Exhibit of previously "lost" auto sketches. Whether from Ford, Chrysler or GM, Detroit's auto designers have always been under strict instructions not to bring design sketches home; luckily for us, not everyone at the companies obeyed.
Kentucky curator Kay Grubola and ex-GM designer William Porter have managed to track down about 100 concept sketches from the '60s and '70s that found their way out of the design studio, avoiding the destruction that comes during corporate re-orgs. The result is the "Designing an Icon, Creativity and the American Automobile" exhibit, on display at the Louisville Visual Art Association until November 10th.
The Times has got a preview of some of the drawings and photos. While the sketches themselves are of course cool, what is really fascinating is a photo inside GM's design studio in what looks to be the early '70s, above; in that era predating casual Fridays and Banana Republic colored dress shirts, every single designer is wearing a white button-down shirt and thin, dark tie. They make the clay model they're working on look positively modern in comparison!
Coroflot Creative Seeds: The 3 Things You Need to Do in a Job Interview, by Dan Buchner. Over at Coroflot's Creative Seeds Blog, Dan Buchner, VP of Design and Innovation at Continuum, shares the three things you need to do in a design job interview. Here's a taste:
Most design firms receive hundreds of portfolios a month. The best firms get even more. To avoid being clumped (and possibly overlooked) with similar applicants (with similar capabilities), think deeply about what it is that differentiates you as a designer--and as a person--from others in the portfolio pile. But standing out does not mean sending a portfolio that's molded into the shape of an origami swan or delivered by carrier pigeon. It means contextualizing your work as part of a larger process, and describing the process of your work in the form of a narrative.
Read the full article
More Creative Seeds
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Core77 Broadcasts: Paul Budnitz from Kidrobot, interviewed by Steven Heller. As founder and President of Kidrobot, Paul Budnitz has surfed the rising crest of the limited-edition art toy and streetwear wave. Not only is he the co-designer of Kidrobot's signature Dunny toy and Munny, he also art directs, co-designs, and collaborates with many of today's leading plastic and vinyl toy artists including Dalek, Frank Kozik, and Gary Baseman to create the majority of toys sold by Kidrobot. The son of a nuclear physicist and a social worker, Budnitz grew up in Berkeley, California. By 15 he was writing computer code for video games and safety analysis programs for nuclear power plants. He studied photography, sculpture, and film at Yale University, graduating with honors in Fine Art in 1990. In 1997 he founded Minidisco.com, a digital recording website for which he wrote back-end software enabling him to run the multimillion-dollar business out of his home. He sold Minidisco in 2002 and immediately founded Kidrobot which in five years has grown from a single online store to a multi-million dollar creative corporation that runs three store-galleries in the United States--San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City (with more on the way)--wholesales its line of twenty toys and clothing to over 250 stores worldwide, and maintains a staff of forty. In this interview Steve Heller talks to the designer/entrepreneur in his New York office, where surrounded by vinyl and hoodies he reflects on the state of this burgeoning art the status of his business.
Edited by Randy J. Hunt.
LISTEN NOW (21 min.) | iTunes | More Broadcasts
UK design expert on Design for Sustainability. Alastair Fuad-Luke, professor at the UK's University College of Creative Arts and author of The Eco-design Handbook, talks to Engineer Live! writer Jon Severn on the topic of "Moving Towards Design for Sustainability:"
Design engineers are more aware of the world in which they live than the average person; they have a better appreciation of the resources that are required to manufacture products and of the finite nature of the world's resources. Most have also now formed an opinion about how urgently man-made climate change needs to be tackled. Yet design engineers and design managers may feel there is little they can do to make a difference within the constraints of their day-to-day work activities.... Alastair Fuad-Luke, however, believes that designers can do more than they might expect.
Click here for the full article.
via engineer live
Fujitsu's design division splits off. Breaking up is hard to do, but perhaps it will be good for design. Japanese manufacturing and technology giant Fujitsu will be spinning off their design division, creating Fujitsu Design Limited.
Utilizing the expertise that Fujitsu's design divisions have developed in areas ranging from consumer products to industrial products and for design functions including broad-based product and function design, user interface design, office and retail space design, the new independent design company will offer consulting in IT industrial design and universal design to Fujitsu Group companies as well as a broad range of outside customers.
The Fujitsu design department has been around since 1961, and their comprehensive "design policy"--something like a mission statement for ID'ers--can be summed up in four points: "human-centered design," "accommodating diversity," "synthesizing diverse design fields," and "usable by all people." Details of the policy are here, and details of the spin-off are here.
Call for entries: sanitation solutions for schools in developing countries. The Humanitarian International Design Organization presents a unique challenge for all you do-gooder designers out there. There's no ca$h money involved, but the winner will be rewarded with warm fuzzy feelings and the opportunity to have their difference-making concepts realized.
Due to free education in many developing countries, schools receive a lot more children. Organisations build new classrooms to respond to the request but there is one thing that many still forget, namely sanitary facilities. Let's be creative and help them to find a solution to conquer this issue. This can go from new concepts to a toilet as we know it, for rural areas out of low cost materials and keeping in mind that water is not available.
submission deadline : October 22, 2007
Body Glove ECO wetsuit. Body Glove's ECO wetsuit is the first produced using its signature eco-friendly, non-petroleum Bio Stretch rubber and Eco Flex exterior.
