Last month at Core77's Third Wave conference, panel moderator, Leigh Christie of MistyWest, asked the audience how many of us in attendance had heard of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). Among the scores of professionals gathered there, only a smattering of hands went up. Christie reacted with noticeable surprise, then remarked on the increased stakes of the panel discussion about the UN SDGs that he was imminently moderating. I, too, was perplexed by the lack of awareness in the room. In this era of human-centered design, I've found that to be in the company of designers, is often to be in the company those who are looking for ways to better life (while surely they exist, I have not yet met a designer who is totally ambivalent to the impact of their work). It is not difficult to find designers who are keen to tackle issues like gender equality, accessible healthcare, ethical production, urban sustainability, clean energy, etc. All of which, are SDGs, (#5, #3, #12, #11, and #7, respectively).

The coincidence makes sense, as most of us are aware that there is much to be addressed in these areas. For much of the last century (at least), industrial design (along with the rest of industrial practice) has largely been unconcerned with the ways in which production has exploited humanity and has accelerated ecological collapse. The SDGs aim to channel our collective awareness towards the development of a future that is more sustainable, or hopefully less colossally destructive (because most of us don't have much of a choice at this point). In setting out their "supremely ambitious and transformational vision" for the world in 2030, the UN created this set of goals that nations, corporations, and even individuals might use as a map for our collective visions of the future. With that in mind the SDG, can be a guide, a language of collaboration, and even a basis for the future of industrial design practice.

Or better yet, present design practice. As many designers have already used the goals as guiding principles for their work. Among the panelists at that UN SDG discussion, designer, Sandra Moerch of SAP, made the point that focusing on a particular goal can often and inevitably lead towards design solutions that have broader benefits for people and society. For Moerch, empowering women, and advocating for rights internationally, is not only about gender equality, but it is also about bringing innovation to different industries and bringing about fair labor with economic growth (#5, #8, and #9). The goals give direction but are broad enough that they can enable creativity and exploration.

Within this framework, universities have also begun to observe the UN SDGs as tools for design education, and as a means of explaining the world that students are designing for. Currently, the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (KADK), in Copenhagen, is host to a design and architecture exhibition that asked students to design their projects in accordance with the UN SDGs. For the last 3 years, degree projects have been required to address the goals in some way, the school does so as a way of "systematizing" the sustainable projects students were already producing. Additionally, the school sees the application of these goals as a means of seeding a "a new Danish growth sector driven by innovative products, solutions and strategies for a sustainable lifestyle and societal arrangement."

Alisa Larsen's project "Vertical Life" proposes that biodiversity can be cultivated and facilitated by making space for plants and insects upon drainpipes in urban environments.

Emil Holck Reimert's project, "Gazelle" is focused on using old manufacturing techniques to ensure that the chair lasts longer, and is less susceptible "wear and tear."

Wooden joints are used to maintain the chair's strong structure.

This reasoning is exemplary of why having this set of goals for development can have far-reaching impact. Even if you are aware that these issues need to be addressed, using the language of the UN SDGs, can signal to other designers, other businesses, and investors, that the ideas outlined by the goals are critical to development going forward. The UN SDGs are ready-made for industrial designers. It is a set of problems to be solved. It is their scope, that requires our collective efforts to bring about meaningful action in these areas. At the very least, the goals can be a reminder. If you find yourself going through these goals and realizing your work exists outside of these hard-to-argue-with ideals, maybe its time you reexamine the future you're designing for.

Car modeling clay is typically used to create 1:1 prototypes of new car designs—one part of a development process that can cost upwards of a billion dollars. For designer Johanna Seelemann, this resource-intensive process represents a "non-rational focus on the way things look that drives modern over-consumption" and opposes the industry's efforts to become more sustainable.

When Seelemann first became fascinated with car modeling and the design process, she wondered: How does the designer know when to stop? Perhaps, she realized, the magic is in being able to keep going. As part of her graduate project at the Design Academy Eindhoven, Seelemann tapped into the adaptable qualities of modeling clay to develop a series of abstract, multi-purpose furniture pieces that are "stable but remain ever-transformable for the user."

"Industrial clay inherits the political weight of car design based on societal and economic dependencies. While the obsolescence of desirability is a driving motor for object evolution and corporate power, it can also tell the story of the human hand in the generation of mass-produced objects through a form of industrial craftsmanship that relies on the age-old art of sculpture," she explains in her project description. "By continually restyling it, an object will never be outdated."

Seelemann worked with automotive designer Daniel Rauch to develop five initial designs that evoke the lines and forms of a vehicle but can be adapted for multiple uses in the home. During DAE's graduation show held as part of Dutch Design Week from October 19 to 27, Seelemann and her collaborators put their concept to the test by continuously transforming the pieces on display throughout the run of the exhibition.

