SendCutSend: A Speedy Outsourcing Service for Laser Cutting Metal

For prototyping parts in metal, a laser cutter comes in dang handy…if you can afford one. For those of you who can’t yet justify the cost, yet would like to make prototypes out of metal, an outsourcing service called SendCutSend offers an affordable alternative with speedy delivery times.

They stock a variety of metals–aluminum, brass, copper, stainless steel, cold rolled carbon steel and hot rolled carbon steel–in at least two different thicknesses. Brass and copper max out at a 4’x4′ sheet, while the other metals can go up to 4’x10′.

You can upload your design to get a quote. The company accepts vector files in AI, DXF, DWG, or SVG file formats. Once they’ve received your design, they’ll review it and contact you if they have any questions; if they don’t, they’ll send you a quote. Once you sign off on it, they’ll cut your part(s) and ship them to you in three days or less.

Check them out here.

Sphero's BB-8 Rolled into Robot Fame. Their RVR Prototypes Open Up a Much Wider Universe of Possibilities.

Sphero’s RVR prototypes expand on the functionality that made their BB-8 bot a household name.

Late one night in 2015, the Sphero team gathered in their Boulder, Colorado, offices to watch Star Wars Celebration Live, a 30-hour live stream hyping the first new Star Wars movie to come out in 10 years.

The team knew something other fans didn’t: this would be fans’ first look at BB-8, a lovable new droid character. Disney had licensed their team to make it, but no one had spoken publicly about it. To their surprise, Star Wars producer Kathleen Kennedy jumped the gun and hinted at the toy release in the broadcast.

“Our Twitter started blowing up right away,” Sphero cofounder Adam Wilson recalls. “We were like, ‘Um, this is gonna be much bigger than we thought.'”

It was. They went on to sell hundreds of thousands of units in just a few days, and the BB-8 toy became the coveted holiday gift of 2015. Wilson estimates that no other company, aside from iRobot, the maker of the Roomba, has made more robots.

The BB-8 bot made Sphero famous.

The explosion of interest proved to be a crash course in how to make indestructible robots that connect to just about any smartphone. But when Wilson looks back at his first product, he concedes that “all you can really do is turn it a color and then drive it around.”

Today, as his team shares a first look at their new RVR prototypes on Kickstarter, Wilson is excited to show how much more his latest robot can do. Newbies can still easily set up straightforward commands, but as they get more advanced, they can also attach and run third-party hardware like a Raspberry Pi, micro:bit, or Arduino, using RVR’s durable, reliable engine for creative applications like autonomous metal detection, battle bots, environmental sensors, or place-based musical instruments. “Chances are, if you can hack it, RVR can do it,” they say on their project page.

RVR is designed to host a wider range of creative uses.

Born of open-source principles, simplified to be classroom-friendly

When Wilson and his cofounder Ian Bernstein first started work on Sphero in 2010, they knew they wanted to make robots that kids and experts alike could take apart and make their own. “We had this rule that no matter what we did, we would make this product hackable. It had to have an open API. Nintendo and Microsoft, with XBox, they keep everything so locked up. We always wanted to make hackable robots that you could really program.”

The problem, they realized, was that not very many people cared to do that hacking. Or maybe the problem was that not many knew how to do that hacking. “So we decided that the best place to start was educational robots,” Wilson says.

Smartphones were becoming ubiquitous, and all kinds of “Internet of Things” inventors were experimenting with connecting physical devices to apps. Their concept for the original Sphero bot was a small rolling light-up ball that you could program and direct from your phone. They positioned it as an educational tool and sold it to classrooms in sets of 12.

“There’s something really satisfying about that instant gratification where on the screen you say, ‘Go forward, then stop, then turn red,’ and the robot does that in real life. We saw kids change from saying, ‘I don’t like technology,’ or ‘I don’t like robots or computers,’ to ‘I might want to be a programmer.'”

Robots themselves aren’t as exciting as all the things you can do with them

The team had a hypothesis that their earliest models quickly confirmed: most kids don’t care about the hardware or software, they want to see what they can do with the thing.

The Sphero Edu app lets users code in JavaScript or drag and drop different functions with block programming, but maybe more importantly, it includes a “community” tab where anyone can share projects and experiments they’ve run, from lesson plans that teach geography to games built around the colored lights. Teachers have uploaded more than 2 million programs on everything from coding to circulatory systems to color theory to buoyancy.

“We see our robots as a canvas,” explains product manager Ryan Burnett. “We’re not selling you hammers and saws, we’re showing you how cool it is to build your own deck. ‘It transforms your backyard! You can do this yourself! And you’ll need a couple of skills and tools along the way, but you’re building a deck, isn’t that cool?’ At the end you feel so accomplished.”

Gender-neutral toys are important, but a sparkling Star Wars personality proved irresistible

The Sphero team originally liked the idea of creating a gender-neutral robot that all kids could relate to, explains Wilson. Seeing how most robots are tailored to appeal to boys, he thought it was important to be inclusive. But testing Sphero with kids, the team quickly realized that those who played the longest all had one thing in common: they named their robots.

Luckily, the team didn’t have to chew on this challenge for too long. Sphero was part of the Techstars accelerator, a prestigious startup support system that had recently penned a deal with Disney. “We had no idea that when we showed up the first week, we would meet Bob Iger,” Wilson says. “He pulled up a picture on his iPhone—he had a model no one had seen before because he’s on Apple’s board—and he pulls up this picture of BB-8 and J.J. Abrams on set. He was like, ‘Could you guys make one of these?’ We were like, ‘Uh, yes. That’s what we do. Robot balls.’ We made one that night.”

Making millions of Disney bots: a crash course in building for everyone

The Disney deal gave Sphero an adorable—and conveniently androgynous—personality to play with. It also forced them to scale up their production faster than they ever thought they’d need to.

After Disney surprised them with the early announcement of the forthcoming BB-8 toy, Wilson called their account manager and asked how many they should expect to sell. “They were like, ‘Well, this is unprecedented, there’s never been anything like this… Millions?’

The word ‘millions’ had not been in the plan for us. It was a quick panic, like, ‘Dude, we need to start fundraising this week. How are we gonna buy all the materials to make these?'”