The production of these eco-friendly materials only consumes 1/10th the amount of energy normally used in the manufacturing of standard petroleum based wetsuits. The ECO is a SMARTER, GREENER, and CLEANER choice for the environment and way better than a battery. With this sustainable wetsuit, we can begin enjoying the earth and our oceans while preserving them at the same time.
thanks eric!
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Robots with better muscles. We stock prisons with weight rooms and libraries, because what our society really needs is stronger, smarter criminals. Now we're giving better muscles to robots, based on a combination of biomimetics and mechatronics. If robots are going to eventually destroy us anyway, we might as well make them look like us.
A project called "Airic's_arm" is a new robotic appendage that looks rather like the original Terminator, and has a musculoskeletal structure resembling our own. Click here--the video has to be seen to be believed, and it really drives home two points: 1) the fine motor control robots can now achieve is quite impressive, and 2) robots have terrible handwriting.
Car with "green" wheels. So maybe you go chainsaw shopping, then afterwards you drive out to that cineplex in the woods to see the Flintstones movie, and on the way home you get a flat tire, and then you have your lightbulb moment.
via hemmings
Origami Meets Plexiglas. Materialworks is one of Germany's organizations serving the design world with material information. Their latest newsletter features an inspiring short story about Hannecke, a company known by its display systems for shows and events.
The company patented a brand new CUT'N FOLD process which makes it possible to heat crooked and intersecting bending lines to create for instance 3D products out of Plexiglas.
This means, the world of flat and simple displays are over and we'll soon be enjoying more smooth and curved designs by the in-house origami expert Stefan Delecat. Delecat's efforts even inspire Hannecke to start producing furniture or instant architecture, so get ready for a more foldable lifestyle.
More Unintended Consequences of Wii: Novelty Controller Overload. From Wednesday's Guardian Unlimited Technology section, a cute, brief article about the recent mad expansion in the number and variety of unique controllers available for home gaming consoles. We're not talking about the array of third-party controllers that have been around for years, designed to improve upon the standard ones that come in the box, but rather the highly specific (and often astonishingly poor) specialty controllers that bundle with particular games.
The author, Steve Boxer, blames the success of the Wii, which owes much of its universal appeal (it's soon to be named the fastest selling new system in UK history) to its unique controller and interface, and I would agree. There are certainly specialty controllers that pre-date the Wii frenzy, notably Dance Dance Revolution's stomp pad and some of the more gear-headed automobile and aircraft consoles, but the pile of cruddy plug-in gadgets described in the article represents an outpouring that has no pre-Wii equivalent.
What's subtly ironic about the sudden fad for eye-catching gadgets is that it's responding in exactly the wrong way to Nintendo's success. What made the Wii interface so seductive, and its sales so robust, was its brilliant non-specificity--many of the system's purchasers were first-timers, drawn in by a completely new mode of interaction that could be applied to hundreds of different scenarios, from bowling to firing an elven longbow. Rather than go through a long learning curve, figuring out which combination of button A and trigger 3 makes your secret agent do a forward roll, the Wii user is encouraged to pick up and play, trusting that motions in the real world will be interpreted in a logical way in the game. The controller is the same every time, but the motions are unique to each experience, just like in real life.
FUTR WRLD Call for Entries. Antimotion + Floating Gat announce a call for entries for their FUTR WRLD competition. Anyone's who's sat doodling visions of the future (Blade Runner anyone?) should check out the FUTR WRLD competition, an open source collaboration inviting artist to create a conceptual rendering of earth and its inhabitants in 2060. Submission deadline is October 31, 2007. Work will be showcased in a limited edition art-book and gallery exhibition in New York.
For information and submission details visit: www.anti-motion.com
Unsure about your concept and want feedback? Post your sketches to the Core77 FUTR WRLD board thread. The one and only YO! has already got some sweet designs up.
Thanks YO!
Lighting Africa. Lighting Africa officially launches on 4 September, when organisers will unveil a competition for the design and delivery of low-cost, green lighting products for low-income consumers in sub-Saharan Africa. More than 350 companies have already expressed an interest - from Africa-based small businesses to multinationals like Philips.
Perhaps key to the appeal, is the World Bank calculation that the so-called "energy poor" in Africa spend about $17bn each year on fuel-based lighting. "It's a sleeping giant from a market perspective," says the IFC's Mr Sturm. "The poor, even the poorest of the poor, can be a profitable market."
Read full article via The Independent.
And finally, Libertiny intros new Honeycomb Vases. We reported on Libertiny's first stab at the Honeycomb Vase earlier this year that has now evolved into a series of shapes. The "slow-prototypes", requiring 40,000 bees over the course of one week to make a single finished piece, make a "booya"-type statement that denounces the mass manufacturing process normally used to make vases.
Thanks to Niti Bhan and Carl Alviani for their contributions to the newsletter.
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