Sculpting clay is, of course, a highly-skilled task that won't be accessible to just anyone, but Seelemann's project proposes a fascinating take that's partly a critique of the automotive industry (and other forms of mass production) and part research project on the idea of aesthetic evolution and the future of adaptation.

I'm a native New Yorker and former die-hard urbanite. But now I've given the city up for good, and have permanently relocated to a rural farm in the American South. This "Free Range Design Observations" section will detail the design-related observations made as a result of this radical location change.

____________________________________

"Future of Transportation Designs" concepts, be they monorails, scooters, mag-lev trains, bike shares or autonomous cars, no longer hold any personal interest for me. Those things are mostly designed with cities in mind. Out here in the countryside, the population is spread far apart and the only way to get around is by car. With no cell service on our farm, I can't even get a nav signal until I'm a couple miles away.

Some of the driveways here are short, and you can see the house from the road. Other driveways are long stretches of gravel that twist out of sight, and you only know there's a house at the end because there's a mailbox at the front edge of it.

A lot of times it's easy to miss a destination here, even when the nav is working. And when you overshoot, you need a safe way to turn around, which isn't easy on a twisty country-two lane. If there's no visible traffic you can try risking a three-point turn, but there's no guarantee that a logging truck isn't going to come barreling around the bend when you're in the middle of it. So I prefer to keep going until I see someone's driveway, then use it to turn around, as it's marginally safer.

But some houses have signs like these prominently displayed in their driveway:

Additionally, some of those houses pair the signs with NO TRESPASSING signs, to really drive the message home.

Upon first seeing these, I asked my wife about them and she suggested it's just a way to express hostility. I was surprised that people would be willing to pay for, install and have to look at such ugly signs as they return home from work each day, but some folks are angry people, I guess.

I've also noticed that it's only the short-driveway houses, visible from the road, that seem to have the signs. Down here, in general, Long Driveway = High Tax Bracket, Short Driveway = Low Tax Bracket.

Anyways, I just came across this thing online:

That's a high-visibility, fake rubber tire spike strip that you're meant to place at the end of your driveway. Because it's just flexible rubber you can drive over it without damaging your tires, but it's meant to fool would-be turner-arounders.

One five-star review states "works like a charm! no more invaders driving into my driveway!

Another said "Finally, a product that caters to sociopaths!"

Yet another wrote, apparently in earnest, "This is exactly what I needed for those darn driveway u-turning people! The gall of some people, using fifteen feet of my driveway without paying rent or even asking, just because they were 'lost' or 'missed' their turn! … The camera I installed five years ago allows me to enjoy te (sic) expressions of frustration and fear when these monsters roll into my driveway 'by accident'."

Upon reading these I thought geez, I haven't seen a product design this passive-aggressive since those knee defenders for airplane seats.

However, there were also some more reasonable reviews from people experiencing issues I hadn't thought of, like the following:

- "Great, safe product. Finally found something to keep delivery drivers from endangering the safety of my dogs in the yard."

- "These really did the trick in tutoring our mail delivery person from patching out our front yard which he had been doing despite notes and other reflectors that attempted to show him the edge of our yard."

- "These are AMAZING! We live the (sic) first house passed (sic) a major attraction with poor signage. We had 50+ turn arounds a day. We have a circle driveway as well so people were turning in and then driving around our cars across our grass! The final boiling point was when someone turned in and nearly hit our daughter on her bike. We have had the driveway spikes for 2 and 1/2 years and not one person has tested them and drove over them."

Okay, so it seems not everyone with no-turnaround devices is simply expressing hostility. But make no mistake, this product exists because assholes exist, on both sides of the driveway. If you go to the trouble of installing a camera just so you can see "expressions of frustration and fear" on people's faces, I think you need to start smoking pot. And if you drive across someone's lawn, especially when there's children or pets around, you need to stop smoking pot.

I imagine products like these, along with that Knee Defender, will only continue to proliferate. Maybe Kickstarter should add a "passive-aggressive" category.

Pop quiz: Which is better for the environment, plastic bottles, or aluminum cans?

Aluminum cans are, of course. But that doesn't mean they're all good; the details can get a little complicated. To start off, let's look at this data visualization of how many aluminum cans us Earthlings go through in one year:

(Note: The creator of the video, MetaBall Studios, cites their data sources as The World Counts and Web Packaging.)

So at press time we were at roughly 178 billions cans used this year, on our way to 200 billion by year's end.

The bad news is, those cans are a bitch to produce, at least from the planet's perspective. The bauxite mining required to produce aluminum "is harsh on the planet…leaving environmental destruction behind," Earth911 reports. "Bauxite mining contributes to habitat loss and water contamination, as well as a slew of other negative environmental impacts, like increased erosion."

The good news is, you can recycle the shit out of aluminum. As in, you can recycle it over and over again, infinitely, unlike plastics, which have a limited amount of times they can be recycled, depending on which type.