They needed more material, more factories, and more test units for all those factories. They got some fast venture capital funding, and expanded their team of about 40 people to about 160.

Their next concern was quality control for all those units. Fortunately, they had always built the Sphero bots to be durable and simple enough for classroom setup. “A lot of teachers who are now assigned to teach code never learned code in school themselves. When they have a whole classroom of students to guide through lessons, it’s disruptive to deal with malfunctions or reassembling broken parts,” Wilson points out. They kept the unit simple to set up to accommodate instructors and parents who might not have any robotics experience.

But still, scaling production from a few thousand units to several million forced them to tighten up the product and make it compatible with more smartphone models; even a low rate of error would now mean a tsunami of customer support tickets. “Star Wars forced us to be universal,” Wilson says. “We made millions of robots, and we got really confident in our ability to make robots that won’t break.”

Rolling forward with a new product and hardier hardware

Wilson is glad he started with a relatively simple product. “The crappiest thing about robots is the mechanics part of it, in almost everybody’s opinion,” he says. “So much of the time, you build something, but once you tell it to move forward, it doesn’t go in a straight line.”

By the time he made millions of BB-8 robots, he finally felt he had the mechanics down—and he was ready to get more ambitious with a new model.

The team started prototyping the RVR as a more adaptable open-source tool that could let users dream up wilder robot missions, “without getting stuck in the weeds of Kalman filters and loops and all this funky stuff,” Wilson says. “RVR just goes right where you say, and it’s very simple to deal with.”

The prototypes they’re putting on Kickstarter have Sphero’s impeccable location and movement accuracy, but also add all-terrain tank treads that can navigate arcs, climb inclines, and make precise starts and stops. A color sensor on the bottom lets the robot read and respond to the world around it. And a port hooks up to more advanced hardware like Raspberry Pi, micro:bit, or Arduino boards.

“We intentionally made it look pretty neutral, even though it does have this cute little face, and we put a restrained but diverse suite of sensors in it just to get you started. But we wanted to make a platform that gave the community the freedom to tell us what the robot should be,” explains product manager Burnett. “If we’re doing our job right, the robot disappears into the background. It’s all about what you’re accomplishing, what you’re creating, or the problem you’re solving.”

He’s started testing it out with Sphero engineers and kids in Boulder, and he’s already seen RVR put towards an impressive range of uses: a solar power monitoring device that scouts out the sunniest spot in your classroom or home, a musical instrument programmed to play particular notes as it rolls over different colors of construction paper, a mobile weather station, a safe-box that delivers notes to friends who know the secret code to receive them, a companion who goes to sleep when it senses it’s on the color programmed to be its “bed.”

RVR‘s color sensors allow for creative applications like playing a particular note every time it rolls over a certain color. 

RVR will use the same app as Sphero, which has a community tab where users can share all these ideas. And the programs made for Sphero, while simpler than what can be done with RVR, will already be there to get new users started.

“We see people doing crazy stuff with just a robotic ball,” says Burnett, “so we’re really excited to see what they’ll do with this whole world of open hardware.”

—Katheryn Thayer

Sphero is live on Kickstarter through March 21, 2019.

Level Up street pavilion provides multi-level hang-out space for Rijeka

Level Up street pavilion by Brett Mahon, Joonas Parviainen, Saagar Tulshan, Shreyansh Sett and Vanja Borovic

Brett Mahon, Joonas Parviainen, Saagar Tulshan, Shreyansh Sett have built a multi-level pavilion where people can gather and relax in Rijeka, Croatia.

Level Up is designed to be a new place for locals in the post industrial port city to socialise, and turns a previously disused rooftop area into a terrace.

Level Up street pavilion by Brett Mahon, Joonas Parviainen, Saagar Tulshan, Shreyansh Sett and Vanja Borovic

The international quartet of architects created the site-specific pavilion as part of European Architecture Students’ Assembly, (EASA) 2018.

The pavilion was built as an extension to Export Drvo, a 1950s industrial storage building by the Dead Canal. Rijeka is due to become Europe’s culture capital in 2020, and the Export Drvo is set to be one of the key venues in the celebrations.

The pavilion, which doubles as street furniture, is formed of a series of levels linking up to a elevated terrace built on the roof.

Different places and surfaces for visitors to sit, swing or relax in a hammock are placed all along the extended staircase to the top of the structure.

Level Up street pavilion by Brett Mahon, Joonas Parviainen, Saagar Tulshan, Shreyansh Sett and Vanja Borovic

On the terrace a platform provides a raised vantage point to look over the city and doubles as a place for speakers to address a crowd.

Mahon, who is from Northern Ireland, Parviainen from Finland, and India-based Tulshan and Sett, drew up the design prior to EASA 2018, where they ran a workshop for participants who helped bring Level Up to life.

Level Up street pavilion by Brett Mahon, Joonas Parviainen, Saagar Tulshan, Shreyansh Sett and Vanja Borovic

“Instead of creating new public urban area, Level Up puts focus on reclaiming existing space,” said the design team.

“It creates a balcony to the Delta with an industrial aesthetic, acting as a public frontage. In an era where permanence of the built form has been defining architecture, Level Up celebrates ephemeral urbanism, inviting everyone to ponder material and spatial impermanence.”

Level Up street pavilion by Brett Mahon, Joonas Parviainen, Saagar Tulshan, Shreyansh Sett and Vanja Borovic

Steel scaffolding was used for the structural frame, with wooden boards and decking used to create the levels, steps and furniture. Plants sourced from a local garden centre were used to decorate the pavilion.

Others repurposing unused places for public space include Jordanian architects Sarah Abdul Majid and Sandra Hiari, who have designed a series of stackable wooden units that can turn abandoned areas into children’s playgrounds.


