Hasta La Ideas

Here’s a production methods mystery, albeit one we think will soon be solved by one of you.

On the Discussion Boards, a Core77 reader asked how a hot water bottle is made. A couple of votes came in for slush molding, which is like rotational molding without the spinning; the mold heats up, vulcanizing whatever part of the liquid rubber inside comes into contact with it, and leaving the stuff in the middle, well, slushy. You then pour the slush out and you’ve got your hollow bottle.

However: How the heck is this threaded insert added?

Then, like the rubber, the plot thickens: Our trusty Board Moderator LMO submitted this photo of that very bottle being produced by B.F. Goodrich in 1939:

Looks like it isn’t slush molding at all. And if we zoom in on the photo, we can see the frying-pan-shaped mandrel that forms the negative space of the bottle inside the mold:

Which beg the questions: How the heck does the worker get the mandrel out of there?

Is it actually possible the bottle has that much flex? What about the threaded insert? And most importantly, how did Sean Penn travel back in time to work in a B.F. Goodrich factory?

Due to our deep readership, we know it’s just a matter of time before someone with direct experience sounds off on how this is all accomplished (except for the Sean Penn time machine part). In the meantime, you may be wondering—where did this awesome and high-quality image of a 1939 manufacturing facility come from, and are there more like it? Stay tuned.

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Move over Roomba! Limbo Robot is sort of like your own personal Mars-rover… only instead of being plutonium powered, it actually harnesses the energy of the waste it “consumes” from cleaning your kitchen and other areas! It uses a process called microbial electrolysis; a proven process that uses bacteria as a power source. The flexible honeycomb wheels allow it to move over obstacles and even collapse to help guide it up stairs.

Designer: Elliot Cohen & Neil Vincenti

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Yanko Design
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(Sustainable Cleaning Bot was originally posted on Yanko Design)

Related posts:

1. A Sustainable Kitchen
2. Sustainable Cycle
3. Sustainable Streetlamp

Bello e impossibile mi vien da dire, dopo aver visto il prezzo di questo splendido backpack, frutto della collaborazione tra la rinata Carven e la label giappo Porter. Lo trovate su Matches.

La versione dupuntozero delle Force 1 le abbiamo già potute ammirare con tomaia pettinata e suola lunare. La novità sta in questa combo “White Ice” disponibile dal 30 marzo.

What promises to be a fascinating discussion about life as an industrial designer is currently taking root on the Core77 Boards. The original poster, presumably a student on the verge of making a crucial decision, started out with a vague (and impossibly broad) query on whether industrial design is a financially lucrative profession. In our members’ efforts to answer, the topic is beginning to veer towards the quality of an industrial designer’s life.

We would need to identify some parameters in order to ballpark your average ID’er’s quality of life. As mentioned before, industrial design is an impossibly broad field, since you can loosely define it as designing anything produced from a factory (and these days, even that is changing). Our readers work everything from plastic widgets to automobiles, appliances to furniture, environments to user interfaces. Some are one-man or -woman studios, others work in consultancies, still others at large corporations.

So what are the commonalities? For one thing, because we often design things that will be produced by machines whose cost far exceeds our own means, we’re often at the mercy of others with larger pockets or a firmer hand on the pursestrings. Which is to say, we are not in positions of absolute power, generally speaking. (Kickstarter and low-cost RP are changing this somewhat, but I believe the impact is fractional.)

Secondly, we work in a fairly obscure profession; when a child talks occupations they want to be a firefighter, a doctor or a police officer when they grow up, not the junior designer on staff at a structural package design firm responsible for low-cost cleaning solution bottles targeted at the Latin American market. Because most people don’t understand what we do and why it’s necessary, there is a degree of skepticism and don’t-get-it-ness that the lesser-established among us are used to dealing with, from engineers who don’t take our profession seriously to marketers who feel our primary task is to change the CAD model into a color of their choosing. For every famous Behar, Starck and Rashid that have earned the power of sway, there are thousands of us who understand we will continually deal with conflict and opposition. To an industrial designer, it’s not a strange sensation to design some cool feature—then instantly start thinking about how you’re going to justify and defend it to others involved in the process.

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