The bad news is, at this point we're only recycling about half of our aluminum cans. (Sciencing.com says 50%; Recycle Nation says 55%. Whatever the case, it appears to be growing--in author Annie Leonard's The Story of Stuff: The Impact of Overconsumption on the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-And How We Can Make It Better, which was written in 2011, Leonard states that we were recycling 45%.)

The good news is, if we're producing 200 billion cans a year and only recycling half of them, that means there's 100 billion cans' worth of raw material just waiting to be used. And if there's demand for that product, there will be demand to recycle more of the cans. So if you're a designer with the power to spec that out, spec that out!

When I lived in Japan, with its frequent mini-earthquakes, I quickly learned not to place items on top of high things in my apartment. In some of the space-tight apartments I visited in Tokyo, I saw that not keeping things atop bookshelves and cabinets was a luxury not everyone could afford.

Because Japan has a combination of frequent seismic activity and crowded interior spaces, there's a market for occasional-use helmets. These won't stop a girder from killing you, but are meant to prevent smaller items, like books or light fixtures, from landing on your head and possibly cutting you.

And because space is Japan is tight--every millimeter of storage space counts--having an occasional-use helmet that breaks down into a smaller shape would be greatly desirable. Particularly in group environments, like schools or offices, where the administration may require that multiple helmets be stored.

As with folding bike helmets, there is no one winning solution as of yet. Here are five design approaches we've found:

Tanizawa Portable Fold-up Disaster Helmet 

This interesting two-piece take on the helmet flips its lid, like a garbage can. That reduces its height by nearly fifty percent (from 140mm to 80mm), making it a bit easier to stow. Made from ABS.

Osamet Collapsible Safety Helmet

Made from ABS, the Osamet design telescopes down from helmet-height to about the thickness of an office binder (45mm).

Derucap Collapsible Safety Helmet

This fascinating spiral design eschews the ABS of the previous two, opting instead for polypropylene and polyethylene. It can collapse down to 40mm. As you'll see by looking at the following designs, the chinstrap in this one appears to be a bit of an afterthought; this design appears the most "designey" (in the pejorative sense of the word) to me.

Tatamet Designer Foldable Safety Helmet and Tatawing BCP

Designer Foldable Safety Helmet

Designer Foldable Safety Helmet

Designer Foldable Safety Helmet

Tatawing BCP

Tatawing BCP

Tatamet's two designs each fold flatter than any of the ones above, getting down to 35mm. Different from the previous three designs, they've gone with what look to be either PP or PE sheets, and their two designs look like they were the most complicated to engineer.

Also, one downside with the Designer model is that you need to use the included built-in tool (might be easy to lose?) in order to break the helmet down, as you can see in the demo video:

Flatmet Collapsible Helmet

Flatmet's design goes flatter than all of them, down to just 33mm. The designers have chosen to go with PP, ABS and polycarbonate, and unlike the others, this one looks the most form-follows-function.

My favorite design of all of them is the Flatmet, because it looks like the designers were not going for an aesthetic, but just trying to work with the material's properties--and then an aesthetic actually emerged.

Anyways, I will say that Japan is an amazing place to live, though I sure don't miss the earthquakes. If I had stayed there longer, I'd have probably purchased one of these to keep near my bed (being waken up by an earthquake is the worst in terms of fear factor). If you click on the links you'll see they're listed in the USD $70-range, but that's likely due to cost of importing; in Japan they go for the yen equivalent of about 30 bucks a pop.

Fun fact: The Bible of Industrial Design, Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things, was originally titled The Psychology of Everyday Things. Good designers must of course understand the basics of psychology if they are to design objects that people can successfully interact with.

A good case in point are buttons. An engineer might conceivably create a button that, once pressed, sends an electrical signal to complete whatever task it was created for, without confirming for the end user that the signal was sent. Any designer or design student who's read Norman's book would know better. From Chapter One's "Fundamental Principles of Interaction" section:

FEEDBACK

Ever watch people at an elevator repeatedly push the Up button, or repeatedly push the pedestrian button at a street crossing? Ever drive to a traffic intersection and wait an inordinate amount of time for the signals to change, wondering all the time whether the detection circuits noticed your vehicle (a common problem with bicycles)? What is missing in all these cases is feedback: some way of letting you know that the system is working on your request.

…Feedback must be immediate: even a delay of a tenth of a second can be disconcerting.

At The Verge Science's San Francisco offices, staffers have learned about bad button design the hard way:

I think we can all agree that this is insane:

So here we have an example of bad design that cannot be directly attributed to the designers of the building, the elevator nor its buttons, but to whomever is in charge of incorporating the building's security systems. Or whomever controls that group's budget. Whichever it is, chances are good they've never read Norman's book, and the building's occupants experience a resultant micro-hassle on a regular basis.

