is that the narrower chisels were almost square in section. This make cutting dovetails hard, and the 750's were a treat to use in comparison. Maurice taught me how to sharpen, which also influenced me as a woodworker and collector.
These are the chisels I used for twenty-five years. In that time I passed from an amateur woodworker/tool collector working in tech on Wall Street, to a guy who could get more tools directly from the manufacturer. When we started selling Japanese tools, I found that the chisels by Nishiki were the best I had ever used by any maker anywhere. So when for a short time we offered decorative chisels by Nishki, I decided to splurge and get myself a set of fancy dovetail chisels. These chisels have the longest edge retention of any chisel I have used, and are a joy to use. When I took a class with Toshio Odate in 2005, he made fun of the fact that the handles were made of Ebony, noting that the wood is brittle and hard on the hand. He's right. Setting the hoops was a nightmare because the Ebony would not soften. I ended up soaking the handle tops for hours and still had problems. But the Ebony transmits hammer blows very directly, a characteristic I like that very much. In retrospect, I would like to have a set of the Ashley Iles dovetail chisels. But aside from the samples in the shop -- that I use whenever I can -- I don't get much of a chance. They seem to sell out too fast for me to snag a set (customers always come first at TFWW).
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This "Tools & Craft" section is provided courtesy of Joel Moskowitz, founder of Tools for Working Wood, the Brooklyn-based catalog retailer of everything from hand tools to Festool; check out their online shop here. Joel also founded Gramercy Tools, the award-winning boutique manufacturer of hand tools made the old-fashioned way: Built to work and built to last.
I'm interested in finding awesome trivia bits you can bring up when your Tinder dates start to go south, and I just came across this gem:
According to Packaging Knowledge, in 1957 two engineers working out of a garage in New Jersey were trying to invent plastic wallpaper with a 3D texture. Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes succeeded in creating bubble wrap--but failed to sell it as 3D freaking wallpaper. Undeterred, the pair subsequently formed the Sealed Air Corporation and began selling their invention for packaging applications.
Obviously the Sealed Air Corporation is still alive and well today. Here's how they make the now-ubiquitous material that we all love to squeeze:
If the product had succeeded as wallpaper, wouldn't we all be constantly visiting each other's homes to pop as many bubbles as possible when the host is out of earshot? Even if you banned me from your house, I would break in at night and just ruin your living room.
Gantri received the Professional Winner Open Design Award in the 2018 Core77 Design Awards.
Gantri is a platform to create and buy modern designs that offer designers a simple way to bring new designs to market. Using Gantri's product framework, materials and components, designers can create production-ready 3D models. Gantri reviews, prototypes and tests designs to ensure quality. Completed designs are sold through the online shop and made using production-quality 3D printing.
Compared to the traditional design process, this model gives designers full creative freedom and drastically reduces time-to-market. This means individual designers can easily create their own design brand and sell directly to their audience with no middleman. Consumers get access to affordable original designs that wouldn't otherwise exist.
Gantri launched Table Lights in October 2017, the company's first product category. Since then, Gantri has worked with designers from the US, Italy, Colombia and more, bringing more than 20 original lights to market.
Table Lights is the first product category on the Gantri platform. It represents their vision for how premium designs can be developed, made and sold using digital technologies.
Each Gantri Table Light is a unique, original design by an independent designer or design studio. They all share the same materials and internal components, and are made using production-quality 3D printing. Every light is created on the Gantri platform and available for purchase online.
The process to create a new table light on Gantri is easily accessible through an online designer dashboard. There are 4 main steps. 1. Concept - the designer submits a thoughtful, original design idea that passes design quality and feasibility requirements. 2. Model - the designer creates a near-production 3D model of the design that integrates internal components. 3. Engineering - Gantri's engineers optimize, prototype and test the design to ensure quality and production reliability. 4. Content - Gantri photographs the design and prepares it for sale. Once the process is complete, the design is listed on the Gantri online shop and sold directly to the customer. The designer receives royalty on sales.
Thanks to digital technologies such as 3D modeling and 3D printing, the development timeframe is much shorter and the designer has a greater degree of freedom in realizing their own ideas. Since products are 3D printed and sold directly, Gantri can adjust production to live market conditions. This minimizes inventory, allowing Gantri to provide services to designers for free and sell products at more attainable prices.
In developing the platform behind Gantri Table Lights, the team created a new 3D printing process capable of producing high-quality parts. They also sourced and certified all components and materials. In addition, the in-house industrial design team created 3 original lights that form the Gantri Reference Design series, and made their 3D models freely available for designers to download.
We are looking for an exceptional product design intern to work alongside our Creative Director and Product Design Director developing products for our two in-house brands: STICKBULB, founded in 2012, is an award-winning collection of modular LED lights made from reclaimed wood. GRADUAL,
View the full design job here
