Attention US designers, you've got an extra week to register for Cut & Paste's annual digital design tournament. The deadline has been extended to Friday, September 17th. Don't miss this opportunity to show off your skills in the ultimate real-time design showdown. Register today!

(more...)

Seoul-based designer Bon-Seop Ku's wicked concept phone has a killer, if fictional, interface: The "Aqua GUI," comprised of water bubbles presumably manipulated by an electric current.

We should point out that while other blogs have picked this up and are insisting this phone was designed for Samsung, we believe freelancer Ku did it on his own purely as a concept.

In any case, it would be cool if you could pop the phone open and drink it during a dehydration emergency.

Check out the rest of the inventive Ku's extremely thick portfolio on Coroflot.

(more...)

Once desktop touchscreens explode in popularity--which will probably happen after Apple releases their rumored touchscreen iMac later this year--PC manufacturers will have to incorporate some serious industrial design to enable screens to travel from viewing height to touch-friendly distance. The standard cheapie monitor stand, which typically looks like an afterthought, just ain't gonna cut it.

A multinational company called Colebrook Bosson Saunders, which made the first monitor arms back in the '80s, isn't sitting around waiting for the touchscreen revolution to happen; they've already got a full line of monitor arms (above) designed for a variety of situations, ranging from bare-bones simple to precision-adjustment to heavy-duty to height-adjusting. They can be mounted to posts, clamped to desks, and even hung from slatwalls. Check out their lineup here.

(more...)

London-based Established & Sons is putting their designers to work. Behind the bar. The company, hosting festival-goers in their hometown with a series of three events this year, will inhabit a public house for one of those events. Established & Sons will re-decorate The Wenlock Arms, "the renowned London Public House" right across the street from the showroom, with the company's own furniture. But best of all, during Happy Hours, designers will be serving up the drinks. Here's hoping Konstantin Grcic doles out a mean pour.

(more...)

Coming up in October at San Francisco's Treasure Island is The Ki, an immersive exposition showcasing "the designs, technologies, brands and innovations that are transforming our world." Billed as a "smart-living experiential lifestyle event," The Ki is broken into the categories of Living, Energy, Transportation, and Technology, and will feature everything from electric vehicles to high-tech laundry machines to organic haute cuisine; attendees will get to experience test drives and tastings.

Here's Zem Joaquin, founder of ecofabulous.com, giving you a taste of what they'll be exhibiting at The Ki.

For more info, click here.

(more...)

As a raw-loft-liver I'm very interested in "kitchen stations," or furniture that can be inserted into empty spaces to serve as kitchens where there are no built-ins.

Netherlands-based design firm Studio Gorm's Flow is a perfect example. It features brilliant touches like a cutting board that slides forward to provide a cavity to dump food waste into the compost bin below; a place to hang your grocery bag when you first come home from shopping so you can unload directly; a dish rack positioned above potted plants and herbs, so the run-off water doesn't go to waste, but gives the plants life instead.

Flow2 from Flow 2 on Vimeo.

Hit the jump for more shots.

(more...)

Nanochair.

Lucas Maassen likes to make furniture in the hopes that it will mess with your head. Surrealist of mind, he has no interest in creating things that function as we think they do--chairs for sitting in, mostly. Instead, his furniture 'concepts' function to challenge our perceptions. Several of these concepts will be on display for perceiving at CITE Showroom in NYC on Friday, September 10, in "Conceivably: The Object is What it Seems."

(more...)

Jay Greene's new book on the power of design wears its affiliations right on the book jacket. The logos of all eight companies he profiles are stamped right on the cover, although perhaps Virgin Atlantic gets an extra psychological shout-out, since the subtitle and author credit seem to owe a little debt to the form of luggage tags. We here at Core77 are always happy to see new books touting the power of design to business executives, but we haven't yet figured out whether the constant onslaught of new books signifies a real change in the way companies do business, or whether its simply another signpost promising an Apple-like future to executives clueless about how to execute the changes needed to establish a design culture.

Interestingly, while, Design is How it Works takes its title from a Steve Jobs quote, Apple is not one of the companies Greene profiled. Instead, Greene's book stands as the first post-Apple design book we've profiled here. The contribution of design to Apple's success is taken as a given. Instead, the reader is only presented with Apple in the introduction, as a framing mechanism to contrast with Bang & Olufsen's equally beautiful products. What Greene aims to demonstrate is that the Bauhaus taught us that design is material beauty and simplicity (B&O), Jobs and company have taught us not to look at design, but to experience it. The following case studies fully support that thesis, but it's a pearl of wisdom or two in Clif Bar case study that should get corporate America's attention.

(more...)

How can we start thinking about sustainability as intrinsic part of good design, instead of an addendum?

How can we assume accountability for what our designs influence, and not just the design itself?

These are the questions many of us have been asking constantly—and answering with only with limited success—for years. I am reminded of the confusion designers have around this topic each time I publicly speak about sustainability—the first comment from the audience during Q+A is always the same: "Tell us what to do!" We are a profession who spends our entire lives generating new ideas, challenging the status quo, and building glorious concepts from nothing, yet remarkably we are paralyzed when confronted with the issue of how to meaningfully engage in the most important issue of our time.

This is the challenge the Designers Accord sought to address when it started 3 years ago. The concept was simple: if designers, educators, and business leaders could openly share knowledge and experience about sustainability, we would collectively (and more quickly) build our intelligence around these issues, and then generate more innovative and world-changing ideas.

(more...)

If design and technology conferences were cities, which cities would they be?

We might imagine South by Southwest Interactive to be a sprawling and disjointed metropolis that has developed organically, like Bangkok. The various CHI conferences or SIGGRAPH would be meticulously clean and orderly, perhaps akin to Singapore. And TED might be closer to a utopian ideal that appears temporarily before vanishing again, making you wonder if it was really there in the first place, like an Atlantis, a Shangri-La or a Camelot. Surrounding these major centres of activity are smaller conferences that spring up from time to time, that start as intimate gatherings of like minded individuals that might eventually grow to be as well-trafficked and dispersed as those more established conurbations.

On August 20th, San Francisco boutique product design company Kicker Studio held such an event: its inaugural Device Design Day (D3), at the San Francisco Children's Museum. This follows in the footsteps of design firms hosting their own conferences, which is something that tends to work well—it helps to articulate what a company does that is different from its competitors, as well as demonstrating a willingness to share knowledge and learnings with the wider community. It'd be nice if some of the more established design firms deigned to do something similar.

(more...)