If I were an omnipotent dictator, Norman would be in charge of my newly-created Ministry of Good Design. They'd have the budget of the U.S. military, and they would take precedence over every other governmental body.

A well-known footwear company is looking for an enthusiastic casual footwear designer to work on our Junior Fashion brand that has The following: -Experience correcting and designing outsole moulds and have technical product knowledge -Knowledge of last development and ability to make corrections -Experience traveling to

I'm typically skeptical of tools that claim to do multiple things. (One notable exception is the LogOx, which I've confirmed performs all of its tasks well.) I'd be extra-skeptical of a tool that claimed to be able to handle three separate digital fabrication operations. But 5,050 Kickstarter backers were not skeptical, and thus a couple of years ago the Snapmaker Modular 3-in-1 3D Printer was successfully funded, and the company has thrived.

Snapmaker's invention is a desktop machine that can 3D print, and do lasercutting, and do CNC milling. The metal-framed machine has different heads that can be attached, depending on which operation you'd like to perform.

This year they announced version 2.0, which is faster, larger and more powerful than its predecessor:

The 2.0 has already been successfully funded--this time by 7,388 backers--and can be pre-ordered here starting at $1,199. (Note that the price is due to increase on December 1st.)

The 2.0 comes in three different sizes…

…and can be custom-configured according to your needs:

Here's the thing: Snapmaker's still got some 1.0 versions in stock, and to liquidate them they're selling the $800 machines for $700. The $100--off sale runs up until the end of December, so if you've got an entry-level digital fabrication enthusiast in your life, click here.

Runner Up Health & Wellness Award Core77 Design Awards 2019.

The animal protagonist in Elvie Pump's promotional video is a cow with heavily drooping udders, wearing suction contraptions pumping milk through laboratory-looking arrays of twisting tubes. As a troupe of women dance in front of it, a voiceover songstress declares: "These aren't udders, they're my boobs."

Elvie's tagline is Pumping Unplugged – and that's exactly what it services. "The future of breast pumps is wearable," says Chiara Technologies, the parent company to Elvie Pump. The pioneering nursing pump is the first silent, hands-free smart product in its category – and it's nailing it with the a market of moms who are tired of feeling like a cow tied up to a science project when pumping.

"By placing women at the center of the design process we've been able to create a product that makes pumping as easy, convenient and comfortable as possible," Chiara says. Involving over 200 expressing (or milk-producing) mothers in its product development, the design responds directly to the most frequent pain points of typical pumping mechanisms: the lack of discretion, the necessary disruption from routine, the uncomfortably mechanical noisiness, and the cumbersome nature of the product elements themselves.

Elvie Pump is designed in five easily washable parts, and fits comfortably inside the cups of most nursing bras. The corresponding app then has the ability to guide and track its behaviors, offering a hands-free experience and preventing the wearer from having to fiddle with it inside their shirt. For example, its technology intuits when the bottle (which is self-contained in the design) is full, automatically ending the pumping session. And during each session, women can view real-time milk volume, while tracking their pumping history for each breast after the fact.

"It was important that this pump fit into women's lives, rather than altering" them, says Chiara. "This is the 'iPhone moment' for the category." In other words, Elvie Pump is making pumping a more integrated part of nursing women's lives; it's granting the machine a newfound seamlessness, allowing women to go about their day-to-day without the disruption of its act, but with just as much attention to its product, not to mention its recipient. It's a win-win all around, because when baby's got milk, everyone's happy.

Read more about Elvie Pump on our Core77 Design Awards site of 2019 Honorees

The most-consumed resource on the planet is water. Any guesses what #2 is?

It's cement, the binding element used to make concrete. And as urbanization continues, we'll be using more and more cement each year. On his blog, Bill Gates writes that "By one estimate, the world will add 2 trillion square feet of buildings by 2060—the equivalent of putting up another New York City every month for the next 40 years."

The problem with cement is that making the stuff generates some 8% of the world's greenhouse gases (10% if you're counting just manmade greenhouse gases). To make cement, you need lime, which is extracted by sticking limestone into a kiln. Just about half of that limestone goes up in smoke during the process, and there's your C02 footprint streaming out of the smokestack. "And right now, we don't have practical ways to make [cement] without releasing carbon dioxide," Gates writes.

However, thanks in part to Gates, we do have a place to stick some of that CO2. Gates has helped fund a company called CarbonCure, which has figured out that if you inject CO2 into ready-mix concrete, the C02 reacts with calcium ions and is transformed into "a nano-sized calcium carbonate mineral that becomes permanently embedded in the concrete." This not only provides a convenient place to sequester the C02 forever--"the CO2 is chemically transformed into a mineral, which means it will never be released into the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas," the company says--but, as it turns out, the procedure actually increases the concrete's compressive strength.

