Event Review: Times Talk: Designing the Car of the Future
For car designers, these might well be both the worst and best of times. As for the bad: some automakers are forecasting the lowest sales since 1998; emissions seem to have become the new tobacco in terms of public ire and (in other countries) regulation; and with each new lawsuit, designers are beholden to increasingly draconian safety standards. On the upside, these are noble challenges to meet -- the kinds of constraints that will, in theory, make for safer, cleaner, and better looking cars. Maybe even all three at once.
Last Monday's Times Talk panel "Designing the Car of the Future," presented a provocative subsection of the automotive industry's leading design lights: Edward Welburn, VP of Global Design at GM; Joel Piaskowski, Chief Designer, Hyundai Kia; and Franz von Holzhausen, Director of Design at Mazda North America.
read complete article
All work and all play at Google Zurich
It's no secret that Zurich Googlers inhabit an office that puts your foosball fun time corner to shame, and there's no better way to spur envy than through a photo gallery put together by the Googsters themselves. Also check out this recent BBC video and article that delves into the inner workings of this ultimate alterna-workspace's benefits like sliding into work rather than taking the elevator.
thanks bryman!
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photo:Marie Richie
RSS Alert: New Article up at Coroflot's Creative Seeds: Eight Things They Never Taught You About Networking, by Carl Alviani
Over at Coroflot's Creative Seeds blog Carl Alviani has compiled a short list of specifics that aim to shed a little more light on this crucial but undefinable skill, networking. Read the beginning of a few...
"1.It's not about the first impression, it's about the third.
You know what they say about the Third Date, right? There's a reason the number three has so much meaning attached to it in relationships, and it's true in professional networking as well.2. A nice business card is nice, but it's just a piece of paper.
I remember the first time I had business cards printed up--500 of them, for Design Week in New York. They were dreadful, but to me they signified that I had arrived. I must have handed out 150 of those things over the course of the week, and I'm confident 99.5% of them never got looked at again.3. Obsequious: Look it up. And don't be it."
Nike's "garbage" shoes: Air Mary Shelleys?
As part of their "Considered Design" mandate, Nike has come up with a clever way to turn production scraps from their own factories into a complete shoe. The Nike Trash Talk (yep, that's the name) uses Frankenstyle stitching so that even tiny scraps can be incorporated into the uppers; the midsoles are made from scrap foam; and the outsoles are made from "environmentally-preferred rubber."
Currently available only in New York and New Orleans, the Trash Talks will go nationwide with Footlocker in April. And at 100 bucks a pop, they pass the savings onto...well, somebody, but not us!
Learn more about Nike's sustainability initiatives here.
via inhabitat
thanks jill!
Bank-sponsored playground design: how to plot fun from misery
Washington Mutual Bank, in conjunction with the non-profit KaBOOM!, is hosting a series of Design Days where children can design playgrounds to be built in ten US cities.
Kids, if you need inspiration for the shapes of your slides and climbing blocks, look no further than the US housing market. Have fun!
wheeeee!
sources: 1, 2, 3
Eiffel Tower Extension
Paris-based Architects Serero have won an open competition to redesign any of the Eiffel Tower's public reception and access areas. Serero's proposal is a temporary addition to celebrate the Eiffel Towers 120th Anniversary by extending the top floor without any modification to the existing structure. It will expand the usable floor area from 280m2 to 580m2.
The Eiffel tower in Paris suffers from its success. Since its creation the amount of visitors coming to reach its top has increased to reach its limit capacity. 6.5 millions People wait between 35 minutes to 1H10 to reach the elevators. The floor area of each level decreases with the height because of the tower geometry resulting in very long waiting lines and crowd management problems.
Designed by Gustave Eiffel, the Eiffel Tower was built for the 1889 Expo in Paris.
Via Bustler
read on
V&A Museum's China Design Now exhibition review.
I wanted to know what it was like to walk down a real street, not see this cleaned-up virtual reality. Where were the urban furniture, the crowded bazaars, the supermarket shelves, the red-light districts? Where were the videos of fashion shows to accompany the showroom dummies dressed in couture? I wanted real people to show me their homes and the design objects they lived with. Excuse me for using a trendy word, but this kind of exhibitions need to be much more of an immersive experience.Even safely on design territory there was an omnipresent timidity. The curators make little attempt to define the emerging aesthetic of Chinese design - although it is detectable in the exhibition. Chinese elements surface in extremely elegant graphic design. In one poster, a leg in a black trouser is intertwined snake-like with another leg decorated with Chinese florally patterned cloth - a neat symbol of modernisation. Literary magazines, meanwhile, use striking monochromatic designs based on Chinese letters. Another purely Chinese quality is the evocation in haute couture ballgowns of the imperial golden age of 1930s Shanghai.
Via "Chinese Art of Deception", Evening Standard
Those of us unable to see the Victoria & Albert Museum's long awaited exhibition on design in China can enjoy it vicariously through reviews. The exhibition opened yesterday and will continue till 13 July.
Different approaches to cell phone design
Though we don't think about it often, cell phones are revolutionary in that 20 years ago few of us had them, and now everyone's got one. Like many products, their designs currently suffer from a "hit" mentality, where a new design becomes a must-have for an ever-shrinking amount of time; anyone remember the Razr, or the Star-TAC?
A Forbes article takes a look at different approaches to cell phone design, from Neonode--the most innovative cell manufacturer you've never heard of--to the big dogs, like Nokia with their $4 billion R&D department, and Sony-Ericsson with their "Clamshell Center of Excellence." Motorola's messing with alternative energy sources while carrier T-Mobile is looking to students at the Illinois Institute of Technology's Institute of Design, who are in turn "staking out their local Starbucks" in a bid to see what well-caffeinated cell users do. Click here to witness the amusing scramble of all the players trying to knock one out of the park.
200-page sketch blogging PDF of TED 2008
The most recent TED conference was captured in writing, on video, and through photos, as always and as expected. But a new medium was tested using Autodesk's BigViz system (Wacom tablets and Sketchbook Pro) and the artistry of visual cartographers David Sibbet and Kevin Richards who captured each presentation live and on the spot. The sketch-blogging session yielded over 700 sketches which have been rounded up into a hefty 200-page "book" that you can download as a PDF.
Softbank's animist cellie
And Finally, Softbank/Toshiba's latest cell phone (coming out April 2nd in Japan): more than meets the eye. The 815TPB has AI that lets it express its "moods" through the LCD, and poseable limbs that are hopefully not hooked up to servos--last thing we need is this little bugger ringing and running away from us because he's not in the mood to serve as a conduit for our calls.
via softbank mobile
Special thanks to Aart van Bezooyen, Niti Bhan and Ian Curry for their contributions to this weeks newsletter!
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