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Hand-Eye Supply Design Directory Coroflot
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Designing DelightBehind the Scenes at Facebook with Director of Design Kate Aronowitz
Building a Bottle BrickTim Dubitsky Shares His Process at GlassLab
London Design Festival 2012Contributors Sam Dunne and Perrin Drumm document the best in show
Burning Man 2012Photos and reporting by Jessica Charlesworth of Unknown Fields Division
Core77 Design Awards 2012Images of all of the 2012 honorees
Eero Saarinen: A Reputation for InnovationA+D Architecture and Design Museum
Los Angeles, CA · Thru January 3, 2013
Draw Up a Chair: The Battery Conservancy Americas Design CompetitionDeadline: October 30, 2012
The Journey of Sebastian ErrazurizReview & Interview by Ray Hu
Making It: Manufacturing Techniques for Product Design, by Chris LefteriReviewed by Robert Blinn
To Design Is to Understand UncertaintyDr. James Self on unknowns in design process and practice
The Crucial Role of Design Education in Europe's Recovery
iPhone 5 Industrial DesignDesigners sound off on the new form factor—join the conversation!
Job Search AdviceWe've all been there: help a recent grad land his first industrial design gig...
Core77 Design Awards Open for Registration on January 17, 2012
SHIFTBoston 2012 Glow Competition Deadline: February 3, 2012
Sunday, November 18, 2012
Designer Kenya Hara of Muji and Haptic fame, among other things, has curated a collection of small-scale, DIY architecture projects created by the likes of Konstantin Grcic, Shigeru Ban and others. And you can download the blueprints and watch the accompanying videos of each project to learn how to build them yourself. The only thing is, all of the projects are designed specifically to be used and inhabited by...dogs.
Architecture for Dogs, invented by architects and designers, is an extremely sincere collection of architecture and a new medium, which make dogs and their people happy. By looking at the diagrams or pictures or watching the videos, people all over the world can make these themselves.Dogs are people's partners, living right beside them, but they are also animals that humans, through crossbreeding, have created in multitudes of breeds. Reexamining these close partners with fresh eyes may be a chance to reexamine both human beings themselves and the natural environment.
As our first project, we present 13 pieces of architecture. Please take the time to carefully examine the details of these elaborately designed ingenious structures, and because it's free to download the blueprints, if you find one you like, make it yourself for your dog.
Objects range from rocking dog houses to platforms designed to bring short pets up to human eye-level to cooling platforms for hot weather. Some of the project descriptions are filled with that architecture-speak and have concepts that seem a bit of a stretch, while others are outright clever: Torafu Architects' concept solves the issue of dogs that enjoy burrowing in their owner's clothes, by incorporating the master's old shirts into the frame of a furniture piece.
One warning: At press time the website was acting a bit wonky. Grcic's entry, for instance, refused to load. I'm thinking a dog somewhere has chewed through a server cable.
Tim Jahnigen is a multicreative, Dean-Kamen-like inventor who has created "systems and technologies with patents pending in a diverse range of industries, from construction and banking to science and medicine." In recent years he turned his attention towards what initially appeared to be a smaller problem: Redesigning the soccer ball.
During the last World Cup we looked at the soccer ball's design history, and complained about the pure evil that is the Jabulani. But Jahnigen was interested specifically in soccer balls as they're used in developing nations. Your average Adidas will last just fine in the back of a minivan or on the well-manicured pitch at Springfield Middle School, but dirt tracks in Darfur and rocky fields in Afghanistan chew the balls up in no time.
So it was that Jahnigen observed a documentary about kids in Darfur kicking around, rather than a ball, a rough sphere of garbage tied up with twine. It was their only option, as balls donated to children in situations like these simply cannot withstand the rough terrain. "The millions of balls that are donated go flat within 24 hours," Jahnigen told The New York Times.
After doing research he discovered a materials company called PopFoam, whose tagline is "Soft Toughness" and whose titular product is made from EVA (ethyl vinyl acetate). As the company describes it, "PopFoam will improve durability, tear strength, tensile strength, flexibility, color availability, chemical resistance, cold weather resistance, sound protection and abrasion resistance while offering the cushioning comforts and the complement of design ascetics [sic] to your products."
However, Jahnigen calculated that tooling costs to produce PopFoam in a spherical, soccer-ball-sized shape would cost a small fortune--about $300,000, money that he didn't have. Here's where it gets a little crazy: The multi-talented Jahnigen is also a music producer, and counts Sting among his list of buddies. When Sting, no stranger to charitable giving, heard about the project, he insisted on funding it.
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At the risk of getting in trouble, I'm going to tell this story because I think any industrial designer would be interested to hear it.
The brilliant and prolific Bruce Hannah, a former IDSA Designer of the Decade, was a professor of mine at Pratt. And years before teaching us, he accidentally invented a certain famous children's toy—the design of which was stolen from him, earning other people millions of dollars. I couldn't find this story anywhere in print, and I realize that's probably for legal reasons, so I will not quote anyone directly. Also bear in mind I'm going off of an anecdote I heard only once, about twenty years ago in class, so the details aren't perfect.
Sometime circa 1970, Hannah would invite friends over to watch pro (American) football. During the games they'd toss a football around the house, but one day things got out of hand, and an errant pass either went through a painting or broke a lamp (I just called a classmate of mine, we can't agree on which it was).
At the time, Hannah and fellow designer Andrew Morrison were working on the Hannah Lounge Chair for Knoll, which came in both single-chair and seating-row configurations for airport lounges, waiting rooms and the like.
It was made from a cast aluminum frame, and between the crossbars was slung two pieces of polyurethane foam (one for the seat, one for the back) encased in wool or vinyl upholstery. We had one at Pratt Studios and the thing was super-comfortable, I slept on it more than once. Anyway, the foam was molded into a tapered shape, as you can see in the photos, pinching off at the front/rear edges for the seat, and the top/bottom edges for the back.
As the designer, Hannah had access to the factory and the production machinery, so after the roughhousing incident he created a football-shaped mold and cranked out a soft, polyurethane foam football. He and his buddies could now toss the thing around the living room without fear of drawing the missus' ire. It was a great idea for a product, but Hannah only made it for him and his friends; he was occupied with perfecting the chair design and wasn't thinking about children's toys.
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Toronto-based design group Castor gets called a lot of names, especially sustainable—that S word whose egregious misuse irks us so. Not that Castor isn't sustainable, there are just so many better ways to describe them. Founders Kei Ng and Brian Richer say their furniture and lighting collection has a "sense of irreverence," a sentiment echoed by their highly irreverent and really kind of awesome head shot, above.
As far as their actual products are concerned, we suggest descriptors like recycled, or perhaps upcycled. The short doc, Castor is French For Beaver (it is—we checked), recently made by Carling Acthim and Lana Mauro, takes a closer look at two of Castor's best known lighting designs, the Tank Light and the Tube Light, both of which repurpose cast off materials like old fire extinguishers and burnt out halogen tubes and turn them into hanging light fixtures whose final form is completely removed from their previous lives.