That's a win for concrete plants, as they can use less cement to make the same amount of concrete, plus they get a green credential. CarbonCure has developed their injecting equipment into an add-on that can be retrofitted into an existing concrete plant's facility in a single day, so the disruption is minimal. And once it's up and running, the production time difference is negligible, and outweighed by the benefits, according to a case study:

- 45 000 yd3 of concrete were produced over an 8 month period using a 5% binder reduction in conjunction with an optimized dose of CO2.

- The estimated cement savings exceeded 450 tonnes and more than 400 tonnes of CO2 emissions were avoided.

- The use of the technology did not impact the producer's cycle time; all operations continued as normal throughout this assessment.

"We can save up to 500 million tons of C02 emissions every year," the company reckons. "48,000 cubic yards of concrete saved 1.5 million pounds of CO2 on 725 Ponce in Atlanta. That's equivalent to an acre of forestland sequestering CO2 for the next 800 years."

While it's not as good as if we'd never created the new C02 required by lime production in the first place, it seems unlikely that we'll do away with concrete anytime soon. CarbonCure's advances are a step in the right direction.

When you make things that other people use to make a living, you can't afford to make many mistakes. Above all else, professional tools have to be functional and durable.

Yet, during my years of covering the tool industry for Popular Woodworking Magazine, I was shocked every year at the outright dumb and dangerous stuff that came to market. After becoming friends with tool designers and makers in the woodworking industry, I asked them these simple questions:

Why? Why do toolmakers insist on making crap? Or, why do they make decent tools with useless features?

The answer is that introducing new products every year helps the sales of the existing products. If you make the same drill every year for 10 years, you will go out of business.

Now, I don't believe the above statement to be true. Some toolmakers, such as Lie-Nielsen Toolworks, have made the same tools for 25 years, such as its 60-1/2 block plane, and the company is doing just fine. Yet, "innovate or die" is the typical battle cry among corporate toolmakers.

The design blunders aren't always obvious. Many times you have to be a serious user of a tool to understand how the designer failed. (This is why field-testing is so important.) The following examples will, I hope, show you how good intentions can result in bad tools. For each tool, I'm going to present the "innovation" from the point of view of the marketing department. And then from the point of view from the victim – I mean, customer.

I call these the "tool-shaped object" design awards because these things look like tools, but they don't quite behave like tools.

The Chisel & Rasp Combination Tool

The marketing department: Site carpenters need both chisels and rasps on the job, especially when installing locks, hinges and other bits of residential hardware. This tool combines the two tools by adding rasp teeth to the front and back of the blade of the chisel. Now the carpenter needs only one tool where he or she needed two before.

The carpenter: Chisels are two-handed tools during paring operations. One hand holds the handle and the other holds the blade. Holding rasp teeth is like trying to cuddle with a cheese grater. When you use a chisel to chop wood, you hold the blade about half the time to position the tool accurately. So, once again, this tool is going to shred the fingers. Finally, rasps are also two-handed tools. One hand holds the handle. The other hand holds the tip of the rasp, which you have thoughtfully made into a hand-ventilating sharp chisel.

Slick Tables & Fences on Chop Saws

The marketing department: A shiny and polished table allows you to slide your work easily into position before cutting. And then to slide the waste away after cutting. Less friction means less effort.

The woodworker: Slick tables and fences are OK for rough work. But they make it difficult to hold the work in position and make an accurate cut. The work can shift left or right easily, making the cut too long or too short. It can even make it difficult to make a square cut because the work will slide away from the fence, spoiling the perfect 90° or 45°. The only way to ensure an accurate cut is to clamp the work to the saw, which slows down your work. Instead, a good surface on a chop saw would be slightly grippy.

Lasers on Tools that Aren't Levels

The marketing major: Now you can cut your wood with laser accuracy thanks to the laser we've installed on your miter saw, circular saw, jigsaw, drill press, (list continues for some time) and tape measure. The laser makes it easy to see where your tool will cut. You're welcome.

The woodworker: First, have you ever had to adjust the lasers on your own tools? It takes time. And then, as soon as you knock the tool, the laser has to be realigned. Even if you treat the tool like a baby bird, the vibrations from the tool's motor loosen the settings, allowing the laser to move. I put tape over the laser to prevent my employees from using them because they (the lasers, not the employees) are never reliable. And why would you put a laser on a tool designed to cut curves (such as a jigsaw)? Lasers on levels are the best invention since the bubble level, but I suspect you guys ordered too many lasers and are going to install them on sanding blocks next Christmas season.

I threw out all my crappy carpenter's pencils. This is what a good one is supposed to look like.

Carpenter's Pencils that Don't Mark

The tool store: Here's a free carpenter's pencil with our store's name printed on it. You're a carpenter, so now you'll remember our store every time you take it out to use it. You're welcome.

