Colony on Canal: A Showroom for Designers, by Designers

Colony-Group.jpgJean Lin at center, with (from left): Kyle Garner, Sit and Read; Kellen Tucker, Sharktooth; Kai-wei Hsu, KWH Furniture; Pete Oyler, Assembly; Nora Mattingly, Assembly; Hiroko Takeda; Michael Maloney, Colony; Hillary Petrie, Egg Collective; Crystal Ellis, Egg Collective; Ryden Rizzo, Allied Maker; Will Kavesh, Token; and Emrys Berkower, Token

This article was originally published in the C77 Design Daily, Vol. 1, Issue 2, on May 17, 2014.

Launching in Manhattan next month, Jean Lin’s new design showroom will bring together a dozen studios to share space and collectively raise awareness of independent American design.

By Mercedes Kraus

Jean Lin is taking a real estate gamble in Chinatown, and she’s gathered a group of emerging designers to ante up with her. At 324 Canal Street, Lin has leased and rapidly renovated a 2,000-square-foot showroom that will soon be the headquarters of a new venture called Colony. Described by Lin as “a designer’s cooperative,” Colony will be something unique in New York’s design landscape—not quite a gallery or store, and not exactly a co-op either, but an experiment in pooling resources to boost the profile of independent design.

The idea started to take shape last year, as Lin’s conversations with designer friends revealed some common business struggles—especially the need for showroom space in Manhattan. Designers kept telling Lin that they lacked a central location to send potential clients to see their work in person, something that is especially crucial for doing business with the interior designers, architects and retailers who might order work in large quantities.

“Having a presence in Manhattan is huge,” says Stephanie Beamer of Egg Collective, a Brooklyn-based furniture-design studio founded in 2011. “That’s really where clients with purchasing power are. But for young designers, it’s virtually impossible.”

Egg Collective is one of 12 design businesses that have signed on for Colony’s launch. The others are Allied Maker, Assembly, Meg Callahan, Flat Vernacular, KWH Furniture, Zoe Mowat, Sharktooth, Sit and Read, Hiroko Takeda, Token and UM Project. Nine of the 12 are based in New York City, with the others within a few hours by car or plane: Long Island (Allied Maker), Providence, Rhode Island (Meg Callahan), and Montreal (Zoe Mowat). Their businesses have been around for as little as two years and as long as a decade. Many of them focus on furniture, but there are also designers of lighting, textiles, wallpaper and household objects.

Starting in June, they will be using the second floor of 324 Canal Street as a joint showroom, occasional exhibition venue and community hub. But first, for Design Week, the space will play host to a pair of exhibitions—a salon-style teaser for Colony and the third edition of Reclaim NYC, an annual design exhibition and charity sale co-founded by Lin.

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Unpacking “Ultralight” with Mike St. Pierre of Hyperlite Mountain Gear

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This is the first of a multi-part look at lightweight backpacking and the designers who love it.

Ultralight is a challenging niche within both the outdoor community and the outdoor industry. Ultralight users are often out on the trail or mountain for weeks on end, and ultralight designers have to get them there and back. To learn about the passions and problem-solving involved, I spoke with Mike St. Pierre, founder of Hyperlite Mountain Gear, makers of award-winning ultralight packs and tents.

C77: What inspires you to create new designs?

Mike: Honestly? My own personal interest level in an outdoor activity. I started out making packs for backpacking and through-hiking because I was doing a lot of that, then I got into climbing, so I made packs for climbers. Then I got into backcountry skiing—so that’s probably one of the next products. New designs come from personal interest and from customers requesting products for niches where they want to go lighter.

How do you determine desired weight and work towards it?

We don’t set out with that goal in mind. Weight is important, but I’ve never been looking to be the lightest guy out there. The weight is a byproduct of the design philosophy: strip away and provide the basics of what you need. A lot of companies build bags that have a multitude of attachment points, bags for doing all kind things—one bag fits all. We don’t look at it that way, it’s good to be specific. Rock climbing? Climbing bag. Ice hiking? Ice hiking pack.