Project credits:

Designers and tutors: Brett Mahon, Joonas Parviainen, Saagar Tulshan, Shreyansh Sett, Vanja Borovic
Participants: Ana Mateos, Anna Opitz, А​nton Fedin, Ásta María Thorsteinsdóttir​, Ayşe Tuğçe Pınar​, Birgit Fløystad, Caro Andrade​, Ciaran Magee​, Chloë Reyda, Felic Micallef, Gleb Rudenya​, Glenn McNamara​, Gustavs Grasis​, Ilia Bebi​, Joanna Lewanska, Julia Triches, Julien Hermant, Klemen Mraz​, Mattea Fenech​, Samúel Aron Laufdal Guðlaugsson​, Sebastian Bidault, Simona Svitkova​, Tadhg Spain.

The post Level Up street pavilion provides multi-level hang-out space for Rijeka appeared first on Dezeen.

Pierre-Emmanuel Vandeputte debuts anthromorphic steel furniture

Pierre-Emmanuel Vandeputte Legs furniture

Belgian designer Pierre-Emmanuel Vandeputte has created a collection of long-legged steel furniture that he has imagined as a family of strange creatures.

Called Legs, the five designs comprise a chair, table, stool, clothes rail and step ladder. Each is made from bent black powder-coated lengths of welded tubular steel.

Pierre-Emmanuel Vandeputte Legs furniture

The simple asymmetrical structures blend long expressive legs with disc-like surfaces to give the the appearance of three-dimensional sketches.

The designer said he imagined the pieces as a series of creatures that invade the home.

Pierre-Emmanuel Vandeputte Legs furniture

“They’ve made their way into a new space: a room that is familiar to you, but causes them to hesitate. Their legs freeze on paths to destinations unknown. They are frozen in time,” described Vandeputte.

“As you approach, you begin to notice that their limbs extend to corners of the room that you left unfurnished and were quick to forget,” he continued.

“Each creature presents a different scale of proportions. Some are more easily suited to the indulgent pace of a lazy weekend morning; others to a brief gesture of acknowledgement as you run out the door, and others still to support simple evenings of deserved recovery.”

Pierre-Emmanuel Vandeputte Legs furniture

The Legs collection is the latest work by Vandeputte, whose previous furniture designs include a portable desk divider that allows users to actively isolate themselves from the noise around them, and a playful cork helmet that lowers over the wearer’s head when they need a respite from ambient noise.

Pierre-Emmanuel Vandeputte Legs furniture

The pieces were presented during this month’s Stockholm Design Week as part of Belgium is Design – a promotional platform for brands from the Belgian design world.

Other highlights from the week included a collection of curtains by Margrethe Odgaard for Kvadrat that take cues from wainscoting and a series of biodegradable acoustic panels made from a new plant-based material by Baux.

Photography by Miko Miko Studio.

The post Pierre-Emmanuel Vandeputte debuts anthromorphic steel furniture appeared first on Dezeen.

Your Furniture Design Moodboard: Winning Furniture Projects from A’ Design 2018

The purpose of this post is twofold. Not only is it a roundup of ten award-winning works that are worthy of your design inspiration mood board (go ahead and bookmark the page for use later!), it’s also a reminder that this is the last call for entries for the A’ Design Award and Competition, a competition that covers almost all categories of design. Furniture consistently ranks in the top 3 of A’ Design’s award categories, and we’ve pulled 10 noteworthy design from a hefty bunch.

We look at the top Furniture Designs from last year, creating a compilation of what A’ Design’s stellar 211-member international jury panel is worthy of winning the A’ Design Award. While we’re at it, do check out what winning an Award does for your Design Career, and don’t forget to head down to the A’ Design Award and Competition page to register to submit your design entries for the Award. The last date of submission is the 28th of February 2019, and the awards will be announced here on YD on the 15th of April!

LAST CALL! Register to participate in the A’ Design Awards now! Deadline: 28th February!

A’ Design Award 2018 Furniture Moodboard
01. Cocoon Lounge Chair by Timmy Kwok
Sitting on the Cocoon is a strangely comforting yet new experience. It looks a little revolutionary, no doubt… but sitting on it gives you an experience that’s difficult to actualize in words. Rest your body against it, and it feels like a hammock, with its woven fabric. However, it doesn’t consume you, like a hammock would. Lie down in a hammock, and the fabric gives in to the shape of your body… lie in the Cocoon, and it feels like you’ve still got some lumbar support. It feels more like a recliner than a hammock. And then there’s experience number three. Designed with a curved frame, the Cocoon swings to and fro, unlike a hammock that swings side by side. The Cocoon somehow manages to combine rocking, lounging, and relaxing all into one beautiful seating device perfect for a lazy afternoon with a cup of hot cocoa.

02. Renaissance Armchair by Zaria Ishkildina
Playing beautifully with a visual illusion called Moire, the Renaissance Chair styles itself on the form of the curule chair, an Ancient Roman chair design that was reserved for the highest of dignitaries, and was often a symbol of status and power. Designer Zaria Ishkildina took the chair’s form, altering the material from wood to multiple stainless steel tubes welded together. The result, although is a wireframe, feels less like one, and more like a modern, minimal (in terms of material choice, rather than abundance) throne.

03. Exo Chair by Svilen Gamolov
The Exo Chair’s memorable postmodern-esque design is quite worthy of being on the mood board because it looks completely unique from the top, front, and side. Designed to look like a rectangle from the front, an intersecting square and circle from the top, and a relatively abstract shape from the side, the Exo’s experimental design immediately looks eye-catching and inviting.

04. Petalis Sound Amplifier by Ismail Gunes Otken
The Petalis is a decorative element with an unusual function. Formed out of thick aluminum sheets, the flower-inspired Petalis works like an acoustic mirror, directing sound-waves to a user, or to a specific area. Televisions or speakers with 360° sound are often at a disadvantage when placed near or mounted on a wall. The Petalis helps guide the sound being thrown towards the sides, curving the sound-waves (much like the cone of a trumpet or gramophone) and helping amplify it by focusing the waves rather than letting them scatter. The Petalis comprises multiple individual ‘petals’ that can be wall-mounted in any way that works for you, both aesthetically and acoustically.

05. Joseph Felt Chair by Windels Lothar
The Joseph Felt chair, interestingly, is made from a single sandwiched sheet/ply of felt and foam. Folded in its clumsy, crumply style, the sheet (although pretty thick) turns into a 3D form, forming an armchair complete with a backrest and two armrests. The entire chair is held together by three well-positioned rivets, and is highly reminiscent of a chair sketch by Nick Baker!

