6 new takes on the Swiss Army Knife
Thilo Fuente, a Swiss designer who recently graduated from ECAL in Lausanne, has tired of the endless, meaningless variations on the Swiss Army Knife. In response, he's teamed up with Wenger, maker of the original, to "strengthen the original design values by quoting the great classics and modernising some of the most characteristic details." But we think he goes further, questioning the archetype of the folding pocket knife—for some, maybe it is more handy to have the tools hanging loosely around one's neck, for others the knife is a luxury item, suited best for preparing absinthe.
All his variations are the real deal, made from anodized aluminum and original Wenger blade steel.
London Design Festival 09 Preview: Dream Ball by Unplug Design
The London Design Festival is just about to kick off so it is time to give you a little preview of what to expect. We will be out and about to cover the most interesting stuff around, reaching from the young gunslingers to the old stagers.
For example there is Dream ball, a brand new soccer ball, which is made by recycling famine relief packaging. Since buying a soccer ball is a luxury for children living in third world countries, they usually make one out of ropes and trash. Aid provided from the UN and RED CROSS to people living the third world is usually packaged in boxes, but most of them contain medication, food and other fundamental commodities. Unplug design wants to give something that will put a smile on childrens faces, a toy that can give them hope and joy. They have redesigned relief packaging in a way that after it has served its primary purpose, it can turn into different types of balls depending on the size of the boxes. They are made by simply cutting by hand the perforated cardboard boxes and weaving the pieces.
The makers are Hwng kung chan, Jin song kyou, Lee hak su, Han min hyun and Jun jin of the Seoul based design studio Unplug . Showing as part of the Designersblock, the designers describe their design approach as follows: "Pull out the plug from the system and plug into the community."
Coroflot Creative Employment Confab
October 21, 2009 in San Francisco, CA
On Oct. 21 we'll be hosting the fourth installment of our Creative Confab, this time in downtown San Francisco, CA. The event features a panel discussion on creative employment, time for networking and a cocktail reception. We've added two workshops in the morning - one for employers and one for job seekers. Space is limited, so register now. $60 for the afternoon and reception or $85 for the workshops as well.
100kgarages: a new initiative to connect designers with local makers
As designers, we are all familiar with how difficult it is to push small projects through the vast industrial manufacturing complex. You have the idea, the drawings and the money, but factories have no time or patience for your small run. Or it's difficult to find someone open to having a conversation about the methods available to produce your rather experimental piece.
Well, 100kgarages is here to change all that. A new partnership between Shopbot, manufacturer of digital fabrication tools, and Ponoko, a digital making community, the site aims to form "the largest network for product designs to be made on demand locally," taking cues from Tom Brokaw's question to the presidential candidates in 2007:
Should we fund a Manhattan-like project that develops a nuclear bomb to deal with global energy and alternative energy or should we fund 100,000 garages across America, the kind of industry and innovation that developed Silicon Valley?
100kgarages supports and celebrates the idea of small industry and individual innovation by maintaining a network of "garages," or fabricators, throughout the world. If you have a design ready, you can proceed in one of two ways: either find a local fabricator and work directly with them, or post the job and wait for fabricator bids to roll in. They are beginning with a focus on CNC routers, the most versatile of digital fabrication tools, but hope to incorporate more technologies (like laser cutters and 3D printers), as time goes by.
If you're a Shopbot fabricator be sure to join their network, and if you're a designer, well, it's high time to dust off those shop drawings and go do something with them.
Autodesk puts the fun in your pocket: Introducing Sketchbook Mobile
There's an app for that: finding a taco stand, playing Frere Jacques on the pan flute, figuring how much to tip, making fart sounds... As the iPhone App Store climbs towards the 100,000 offering mark, we occasionally sigh and wonder when something genuinely useful to professional designers will appear. That may finally be answered with Autodesk's release of Sketchboook Mobile, the handheld counterpart to their "worth buying a Wacom for it" Sketchbook Pro design sketching software. The interface for SB Mobile is more than a little reminiscent of its bigger, older counterpart, featuring a simplified marking menu for tool selection, and a similar set of icons and workflows.
A quick browse through the App Store turns up plenty of drawing utilities, so there's nothing momentous about adding one more. The most famous so far is Brushes, which gained notoriety in June when Jorge Colombo used it to create a cover for the New Yorker, spurring its sales, and spawning an evocative series of short videos depicting the stroke-by-stroke construction of various NYC scenes on Jorge's touchscreen.
