All posts from Core77

Continuum continues their series Open for Branding, where they are sharing, from start to finish, their latest branding project for the new, nomadic Design Museum Boston.

Wow. Last week, we posted our Design Museum Boston branding concepts for feedback, and more than 1700 people checked out our survey and 274 completed it. The greatest part: everyone aligned--Continuum, Design Museum Boston, and you—on which directions were the strongest.

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Guest post by Phil Patton.

Surprisingly self-effacing among the high profile wit and higher profile designers of Alessi, the new Ovale line of tableware from Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec may sum up the current design zeitgeist.
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We love the new collection released bye eco-friendly undies line PACT in partnership with the Creative Growth, a contemporary art center in Oakland that "focuses on unlocking the creativity of adults artists with developmental disabilities."

The collection comprises of six prints, each a talented Creative Growth artist: Erin Punzel, William Tyler, Donald Mitchell, Dan Miller, and Maureen Clay. 10% the sale of each pair of sustainably-produced underwear goes towards the Creative Growth, to support their continued nurturing of creativity.

See the full collection at PACT, which is available for purchase beginning today. Our favorite? Stripes, pictured above.

Also, if you're in San Francisco, keep your eyes peeled for a PACT party at Creative Growth, where you can see the originating artworks in person. (more...)

You've got one month left to enter this year's Buckminster Fuller Design Challenge, witha monster prize of $100,000 each year for "comprehensive solutions that radically advance human well-being and ecosystem health."

According to the Buckminster Fuller Institute, the winning solution will be a system—not a stand-alone innovation, but a project that strategically integrates social, economic, environment, political and cultural issues—that exemplifies the trimtab principle. Often used by Bucky himself, the metaphor refers to small steering devices used on ships and airplanes where relatively small amounts of leverage are applied at the right time to maximum effect.

For a full rundown of the competition, the criteria, and the jury, visit The Buckminster Fuller Institute's website, or watch Elizabeth Thompson, the executive director of the Buckminster Fuller Institute, give a run down on Design Science above.

Deadline: Monday October 4th (more...)

As various print magazines like Gourmet scramble to reinvent themselves as Ipad apps, we are happy to see that some people still believe a physical printed product can be quite nice. A staple in our daily blog roll of creative delights, It's Nice That, is going against the grain with the fourth issue of their bi-annually printed publication. The publication serves as an archive of the blog's best editorial content, as well as a venue for more in-depth stories, and this issue sounds juicy with features, tons of work, and interviews with Neville Brody, Miranda July and others.

Issue #4 is now available for pre-order, with an incentive for those who appreciate cute illustrated blob-men and the lovely details in printed matter: a free screenprint by James Jarvis (two-color with spot UV gloss, unfolded at 185 x 245 mm).

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Aside from some beautiful shots of the cast off-camera, Rolling Stone's coverage of Mad Men also caught some delightful moments capturing the contrast between life in 2010 and 1965. Enjoy.

Don Draper (Jon Hamm) checks his iPhone 4.

Roger Sterling (John Slattery) looking more suited for Brooklyn than Madison Ave.

Kenny Cosgrove (Aaron Stanton) and Harry Crane (Rich Sommer) perhaps admiring the new iTunes 10 on a MacBook Pro.

Given Mad Men is so well-respected for its attention to period detail (i.e. the Helvetica poster we all saw in the new creative lounge at SCDP early this season) I find this even more entertaining and jarring in their mid-century environs.

Via Armin Vit.
Photos by James Minchin III for Rolling Stone.(more...)

We're excited by the recent trend toward open-source design approaches, with Continuum's Open for Branding project, Betacup on the Jovoto platform, and the recent announcement of Open IDEO. So, we're especially thrilled to be able to announce and track, first-hand, Open Planet Ideas, a promising collaboration between Sony and global conservation group WWF, utilizing the Open IDEO platform.

This challenge is a great one for designers: using existing Sony technologies, either on their own or in unique combinations, how can we address key sustainability issues in new ways? Sony provides information about all their available tech, the WWF provides all the latest environmental facts and figures, and participants provide their fresh inventor minds. Casting a wide net, Sony is betting on the myriad of ideas that can come from a community of people both interested in environmental issues and capable of re-purposing anything from GPS units to dye-sensitized solar cells. Participants can also propose disruptive new applications from nine 'seed' technologies, used alone or in new combinations.

Today kicks off the initial inspiration phase, open through October 1, in which participants upload inspirations and observations in the form of photos, stories, or videos. With community input, the best insights will be synthesized, and the challenge will be re-framed to kick off the concept phase.(more...)

We've been hearing the moans and groans of the music industry for a while about its demise due to lack of interest in the physical music product. And some of us still love that physical experience of putting on a record--the scent of it, delicately placing the needle on the vinyl, and pushing play. Luckily designers and other creatives see these changes as opportunities, and interesting new ways of experiencing and connecting with music are finally picking up some steam. A recent example we wrote about is Boym Partners' collaboration with Ghostly Records, involving a "totem" designed to bring tactile life to Matthew Dear's Black City album.

