Hasta La Ideas

(Photo: Dan Connor)

Levi’s is putting its workwear roots to work with a new series of community-based pop-up spaces that act as functional workshops, event spaces, and retail storefronts. The first in a planned series of Levi’s Workshops opened this week in San Francisco’s Mission district, just down the street from one of the company’s original factories, and it’s all about printmaking: from classic letterpress and screenprinting to photocopying and good old-fashioned typesetting. Over the next eight weeks, the print shop will host classes (including Saturday’s denim papermaking session that will offer pointers on transforming your jeans into art supplies), book parties, and special events with local luminaries including Beautiful Losers director Aaron Rose, Alice “Farm-to-Table” Waters, and Craigslist founder Craig Newmark. Levi’s has invited these three “local pioneers” (again with the hardscrabble heritage) to execute printmaking-based collaborations. We hear that Waters is cooking up an educational poster for her Edible Schoolyard project, while Rose will lead a public screenprinting workshop with Sister Corita Kent, the California artist/activist who is the subject of his new documentary short, Become a Microscope. Levi’s will switch coasts (and crafts) later this fall with a New York City workshop focused on photography. In the meantime, here’s some luscious, percussive printmaking footage straight out of San Francisco:

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

pHere’s some seriously behind-the-scenes industrial design stuff: /p

pA company called A HREF=”http://www.indexsar.com/” IndexSAR/A, which specializes in testing out wireless systems, needed a model of a human hand to stick a cell phone into. For the purposes of their testing parameters, it was determined that the hand model needed to be made out of carbon black, a material that absorbs radio waves put out by cell phones./p

pimg alt=”0idcmhand.jpg” src=”http://s3files.core77.com/blog/images/0idcmhand.jpg” width=”468″ height=”466″ class=”mt-image-none” style=”” //p

pThe problem with this, as described by Vince O’Horo, Director of A HREF=”http://www.idcmodels.com/” Industrial Design Consultancy’s modelmaking branch/A: “Carbon black is a difficult substance to work with. The ratio of carbon to polymer needed to be exactly right in order to distribute the carbon evenly throughout the phantom hand. Often the carbon powder becomes very thick when mixed, making it difficult to manipulate and creating air pockets within the mould. We had to work quickly and accurately, employing a moulding technique customised for this particular job.”/p

pWhen O’Horo says “quickly” he means rapidly, as in Rapid Prototyping. Using a combination of stereolithographic mold-making, pressure casting and vacuum casting, IDC Models’ team was able to mold a hand with the appropriate materials, and even incorporated polyurethane elastomer into the fingers so they could flex around different-sized phones./p

pThere are some more details (vague ones, of course, for proprietary reasons) at A HREF=”http://www.prw.com/subscriber/newscat2.html?cat=1channel=310id=1278588981″ the PRW source article/A.br /
/pa href=”http://www.core77.com/blog/technology/industrial_design_consultancy_models_gives_cell_phone_testers_a_hand_16905.asp”(more…)/a
pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/oAYMFwPqixOq2jJ1L4TQ7BYhHno/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/oAYMFwPqixOq2jJ1L4TQ7BYhHno/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/
a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/oAYMFwPqixOq2jJ1L4TQ7BYhHno/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/oAYMFwPqixOq2jJ1L4TQ7BYhHno/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/p

pI’ve had a shaved head for most of my adult life, so I’m out-of-touch with haircare products in general. Even still, I never expected to see this symbol,/p

div style=”align: right;”img src=”http://www.core77.com/blog/images/2010/07/0braunbrush1.jpg” width=”468″ height=”350″ alt=”0braunbrush1.jpg”//div

pon a hairbrush. /p

div style=”align: right;”img src=”http://www.core77.com/blog/images/2010/07/0braunbrush2.jpg” width=”468″ height=”271″ alt=”0braunbrush2.jpg”//div

pWhat gives? I mean look at this thing:/p

pobject width=”468″ height=”282″param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/QSdFEMqadxAamp;hl=en_USamp;fs=1″/paramparam name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”/paramparam name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”/paramembed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/QSdFEMqadxAamp;hl=en_USamp;fs=1″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”468″ height=”282″/embed/object/p

pBraun’s A HREF=”http://www.braun.com/global/hair-care/satin-hair/satin-hair-brush/satin-hair-brush-models.html” Satin Hair brush/A uses something called Iontec, a “uniquely designed green ion jet [that] releases millions of satin ions proven effectively [sic] onto your hair. These satin ions immediately begin to reduce static and friction to instantly restore you [sic] hair’s shine and smoothness.”/p

pIons in your hair. Have any of you females actually used this product? If so please leave a comment, I’m curious as to whether this actually has any effect. (I’ve found ionated water to be quite effective for another product, but that description will have to wait until a forthcoming review of the A HREF=”http://www.core77.com/blog/object_culture/chemical-free_cleaning_in_a_raygun-like_package_16423.asp” Ionator/A is ready.)br /
/pa href=”http://www.core77.com/blog/object_culture/now_even_hairbrushes_need_batteries_16904.asp”(more…)/a
pa href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/P4OIz6Hx5ZojA943rtji173qNJ0/0/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/P4OIz6Hx5ZojA943rtji173qNJ0/0/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/abr/
a href=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/P4OIz6Hx5ZojA943rtji173qNJ0/1/da”img src=”http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/P4OIz6Hx5ZojA943rtji173qNJ0/1/di” border=”0″ ismap=”true”/img/a/p

pimg alt=”0tecnomatixjack.jpg” src=”http://s3files.core77.com/blog/images/0tecnomatixjack.jpg” width=”468″ height=”517″ class=”mt-image-none” style=”” //p

pThe Tecnomatix product called A HREF=”http://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/en_us/products/tecnomatix/assembly_planning/jack/index.shtml” Jack/A isn’t just a single virtual guy; it’s a software package of, giggles aside, anatomically correct and scalable human figures that can be dropped into virtual environments for “human prototyping.” The software is smart enough that you can assign Jack a task, whether it’s driving a forklift, stacking tires or moving boxes around inside a space capsule filled with other bodies, and assess his performance to hammer out the human factors issues of your designs. Can he reach the far side of the dashboard? Will he keep bumping into that thing at the end of the counter? Can he see past the C-pillar? /p

pJack was originally developed in the ’80s for NASA, after which he found employment in the U.S. military; now, through a convoluted series of corporate acquisitions, Jack is owned and deployed by Tecnomatix, a branch of Siemens./p

pHere Ulrich Raschke, Director of Tecnomatix Ergonomics Products, tells you a little about Jack. (And yes, females, there’s also a Jill. I’ll bet she costs only 75% of what Jack does even though she does the same amount and quality of work.)/p

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