How do developments in high-tech materials impact your line of products and new designs?

When I found out about cuben fiber it was a no brainer. It’s truly waterproof, the strongest material in the world, it’s non woven. All the other fabrics out there are coated fabrics. Instead you’ve got something that won’t leak, weighs less… It’s the best. So we’re always searching for the newest modern materials. More minimalist designs mean more high tech materials. Marrying the two is how we reduce the weight. Stick with what works, but sometimes you find something exciting that can spark a whole new line.

I had a heavy hand in the development of a lot of fabrics that we use. We’re doing our own production here in Maine—when we started no one was willing or had knowledge of the adhesives and bonding techniques involved. I shopped it around, and decided there was no way to do it unless we build out manufacturing ourselves. Our cuben fiber with laminated woven fabrics, those are products fabrics I had my two cents in with our developers. I constantly find things I like somewhere, and find a way to get it laminated or incorporated in the manufacture of the cuben.

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A Lesson in Cycling History from Edward Albert: ‘Gangs of New York’ Bike Exhibition at Rapha Cycle Club NYC

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Photos by Isaac Schell unless otherwise noted

On the occasion of the Red Hook Criterium this weekend, the Rapha Cycle Club here in Lower Manhattan is pleased to present Gangs of New York, an exhibition of exquisitely preserved vintage bicycles from the collection of Edward Albert. If Jamie Swan is a “Keeper of the Flame,” so too is Albert a dedicated chronicler/collector amongst the current generation of cycling enthusiasts in the Tri-state Area.

What do these bicycles, mostly from the interwar period, have to do with an unsanctioned nighttime race in a Brooklyn shipping terminal? As Albert notes in this brief history of his personal story and the bicycles currently on view at the Cycle Club, all bicycles in New York were fixed-gears until the middle of the last century, when derailleurs finally caught on in the States. So while we look forward to footage of this year’s race—Red Bull will be capturing it this year—we are very pleased to have a folk historian share a bit of context for NYC cycling culture.

Albert will be present at the opening reception of Gangs of New York, tomorrow afternoon from 2–4pm at the Rapha Cycle Club at 64 Gansevoort Street, New York, NY 10014 (the Red Hook Criterium will take place later that evening).


As a Ph.D. in Sociology, I taught for 25 years at Hofstra university and retired in 2005 as an Emeritus Professor of Sociology. Many of those years were spent studying the sport of bicycle racing, about which I have published quite a bit in professional journals and edited collections.

I have always been interested in bikes—like most people, I’ve been riding since I was a kid. But the 60s being what they were, even though I wanted to race, smoking etc. got in the way. In 1974, I was in Toronto working on my doctorate and got involved with a local bike store and club. By the following year, at the age of 26, I was all in. Bike racing became the most important thing in my life. I quit smoking and started racing seriously as I worked on my dissertation. I moved up relatively quickly (to Cat. 2) and continued to race until around 2000. Sometimes I think I stayed in academia because it allowed me the time to train and race—I became a cyclist and continue to define myself as such.1

I started collecting when I stopped racing. Before I stopped, all I wanted was a bike that would help me do well in races. After collecting for a bit, I got talked into bringing two bikes to the Cirque du Ciclisme vintage bike show in Greensboro, NC. They were a restored pair of Dick Power bikes I had gotten from a guy who knew him, whom I had met while out training. The bikes—one track and one road—won Best in Show. I was hooked. That also started me on the path of not only looking at the bikes but (as a sociologist and social historian) looking at the stories behind them. That ended up with me interviewing countless riders from the day and my as-yet-unpublished book A Dark Day in Sunnyside about the builder and coach Dick Power.

