They Innovate Inc. is the name of an upstart design company out of Port Hope, Canada. Focusing on the phone mounting space, their first product is the Clipless, a magnetic means of attaching your phone or tablet to any surface (including your own clothes).
Early prototypes were 3D-printed, but the team didn't get much traction; early test runs indicated what more and more people are discovering—not everyone digs the occasionally janky results you get with 3D-printed plastic. But after switching to a CNC mill and changing materials to aluminum, user feedback went positive and the group knew they had a hit on their hands.
Man I can't get over that new Mac Pro. And while we all know the "thermal core" part is made from extruded aluminum, how is the exterior (which is also aluminum) made? It's obviously not extruded, as it's got that inward-curving lip up top, and it wouldn't make sense from an efficiency standpoint to CNC-mill the entire thing out of a billet; there would be too much waste. Any guesses?
According to Don Lehman, it's made using the production method known as impact extrusion. Conceptually, the process is more similar to blowmolding than proper extrusion, except a metal punch takes the place of compressed air, and the material used is metal rather than plastic. Here's a quick look at impact extrusion as performed by Illinois-based Best Metal Extrusions, on a product significantly smaller than the Mac Pro. (Looks like a cigar holder, but your guess is as good as mine.)
Here's something a little closer in size to the Mac Pro:
Sometimes you don't realize your behavior is actually compensating for a design flaw. That is, until you see the solution. When borrowing a car and carrying anything heavy or delicate—a full toolbox, a few bottles of booze, a birthday cake—I always place it in the rear seat footwell. It would be much more convenient to load into the hatch, but I don't want those things sliding around because I took the corner too hard after watching Fast & Furious 6.
That's where the Stayhold comes in. The Velcro strip on the bottom adheres it firmly to the carpeting inside your car, allowing you to wall things off against the edges or build your own little fort.
As humble as this device is, to me it represents the ideal of what industrial design has to offer: It's simple, largely monomaterial, addresses a valid need, and is relatively inexpensive. Sure it's not going to wind up in the MoMA, but then again, neither is anything in the trunk of my car.
Herman Miller's Embody is one of the best office chairs on the market, and the company has a reputation for excellence in design and engineering. So we were surprised when both armrests on our review unit of the Embody independently stopped working within just a few years. (Two and a half, to be exact.) We subsequently saw the same issue on a second Embody.
The Embody's cost has come down from a whopping $1,600 to a more manageable $1,100 or so, but that's still a lot of scratch; shouldn't a Herman Miller product last longer than that? After all, the company does guarantee their products for 12 years. But if you've got a busted Embody and don't want to go through the hassle of shipping it back to HM for repairs, living without it for a spell, then waiting around for the delivery guy, we figured we'd see if we could fix ours using basic household tools. Have a look:
**Update 6/17**
Herman Miller writes:
The arm issue was limited to early production, identified, and soon thereafter resolved via product design--it is no longer an issue.
We would like to point out that the warranty really is the best solution for any covered issues, and we pledge to make it as convenient as possible. Repairs oughtn't be attempted by the user as it voids your warranty, not to mention there is the potential for frustration and injury.
Any owner of an early Embody with the product problem depicted in the video should contact us for warranty repair. We will gladly assist with return arrangements, and the customer will receive a fixed or replaced chair.
In the original Miami Vice television series, Detective Zito is murdered in Season Three. After learning of his death, co-cops Crockett, Tubbs and Switek visit his house, where they discover Zito's collection of snow globes. They look at them in bewilderment, and the clear message delivered by their faces—in as ham-fisted a way as only '80s American television can do it—is "Wow, I guess we didn't really know this guy at all." Cue violins. An as hackneyed as that moment was, it was the first time your adolescent correspondent understood the usage of physical objects as a narrative device in storytelling.
Years later in ID school, professors who apparently knew each other as well as Zito and Switek delivered conflicting messages on this front. One professor would tell you that "Objects exist to tell stories—they tell us about ourselves!" while others said objects were mere intermediaries that we should design to be unobtrusive; the whole "People don't want a toaster, they just want toast" mentality.
It's easy to see the "Objects tell us about ourselves" bit as a bunch of hooey, as with iPhone and Android users—upon spotting the competing product on an acquaintance's desk, they'll tiresomely begin projecting qualities of the most vociferous proponent of that product onto the user. Ditto Mac and PC users. But it does fascinate me that some objects tell tales we never see coming. Case in point: Stanford economist Eric Hanushek, and his research partner Ludgar Woessman from U. of Munich, put together a study where they found a specific object in certain family's homes that served as a reliable indicator that a child from that family would do well in school.