Compelling as they are, though, these videos highlight one of Brushes' (and pretty much every other drawings app's) main shortcomings as a serious design tool: poor layer control. Each image is constructed in a rigorous back-to-front order, and while that's fine and familiar to artists used to acrylics and oil paints, it's excruciating for the Photoshop and Corel proficient. The latest Brushes release does offer layers -- four of them -- but the interface is clunky and childish, and few users seem to employ them. While still limited, SB Mobile offers six layers which can be re-ordered with an elegant Photoshop-meets-Apple kind of interface, as well as some other features familiar to design professionals: customizable brushes, sample-based color selection, multiple undos, and sketch symmetry.
ILoveSketching: The future of design drawing?
Speaking of sketching, I'll admit that when I read the description of this gesture-based 3D sketching system I was disdainful, as they make it sound like no one will need to learn perspective drawing anymore. Then I saw the demo we posted last year. IloveSketch essentially lets you draw while rotating your "paper" in three dimensions. For those who need to see it in person, it'll be appearing at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology 2009 in Canada come October.
Watch the video here.
3D CAD News and Tips: Special "Morphogenesis" Issue
No, that's not a coliseum for interstellar gladiators from the next installment of the Alien franchise, it's a demonstration of a new set of design tools, included in the newest release of ID CAD software SolidThinking. The technology, which ST is calling Morphogenesis, is a sort of semi-automated biomimicry toolbox, and after an hour-long phone and webinar demo last week, we have to say it's unlike anything we've come across in the CAD world to date.
Starting from the long-popular design ethos of looking to nature for the best solutions, the Morphogenesis tool set works by proposing optimized 3D structures to the CAD user, based on a defined external envelope and a set of loads and constraints. By hacking away at the envelope until only the minimum of needed material is left, the tool produces some thoroughly odd, organic shapes, often reminiscent of bones or sponges. The shapes can be saved as STL or other 3D data and used as an underlay for exploring alternate designs.
Nearness as an interactive technology
Timo Arnall leads the Touch project at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design in Norway, investigating Near Field Communications (NFC) as a means of creating new situations and interactions through the use of mobile devices and RFID. His interdisciplinary team is focused especially on the social and cultural inquiry of these technologies.
Though much of this interaction is touch-based, a unique quality of NFC is the property of 'nearness,' where there is communication without touch. This video, produced by Touch and BERG, very sensitively explores the physical implications of proximity, using RFID for much more than identification. Also included are other objects that exert influence through nearness: mobile phones, magnets, and moving air.
For more on RFID and NFC, browse the Touch blog here.
Design in the Supermarket
Dmitri Siegel has a priceless piece up on DesignObserver entitled "Lost In the Supermarket", where he looks at the "culture of design" in a kind of drive-by ethnographic assessment. Don't want to ruin it, but here's a quick sample:
For example, strolling through the aisles of the Supermarket you might think that our species was cursed with fingerless mitts instead of hands. The shelves are an eco-system of plastic ridges, fins and nubs resolutely devoted to the promotion of grippage and the eradication of slippage. Apparently men are particularly afflicted with the inability to grip: the more masculine a product’s target consumer, the more layers of ridges and grippers it contains. The faux-ergonomic flourishes on shaving razors could make them serviceable for a walrus.
Starck's "Design for Life" now online
For those of you who don't live in the UK, you can now watch Philippe Starck's industrial design reality show, "Design for Life," on the internet. (Or you can read about Steve Rose savaging it here.)
The program is an entire hour long, but it is a Friday...here's to hoping you don't get caught by your boss and fired the way Starck fires, well, everyone.
Watch it here.
Feast is coming up on October 1st
The Feast Social Innovation Conference, hosted by All Day Buffet, is looking like a great event to start October off with. Speakers include William Drenttel (Partner of Winterhouse), Matthew Bishop (Chief Business Writer of The Economist), Joshua Viertel (President of Slow Food USA), Annie Duke (Professional Poker Player), Becky Straw and Ron Arnold (COO and Director of Water Programs for Charity Water), Uffe Elbaek (Founder of The Kaos Pilot) and Ken Banks (Founder of kiwanja.net & FrontlineSMS), and the conference will take place in the swank-city The Times Center in NYC.
