Core77 presents Hack2Work: Essential Tips for the Design Professional
We've just launched a new special called Hack2Work: Essential Tips for the Design Professional. Filled with hundreds of tips, tricks, lifehacks and advice for practicing designers, the feature covers everything from office politics to office snacks, from essential books to essential software, and from intellectual property and design research to design conferences, working with the press, sustainable practice, and creative hiring.
Dive right in at core77.com/hack2work. There truly is something here for everyone—fun, useful, irreverent, surprising—Hack2Work is ultimately a celebration of design...and its practitioners.
Summer's over. Hack 2 Work!
Joey Roth's porcelain speakers
San Francisco-based designer Joey Roth's neato handmade speakers are "acoustically-dead" porcelain forms capped with cork. The maple plywood base, and volume slider, adds a nice touch of analog to your hi-tech MP3-player thingamajiggy.
No mere concept, these are for sale at gSelect (though as we've mentioned they are handmade, not mass-produced, so availability is limited).
New 1 Hour Design Challenge: The Future of Digital Reading
Core77 has teamed up with Portigal Consulting and 826 Valencia to challenge you to design the Future of Digital Reading...in 90 minutes! What will reading look like as it continues to evolve, going digital (and beyond)? In 5 or 10 years, will we still be holding paper squares in our hands when we read? Will we be back to stone tablets? Will we still be using our eyes? Core77 challenges you to create a rich future digital reading experience based on the research findings by Portigal Consulting's Reading Ahead project.
Full details and video intro here.
1 Hour Design Challenge Winners! Ideation Sketches!
The results are in for the latest 1 Hour Design Challenge: Ideation Sketches. Congratulations to winner Thedinomeister for hitting it all: good quality, good quantity and just loose enough to have been done in an hour. There were a ton of great entries to choose from, and thanks to everyone for entering.
See all the winning entries here.
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.
Make History gathers 9/11 stories over streetviews
The National 9/11 Memorial & Museum has launched Make History, "a world-wide initiative to gather any and every 9/11 story in an effort to understand history from the perspective of those who witnessed it. Using the website, visitors can search, group and sequence any number of histories, photos or experiences, creating custom sequences by time, geography or theme. Each photo is overlaid on a current street-view image of the present day, creating a 'double exposure' of past and present."
The site was created by Local Projects. Visit 911history.org to submit photos, stories, and video.
Eurobike 2009: Top 5 Trends
Eurobike, the world's leading tradeshow for the bike industry took place earlier this month in Friedrichshafen, Germany. The upcoming E-bikes were one of the hottest topics but there's more to see. As usual, design is in the details, therefore a closer look at this year's trends in bikes and bike parts highlighting lightweight, comfort, computerization, and style!
1. Rise of the E-bike
Since the first E-bikes entered the market few years ago a lot has changed. Their engines have become extremely compact, sometimes invisibly integrated within the bike frame as demonstrated by the Sparta ION e-bikes. Also, their support range has improved to 80-90 kilometers. Being 3-4 times more expensive than a normal bike makes them a promising moneymaker for the bicycle industry. Of all spotted e-bikes, our favorite example is the lightweight and portable Gocycle, designed from scratch and awarded with this year's Eurobike award.
3 Questions for John Foster of IDEO
IDEO is very likely the best known and most respected design consultancy on earth. And while hundreds of thousands of words have been penned in attempts to sort out how they got there, we're putting our money on a simple explanation: they hire astonishing talent.
You can argue about process and brand identity and consumer focus if you like, but a few moments discussion with pretty much any IDEO employee conveys a sense that they are the real reason; that together they comprise a sort of supergroup, radiating competence, skill, enthusiasm and thoughtfulness, and that none of those other strategies would be worth a damn without such talent available to implement them.
Finding and attracting such professionals is an incredibly difficult job, but keeping them engaged and productive even more so. As IDEO's Head of Talent and Organization, John Foster is responsible for both tasks. We've been fortunate enough to secure his presence on the discussion panel at next month's Creative Employment Confab in San Francisco, and to get a few preliminary minutes of his time to ask some basic creative hiring questions. Whether you're an employer or aspiring designer, this is worth reading.
Read it all here.
Call For Entries: 2010 Buckminster Fuller Challenge
The Buckminster Fuller Institute has announced the call for entries for their 2010 running of the Buckminster Fuller Challenge, which seeks ideas for "the development and implementation of a solution that has significant potential to solve humanity's most pressing problems."
"We're looking for comprehensive anticipatory design solutions that address multiple problems without creating new ones down the road - integrated strategies dealing with key social, economic, environmental, policy and cultural issues.Our entry criteria is deeply inspired by what Fuller termed comprehensive anticipatory design science - a methodological approach to solving complex problems that we feel holds an important key to how innovators need to be thinking about the design of strategies if they are to have a transformative effect on the system as a whole," explains Elizabeth Thompson, Executive Director of the Buckminster Fuller Institute.
Deadline's October 30th, and first prize is 100 large.
Redesign Your Farmers' Market Winners
GOOD and Architect's Newspaper have chosen the winners to their Redesign Your Farmers' Market competition. There were lots of great ideas proposed by the 22 finalists, from hydroponic markets to refurbished train cars and rooftop urban farms. Read more about the winners below, and be sure to browse the site for more proposals.