Any guesses as to what that object is? A computer? A television? An iPad?
"Racetrack Playa" sounds like the screenname of an online teenager you're competing against in Need for Speed, but scientists recognize it as the name of a dried-up lake in Death Valley. For a century, scientific minds have been puzzled by a well-documented, poorly-understood phenomenon occuring at Racetrack Playa: Enormous stones, some up to 700 pounds, appear to have somehow moved themselves across the lakebed floor in random patterns, leaving a furrowed trail behind them.
No one had ever seen these "sailing stones" move, but many photographed the end result. The original thought was that the lakebed forms a thin sheet of ice on it, and that the wind then blows the rocks across it; but that theory was discounted after researchers calculated it would take wind speeds of hundreds of miles per hour to move the rocks, while the wind at the Racetrack maxes out around 90 m.p.h. And if you're wondering why they don't just strap a GoPro camera onto a rock to see what's going on, scientists returning to the site over the years have calculated that the rocks move for short periods of time, just once every three years. That's a bit longer than your battery's likely to last.
However, a fortunate collision between two of these magic rocks provided planetary scientist Ralph Lorenz with an interesting discovery:
Yesterday Apple unveiled their ridiculously sexy update to the Mac Pro line. The sleek, 9.9-inch-tall, 6.6-inch-diameter cylinder is unlike any other desktop machine you've seen.
At first blush you might assume they're simply playing with basic geometry, as they did with their famously failed Cube design; but the cylindrical shape was not arbitrarily selected, and is pure form-follows-function. The design process began with re-thinking the internal architecture and deciding that each core--the machine can be kitted out with up to twelve--ought receive equal cooling to improve performance. Says Apple of the resultant "thermal core" design:
Rather than using multiple heat sinks and fans to cool the processor and graphics cards, we built everything around a single piece of extruded aluminum designed to maximize airflow as well as thermal capacity. It works by conducting heat away from the CPU and GPUs and distributing that heat uniformly across the core. That way, if one processor isn't working as hard as the others, the extra thermal capacity can be shared efficiently among them.
Red Comet salesman kit, via Collectors Weekly—looks cool, but what does it actually do?
You know how words like 'ingenious' and 'inflammable' actually mean the same thing as 'genius' and 'flammable,' respectively? It so happens that the object known as a "fire grenade" has a similarly paradoxical name: it's a glass vessel containing an extinguishing agent, intended to be thrown at the flames—in the same manner as the projectile weapon—in order to put it out.
Lamps by Valentino Llegada
But before we get into the "more-than-you-ever-cared-to-know" segment of this post, it's worth mentioning that a couple of strikingly similar blog submissions inspired (or sparked my interest, if you will) my inquest into fire extinguisher history. Southern Florida-based artist Valentino Llegada has taken to upcycling the aluminum canisters into household objects, namely vases and pendant lamps. Seeing as manufacturers and fire departments alike typically recommend replacing them annually, the raw material is essentially an alternative to recycling non-refillable varieties of extinguisher (actual shelf life may be over a decade for dry chemical extinguishers; compressed gas extinguishers may develop slow leaks within a year).
Samuel Bernier's project, on the other hand, is a bit more robust: the DIYer extraordinaire recently posted a detailed Instructable for a fire extinguisher floor lamp, which he created with the help of ENSCI students Sarah Khoubbaz and Rim Besbes during a workshop called "Lounge Share." We've seen homages to Achille Castiglioni (namesake of Bernier's project) before, but this upcycled tribute neatly conflates the iconic forms of an oft-overlooked safety item and an objet d'art.
Earlier this week the Chinese government clamped down on the Internet, as they do every June 4th, to quell any traffic glorifying the Tiananmen Square protests. Someone promptly released the Photoshopped image you see above, where the tanks are replaced by ducks. But while gigantic rubber duckies may be getting the Communist Party's goat, it's not the gigantic rubber duckies from the image above.
This is a little convoluted, but bear with us: In 2007, Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman created an enormous, floating, inflatable rubber duck, some 26 meters long, 20 meters wide and a whopping 32 meters tall.