06. The Dialogue Clock by Evgenia Dymkina
The Dialogue Clock’s unique design draws attention to a few things. Firstly, its immediate separation of the usually concentric coaxial watch hands. Not only do the watch hands now exist one beside the other, they also turn the positive space into negative, making the hand a cutout in a white dial. This allows the two dials (hour and minute) to look like pacman-ish faces that rotate in their place, only facing each other twice in the entire day (at 3:45). The rather unusual design of the Dialogue clock also opens it up to a lot of other explorations. Can you think of a few?

07. Darkside Stool/Side Table by Romulo Teixeira and Cintia Miyahira
Serving a reminder that inspiration can be found anywhere, even in the ever nourishing domain of art, the Darkside Stool/Side-Table pays tribute to one of the most influential music albums of our time, and its album art, that is an icon in itself. Made from Stainless Steel and Acrylic, the stool has all the visual elements from the background. The triangular prism finds itself at the base of the stool, made of stainless steel and colored black, while the prismatic material forms the acrylic seat on top. Lastly, the seven colors of the spectrum form supports for the acrylic seat (although there are only six here, to give the seating bilateral symmetry).

08. Dodo Multifunctional Chair by Mohammad Enjavi Amiri
‘Do’ means dual, or two, in Urdu and Hindi. The Dodo, by that definition perfectly describes this absolutely ingenious shapeshifting piece of furniture that shifts between two forms, and can go from chair to stool to coffee table, simply by folding one edge inwards on itself. Designed from individual beechwood slats, with stainless steel joineries and hinges, the Dodo chair can exist in two forms (open and closed), and just by doing that, can serve multiple purposes, from a barstool, to chair, to table, to even a bookshelf! Truly versatile piece of furniture, I say!


__
LAST CALL! Register to participate in the A’ Design Awards now! Deadline: 28th February!

Sphero's BB-8 Rolled into Robot Fame. Their RVR Prototypes Open Up a Much Wider Universe of Possibilities.

Sphero’s RVR prototypes expand on the functionality that made their BB-8 bot a household name.

Late one night in 2015, the Sphero team gathered in their Boulder, Colorado, offices to watch Star Wars Celebration Live, a 30-hour live stream hyping the first new Star Wars movie to come out in 10 years.

The team knew something other fans didn’t: this would be fans’ first look at BB-8, a lovable new droid character. Disney had licensed their team to make it, but no one had spoken publicly about it. To their surprise, Star Wars producer Kathleen Kennedy jumped the gun and hinted at the toy release in the broadcast.

“Our Twitter started blowing up right away,” Sphero cofounder Adam Wilson recalls. “We were like, ‘Um, this is gonna be much bigger than we thought.'”

It was. They went on to sell hundreds of thousands of units in just a few days, and the BB-8 toy became the coveted holiday gift of 2015. Wilson estimates that no other company, aside from iRobot, the maker of the Roomba, has made more robots.

The BB-8 bot made Sphero famous.

The explosion of interest proved to be a crash course in how to make indestructible robots that connect to just about any smartphone. But when Wilson looks back at his first product, he concedes that “all you can really do is turn it a color and then drive it around.”

Today, as his team shares a first look at their new RVR prototypes on Kickstarter, Wilson is excited to show how much more his latest robot can do. Newbies can still easily set up straightforward commands, but as they get more advanced, they can also attach and run third-party hardware like a Raspberry Pi, micro:bit, or Arduino, using RVR’s durable, reliable engine for creative applications like autonomous metal detection, battle bots, environmental sensors, or place-based musical instruments. “Chances are, if you can hack it, RVR can do it,” they say on their project page.

RVR is designed to host a wider range of creative uses.

Born of open-source principles, simplified to be classroom-friendly

When Wilson and his cofounder Ian Bernstein first started work on Sphero in 2010, they knew they wanted to make robots that kids and experts alike could take apart and make their own. “We had this rule that no matter what we did, we would make this product hackable. It had to have an open API. Nintendo and Microsoft, with XBox, they keep everything so locked up. We always wanted to make hackable robots that you could really program.”

The problem, they realized, was that not very many people cared to do that hacking. Or maybe the problem was that not many knew how to do that hacking. “So we decided that the best place to start was educational robots,” Wilson says.

Smartphones were becoming ubiquitous, and all kinds of “Internet of Things” inventors were experimenting with connecting physical devices to apps. Their concept for the original Sphero bot was a small rolling light-up ball that you could program and direct from your phone. They positioned it as an educational tool and sold it to classrooms in sets of 12.

“There’s something really satisfying about that instant gratification where on the screen you say, ‘Go forward, then stop, then turn red,’ and the robot does that in real life. We saw kids change from saying, ‘I don’t like technology,’ or ‘I don’t like robots or computers,’ to ‘I might want to be a programmer.'”

Robots themselves aren’t as exciting as all the things you can do with them

The team had a hypothesis that their earliest models quickly confirmed: most kids don’t care about the hardware or software, they want to see what they can do with the thing.

The Sphero Edu app lets users code in JavaScript or drag and drop different functions with block programming, but maybe more importantly, it includes a “community” tab where anyone can share projects and experiments they’ve run, from lesson plans that teach geography to games built around the colored lights. Teachers have uploaded more than 2 million programs on everything from coding to circulatory systems to color theory to buoyancy.

“We see our robots as a canvas,” explains product manager Ryan Burnett. “We’re not selling you hammers and saws, we’re showing you how cool it is to build your own deck. ‘It transforms your backyard! You can do this yourself! And you’ll need a couple of skills and tools along the way, but you’re building a deck, isn’t that cool?’ At the end you feel so accomplished.”

Gender-neutral toys are important, but a sparkling Star Wars personality proved irresistible

The Sphero team originally liked the idea of creating a gender-neutral robot that all kids could relate to, explains Wilson. Seeing how most robots are tailored to appeal to boys, he thought it was important to be inclusive. But testing Sphero with kids, the team quickly realized that those who played the longest all had one thing in common: they named their robots.

