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In my experience, Australians seem to travel in packs of two or more. Each time I've met an Australian, one, two or more of their countrymen are close by. At Dwell on Design this past weekend, I met six in one booth.
The six form Quench, a collective of designers from Queensland, Australia, who all smartly pool their resources, whether they're sharing manufacturers, or studios, or a tradeshow booth at Dwell. Each represented himself individually, but all together (with their space) confirmed another Australian stereotype of mine: they are fun, engaging, and colorful.
Luxx Box's Watch Out
David Shaw's Flow
There was David Shaw's "Flow" planter, a divider/bench/planter nicely done in white and grey powder-coated steel. Flow is representative of Shaw's public works design, for his studio Street and Garden Furniture Co. He creates bus benches, bike racks, drinking fountains, etc., with a clean yet classic sensibility greatly needed in public works design (at least in the U.S.).
Luxx Box's Milk and Tingle
Alexander Lotersztain, with his studio Derlot Editions, and Jason Bird's Luxx Box brought the playful color to the Quench booth. Derlot had "Picket," a lovely table with a solid Tasmanian oak top and brightly colored, powder-coated steel legs. The legs are an appealingly chunky, rounded-tube shape. Luxx Box brought the most color, showing a range of colors in the Milk stool, recyclable polyethylene Tingle seat, and Watch Out, a colorful take on the old industrial sconce.
The Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, founder and one-third of KiBiSi, now lives for much of the year in New York City and has an observation of his home-away-from-home: "It is the most insanely noisy city."
Ingels has likely had sound on his mind a lot lately, as KiBiSi's new Capital headphones for AIAIAI have just hit the market. Designed for the on-the-go urbanite, the Capital headphones are durable, foldable, flexible, and even weatherproof, "tested to withstand rain, snow and hail," the way the U.S. Postal Service used to be. Check out the features in this video animation:
Coinciding with the debut of the product, KiBiSi has also released this video of Ingels and co-KiBiSi'er Lars Larsen chewing the design fat. The vid's got the best of both worlds—Ingels discussing design philosophy in a relatable way that doesn't veer too far into abstraction, followed by Larsen discussing the nuts-and-bolts design of the product:
After working his way through the South, Dave talks with innovators of the automotive industry in Phoenix and Los Angeles. Keep up-to-date with all of the adventures on Route 77 by following @DaveSeliger on Twitter!
Day 13
The newest generation of the Rally Fighter
I was very excited to find out that Local Motors, a crowd-sourced car company, was based out of Phoenix, AZ—right in the middle of my four days driving through the desert. Local Motors released the first generation of the Rally Fighter in 2010 and is now rolling out the second generation. The company has also hosted design competitions for a variety of clients, including DARPA and Peterbilt. However, Local Motors faces stiffcriticism that the company is effectively lowering the value of designers through their design competitions. I sat down with Local Motors' Adam Keiser and Alex Fiechter to learn how the company is attempting to disrupt the auto manufacturing industry through crowd-sourced design, as well as increase the value of designers along the way.
Local Motors' Adam Keiser
Local Motors' microfactory
Local Motors CEO Jay Rogers initially came up with the concept for a community-driven (no pun intended) car design company while a student at the Harvard Business School. The point behind having a community—called the Forge—design a car is to have them design the car they would want to buy and then make that car a reality. In this way, Local Motors has an established niche market before the car is even produced. This is in stark contrast to the current paradigm of auto manufacturing. "You can't walk into Ford or GM and say, 'I want a car exactly how I want it designed,'" said Keiser. Moreover, Local Motors is set-up to have an extremely quick turnaround from initial sketches to a working prototype; in the case of the Rally Fighter, this timeline was only 18 months.
The first generation of the Rally Fighter
The prototype Rally Fighter
At the very foundation of this business model, though, is having a dedicated community of designers and engineers that will design whatever this car is. Fiechter argued that the compensation for the winning designer is more than fair. In the case of the Rally Fighter, winner Sangho Kim received an initial reward of $7,500, and then another $10,000 when Local Motors started to develop the car. The implicit understanding is that the prize money is representative of Local Motors purchasing the designer's IP. Given that each competition only lasts for 3 to 4 weeks, and that a majority of competitors are students or recent graduates, "that's pretty significant compensation for that amount of time," said Feichter.