Tickets are almost gone, so hit the site and register.
Reflections from the 'Designing for Good' Seminar
Patrick Flick's rate of change graphic. Copenhagen August 28 2009
With the economic, social and environmental problems that the planet faces today it would be easy to give in to a pessimistic world view: science offers a gloomy outlook and attempts to reverse the negative tide often appear too little, too late. Yet from the design sector comes hope: in the midst of eco buzzwords and sustainability banter, there is a new generation of designers who are implementing 'new design' and starting to reap the benefits.
'New design' deploys the potential and fluidity of the design process in multidisciplinary fields to produce tangible solutions to global problems; this new form of design is dubbed 'process design', 'service design' or 'human centered desig', but could simply be called designing for good.
John Thackara on the future of individual mobility
On a related note, John Thackara, in the sustainable mobility section of the September Domus Magazine, argues that designers should focus on reducing the movement of matter "by changing the word faster to closer".
"The fundamental problem with the car and the plane is not that they burn too much of the wrong kind of fuel. The problem is that they enable, and perpetuate, patterns of land use, transport intensity, and the separation of functions in space and time, that render the whole way we live unsupportable. Rather than tinkering with symptoms - such as inventing hydrogen-powered vehicles, or turning gas stations into battery stations - the more interesting design task is to re-think the way we use time and space."
>> Read article
A Romp and a Rant: David Stairs on 'Design for Social Good'
More reflections this week over at Design-Altruism-Project: David Stairs has sawed off his shotgun and taken out, well, just about all the usual suspects around design for social change. Core77 takes one of the first hits (a little obliquely though, on the shoulder, I think), and then all the king's men fall one by one. It's a great read, and besides the obvious schadenfreude yuks, Stairs has some fine points to make. Here's one near the top:
For all our talk about "planning," human beings don't plan very well in the collective sense--civilization is just too complex. The beauty of the hives' single-minded purpose doesn't translate to people. As Americans we are raised to love independent choice, but this is precisely what leads to disaster when applied on a global scale. And it is no different with social design, where competition for the Internet "commons" is much more prevalent than cooperation. Add to this the fact that 98% of designers when asked say they want only to design, not plan, write grants, fund raise, correspond, or do any of the nine-hundred other nitty little things necessary to helping less fortunate people and you're left with a large, well educated audience wearing blinders.
...and another later on:
If this blur of hysteria begins to make you feel a little woozy, join the club. I'm all about helping people, spend much time doing so, and I agree with Mariana [Amatullo] that there's more than enough pain to go around in this world. The people trolling the net and re-posting RSS feeds for the pleasure of their Twitter "possees" are just engaging in a big circle jerk. But beyond such dim sighted initiatives something else lurks: the sudden widespread enthusiasm for social amelioration through design. It's so terribly trendy to care, about the poor, the environment, and every form of "betterment" that I begin to assume we must be selling more design by fetishizing social relevance.
Beyond the High Line
Fast Company has a nice post about the recent revival the of the mixed-use bridge as a popular building type, beginning with the High Line, a new paradigm of urban planning by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and James Corner Field Operations.
Pictured above are a few of our favorites, including a bridge house by Max Pritchard, which takes advantage of the empty space above a ravine in Adelaide, Australia. The simplicity of the bridge format allowed the house to be built completely from pre-fab materials, costing only $190,000 to construct.
Exploring a similar concept on a much grander scale, Aristide Antonas' Bridge from Recycled Grids is made completely of materials recycled from city equipment on a modular frame, so (in addition to housing a big city market) the entire structure can be disassembled and moved.
Read the whole post here.
This Just Inbox: Graffiti vs. Porcelain
And finally, Cabracega, a design firm in Portugal, has invited graffiti artists Hium, Mar, Mr. Dheo, Quillograma and Tosco to give classic Portuguese porcelain sets a graffiti motif.
It's intended to confront two different places and times. On one hand, we have the elegant quality of porcelain - represented by the table sets and decorative objects, taking us back to a different timeframe. On the other hand, there is graffiti as an art form and a way for contemporary urban intervention, which aims to promote new perspectives over cityscapes.
The pieces were shown at Experimenta Design Lisboa and will remain on view through October 9th at Espaco Zaum in Lisbon. More info here, and a couple more shots after the jump.
Special thanks to Marcia Caines and Mark Vanderbeeken for their contributions to this week's newsletter.
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