Luckily, the team didn’t have to chew on this challenge for too long. Sphero was part of the Techstars accelerator, a prestigious startup support system that had recently penned a deal with Disney. “We had no idea that when we showed up the first week, we would meet Bob Iger,” Wilson says. “He pulled up a picture on his iPhone—he had a model no one had seen before because he’s on Apple’s board—and he pulls up this picture of BB-8 and J.J. Abrams on set. He was like, ‘Could you guys make one of these?’ We were like, ‘Uh, yes. That’s what we do. Robot balls.’ We made one that night.”

Making millions of Disney bots: a crash course in building for everyone

The Disney deal gave Sphero an adorable—and conveniently androgynous—personality to play with. It also forced them to scale up their production faster than they ever thought they’d need to.

After Disney surprised them with the early announcement of the forthcoming BB-8 toy, Wilson called their account manager and asked how many they should expect to sell. “They were like, ‘Well, this is unprecedented, there’s never been anything like this… Millions?’

The word ‘millions’ had not been in the plan for us. It was a quick panic, like, ‘Dude, we need to start fundraising this week. How are we gonna buy all the materials to make these?'”

They needed more material, more factories, and more test units for all those factories. They got some fast venture capital funding, and expanded their team of about 40 people to about 160.

Their next concern was quality control for all those units. Fortunately, they had always built the Sphero bots to be durable and simple enough for classroom setup. “A lot of teachers who are now assigned to teach code never learned code in school themselves. When they have a whole classroom of students to guide through lessons, it’s disruptive to deal with malfunctions or reassembling broken parts,” Wilson points out. They kept the unit simple to set up to accommodate instructors and parents who might not have any robotics experience.

But still, scaling production from a few thousand units to several million forced them to tighten up the product and make it compatible with more smartphone models; even a low rate of error would now mean a tsunami of customer support tickets. “Star Wars forced us to be universal,” Wilson says. “We made millions of robots, and we got really confident in our ability to make robots that won’t break.”

Rolling forward with a new product and hardier hardware

Wilson is glad he started with a relatively simple product. “The crappiest thing about robots is the mechanics part of it, in almost everybody’s opinion,” he says. “So much of the time, you build something, but once you tell it to move forward, it doesn’t go in a straight line.”

By the time he made millions of BB-8 robots, he finally felt he had the mechanics down—and he was ready to get more ambitious with a new model.

The team started prototyping the RVR as a more adaptable open-source tool that could let users dream up wilder robot missions, “without getting stuck in the weeds of Kalman filters and loops and all this funky stuff,” Wilson says. “RVR just goes right where you say, and it’s very simple to deal with.”

The prototypes they’re putting on Kickstarter have Sphero’s impeccable location and movement accuracy, but also add all-terrain tank treads that can navigate arcs, climb inclines, and make precise starts and stops. A color sensor on the bottom lets the robot read and respond to the world around it. And a port hooks up to more advanced hardware like Raspberry Pi, micro:bit, or Arduino boards.

“We intentionally made it look pretty neutral, even though it does have this cute little face, and we put a restrained but diverse suite of sensors in it just to get you started. But we wanted to make a platform that gave the community the freedom to tell us what the robot should be,” explains product manager Burnett. “If we’re doing our job right, the robot disappears into the background. It’s all about what you’re accomplishing, what you’re creating, or the problem you’re solving.”

He’s started testing it out with Sphero engineers and kids in Boulder, and he’s already seen RVR put towards an impressive range of uses: a solar power monitoring device that scouts out the sunniest spot in your classroom or home, a musical instrument programmed to play particular notes as it rolls over different colors of construction paper, a mobile weather station, a safe-box that delivers notes to friends who know the secret code to receive them, a companion who goes to sleep when it senses it’s on the color programmed to be its “bed.”

RVR‘s color sensors allow for creative applications like playing a particular note every time it rolls over a certain color. 

RVR will use the same app as Sphero, which has a community tab where users can share all these ideas. And the programs made for Sphero, while simpler than what can be done with RVR, will already be there to get new users started.

“We see people doing crazy stuff with just a robotic ball,” says Burnett, “so we’re really excited to see what they’ll do with this whole world of open hardware.”

—Katheryn Thayer

Sphero is live on Kickstarter through March 21, 2019.

Snøhetta and Heatherwick Studio unveil designs for Sidewalk Labs' Toronto neighbourhood

Quayside at Sidewalk Toronto by Snøhetta and Heatherwick Studio

Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs has tapped Thomas Heatherwick‘s studio and architecture firm Snøhetta to develop proposals for the smart, mass-timber city that the company is developing on Toronto’s waterfront.

Renderings by Snøhetta and Heatherwick Studio were used to illustrate a document outlining the updated concepts and proposals for Sidewalk Toronto, a project under development by Sidewalk Labs – a subsidiary of Google’s parent company – and partner Waterfront Toronto.

Quayside at Sidewalk Toronto by Snøhetta and Heatherwick Studio
The Sidewalk Toronto update features a visual by Snøhetta that depicts two high-rises linked by a curved structure

Released 14 February 2019, the Project Update focuses on the development of the 12-acre (9.5-hectare) Quayside neighbourhood at Parliament Slip – east of the city’s Downtown area on the edge of Lake Ontario. The site makes up a small portion of the Sidewalk Toronto’s scheme, which was first unveiled last year and billed as a “future city”, and is intended as a test bed for later expansion.

Advancing on Sidewalk’s August 2018 update of the parcel, which revealed plans to construct buildings from local and renewable Canadian timber, Snøhetta and Heatherwick Studio’s designs are all wooden.

Quayside at Sidewalk Toronto by Snøhetta and Heatherwick Studio
Snøhetta has also designed an interior courtyard detailed with a gridded wooden construction

Visuals by Snøhetta include an exterior image of a pair of high-rises linked by a curved structure. While their uses are not explicit, it is likely the buildings could form part of the housing that Sidewalk Labs plans to include in the new town.

These include models of co-living for singles and purpose-built family dwellings, as well as affordable housing totalling 80 per cent of the accommodation – much more than the average 26 per cent provided in Toronto developments. The amount would also be four times that typically offered in a waterfront development.