The Winner: Farm on Wheels by Mia Lehrer + Associates, pictured above
Farm on Wheels is a program that brings locally grown produce to the people of L.A. County. The program selects fresh fruits and vegetables from local farmers and distributes the produce through a network of farm trucks. To engage more people in the consumption of fresh foods and support local and urban agriculture, Farm on Wheels creates a simplified and convenient food distribution network between farmers and consumers.
Continue reading to see the runners-up.
2009 Open Architecture Challenge Awards
Speaking of competitions, Architecture for Humanity hosts the Open Architecture Challenge every two years, in which design firms partner with existing organizations to "address architectural inequities affecting the health, prosperity and well-being of under-served communities." This year's challenge focused on classrooms.
Section Eight Design was selected as the winner for their partnership with Teton Valley Community School, a non-profit, independent school in Victor, Idaho. The proposal, pictured above, focuses on scalability and a connection to the outdoors, taking advantage of the school's location at the base of the Teton Mountain Range. In addition to classrooms and meeting spaces that the school will build incrementally as they raise funds, gardens, farm animals, and local, drought-resistant flora will be integrated into the school's fabric to promote community, environmental responsibility and a "sense of place."
If the eyes are the windows to the soul, what are the lips?
Although it took her 30 years to act on her idea, nurse Jeanne Hahne is developing ClearVision, which despite the cliched name, is an accurate label for a medical face mask with a window so patients can see the mouth (and thus the smile) of their cheerful healthcare professional. Although intended to "ease patient anxiety", early anecdotes point to the unexpected benefit of improved communication between colleagues.
Design Patriotism by Jeremy Zietz
That's a big title, but Jeremy Zietz's essay up on Continuum's blog is a good thinkpiece with tendrils all over hell and back. My favorite section is the "Disconnection to Manufacturing" of course (with its mention of How It's Made and Manufactured Landscapes), but Handmade Detroit gets a mention as well as a bunch of others. Further along, here's a paragraph we can all get behind:
Being involved in a community of commerce is about personal relationships with the people involved, the stakeholders. Who's behind the process? What motivates them? Strong product development companies and vendors know the value of these connections and spend big on fine-tuned service and sales. Similarly, we still realize the value of that ashtray we made in art class for our parents (smoking or non) and its endless value, a stamp in time. Owning things that are connected to strong relationships is of the highest value. The tighter our list of stakeholders becomes, the more we gain an understanding of the process and invest in our communities. We may see how development systems working on this community scale can more efficiently customize solutions to its needs and promote its own expression. As consumers understand their products more, stakeholder's values of fair trade, worker's rights, and local manufacturing will be heightened.
Atomic Atemporality: Atompunks unite for GOGBOT 2009
The theme of this year's GOGBOT Festival 2009, a gathering of socially and aesthetically curious artists, designers and thinkers, was Atompunk—drawing inspiration for new ideas from the period framed by the cold war.
GOGBOT 2009 took place between September 10-13 at ten venues in the center of Enschede, NL (about an hour and a half east of Amsterdam and Utrecht.) The festival program was developed over the past ten months by the good people of PLANETART with shared ideas and images from the global community via the Atompunk mailing list.
The opening ceremony featured a presentation by guest of honor Bruce Sterling and a live performance by Alec Empire. Read Bruce's introduction to Atompunk here.
The arcade game cabinet designer who changed gaming forever
Interesting factoid: In 1981, Shigeru Miyamoto was an industrial designer who had been working for Nintendo for four years designing arcade cabinets. Bizarre Japanese corporate structures being what they are, he was eventually somehow tasked with designing what would go inside the cabinet--that is to say, the game.
Miyamoto then developed the "gorilla/carpenter/girlfriend love triangle" that changed a generation and gave birth to a new industry. Donkey Kong was the first-ever videogame to incorporate a narrative, as well as characters that weren't deaf-and-dumb paddles or boring reticles.
Miyamoto is today referred to as the "Father of modern video games;" his subsequent hit The Legend of Zelda has been called "The Citizen Kane of videogames." He's also the man behind Super Mario Brothers, Star Fox, and Wii Music, to name a few.
In any case, when we came across Maximum PC's article on how to build an old-school arcade cabinet, we couldn't help but think it's the perfect DIY project for an industrial designer. We're sure Miyamoto would agree.
Velcro made of steel
Totally wicked: The Metaklett strips you see above are essentially steel Velcro, developed by German engineers at the Technical University of Munich and intended, like the regular stuff, to be fastened and unfastened without the use of tools.
The steel strips, "one kind bristling with springy steel brushes and the other sporting jagged spikes," are only 0.2 millimeters thick, but a square meter of the stuff can hold "a perpendicular load of 7 tonnes." Developer Josef Mair foresees the stuff being used for building facades or automobile assembly. And it will withstand temperatures of up to 800 degrees Fahrenheit, so you could even use it in Arizona in July.
via dvice
Maarten Kolk & Guus Kuster's Avifauna
And finally, Maarten Kolk & Guus Kusters have created Avifauna, a collection of odd and beautiful taxidermied animals. A Grey Heron, Tawny Owl and Blackbird were stuffed without their plumage then wrapped in fabric and mounted on an oak base.
From the designers:
'Avifauna' is about bringing two common worlds we love together, nature and textile. We've started to materialize the beauty, shape and language of form that we see in animals and what's better to start this search than to mold on the animal itself.
Special thanks to Steve Portigal and Michael Doyle for their contributions to this week's newsletter.
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