The inaugural International Conference on Designing Food and Designing For Food kicked off yesterday at London Metropolitan University. Presenting research, discourse, case studies and wacky boxed lunches (!), the 2-day event is the first of its kind to reflect on the multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary nature of food design. The conference presents 29 papers and 7 posters from academics, researchers and students alongside a "Projects" session that includes an exhibition and discussion of 12 selected food design projects. Each day ends with roundtable discussions that tackle subjects like the role of co-creation, product development and dining as Gesamtkunstwerk.
More of an academic colloquium than food-fun-fair, the conference kicked off with keynote presentations that focused on the role of "thrill" in food experience by Brendan Walker. Described as the world's only "Thrill Engineer," Walker was originally trained in aeronautical engineering before researching and teaching Interaction Design at the Royal College of Art. His work offered a lens on the most fundamental consequence of food experience: emotional stimulation.
Coroflotter Matt Pauk is a footwear design pro: he's been at New Balance for the better part of a decade, and it shows. As Senior Designer in the Innovation - Wellness category, he's pleased to present his latest project: the "Aneka" lifestyle shoe.
This concept is the result of research into the body improvement market. Aneka is something truly fresh for the wellness space. Drafting success of yoga, with participation up double digits, Aneka strives to provide a shoe with a similar mind set. This is a pure and honest concept that is physically provocative through each step you take. It targets the active, style-driven woman looking for a truly unique footwear solution.
Besides the fact that Pauk's clearly a natural, he's done a great job documenting the entire design process.
While we're new to the infinite scroll game ourselves, Pinterest is perhaps the best example of the tiling effect known as masonry, in which images can be neatly arrayed regardless of dimensions. Couple with an autoloader script, Pinterest ensures that the fun never ends... inducing what NYC digital agency Firstborn has dubbed "Scrolling Slumber." Their client, Japanese clothing megachain Uniqlo, wanted to do something about it. Hence, the (dryly-titled) Dry Mesh project:
I don't know if there's a world record for tallest skyscraper ad unit, but the image heights on Uniqlo's Pinterest page (still live as of press time) measure in the web-optimized 1000s. Not to get too 'meta,' but here are a couple resized versions of the pinned graphics:
All of these T's were originally in a single column...
You can always count on the exceptional fabrics from Maharam to breathe some life into NeoCon's mostly commercial and contract offerings. This year the company debuted an eye-catching line up of brand new patterns from fashion designer Paul Smith, experimental Antwerp-based Studio Job, artist/designer Hella Jongerius and conceptual artist Liam Gillick.
Gillick displayed his patterns at NeoCon in an installation called Directed Expansion System that's "reminiscent of a production line or supply system [and] expresses Gillick's interest in sites of production as opposed to consumption." That's all very well, but no matter what Gillick meant to say with the way he designed his display, I was too enthralled with his lively, intricate patterns to notice. Perhaps it's the dawn of digital printing (admittedly, a technology that's been around for a while now but only seems to just be entering the commercial market now) that's inspiring designers to get smaller and more precise. Certainly Maraham Digital Products has put out some wonderfully minute, illustrative patterns in recent years.
One more from the graduating class of RCA: Marjan van Aubel, "a product designer with an inquisitive, almost scientific perspective," presents "The Energy Collection," a set of solar glassware that discharges through a matching bookshelf, which serves as a rather large battery. It's a vaguely biological ecosystem: the tableware 'drones' gather energy during the day, 'feeding' the shelf, which can be used to power a lamp or charge a phone... but the real magic lies in the physics:
Within each glass is a photovoltaic layer of dye Synthesized Solar Cell. This means that the properties of colour are being used to create an electrical current. This technology was invented by Michael Graetzel at EPFL. It is a technique based on the process of photosynthesis in plants. Like the green chlorophyll which absorbs light energy, the colours in these cells collect energy.
Graetzel uses a porous Titanium dioxide layer soaked with photosensitive dye—a natural pigment extracted from the juice of blueberries or spinach. He discovered that the dye that gives the red or blue colour to berries, gives off an electron when light strikes it. One side of the glass is positive, the other negative and when the cell is exposed to light, the dye transmits its electrons to the titanium dioxide and releases an electronic current.
Sounds like pretty heady stuff; I'd be curious as to whether the technology can be implemented at scale, especially given the material advantages of the dye (as opposed to traditional silicon cells): "The glassware uses sunlight as a sustainable source of energy, but can also work under diffused light. This makes them much more efficient for use inside the home compared to standard solar panels, which only work in direct sunlight and are not suitable for indoor use."