I'm currently in rainy North Carolina, where Tropical Storm Andrea has me scurrying about my rental car with an umbrella—and getting soaked every time I get in or out of the car. It's not just the rain hitting me when I open/close the umbrella and get my body in/out of the car; it's that often-overlooked design problem of getting the umbrella in/out of the car. With a four-door, you can either open the rear passenger door, throw the umbrella in the back, then hustle into the front seat, exposing yourself to the elements. Or you can climb into the driver's seat, keeping the umbrella open until the very last minute, then collapse it and pull the sopping mess across your lap to throw it into the front passenger seat. We've had umbrellas for thousands of years, and cars for a hundred, and no one has resolved this problem?
Some have tried. Rolls-Royce's Phantom and Ghost models have a fancy, full-size pop-out umbrella that stores in a compartment in the door:
In the early 1980s, Frenchman Franck Goddio was working in finance. But rather than searching for treasure in spreadsheets, he began looking elsewhere: underwater. With a passion for underwater archaeology, Goddio quit his finance gig, founded the Institut European d'Archeologies Sous-Marine, and started searching for shipwrecks.
His results were impressive. Goddio excavated Spanish galleons, trading ships from the British East India Company, and Napoleon Bonaparte's flagship, among others. But it was an expedition he undertook in 2000 that really put him on the map, so to speak: He managed to locate Thonis-Heracleion, an ancient port city (built circa 800 B.C.!) that's now completely submerged off the coast of Egypt. The hyphenated name hints at its cosmopolitan nature: The Egyptians called it Thonis, the Greeks, Heracleion after a massive temple to Heracles that once stood at the site.
Robot vacuums are amazing, particularly if you've spent years pushing a manual vacuum around your apartment. To have this little disc thoroughly clean the floor when you're not even there is an experience that will spoil you. But that doesn't mean it's a completely hands-off experience; in their current iteration, robot vacuums still require some supervision and maintenance—things that they never show you in the commercials.
Here we'll take a look at what the actual user experience is with our review of Moneual's Rydis MR6550. After the shine of using a new product wears off, what tasks will you find yourself repeating to keep the thing running smoothly? And what will you wish the product's designers had done differently? Watch and find out.
While ad agency Ogilvy Mather addressed Diet Coke marketing with an ultra-thin (concept) vending machine, they're addressing the package design itself to push the flagship Coke product. Ogilvy Paris, with the input of the Singapore office, has commissioned a Coke can that can be split into two halves.
Half-sized soda cans already exist; I spotted some overseas, though I've never seen any in the 'States (which makes sense given American appetites) so it was just a matter of creating a top-half can for a perfect fit:
Earlier this month, we took a look at Sunglass, a product design collaboration site where users can download plug-ins to connect their local CAD environments to the cloud. Their partnership with Cadenas Part Solutions, a company that creates digital catalogs for major parts manufacturers, is starting to reveal the promise of such a system.
The two companies' newly-announced joint venture, the Sunglass Parts Library, provides users the ability to instantly access parts files—gears, motors, hinges, etc.—and integrate those parts directly into their CAD files. "It's the first interactive application with the ability to integrate an enterprise-grade manufacturing library directly into the 3D design environment," they write. The analogy isn't perfect, but the team-up is sort of an industrial design version of the iPod-and-iTunes ecosystem: Its success is dependent not only on the interface's ease-of-use, but also on the ability to sign up multiple bodies—in Apple's case, the music labels; in Cadena's case, the parts suppliers.
At this rate, bicycle mudguards are the new iPhone cases: it seems like every other bike-obsessed industrial designer is looking to develop an ultraminimal solution to the problem of protecting one's back from the grit and grime of the streets. The now-on-Kickstarter Musguard splits the difference between Windsor detachable fenders and the recently-seen Plume. It's a blade-like strip of polypropylene that is affixed to one's seat tube with a velcro strap, fixed in place at the seatstay bridge such that it sits almost directly above the rear wheel.
The slick (pun intended) video showcases the product on what I conjecture to be the mean streets of Ljubljana, as well as shots of designer Jurij Lozic's studio and glamour shots of fixed-gear riders (in fact, one of the bikes is available as a KS reward). The Musguard itself is produced locally in Slovenia, and is not only removable and rollable but also recyclable as well:
At a previous design gig, I had a co-worker who'd derisively refer to our boss—behind his back, naturally—as "The Millimeter." Because whenever we'd submit renderings to him for approval, he'd invariably say "Looks good, but can you move this line just a millimeter to the [left/right]?" He couldn't help himself; he'd have said it to a child drawing a rectangle or to Michelangelo carving David.
