Hasta La Ideas

Hosted by Don Lehman, Core77’s podcast series is designed for all those times you’re sketching, working in the shop, or just looking for inspiration from inspiring people. We’ll have conversations with interesting creatives and regular guests. The viewpoint of Afterschool will come from industrial design, but the focus will be on all types of creativity: Graphic design, storytelling, architecture, cooking, illustration, branding, materials, business, research… anything that could enrich your thought process, we’ll talk about.

Our guest today is Martin Kastner, the founder and principal designer at Crucial Detail in Chicago. One of his major clients also happens to be one of the world’s top restaurants: Alinea. If it sounds funny to hear that a restaurant regularly works with a designer, well: The food they create at Alinea is so inventive and so unique that they literally had to design tools just so people could consume it. If you haven’t seen this work before, you owe it to yourself to look at Crucial Detail’s website before you get too deep into today’s episode. Check it out at crucialdetail.com. Seriously. You’re gonna want to see this.

Last year, Martin Kickstarted one of the objects he designed for Alinea’s cocktail bar, Aviary. It’s a drink infusion vessel called Porthole, which absolutely smashed through his goal of $28,500 to raise nearly three-quarters of a million dollars. We talk about that too.

If that wasn’t enough, Martin has one of the most improbable designer origin stories I have ever heard of. Don’t worry, I’m not going to ruin that for you.

Get the Afterschool Podcast, Episode #4: on the iTunes store | Direct download link [mp3]

Show notes after the jump:

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