The carpenter: The traditional carpenter's pencil is a piece of pencil lead that is wrapped in wood. It's wide and flat. You got the wide and flat part right. The "lead" is some sort of gummy plastic or resin that I can't sharpen. It just crumbles. The "wood" is also an unknown material that isn't strong enough to support the "lead" during use. The whole tip falls apart each time I sharpen it. Every time I look at this pencil I see the name of the hardware store that gave it to me and wonder if they know anything about tools.

Featherweight Workbenches

The manufacturer: Commercial workbenches can cost as much as $2,000, which is more expensive than a typical table saw. We've developed a workbench for $149.99 that will let you get started for a fraction of the cost. It has a handy tail vise, four drawers for storing tools and four bench dogs (which are inserted in the vise and the benchtop to apply clamping pressure). What more could you need?

The woodworker: Mass, perhaps? So that it won't dance across the floor like a spastic chicken when I work on it. A base that will stay together and not sway? Dogs that don't slam into the handy drawers right below the benchtop? Honestly, for about the same price, I could screw together some yellow pine or fir 2x12s and have a better bench.

Saw Handles with Billy Club Handles

The tool designer: Our tool company looks to the future, not the past, for inspiration. Our tool designs ignore the ornately curved handles of the past and embrace the clean lines of modern life.

The woodworker: I'd like to shake your hand. Why? To see if your hand is just a robotic clamp without nerves, tendons, flesh or muscles. Your design for a saw handle offers all the comfort of a corncob. Early saw handles were curvy so they could be used for long stretches without hurting your wrist or blistering your palms. Your saw handles are cut out on a CNC router so they can be almost any shape. Why the heck would you pick this one?

Most Rotary-tool Accessories

The marketing department: There's almost nothing you can't do with our rotary tool. It cuts wood and metal with our abrasive spinning disks. You can sand hard-to-reach areas with our sanding sleeves. Shape metal or other hard materials with our grinding wheels. It's a workshop you can hold in your hand!

The user: I have yet to find anything I can do with your rotary tool. It dents wood and metal with your spinning disks. (I think erosion might be a faster way to get the job done.) I can burn hard-to-reach areas with your sanding sleeves. And I can throw stone fragments into my face with your overly friable grinding wheels. It's a great gift for an annoying neighbor.

Anodized Aluminum Measuring Tools

The manufacturer: Aluminum layout tools are inexpensive, lightweight and incredibly accurate. They are much less likely to bend or warp than steel tools – a huge improvement over traditional tools.

The user: Every time I put my aluminum try square down I see a new ding on its blade. Where did this come from? I don't remember dropping the square. Did I perhaps just look at it too hard? Why is my aluminum straightedge covered in tiny dents and dings all up and down its blade? I hardly used it. Oh, now I remember. Aluminum is inexpensive, lightweight, accurate – and it's really too soft for a hard-working shop environment. If you hang your tools on the wall and admire them, these will serve you well. Otherwise, get some traditional steel squares or get ready to sand out some dents every so often.

$6 Stinky Rubber Mallets

The tool store: Do you need a rubber mallet but don't have enough money to buy even a hamburger? We have you covered. It's a stick of wood with a rubber head – everything you need.

The homeowner: I always wondered what happened to the company that made Superballs (TM). Now I know – they make these dang mallets. Every time I hit something I duck because the thing bounces back at me like it's on the attack. Oh, and what's that smell that never goes away? It's like vinegar and raw sewage had a baby. Next time I'll just tie a rock to a stick, sniff some rotten meat and get the job done for $0.

Battery-powered Clamps

The manufacturer: This motorized C-clamp provides 350 pounds of clamping force; all you have to do is press a button. Squeeze the trigger and bam – you're clamping. No more turning a handle around and around.

The woodworker: No. Just no. For the love of all that is holy, this is a complete waste of ABS plastic, pot metal and batteries. There is not a single application in the history of ever in which this makes sense. It's simply a way to snatch the money from people who are buying a Christmas gift for grandpa. "Hmmm, dad has arthritis, perhaps this will help him in the shop."

Let me list some better ways to spend the $34.95. Burn it. Flush it down the toilet. Try to feed it to some birds.

Vibrating Detail Sanders

The manufacturer: You can sand mouldings, get between chair spindles or balusters on the stairs – anywhere a big sanding tool cannot go. This sander provides 1.2 amps of sanding power and has a high-efficiency dust filter that removes the fine and dangerous particles.

The woodworker: It has enough power to maybe massage my feet. The filter is completely unnecessary as the thing barely removes any wood while in operation. While you don't need a dust mask, you will need earplugs – while in operation it sounds like a constipated bumble bee.

Time to Checkout

I always feel like a grumpy old man after I write about questionable tool designs. Perhaps I should just close my laptop and go yell at the kids in my yard. But I keep hoping that one day, someone will listen. After years of encountering tools such as those above, I became crazy enough to start making my own woodworking tools.