EddieAlbert-DickPower-COMP.jpgImages courtesy of Edward Albert

I have about 38 bikes, give or take a few, at the moment. Many of the New York track bikes and memorabilia came from the people I interviewed. After interviewing a good ex-rider and member of the German Club, Eddie Troll, I asked if he had any stuff left he would be willing to sell. He took me into the garage and showed me his bike, lots of parts, etc. He said sure, my kids are just going to throw this stuff in the dumpster. This was not an uncommon theme—I got the Drysdale that is in the show (more on that below) from a nonagenarian who had retired to Las Vegas. Same sentiment.

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Unicorns, Mental Athletes, and Caged Animals (with Superpowers): A Core77 Exclusive Interview with the Design Team Behind Google X

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If you’re an industrial designer looking to work in the tech sector, Google is probably pretty low on your list of prospective employers—if it’s on there at all. The company employs plenty of UX designers, interaction designers, motion designers, and others who shape how Google users interface with its many digital tools. But Google doesn’t really make stuff, and ambitious designer-makers are much more likely to set their sights on Apple, IDEO, frog, or any number of other high-profile companies that do.

That may be about to change. Recently, Google invited Core77 to visit its Mountain View, California, campus and meet some of the design talent behind Google X, the semi-secret “moonshot factory” that has in recent years been designing quite a bit of actual stuff, some of which you’ve no doubt heard about by now. X was founded in January 2010 to continue work on Google’s self-driving car initiative, and to start developing other similarly futuristic projects. The next to be unveiled was Google Glass, the much-publicized wearable computer that is expected to reach consumers sometime this year. After that, X launched (quite literally) Project Loon, an attempt to provide Internet service to rural and remote areas via balloons floating in the stratosphere; it conducted a pilot test in New Zealand last June. X also recently acquired Makani Power, which develops airborne wind turbines that could be used to harvest high-altitude wind energy, bringing its total number of public projects to four.

But what’s interesting for the design community is not just that Google X is doing some traditional industrial design in the service of realizing outrageously big ideas, but that it’s integrating I.D. with a variety of other disciplines in a particularly rigorous fashion, creating an ideal-sounding nexus of design thinking, user research and fabrication. And it is actively seeking new talent who can help flesh out its multidisciplinary approach.

“We’re looking for unicorns,” says Mitchell Heinrich, one of the four X-ers I met in Mountain View about a month ago. Heinrich founded and runs his own group within X called the Design Kitchen, which acts as X’s in-house fabrication department but is also deeply involved in generating (and killing) new ideas. And what he means by “unicorns” is designers who have the rare ability to excel in both of those roles—as he puts it, “people who have the ability to have the inspiration, the thought, the design, and then are able to carry that out to something that actually works and looks like what they want it to look like.”

That may not sound like such a fantastically rare combination of skills, but Heinrich insists that finding people who can do this kind of soup-to-nuts design—come up with brilliant ideas and then actually make them, while also working extremely fast—has been difficult. In other words, the Kitchen has high standards. “I like to think of it as more like a Chez Panisse than an Applebee’s,” he says.

GoogleX-campus.jpgThe Googleplex in early December

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Editing Made Easy: Trace 2.0 Gives Designers the Power of ‘Peeling’ in Their New Round of Updates

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Today is going to be a great day for designers who still can’t take their eyes (and hands) off of the Trace app from Morpholio Projects—they’ve added a few exciting features to the already stellar tool. Since its launch in September 2012, the app has caused quite a buzz within the digital design world with its ever-evolving toolkit. Mere months after the initial launch, the group added templates to the design, making niche design accessible even to those just looking to dabble in a new niche. Aside from being a go-to tool for getting designs down on “paper,” Trace has become a platform for constructive criticism and idea sharing, thanks to another round of additions—this time incorporating production and presentation software—before the app reached its first birthday.

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Tomorrow, the app will officially introduce a few new tools that will aid in the design process, but you can experience all of them a day early. In its first stages, its main functions were to recreate the physical tracing paper we all hate toting around in a digital interface. This time around, you can expect new colors, filters and more layer editing capacities. Check out this video for a better look at Trace 2.0.

