Core77 Photo Gallery: Maker Faire Africa 2009
We're very excited to present our newest gallery of over a hundred photos from the inaugural Maker Faire Africa in Accra, Ghana. One of the main purposes of the faire was to showcase African ingenuity to the world; inventors, artisans and makers coming from as far as Liberia, Malawi and Uganda. Core77 correspondent Nathan Cooke was on-site to capture it all, from plastic fashion to agricultural machinery. Take a look!
Core77 Photo Gallery: Eurobike 2009
Hot on the heels of the Maker Faire Africa, we bring you another massive gallery! The Eurobike Show is one of the world's leading tradeshows for the bike industry. This year electric bicycles, or e-bikes, were all over the place, along with the usual lightweight parts, bike fashion, and colorful accessories to pimp your ride. Bonus: lots of BMX tricks.
Tai Chiem's gaming systems of the future
Australia-based designer Tai Chiem's bugged-out next-gen gaming systems take it to the next level. Above, his X-Box 720; middle, a Playstation 4 with a glass touchscreen panel, and bottom, the coup de grace--a PSP with a flexible, roll-out OLED screen.
Check out Chiem's full book on Coroflot.
Ross Racine's Suburbs of the Imagination
Though he's been making the rounds in the art blogs for awhile, we just had to spotlight Ross Racine's hypnotic and highly detailed drawings of suburban alter-realities. Hand drawn on the computer then printed with an ink-jet, his photo-realistic, aerial photograph-like works are not so far fetched, capturing many of the qualities and absurdities of existing suburbs. To make it even easier for us to imagine them as real developments, Racine has illustrated his fake landscapes at different times of the day and in different weather —The Days and Hours of Brookdale Gardens might as well be seen from a plane.
DRC - Design Research Conference
Oct. 1-2, 2009
Chicago, IL
The Design Research Conference (DRC), hosted by the IIT Institute of Design, brings together a growing community of design professionals advancing the role of design research in innovation. A forum for discussing the current and emerging issues in the field, the conference fosters the collaboration of forward-thinking, creative professionals and students from a variety of disciplines.
Jan Chipchase on the "Rise of the Superfakes"
Even though we just blogged him, we're putting the spotlight back on globe-trotting Nokia researcher Jan Chipchase for a brief moment, to draw some eyes to a completely fascinating series of observations on the future of fakes, in China and beyond.
Returning from a long research swing through China and SE Asia, Jan put together this essay on the growing volume and variety of fake consumer electronics on the market -- cellphones especially -- with some surprising developments in multiple tiers of "fake" quality (copy the logo? copy the ID? copy everything?), and the role played by packaging and accessories in their desirability:
Sometimes fake mobile phones can be bought in real (or exceptional quality) packaging. Whilst the size of the grey market is challenging to calculate - in countries with high import tarriffs there is a significant incentive for local entrepreneurs to smuggle in the devices, and since it's far easier to smuggle phones without bulky packaging and accessories these can be used elsewhere to increase the authenticity of fake products elsewhere. Simple arithmetic: what premium can be charged for a fake product sold in real packaging minus the cost of shipping that 'recycled' packaging? Phones sold through these unofficial channels may also come with real or fake, new or used batteries and chargers. In many of these markets and with few exceptions, the risk of being caught is negligible.
Read the whole thing, including some interesting proposals on how Apple might combat knock-offs in China, here.
2 Questions for Kate Gilman of 24 Seven
Hey CDs and senior designers -- how many interviews did you conduct last year? Five? Ten? How about 450?
Kate Gilman's job at creative staffing agency 24 Seven, Inc. has her scrutinizing graphic and interactive designers, marketers, design directors, and a slew of other creative professionals at the rate of two per day on average. Coupled with her own design background (she holds a Graphic Design degree from RISD), this makes her exceptionally qualified to explain what does and doesn't work in creative hiring. As the first of our four panelists at the upcoming San Francisco Coroflot Creative Confab, we posed Kate a pair of questions on the topic recently Here's what she said:
In the months since the economic downturn, how much of shift have you actually seen in the creative hiring patterns of your clients?I noticed the downturn start in the fall of 08, and everyone was on a freeze until January 09. Little did we know what we were in for...the beginning of the year was not good for recruiting in the advertising industry, to say the least. The market was saturated with top talent, funds were frozen, and jobs just weren't available. Lucky to have a job, my role at work became much more about consoling and advising people how to get through this, rather than fielding calls from my clients.