Quayside at Sidewalk Toronto by Snøhetta and Heatherwick Studio
Heatherwick’s proposals include a design for Google’s Canadian HQ

Snøhetta’s interior view reveals an exposed gridded wooden construction that outlines a courtyard, showcasing one of the many public arenas intended for the site. A large tree grows up the centre, while translucent screens offer glimpses inside the buildings.

Meanwhile, Heatherwick Studio has produced designs for the Google Canadian headquarters at the site, following the firm’s work with BIG on the tech company’s new California campus and London HQ.

The Sidewalk Toronto HQ, which is intended to bring more Google jobs in the eastern waterfront, features a sunken circular courtyard topped with a bubbly roof, and curvilinear wooden balconies and a bubbly roof.

Similar organic forms can be found in Heatherwick’s proposal for another courtyard and a waterfront complex, where buildings are fronted with rounded, slatted balconies. Depicted in snowy conditions, the waterside site also features the “building coats” that would be drawn over to protect the woodwork from harsh weather conditions.

Quayside at Sidewalk Toronto by Snøhetta and Heatherwick Studio
Curvaceous balconies front the proposal by the British studio, which spills onto the waterfront

Heatherwick Studio has also developed the Innovation Centre, which Sidewalk Labs intends as a hub for startups and tech companies.

Sidewalk Toronto, which was first unveiled in October 2017, aims to address many urban issues – like affordable housing, traffic congestion and safety, and environmental problems – with smart designs. Sidewalk Labs urban planner Rohit Aggarwala said it could provide a model for cities to use the latest technologies in urban design, in an interview with Dezeen last year.

Quayside at Sidewalk Toronto by Snøhetta and Heatherwick Studio
Heatherwick Studio has also developed a scheme for the Innovation Centre, intended as an incubator for startups

Following this ethos, the company chose mass timber construction for the neighbourhood to provide an example of an affordable and sustainable built environment. The cradle-to-cradle construction forms part of a wider environmental strategy, along with comprehensive recycling and composting systems, and underground, robotic trash disposal.

The wooden construction would also support the Canada’s timber industry.

The first visuals for the Quayside project were completed by Michael Green Architecture – the firm behind the largest mass-timber building in United States. These explored two types of engineered wood: cross-laminated timber (CLT) and glue-laminated timber, also known as Glulam, which are both significantly stronger than standard wood.

The proposal includes public spaces that are built “modular kit of parts” so that they could easily be rearranged for different uses. Other forward-thinking details in the proposed neighbourhood are the integration of autonomous vehicles and the introduction of larger curbs.

Quayside at Sidewalk Toronto by Snøhetta and Heatherwick Studio
The duo’s designs focus on the development of the 12-acre (9.5-hectare) Quayside neighbourhood at Parliament Slip

In the latest update, the team developed plans for sourcing data from residents living in the neighbourhood. This had formed a point of contention for many, particularly after the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal, which saw data allegedly used to influence voters in political campaigns.

However, the revised scheme suggests the establishment of an independent Civic Data Trust, which will de-identify all personal markers before using the data.

The post Snøhetta and Heatherwick Studio unveil designs for Sidewalk Labs’ Toronto neighbourhood appeared first on Dezeen.

B-School Bonuses

UPPERCASE magazine issues and book projects that featured B-Schoolers from 2018.

UPPERCASE magazine issues and book projects that featured B-Schoolers from 2018.

When you use my affiliate link to register, you’ll also receive these UPPERCASE B-School Bonuses:

  • A one-year subscription/renewal to UPPERCASE, the quarterly print magazine.

  • Jot down your a-ha moments in a custom planner created by 2018 B-School alumnus Crystal Ink for UPPERCASE.

  • Complimentary membership to the UPPERCASE Circle, a gathering place for the creative & curious subscribers of UPPERCASE magazine.

  • Access to the private UPPERCASE + B-School community and discussion board for focussed conversation and support from Janine and your fellow B-Schoolers and Alumni.

  • Online group video calls and weekly B-School chats with Janine to ask questions and share your progress with the encouraging UPPERCASE B-School community.

  • The opportunity to pitch your ideas or business concept to be published in UPPERCASE magazine and books.

  • Access to UPPERCASE e-courses to be released in 2019.

UPPERCASE + B-School private discussion and learning space.

UPPERCASE + B-School private discussion and learning space.

Get an UPPERCASE subscription or renewal when you sign up for B-School through my  affiliate link !

Get an UPPERCASE subscription or renewal when you sign up for B-School through my affiliate link!

Join B-School

Your Furniture Design Moodboard: Winning Furniture Projects from A’ Design 2018

The purpose of this post is twofold. Not only is it a roundup of ten award-winning works that are worthy of your design inspiration mood board (go ahead and bookmark the page for use later!), it’s also a reminder that this is the last call for entries for the A’ Design Award and Competition, a competition that covers almost all categories of design. Furniture consistently ranks in the top 3 of A’ Design’s award categories, and we’ve pulled 10 noteworthy design from a hefty bunch.

We look at the top Furniture Designs from last year, creating a compilation of what A’ Design’s stellar 211-member international jury panel is worthy of winning the A’ Design Award. While we’re at it, do check out what winning an Award does for your Design Career, and don’t forget to head down to the A’ Design Award and Competition page to register to submit your design entries for the Award. The last date of submission is the 28th of February 2019, and the awards will be announced here on YD on the 15th of April!

LAST CALL! Register to participate in the A’ Design Awards now! Deadline: 28th February!

A’ Design Award 2018 Furniture Moodboard
01. Cocoon Lounge Chair by Timmy Kwok
Sitting on the Cocoon is a strangely comforting yet new experience. It looks a little revolutionary, no doubt… but sitting on it gives you an experience that’s difficult to actualize in words. Rest your body against it, and it feels like a hammock, with its woven fabric. However, it doesn’t consume you, like a hammock would. Lie down in a hammock, and the fabric gives in to the shape of your body… lie in the Cocoon, and it feels like you’ve still got some lumbar support. It feels more like a recliner than a hammock. And then there’s experience number three. Designed with a curved frame, the Cocoon swings to and fro, unlike a hammock that swings side by side. The Cocoon somehow manages to combine rocking, lounging, and relaxing all into one beautiful seating device perfect for a lazy afternoon with a cup of hot cocoa.