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Bruce Lee And His Cards

“The meaning of life is that it has to be lived.” How true! And full marks for guessing the author of this quote – Bruce Lee. Known as the most influential martial-arts artists of all time, Lee was single-handedly responsible for breaking the stereotype of Asians in Hollywood movies. Commemorating his 73rd birthday today, the visionaries in the art of magic and cardistry, Dan and Dave, are out with a dedicated Bruce Lee Playing Cards Deck. All the cards feature an inspiring Bruce Lee quote, except for the Aces.

Besides the use of captivating colors for the deck, I love the fact that Dan and Dave have used different philosophical quotes from Bruce Lee’s teachings on each card. Infusing a deeper meaning to them, the Aces are void of any comment, symbolizing a free mind.

Bruce Lee Enterprises along with magicians Dan and Dave honor the masters’ legacy and contribute to his foundation. Here’s a trivia that I suppose every die-hard Bruce Lee fan would know: he was born 73 years ago, on both the hour and year of the dragon.

The Chinese dragon design on the backs of the cards celebrates his birth and the iconic tracksuit he wore in ‘Game of Death’ inspires the faces of the cards. They feature a black stripe running through them, “like water”.

The unique monogram that brings Bruce Lee and Dan and Dave Buck together as one, unifying their art forms under the teachings of Jeet Kune Do, and Bruce Lee’s philosophy of using no way as way and having no limitation as limitation, is by far the most delightful part of this deck. In one direction, the symbol reads BL, flip it over and DB is seen, as if by magic. Clever!

Early in the year we featured Dan and Dave’s collaboration with Stranger & Stranger for the Ultimate Deck, and this year we are proud to feature their new Bruce Lee playing cards. Just like their Ultimate Deck, lots of thought when into these, both in concept and execution. In our opinion, they couldn’t more beautifully pay tribute to Bruce Lee.

Like water, playing cards can flow or they can crash. “Be like water.”

Designers: Dan and Dave [ Buy it Here ]


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(Bruce Lee And His Cards was originally posted on Yanko Design)

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Breaking News: Jony Ive, Marc Newson & Bono Somewhere in the Vicinity of Sotheby’s Right Now

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Well, here’s an unexpected scoop from our own Don Lehman, who just documented what is likely the most surreal scene we’ll see this month: Jony Ive, Marc Newson and Bono piling into a custom Fiat Jolly—designed by the two industrial design megastars for their muscian friend’s charity event—for a photo opp with Lot 43 of the upcoming (RED) Auction.

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Don stopped by the exhibition, which is open to the public at Sothebys’ New York City HQ at 71st and York, this afternoon, hoping to catch a glimpse of the one-of-a-kind desk and Leica camera, also designed by the dynamic duo, along with some 40+ other art and design objects, only to find the room closed off for a private gathering. It turns out that the triumvirate were inspecting the goods—Don reports that he also overheard Bono’s fingers dancing on the custom Steinway—in anticipation of Jony and Marc’s (RED) Auction this Saturday.

Here are a couple of videos of Jony, Marc and Bono having their way with the Fiat:

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Exclusive Photos: Making-of the Queen’s Baton for the XX Commonwealth, Designed by 4c Design, Ltd.

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Last week, we took a look at the story behind the bespoke baton that Glasgow’s 4c Design, Ltd., created for the XX Commonwealth Games in 2014. The baton was unveiled at a special ceremony on October 9, the occasion for remarks from Prince Imran of Malaysia (President of the CGF), Lord Smith of Kelvin (Chair of the 2014 Games) and of course Her Royal Majesty Queen Elizabeth II herself.

The BBC’s Mark Beaumont filed his latest report, from Sri Lanka, yesterday afternoon; the Baton is about halfway through it’s tour of Southeast Asia and will be in Australia by Halloween (view the full 70-country, 288-day route here).