Maybe you will follow suit. Or, at the least, perhaps you'll think twice before buying a screwdriver with a laser on it – or designing one.

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Navigating the world of crowdfunding can be overwhelming, to put it lightly. Which projects are worth backing? Where's the filter to weed out the hundreds of useless smart devices? To make the process less frustrating, we scour the various online crowdfunding platforms to put together a weekly roundup of our favorite campaigns for your viewing (and spending!) pleasure. Go ahead, free your disposable income:

If you have some extra space and a sunny backyard, HomeBiogas has just released the second generation of its user-friendly system that turns organic waste into clean, renewable cooking gas and fertilizer.

GoSun's ultra-slim flatware comes with a handy carrying case thin enough to slide into your wallet. Having your reusable utensils always ready to go will make it that much easier to kick single-use plastics once and for all.

Here's an early holiday gift idea: this automatic rubber band gun can fire 144 shots in under a minute, making it an ideal addition to any playtime arsenal. You can opt for the fully-assembled version or a DIY kit with 70 components.

Sunglasses are incredibly accident-prone but these come with a self-repairing coating to protect you from having to buy new ones every time they accidentally slip out of your pocket.

The Henty Everyday travel bag comes with a plethora of features to keep you organized and can expand to fit everything you need for multi-day trips.

Do you need help designing, developing, patenting, manufacturing, and/or selling YOUR product idea? MAKO Design + Invent is a one-stop-shop specifically for inventors / startups / small businesses. Click HERE for a free confidential product consultation.

Something that's never addressed in Japanese anime: How would those giant robots support themselves, let alone generate the energy to move around? Just one of Voltron's metal lions would be impossibly heavy; propelling it would be quite the physics challenge.

Gets 0.000001 miles per gallon. Requires premium fuel

Well, researchers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology's Suzumori Endo Lab have come up with a partial solution, even if they're focusing on industrial robots, not the villain-fighting kind. Their challenge was to create a workable robot arm 20 meters long (that's nearly 66 feet). The arm needed to be able to support itself, as well as move around.

They came up with what they're calling the Giacometti Arm (after Alberto Giacometti, the Swiss sculptor known for shaping willowy figurines), which features a segmented body constructed of helium-containing balloons. Each is connected to the next by thin, pneumatic-driven "muscles" that can expand or contract in order to induce motion. Thanks to the helium, the entire thing weighs just 1 kg (2.2 pounds).

The team's work "aims for practical robot designs by removing excess fat," the researchers write. "Although this robot arm is not suitable for precise positioning, rapid motion, and high load capacity, which are the aspects most conventional robots focus on, it is designed for very specific purposes, such as inspection using a small camera at its tip and is designed to be essentially safe even if it falls down or hits an object."

Video of it in action:

Okay, so maybe we won't have giant fighting mecha just yet. But with this latest breakthrough, we could at least make a gigantic balloon Voltron that could find work as a roof inspector. That's not kind of cool?

"Your shingles look like shit."

The UI/UX Designer role at Small Planet encompasses both Interaction Design and Visual Design in the service of creating inspired mobile applications, websites, and other digital products. Our designers contribute to the entire product lifecycle, from problem validation and UX research, to UX/UI design and development, testing, and iteration. We are looking for creative and rigorous thinkers who can create elegant and intuitive interfaces that honor and engage users. We especially value communication, openness, and collaboration.

L.A.-based RPG enthusiast Karen Wang loved the tabletop games, but "The dice I wanted to use just…didn't exist," she writes. "If I wanted the kind of dice I was imagining, I realized I should try making them myself." Wang learned how to cast resin with the help of some local resin and plastic shops and began producing dice. Encouraged by friends, she then poured herself into it, if you'll pardon the pun.

"This (somewhat obsessive) hobby," Wang writes, "slowly turned into what Dispel Dice has become today."

This week Wang launched a Dispel Dice Kickstarter campaign in hopes there was a wider audience for her handcrafted resin creations. Her modest funding target was just $20,000-- but an avalanche of orders piled in, bringing her total to $1.5 million by day's end. As of this morning, she's up to $1.7 million, with 14,508 backers.

Her dice are, as you'd expect, unlike any you've seen before:

Every artisan set is hand poured, polished, and painted, so there may be slight imperfections or differences of color and material suspension in the dice. No part of this process is automated. Please understand that due to the nature of how they're crafted, it is impossible to ensure they're absolutely perfect or identical because each one is one of a kind.

If you'd like to pledge, there are still 30 days left in the campaign.

The UK's Hope Technology and Lotus Engineering have teamed up to create an Olympic superweapon: The HB.T, a carbon fiber bike with 3D-printed titanium elements that the Great Britain Cycling Team will ride in the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games.