02. Renaissance Armchair by Zaria Ishkildina
Playing beautifully with a visual illusion called Moire, the Renaissance Chair styles itself on the form of the curule chair, an Ancient Roman chair design that was reserved for the highest of dignitaries, and was often a symbol of status and power. Designer Zaria Ishkildina took the chair’s form, altering the material from wood to multiple stainless steel tubes welded together. The result, although is a wireframe, feels less like one, and more like a modern, minimal (in terms of material choice, rather than abundance) throne.

03. Exo Chair by Svilen Gamolov
The Exo Chair’s memorable postmodern-esque design is quite worthy of being on the mood board because it looks completely unique from the top, front, and side. Designed to look like a rectangle from the front, an intersecting square and circle from the top, and a relatively abstract shape from the side, the Exo’s experimental design immediately looks eye-catching and inviting.

04. Petalis Sound Amplifier by Ismail Gunes Otken
The Petalis is a decorative element with an unusual function. Formed out of thick aluminum sheets, the flower-inspired Petalis works like an acoustic mirror, directing sound-waves to a user, or to a specific area. Televisions or speakers with 360° sound are often at a disadvantage when placed near or mounted on a wall. The Petalis helps guide the sound being thrown towards the sides, curving the sound-waves (much like the cone of a trumpet or gramophone) and helping amplify it by focusing the waves rather than letting them scatter. The Petalis comprises multiple individual ‘petals’ that can be wall-mounted in any way that works for you, both aesthetically and acoustically.

05. Joseph Felt Chair by Windels Lothar
The Joseph Felt chair, interestingly, is made from a single sandwiched sheet/ply of felt and foam. Folded in its clumsy, crumply style, the sheet (although pretty thick) turns into a 3D form, forming an armchair complete with a backrest and two armrests. The entire chair is held together by three well-positioned rivets, and is highly reminiscent of a chair sketch by Nick Baker!

06. The Dialogue Clock by Evgenia Dymkina
The Dialogue Clock’s unique design draws attention to a few things. Firstly, its immediate separation of the usually concentric coaxial watch hands. Not only do the watch hands now exist one beside the other, they also turn the positive space into negative, making the hand a cutout in a white dial. This allows the two dials (hour and minute) to look like pacman-ish faces that rotate in their place, only facing each other twice in the entire day (at 3:45). The rather unusual design of the Dialogue clock also opens it up to a lot of other explorations. Can you think of a few?

07. Darkside Stool/Side Table by Romulo Teixeira and Cintia Miyahira
Serving a reminder that inspiration can be found anywhere, even in the ever nourishing domain of art, the Darkside Stool/Side-Table pays tribute to one of the most influential music albums of our time, and its album art, that is an icon in itself. Made from Stainless Steel and Acrylic, the stool has all the visual elements from the background. The triangular prism finds itself at the base of the stool, made of stainless steel and colored black, while the prismatic material forms the acrylic seat on top. Lastly, the seven colors of the spectrum form supports for the acrylic seat (although there are only six here, to give the seating bilateral symmetry).

08. Dodo Multifunctional Chair by Mohammad Enjavi Amiri
‘Do’ means dual, or two, in Urdu and Hindi. The Dodo, by that definition perfectly describes this absolutely ingenious shapeshifting piece of furniture that shifts between two forms, and can go from chair to stool to coffee table, simply by folding one edge inwards on itself. Designed from individual beechwood slats, with stainless steel joineries and hinges, the Dodo chair can exist in two forms (open and closed), and just by doing that, can serve multiple purposes, from a barstool, to chair, to table, to even a bookshelf! Truly versatile piece of furniture, I say!


__
LAST CALL! Register to participate in the A’ Design Awards now! Deadline: 28th February!

Sphero's BB-8 Rolled into Robot Fame. Their RVR Prototypes Open Up a Much Wider Universe of Possibilities.

Sphero’s RVR prototypes expand on the functionality that made their BB-8 bot a household name.

Late one night in 2015, the Sphero team gathered in their Boulder, Colorado, offices to watch Star Wars Celebration Live, a 30-hour live stream hyping the first new Star Wars movie to come out in 10 years.

The team knew something other fans didn’t: this would be fans’ first look at BB-8, a lovable new droid character. Disney had licensed their team to make it, but no one had spoken publicly about it. To their surprise, Star Wars producer Kathleen Kennedy jumped the gun and hinted at the toy release in the broadcast.

“Our Twitter started blowing up right away,” Sphero cofounder Adam Wilson recalls. “We were like, ‘Um, this is gonna be much bigger than we thought.'”

It was. They went on to sell hundreds of thousands of units in just a few days, and the BB-8 toy became the coveted holiday gift of 2015. Wilson estimates that no other company, aside from iRobot, the maker of the Roomba, has made more robots.

The BB-8 bot made Sphero famous.

The explosion of interest proved to be a crash course in how to make indestructible robots that connect to just about any smartphone. But when Wilson looks back at his first product, he concedes that “all you can really do is turn it a color and then drive it around.”

Today, as his team shares a first look at their new RVR prototypes on Kickstarter, Wilson is excited to show how much more his latest robot can do. Newbies can still easily set up straightforward commands, but as they get more advanced, they can also attach and run third-party hardware like a Raspberry Pi, micro:bit, or Arduino, using RVR’s durable, reliable engine for creative applications like autonomous metal detection, battle bots, environmental sensors, or place-based musical instruments. “Chances are, if you can hack it, RVR can do it,” they say on their project page.

RVR is designed to host a wider range of creative uses.

Born of open-source principles, simplified to be classroom-friendly

When Wilson and his cofounder Ian Bernstein first started work on Sphero in 2010, they knew they wanted to make robots that kids and experts alike could take apart and make their own. “We had this rule that no matter what we did, we would make this product hackable. It had to have an open API. Nintendo and Microsoft, with XBox, they keep everything so locked up. We always wanted to make hackable robots that you could really program.”