Just as industrial designers pore over millimeters, radii and materials, sound designers obsess about details laypeople will probably never notice. Take, for example, the sound that you hear when getting an incoming video call on Facebook:
If you think shaving on Earth is a pain, try shaving in space. With no running water, your shorn whiskers will scatter and float around the cabin—which is bad news for the sensitive electronic devices inside. It's also kind of disgusting as you can accidentally breathe the hairs in. Here astronaut Chris Hadfield shows you how it's done:
I recently hunted down and acquired Braun's classic Sixtant SM 31 razor from a source in Italy. The freaking thing was made in 1962 and it still works perfectly, but finding it wasn't easy. For those of you who don't want to spend your days scouring eBay and Etsy, here's a chance to pick up another Braun design classic without putting in the legwork: They've announced they're re-issuing their iconic ET66 Calculator, designed by Dietrich Lubs and Dieter Rams back in the '80s.
Summer's nearly upon us, and we here at Core77 will shortly spend a weekend at a cabin rental where we can sit outside and drink nice, frosty beer in between spirited bouts of wrestling. But there's a design problem: While we can wrestle out in the woods as good as we can in the office, having cold beer outside means hauling up a cooler, keeping that cooler well-stocked with ice, and downing the beer faster than we'd like so it doesn't go warm—and that accelerated boozing sometimes impacts the wrestling results. There's gotta be a better way!
This is crazy—see those yellow dots on the map? Those are the locations of some 20,000 known shipwrecks off the coast of America, all mapped by the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration as part of their Remediation of Underwater Legacy Environmental Threats (RULET) project. Many of those yellow dots are older sailing ships or coal-fired vessels, and it's no big deal if those sit on the bottom of the ocean; others, however, are World-War-II-era oil tankers torpedoed by the freaking Nazis.
Those tankers, and some other non-wartime wrecks carrying large volumes of oil, are a problem. It's only a matter of time before corrosion starts to release thousands of tons of oil from those ships into the ocean. Some 87 wrecks have been added to a national risk assessment report, with 36 of them deemed "high priority for a Worst Case Discharge." And these are just the boats that NOAA knows about; they estimate "it is likely that local knowledge will bring forward other vessels that [also] meet the criteria...."
If these ships start to leak, it is not just the poor Gulf states that dealt with the Deepwater Horizon disaster that will be affected:
The majority of the 36 higher risk wrecks identified in RULET are located off the North Carolina and Florida coasts. They reflect the intensity of World War II casualties in the Battle of the Atlantic. For the 6 Most Probable Discharge (10%) scenario, the high priority wrecks are located off of New England and Florida.
As this report was just released two days ago, any potential solutions have yet to surface.
Move over, Rain Tail—there's a new ultraminimal rear fender in town. The Plume is a recoiling mudguard that is deployed by unrolling the coiled strip of stainless steel and 'retracted' with a simple flick. The hardware slides neatly onto a bicycle seatpost and it looks something like a sideways cupholder when not in use, functioning something like a reverse slap-bracelet.
Note: Animated GIF for purposes of illustration only
Founders Dan McMahon and Patrick Laing met three years ago in London and have been developing the Plume for about as long. Now that they've filed a patent on the recoiling design, they're pleased to present their creation to the public via Kickstarter.
It's certainly a clever solution to a common problem, and the Kickstarter page duly features a couple examples of what Sparse deemed to be "bike hacks," i.e. variations on DIY mudguards. The main advantage of these ad hoc fabrications is that they're inherently disposable; the tradeoff is that they're ugly as sin.
Longtime Core77 readers know I've been a fan of Art Lebedev Studio for ages. Recently I got a kick out of their Attraktsionus ferris wheel/ski lift combination, their Stubus tree ring watch where cracks in the heartwood and exterior rings serves as the hands, and their older Skrepkus paper clip.
You couldn't make it up: a Portland, Oregon-based design duo just launched a crowdfunding campaign to launch a mason jar-based product, designed expressly to brew one of the two beverages that the City of Roses is famous for.
Besides its rugged good looks, it so happens that the mason jar is more durable than the traditional carafe; bedecked in a wool sleeve for insulation and topped off with a maple lid (with a press), the Portland Press is a crafty take on the iconic coffee brewing apparatus (footnote: the origin of the French press is unclear, but the modern version was patented in Italy in 1929; today, it's typically associated with Bodum of Denmark).