But a few months into it, marketing and advertising executives started realizing that they couldn't keep churning out the same marketing content: billboard designs, websites, catalogs, advertisements, direct mail, etc. had to be updated. So we've seen a rise in hiring since then, though it's definitely shifted towards freelance and temporary work, with direct-hire positions only trickling through. Budgets seem to get approved one project at a time, and people are hesitant to commit long-term. Designers have shifted too, and those who were only considering full-time jobs previously have widened their search.
No-nonsense Teutonic time-teller
The Qlocktwo is a simple, cerebral, no-nonsense, and undeniably Teutonic-flavored timetelling device designed by German firm Biegert & Funk. How it works should be completely obvious by the photo.
via gizmag
Cargo Bikes, Part 1
We spotted this Danish "Long John style" cargo bike making the blog rounds, and while we thought it was nifty-looking, it seems to be getting a mixed response. One commenter wrote that "Every third world country has a simpler, cheaper, and less awkward-looking version of this montrosity" and linked to this Flickr shot from China.
We knew there had to be a Flickr set devoted to these, and sure enough, we eventually found Bricole Urbanism's motherlode with an attendant explanation:
[In Chinese cities] informal collection of recycling, deliveries and use of bicycles for retail and selling is still very common....The bicycle remains by far the cheapest and indeed the only affordable means of transportation. Especially over short delivery distances, it would seem to many Chinese almost wasteful to use a truck.
Read more at Cargo Bikes, Part 2.
A 15.4-inch laptop--with two screens
That's no mere concept--gScreen's dual-screen Spacebook 2009 laptop is slated to hit store shelves (or Amazon webpages, anyway) by December of this year. Alaska-based gScreen is hoping the dual LED screens will be a hit with designers, filmmakers, photographers, CAD engineers, finance guys with spreadsheets, and even the military. Of course, having two 15.4-inch screens and a full-sized keyboard in one package comes at a price--this beast weighs in at a whopping 12 pounds.
via gizmodo
Designers Accord Charlotte Town Hall: Reflections and Photographs
We've got a post-script from the Designers Accord Town Hall Meeting at BOLTgroup in Charlotte, North Carolina. Thanks to Karen Smith for her reflections and Gianluca Camarda for his photographs.
How do you entice a crowd of designers to attend yet another meeting straight after work?
Offer rich content on sustainable design...and free wine.
BOLTgroup hosted the Designer's Accord Town Hall in Charlotte, NC, the first such event in the Southeast. The Town Hall created a forum for sharing sustainable design practices and was attended by over fifty designers. The Designers Accord is a global coalition of designers, educators, and corporate leaders, working together to create positive environmental and social impact.
Designers from the Charlotte area sipped on beverages in corn-based plastic cups, and ate off plates made from plant-based renewable materials. Industrial designers, graphics designers, architects and interior designers made connections with like-minded colleges committed to sustainability in their practices. Everyone was enjoying the initial "meet and greet" so much it was hard to start the presentations. An emergency run to the store for more wine reminded us how designers love their libation! After an extra 20 minutes of consumption and a tapping of the microphone from our MC, Monty Montague, the crowd settled in.
While brief technical difficulties got the presentations off to a rocky start (momentary microphone reverberations sounded oddly like a crackling radio station) the first presentation finally succeeded by way of a web link with Valerie Casey from San Francisco. Valerie, founder of The Designers Accord, gave us a history of how the Designers Accord came to be and reviewed some of the guidelines: 1. declare participation, 2. educate teams, 3. measure your footprint (be conscious of resources), 4. dialogue – talk to each client, 5. engage/experiment/collaborate – all design starts to tackle issues.