The problem, they realized, was that not very many people cared to do that hacking. Or maybe the problem was that not many knew how to do that hacking. “So we decided that the best place to start was educational robots,” Wilson says.

Smartphones were becoming ubiquitous, and all kinds of “Internet of Things” inventors were experimenting with connecting physical devices to apps. Their concept for the original Sphero bot was a small rolling light-up ball that you could program and direct from your phone. They positioned it as an educational tool and sold it to classrooms in sets of 12.

“There’s something really satisfying about that instant gratification where on the screen you say, ‘Go forward, then stop, then turn red,’ and the robot does that in real life. We saw kids change from saying, ‘I don’t like technology,’ or ‘I don’t like robots or computers,’ to ‘I might want to be a programmer.'”

Robots themselves aren’t as exciting as all the things you can do with them

The team had a hypothesis that their earliest models quickly confirmed: most kids don’t care about the hardware or software, they want to see what they can do with the thing.

The Sphero Edu app lets users code in JavaScript or drag and drop different functions with block programming, but maybe more importantly, it includes a “community” tab where anyone can share projects and experiments they’ve run, from lesson plans that teach geography to games built around the colored lights. Teachers have uploaded more than 2 million programs on everything from coding to circulatory systems to color theory to buoyancy.

“We see our robots as a canvas,” explains product manager Ryan Burnett. “We’re not selling you hammers and saws, we’re showing you how cool it is to build your own deck. ‘It transforms your backyard! You can do this yourself! And you’ll need a couple of skills and tools along the way, but you’re building a deck, isn’t that cool?’ At the end you feel so accomplished.”

Gender-neutral toys are important, but a sparkling Star Wars personality proved irresistible

The Sphero team originally liked the idea of creating a gender-neutral robot that all kids could relate to, explains Wilson. Seeing how most robots are tailored to appeal to boys, he thought it was important to be inclusive. But testing Sphero with kids, the team quickly realized that those who played the longest all had one thing in common: they named their robots.

Luckily, the team didn’t have to chew on this challenge for too long. Sphero was part of the Techstars accelerator, a prestigious startup support system that had recently penned a deal with Disney. “We had no idea that when we showed up the first week, we would meet Bob Iger,” Wilson says. “He pulled up a picture on his iPhone—he had a model no one had seen before because he’s on Apple’s board—and he pulls up this picture of BB-8 and J.J. Abrams on set. He was like, ‘Could you guys make one of these?’ We were like, ‘Uh, yes. That’s what we do. Robot balls.’ We made one that night.”

Making millions of Disney bots: a crash course in building for everyone

The Disney deal gave Sphero an adorable—and conveniently androgynous—personality to play with. It also forced them to scale up their production faster than they ever thought they’d need to.

After Disney surprised them with the early announcement of the forthcoming BB-8 toy, Wilson called their account manager and asked how many they should expect to sell. “They were like, ‘Well, this is unprecedented, there’s never been anything like this… Millions?’

The word ‘millions’ had not been in the plan for us. It was a quick panic, like, ‘Dude, we need to start fundraising this week. How are we gonna buy all the materials to make these?'”

They needed more material, more factories, and more test units for all those factories. They got some fast venture capital funding, and expanded their team of about 40 people to about 160.

Their next concern was quality control for all those units. Fortunately, they had always built the Sphero bots to be durable and simple enough for classroom setup. “A lot of teachers who are now assigned to teach code never learned code in school themselves. When they have a whole classroom of students to guide through lessons, it’s disruptive to deal with malfunctions or reassembling broken parts,” Wilson points out. They kept the unit simple to set up to accommodate instructors and parents who might not have any robotics experience.

But still, scaling production from a few thousand units to several million forced them to tighten up the product and make it compatible with more smartphone models; even a low rate of error would now mean a tsunami of customer support tickets. “Star Wars forced us to be universal,” Wilson says. “We made millions of robots, and we got really confident in our ability to make robots that won’t break.”

Rolling forward with a new product and hardier hardware

Wilson is glad he started with a relatively simple product. “The crappiest thing about robots is the mechanics part of it, in almost everybody’s opinion,” he says. “So much of the time, you build something, but once you tell it to move forward, it doesn’t go in a straight line.”

By the time he made millions of BB-8 robots, he finally felt he had the mechanics down—and he was ready to get more ambitious with a new model.

The team started prototyping the RVR as a more adaptable open-source tool that could let users dream up wilder robot missions, “without getting stuck in the weeds of Kalman filters and loops and all this funky stuff,” Wilson says. “RVR just goes right where you say, and it’s very simple to deal with.”

The prototypes they’re putting on Kickstarter have Sphero’s impeccable location and movement accuracy, but also add all-terrain tank treads that can navigate arcs, climb inclines, and make precise starts and stops. A color sensor on the bottom lets the robot read and respond to the world around it. And a port hooks up to more advanced hardware like Raspberry Pi, micro:bit, or Arduino boards.

“We intentionally made it look pretty neutral, even though it does have this cute little face, and we put a restrained but diverse suite of sensors in it just to get you started. But we wanted to make a platform that gave the community the freedom to tell us what the robot should be,” explains product manager Burnett. “If we’re doing our job right, the robot disappears into the background. It’s all about what you’re accomplishing, what you’re creating, or the problem you’re solving.”

He’s started testing it out with Sphero engineers and kids in Boulder, and he’s already seen RVR put towards an impressive range of uses: a solar power monitoring device that scouts out the sunniest spot in your classroom or home, a musical instrument programmed to play particular notes as it rolls over different colors of construction paper, a mobile weather station, a safe-box that delivers notes to friends who know the secret code to receive them, a companion who goes to sleep when it senses it’s on the color programmed to be its “bed.”

RVR‘s color sensors allow for creative applications like playing a particular note every time it rolls over a certain color. 

RVR will use the same app as Sphero, which has a community tab where users can share all these ideas. And the programs made for Sphero, while simpler than what can be done with RVR, will already be there to get new users started.

“We see people doing crazy stuff with just a robotic ball,” says Burnett, “so we’re really excited to see what they’ll do with this whole world of open hardware.”

—Katheryn Thayer

Sphero is live on Kickstarter through March 21, 2019.