"In a nod to the iconic Olympic gold medal-winning bike ridden by Chris Boardman in 1992, British Cycling can today reveal the cutting-edge bike that Great Britain's track squad will ride at the 2020 Olympics.

"Collaboratively developed by component manufacturer Hope Technology, and recognised automotive consultancy Lotus Engineering with the help of engineering giant Renishaw work on the new bike has been taking place in all corners of the country. This includes wind tunnel testing in Southampton, to further refinement and production of the bike in Gloucestershire, East Anglia and Lancashire.

"British riders have just begun putting it through its paces at British Cycling's base at the HSBC UK National Cycling Centre in Manchester."

Thus far the creators aren't releasing any numerical statistics about the bike, beyond that they know it's "quick" and "as light as those seen at the highest level."

Another number they've left out is the price. Yes, ordinary consumers will be able to purchase this bike, at least in the UK, starting on January 1st, 2020.

Here's a behind-the-scenes with the creators:

This bar clamp was designed into a "clever" bookshelf. The serrated edges of the bar will of course mar the bottom of your books; you'll get a nice divot in the cover of the outermost book/ and who doesn't want to crank/uncrank a handle every time they remove/replace a book? (Not to mention, if you want to add a book that's more than double the width of the distance from the bar to the wall, you'll have to hold the book in place while you screw the clamp down.)

"Right over the area where you bend over to retrieve books, we placed a staggered series of sharp edges. In an effort to be inclusive, we want people of all heights to have the opportunity to catch their heads on the corners."

True story: This 5 1/4-quart Le Creuset Cast-Iron Star Wars Han Solo Carbonite Signature Roaster costs $450. I think that's more than the actual bounty they paid Boba Fett to capture Han.

"By making the horizontal bars protrude outwards as they go down, we hope to discourage short people from reaching the good stuff at the top."

True story: This self-adhesive plastic film depicting a photorealistic version of pine grain costs $42 to cover a 24" x 48" area. At my local home center, you can buy the same amount of actual pine (3/4" thick) for about 16 bucks, and not have to add plastic and adhesive chemicals to your project.

"As per law, we made sure one of the bathroom sinks was at wheelchair height. (There's nothing in the law about needing room under the sink to actually fit a wheelchair user's legs, so we stuck with our fun yellow barrel concept throughout.)"

When you didn't start your Transportation Design project until the last minute so you repurpose a model from last semester's Footwear Design class.

"We designed our full-length dressing room mirrors so that people can only see three sections of their body, and what those sections are, varies according to the person's height. Fun!"

"I wanted a more new-school way to get my fingers pinched in a door."

As most of you know, LED bulbs use way less power than incandescent bulbs. (The U.S. Department of Energy says at least 75% less power; Consumer Reports puts the figure at 80%.) That's because incandescents wastefully transform most of the incoming energy into heat, whereas LEDs are efficient enough to transform most of that energy into light.

That's easy for us adults to grasp, maybe not so easy for a child. Hence the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia's science museum dedicated to the fellow on our C-notes, has installed this simple demonstration machine:

Whatever exhibition designer came up with that should be lauded. I really hate that things like this go uncredited. And speaking of credit, the video has been attributed to the Instagram account AndysTechGarage; I couldn't find it on his page (the man has over 2,000 posts) or I'd have embedded it.

Came across this (uncredited) video demonstrating how gravity and tension can be wielded to create an unlikely object:

This reminded me a bit of designer Robby Cuthbert's tensegrity-based furniture designs. Which in turn made me wonder: How long until a design student attempts to integrate this trick into a furniture design project?

By the bye, here are the best (untrue) comments from this Reddit thread explaining the phenomenon:

- "The camera is upside down"

- "It's in Australia"

- "Magnets, bitch"

- "The fucking strings are haunted"

Corridor Digital's video of the gunslinging "Bosstown Dynamics" robot may have been fake, but the following are all real. (And thankfully, diminutive.) First off, robots fighting with swords:

From Japan's ROBO-ONE league.

Secondly, a robot performing a single-leg Suplex on another:

From Japan's Kanto Robot Heavyweight Championship

How hilarious is it that they have a robot referee? (We'll put the full video down at the bottom, it's hilarious but also 13 minutes long.)

Finally, here's some folks from MIT's Biomimetic Robotics Lab showing off nine of their Mini Cheetah 'bots playing soccer, among other things:

From MIT's Biomimetic Robotics Lab

While these are all RC (for now), you've undoubtedly noted that despite their clunkiness, they're all mechanically capable of taking to their feet after being knocked down. This is something I hoped no robot would be able to do--pushing them over is likely to be our last line of defense.

Extended Viewing

As mentioned above, the full wrestling video (with excited narration in Japanese) is pretty freaking funny, even if you can't understand what's being said. Sneak a peek at it while you're waiting for something to render.