And Arcade Fire seem to be on a roll with their new album The Suburbs, first by accompanying the digital version of the album with virtual liner notes to browse while playing it on your smart phone. Now the Canadian band has unveiled their next tech-y endeavor for Suburbs, collaborating with Google and writer/director Chris Milk in the release of a pretty incredible and personalized experience for their song "We Used to Wait." The "Wilderness Downtown" is Milk's interpretation of the Arcade Fire song, and also a great experimentation with all the bells and whistles one gets to play with by working with Google.
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We're excited to hear that Ponoko, the popular, laser-cutter based, online fabrication system, is teaming up with SparkFun to offer electronic hardware as part of its catalog of materials, allowing makers to create polished, custom electronic products. Touch-sensitive, gps-enabled, music-producing robots that feed your cat come to mind.(more...)

The Keep Cup, a reusable cup for the takeaway espresso market.

What a great idea: a 'green' product to make a difference, make one happy, and assist in performing the menial tasks that litter an otherwise hectic day. Or is it? Consumer decision-making is beginning to follow a distinctly 'green' trend, which is fantastic in principle but often contrived in reality. What does this mean for the designer who imagines, designs and creates these goods that cater for growing consumer demand in 'sustainability?' There lies the contradiction between designing for the consumption obsessed market and designing to the core principles of sustainability, where environmental, economic and social aspects are somewhat detached from a consumer driven market.

A designer in an appliance company designs a product for disassembly although there is no effective product stewardship scheme to collect the parts from reclaimed models.

According to Ezio Manzini, design theorist from the famed Politecnico di Milano, we have a crisis of the commons (common areas, goods, etc), a lack of contemplative time (a time poor existence, longer hours at work, etc), and most relevant to designers, a proliferation of remedial goods (Manzini 2003). The latter sees products solving every perceived problem imaginable. Whether it is a toothbrush that oscillates the plaque off in half the time, or a breakfast bar filling the five-minute bus ride, we have become increasingly, unconsciously used to products feeding our increasing wants, without a thought as to how that consumption impacts the environment. Last century, the raw materials consumed by one person in the US increased five fold (Matos and Wagner 1998). This looks more ominous when combined with the fact that only around 15-20 % of the world is highly developed to a US or western style of consumption (UN, 2009). One approach is for design to lower the user's consumption, without degrading the consumer's experience. The question is whether the new breed of 'eco' products adds to the crisis, or makes a real difference.(more...)

In this fifth post in our series, Dogs on Design, Raleigh Pop blogger Sarah F. Cox sat down with designer Michael Surtees, an interaction designer at Behavior. They talked about how humans behave on the web and how dogs behave in the park.

I'm trying to ask Michael Surtees serious questions about his design critique of the mobile application Foursquare, but I'm a bit distracted. His weimaraner, Madison, keeps trying to crawl into his lap. We are seated on a bench in Washington Square Park at 9 am on a hot August Saturday and the slanted sun is already starting to bake sunbathers while some sort of work-out club is lunging and lifting in the shade. The park is a mid-point in one of the shorter walking routes Surtees and Madison take down Fifth Avenue. For a longer walk, they'll head north on Park Avenue to 42nd Street and loop back south to 23rd Street en route to the apartment. "What I like about that walk is that the sidewalks are wide, washed daily, and I get to observe Grand Central Station for several blocks." As a Canadian import, Surtees is still struck by New York icons after four years here. "While I live pretty close to the Empire State Building I never take it for granted. It's pretty rare for me not to stop at a light on Fifth Avenue, look up to that building and smile. That this is my normal view walking Madison."(more...)

I was reading this article on Top Ten Lost Technologies and came across an interesting tidbit about Damascus Steel, one of only two materials to make the list (the other being Roman Cement). Damascus Steel was a super-strong Middle Eastern forged metal used from roughly 1100 A.D. to 1700 A.D. It was said to be able to cut through rocks and other people's swords, making it the bad-ass material of its day.

Sadly, the "recipe" for making Damascus Steel no longer exists, and they've not been able to reverse-engineer how to make it. In any case, below is the passage that struck me, boldface mine:

The particular process for forging Damascus steel appears to have disappeared sometime around 1750 AD. The exact cause for the loss of the technique is unknown, but there are several theories. The most popular is that the supply of ores needed for the special recipe for Damascus steel started running low, and sword makers were forced to develop other techniques. Another is that the whole recipe for Damascus steel--specifically the presence of carbon nanotubes--was only discovered by accident, and that sword smiths didn't actually know the technique by heart. Instead, they would simply forge the swords en masse, and test them to determine which met the standards of Damascus steel. Whatever the technique, Damascus steel is one technology that modern experimenters have been unable to fully reproduce.
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