Designers Accord Chicago Town Hall: Reflections & Photographs
It's been a busy couple of weeks for Designers Accord, with a Chicago Town Hall Meeting following close behind Charlotte's. Here are some reflections and photographs from fueledbycoffee.
When it comes to sustainability, there are a whole slew of difficult topics that designers want to tackle but rarely get a chance to discuss in the open. The Chicago Designers Accord Town Hall called them the "elephants in the room" and engaged in a no-holds-barred discussion around the secret thoughts we all have but rarely share. Over 70 designers, critical thinkers and change agents made their way to gravitytank on August 19th for Chicago's first Designers Accord Town Hall meeting. Actually... scratch that, two designers drove out from Detroit, so it's really the Midwest's first DA Town Hall meeting.
Kicking off the night, Lucas Daniel & Teaque Lenahan of gravitytank introduced the evening's theme of "elephants in the room". Our hope was to learn from each other about the challenges, hurdles and questions that come up when engaging in sustainable efforts, either for clients or internally at companies. Teaque shared one big elephant-- that conservation and sustainability go hand-in-hand, but many projects, no matter how 'green,' are about selling more stuff. They aren't as In the end, it's about creating value for companies and consumers. He shared gravitytank's short video entitled "Wisdom," featuring interviews with senior citizens recounting their memories of conserving resources, recycling and reusing during WWII. The video brings to light that with a common enemy, a whole nation of consumers was motivated to act responsibly and how we have a lot to learn from the often ignored, but perhaps wisest of eco-consumers-our grandparents. Intended as a thought piece, Wisdom suggests that consumers will get creative when motivated and that there are ways companies can innovate and create value without automatically assuming disposability.
SCAD prof on the rise of "service design"
The Savannah College of Art and Design has over 9,300 students and 1,500 faculty members, so President/Co-Founder Paula Wallace is in a good position to discuss "the value of a design education," as she does in her guest blog for Fast Company.
In last week's installment she talks with SCAD ID professor Peter Fossick, who has an interesting take on design: It's not so much the product designs themselves, but the services designed around them that can make the difference. In Fossick's own words:
Everything is moving toward service design. Design is becoming more intangible, less about product and more about the experience of the product. Look at Velib, the bicycle rental program in Paris. The technology is ancient--it's a bicycle, after all--but the program is so brilliant thanks to the service architecture. I'm not saying we'll stop inventing new products. I'm just saying that designing the experience of the product is becoming just as fundamental as the product itself.
INDEX: Award 2009 Winners Announced in Denmark
Earlier, we highlighted the finalists of this year's INDEX: Award. This 500,000 euros award is an initiative from Denmark that focuses on "Design to Improve Life" and recognizes projects where design offers solutions for major global challenges like climate changes, pollution, natural disasters, poverty, overconsumption and other important issues.
Now, all winners have been announced for the categories Body, Home, Work, Play, and Community. You can now watch the award ceremony online.
Continue reading for a rundown of all the winners
Lina Nordqvist's family of Swedish stickback chairs
In A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander advises us to "never furnish any place with chairs that are exactly the same," because a variety of furniture will accommodate a range of sizes and moods. Of course, Achille Castiglioni had this all figured out, but most of us find that it's just easier to buy things that match.
Linda Nordqvist, however, proposes a set of chairs that occupies a healthy middle ground. Produced by Design House Stockholm, Family Chairs is a series of traditional Swedish stickbacks. Each chair varies slightly, taking on a different character through the arrangement of its spindles. Though capable of standing alone, the chairs form a charming and boisterous family when grouped.
Now there's no excuse; all different is the way to be.
In B Flat: A YouTube digital orchestra
And finally, we are loving In B Flat, an experimental, collaborative video orchestra from Darren Solomon. Each video produces one element of the composition (in B flat), which you can mix together by adjusting the volume sliders. Not to be missed! Give it a try here.
via It's Nice That
Special thanks to fueledbycoffee, Karen Smith and Gianluca Camarda for their contributions to this week's newsletter.
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