Hasta La Ideas

I want you to put this in your living room

If I were a famous sculptor, I’d sell you a block of raw granite that you’d put in your house in California, surrounded by a bunch of internet-connected industrial robot arms with sculpting attachments. In my apartment in New York I’d have an identical-sized chunk of granite. Whenever I felt like sculpting for a few hours, I’d put on some internet-connected gloves that tracked my hand motions and I’d begin taking chunks out of the block. Over in California, the robot arms would simultaneously whir to life and carve exactly what I was carving. So over a period of a few weeks, this sculpture would begin to take shape at random times of the day and you’d see the process happening.

Although all of the technology to make that happen currently exists, I’ve yet to see anyone do it. The closest thing I’ve seen to this pipe dream of mine is Antwerp-based Unfold Studio’s L’Artisan Electronique, a “virtual pottery wheel” that tracks your hand motions while you shape a laser-projected rotating shape. A printer that looks rather like a pastry tube then extrudes your creation in clay. It all happens in the same room and it’s not as cool (or messy) as my remote sculpting idea, but mark my words, it’s just a matter of time:

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There is an old adage in the firefighting community that the profession is 150 years of tradition unimpeded by progress.

The original fire helmet, then called a fire cap, was designed in 1731 by Jacobus Turk for the Fire Department of New York in order to distinguish the department from competitors. (Scarily enough, firefighting was once privatized—just like in the movie ‘Gangs of New York.’)

An ornamental eagle—with no related significance—was added to the helmet design around 1825. A 1930 New Yorker article points out that the eagle “sticks up in the air, it catches… on telephone wires, it is always getting dented… every so often, some realist points out how much safer and cheaper it would be to do away with the eagle, but the firemen always refuse.” The eagle still exists as an integral part of the helmet today.

The colors of the helmet, however, do have importance. Black generally denotes a private/basic firefighter, yellow or red can denote a lieutenant or captain, and white denotes a chief. Sometimes all of a department’s helmets are black, while only the colors of the helmet badges denote rank. Lastly, Alcohol Tobacco & Firearms (ATF) fire investigator helmets are bright blue.

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BMW Group’s design team has developed a folding bike that fits in the trunk of a Mini, though you need not purchase a Mini to get one; starting in August you’ll be able to order the bike separately from the online Mini Lifestyle website and from a handful of Mini dealers.

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If your heart goes aflutter at the sight of dramatic window treatments and lush upholstery, here’s a great gig for you. Elle Decor is on the search for a new graphic designer to join its New York team.

Here, you’ll collaborate with the magazine’s editorial staff to create front-of book and back-of-book pages from concept through production. In addition to being a source of creative ideas, you’ll assign tasks to illustrators, traffic layouts, work with production on color corrections and prepare layouts, files and art to ship and send to press.

The ideal candidate will have at least two years of related experience at a consumer magazine, and a passion for editorial design. Detail-oriented designers with a masterful understanding of InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator should apply here.

For more openings and employment news, follow The Job Post on Twitter @MBJobPost.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

What’s it like to start up a college-level industrial design program from scratch? Soon we’ll be able to ask our own Allan Chochinov, whom as many of you know has been tapped to chair the School of Visual Arts’ new MFA in Products of Design Program. And while New York City is a great location for such a program and one that will be able to draw on copious local talent, any school that decides to offer education in industrial design is good for our field and should be noted. Thus we turn our attention to the University of Iowa Iowa State, whose College of Design is now wrapping up the first year of their new industrial design program.

While the Iowa State program doesn’t have The Choch in charge, program director David Ringholz has been hard at work establishing what is one of only ten ID programs in the American Midwest. One of the early challenges was that the actual classes were ready before the fabrication facilities were—their state-of-the-art ID lab is scheduled to be useable by the fall semester of this year—but that hasn’t stopped students from signing up:

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