Don't be fooled by the pictures, this light-up headgear is more DIY tech than discotheque. The brainchild of Wouter Walmink, Alan Chatham and Floyd Mueller of RMIT's Exertion Games Lab, the "LumaHelm" certainly isn't the first bicycle illumination concept we've seen, but it might be the smartest one... not least because it's attached one's cranium as opposed to one's conveyance (no offense to Mitchell Silva et al). The prototype is an off-the-shelf helmet that's been augmented—at once hacked and adorned—with several LED strips, such that the array of 104 multicolored lights is mapped evenly onto the hemisperical surface (they left the padding intact to ensure that it still meets safety standards). An accelerometer serves as an input for Processing via Arduino: deliberate motions of the head activate corresponding sections of the surface, approximating left and right turn signals, as well as braking (with a quick backwards tic). A translucent vacuum-formed shell serves to protect the LEDs and diffuse the light they emit.
While the safety applications of the LumaHelm are obvious, the designers abide by a broader outlook, emphasizing the potential of light as a medium for expression.
LumaHelm turns the helmet into a display through which we can communicate, express and play. We are exploring how this can make cycling safer, skateboarding more expressive, improve communication on construction sites, and affect any other activity requiring a helmet. Through this design and research process we want to find out what wearable technology in the future may look like and how it can be more intimately integrated in our everyday lives.
In an interview with ABC Radio, Walmink notes that the materials cost them about $400 and that they're planning on releasing instructions so that the average DIYer have the means to make their own LumaHelm. And while commercial availability is still a long-term goal, he comments that an LED-embedded hardhat might bypass the noise issues specific to construction sites as a new form of communication.
Thus, the project is as much a thought experiment as a cycling solution, a new way to broadcast our thoughts in an RGB dot matrix that happens to enclose their very source.
It has now come to my attention that the same guys working on sensor-equipped robots, who are clearly hellbent on our destruction, are now developing them so that they can consistently defeat human beings in competitions. The geniuses over at U. of Tokyo's Ishikawa Oku Lab have developed a dishonorable robot hand that uses its lightning-quick vision to cheat at Rock-Paper-Scissors:
Nice going, guys. When are you gonna get around to teaching them how to box and fire handguns?
"The purpose of this study," write the researchers, "is to develop a janken (rock-paper-scissors) robot system with 100% winning rate as one example of human-machine cooperation systems."
ROUTE 77: Core77 American Roadtrip
LONDON OLYMPICS 2012
DMY Berlin 2012
Core77 OPEN Exhibition 2012
New York CityVision Competition
Snarkitecture - Funiture 
Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving, by Jon Kolko
Where They Create, by Paul Barbera and Alexandra Onderwater
The Key to Sustainable Product Creation: Engineering + Design
One Chair a Week 
IKEA Takes on Consumer Electronics
New Philips LED Light Bulb
Core77 Design Awards 
SHIFTBoston 2012 Glow Competition 
Luxx Box's Watch Out
David Shaw's Flow
Luxx Box's Milk and Tingle
Derlot's Picket 
The newest generation of the Rally Fighter
Local Motors' Adam Keiser
Local Motors' microfactory
The first generation of the Rally Fighter
The prototype Rally Fighter
All of these T's were originally in a single column...
This gradient was originally 8000+ pixels high...
Google Maps: Designing the Modern Atlas
The Messy Art of Saving the World
Big Idea, Little Printer
The Landscape of User Experience Design in Asia
A nod to Daft Punk?
Photo by Craig Sillitoe for 
DMY Berlin 2012
NEW YORK DESIGN WEEK 2012
FRIEZE ART FAIR NEW YORK 2012
MILAN 2012: SALONE INTERNAZIONALE DEL MOBILE
Book Review - "Learn for Life: New Architecture for New Learning"
Book Review - Introducing: Visual Identities for Small Businesses
Wallpaper's City Guide: What's Hip in Tel Aviv
Paper View: Sight Unseen's Printed Edition
3
Engineering Efficiency: Q+A with Alex Knox, Dyson's Industrial Design Director
London Olympics 2012: Nike Unveils Pro TurboSpeed & Medal Stand Collection for US Athletes
DESIGNING A WALKING LA: Q+A with LA Walks founder Deborah Murphy
CATALYSTS FOR CHANGE: How to Gamify a Path Out of Poverty
Looking Back at 20 Years of Kikkerland with Jan van der Lande