The acronym "P.O.S." always struck me as somewhat ironic: most folks who have worked in retail know that it's short for Point Of Sale, but it also has a pejorative meaning in common parlance. When it launched in 2010, Square's register app marked a digital solution to the former—precisely because extant payment gateways so often might be characterized as the latter.
Today, they announced a major upgrade from the now-iconic card reader.
Square, the company making commerce easy for everyone, today announced Square Stand, beautiful new hardware for brick and mortar businesses that turns an iPad into a complete point of sale. With local businesses increasingly tearing out their old point of sale systems to run Square Register, Square Stand gives merchants a remarkable new way to manage and grow their business, all for the price of a cash register.
"Local business owners take as a given that they need an ugly, slow, expensive, and complicated point of sale system cluttering their counter," said Jack Dorsey, co-founder and CEO of Square. "Square Stand is elegant, fast, affordable, and easy to use. Whether you're selling cupcakes, cardigans, or cappuccinos, running your business with Square has never been easier."
Designed by Ammunition Group in collaboration with Square, the simple swiveling stand is designed as an all-in-one system. The card reader is discreetly integrated into the base, providing a larger and more stable slot for swiping.
They've also managed to cast a young Julianne Moore in the role of a lifetime:
Like my train pass wallet, these objects fall into the category of things I touch and use every day. Carabiners are intended for mountain climbing, but their simple design and great utility make them super-useful to city dwellers like me, who only climb subway steps. I use them in the photo studio, during event coverage, and for my dogs, and I now wonder how I ever got by without them.
Leash Splitter
These were initially pet-driven purchases. I own two dogs and was looking for a way to hold both of their leashes in one hand without them becoming entwined. First I bought this thing, which is called a rotor swivel:
I spotted it at a mountain climbing equipment store across the street from Core77 HQ. It's just two aluminum loops attached by an enclosed bearing that allows them to rotate independently, and it set me back forty bucks. Being designed for climbing, I figured it's got to be watertight, which I'd need to weather thunderstorms (I'm out with the dogs for up to two hours a day, rain or shine).
Next I sewed a length of webbing through it to serve as a handle. (If any of you are interested in working with canvas webbing but don't know how to sew, please pipe up in the comments and I'll prepare a basic tutorial. With a simple trick, someone with no skill can use even a junky sewing machine to sew canvas webbing.)
Then I needed a carabiner to attach the two leashes to the rotor. Mistakenly thinking beefier would be better, I initially bought this Omega Pacific locking carabiner at the same equipment store for ten bucks.
However, I found this carabiner too bulky, and together with the rotor it added too much weight to the leashes for my taste. But at the hardware store I spotted these cheapie "key holder" carabiners for just a few bucks.
They appear to be made from aluminum and one can be used to handily attach the rotor to the two leash handles.
Whether you watch Mad Men or not, you understand that the advertising industry reflects the times we live in, addressing our distorted self-images with occasionally ruthless trenchancy. Thus Ogilvy Paris has commissioned the Slender Vender, an ultraslim vending machine for client Diet Coke.
It's more of a stunt than the real deal; while the machines were actually created and scattered about Paris, they dispensed free product. And though advertising blogs are heaping praise on the things--Adland TV writes "The idea is quite nice, turn the vending machine into a slender pole, reminding people that Diet Coke is the skinny choice" while Adverblog posits "Diet Coke is the responsible choice when it comes to calories, so why not let the vending machine show how slender it can be. Nice campaign to make the point of sale an experience," it doesn't take a major cynic to see these machines probably wouldn't fly in the 'States. Walk around your average U.S. shopping mall and see if the folks drinking Diet-anything are any skinnier than the folks drinking the regular variants.
NY DESIGN WEEK 2013 - WANTED DESIGN
NY DESIGN WEEK 2013 - SATELLITE SHOWS
NY DESIGN WEEK 2013 - ICFF
FRIEZE NEW YORK 2013
Red Comet salesman kit, via 
Lamps by Valentino Llegada
Photoshopped, obviously
Real!
Looks cool...
Note: Animated GIF for purposes of illustration only
Looks cool, but what does it actually do?
9(unknown*no*no*0)&guid=ON&x_utmac=MO-385556-14){kind=small}