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We’re pleased to present a series of exclusive photos documenting the making-of the baton, courtesy of 4c Design.

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4cDesign-QBR-2-HandleTest.jpgTesting ithe durability of the handle.

5.jpgThe “Birdmouthing” join comes from 1,000+ years of shipbuilding tradition

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4cDesign-QBR-4-Prepolish-inHand.jpgThe form was 3D-printed with Direct Metal Laser Sintering, but the rough titanium requires quite a bit of manual polishing…

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4c Design’s Baton for the XX Commonwealth Games Combines Cutting-Edge 3D-Printed Titanium with a Millenium-Old Woodworking Technique

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Most Americans are slightly awed by the British ability to reinvent, update and have fun with their own customs and heritage whilst staying true to the roots that give those traditions magic and meaning in the first place. This was plainly evident at Buckingham Palace last Wednesday, October 9, at the launch of the Queen’s Baton Relay. The empty baton was escorted to the palace by pipers of the Scottish Guard and presented to Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, by Britain’s most successful track cyclist Sir Chris Hoy. As she has done every four years since 1958, the Queen placed the message she will read out at the opening ceremony of next year’s Commonwealth Games in Glasgow into a custom-designed baton and sent it on a 288-day tour around the 70 nations of the Commonwealth. Both the design and fabrication of the baton tell a powerful story that embodies not just Scotland’s culture but also the Scottish tradition of design and engineering excellence.

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The phrase “one must learn to take the rough with the smooth” is quite popular in the UK, and no one does this better than Glaswegians… or the rest of the Scots for that matter. The aesthetic features of the baton are equally influenced by the rich tradition of Scottish pageantry (and all its associated regalia) and the natural, rough-hewn craft work found in the castles, crofts, weathered landscapes and pastimes like boating and curling found throughout the land. Furthermore, the fabrication technologies reflect the duality of Scotland’s unique cultural heritage by joining the cutting-edge innovation of Direct Metal Laser Sintering (DMLS) with woodworking practices from a 1,000-year-old tradition of boat building.

Combining leading-edge technology with artisan skills, the design is literally centered on The Queen’s Message and the tradition of the baton as the symbolic invitation to Commonwealth nations and territories to attend the Games. At the heart of the baton is The Queen’s Message, inscribed on a sheet of parchment handmade in Glasgow using linen and plant fiber. The message will be scrolled and held in a transparent cylinder within a pure titanium latticework frame. For the first time, the message forms the visual core of the baton design—illuminated from within by LED lights, yet unreadable until the Opening Ceremony.

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According to Will Mitchell, Design Director of 4c Design, Ltd., the studio behind the baton:

The Baton has several features to enable the Queen’s Baton Relay team to monitor its overall health on the journey. The batteries have been selected to ensure that the light will run for a minimum of eight hours straight. There is also an LDR sensor on the outside to compensate for brightness.

Although the battery power is more than enough, should there be any doubt the unit has been fitted with a piece of monitoring software which can be read via Bluetooth and a phone App to show what percentage of charge is left. The App updates the team on the electronics operating temperature and will also allow the operator to turn the unit on and off, which was demonstrated at the Baton launch, when the Queen held the Baton after the message was inserted.

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Tom & David Kelley of IDEO Talk ‘Creative Confidence,’ New Book Hits Shelves Today

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If a recent segment on 60 Minutes is any indication, IDEO’s David Kelley is among the design superstars who have crossed over into mainstream recognition. David and his brother Tom, also a partner at the leading innovation consultancy, are pleased to present a new book, Creative Confidence, to prove that deep down (or perhaps not so deep) inside, “each and every one of us is creative.” We had a chance to catch up with the Kelley Bros. to chat about their latest page-turner and how each of us can tap into our own creative potential.

Earlier this year, Bruce Nussbaum published a book called Creative Intelligence. To what degree is this premise—that anyone can be creative—a new trend, and why do you think that is? Or alternately, if the idea has been in the ether for some time, why now?

While creativity is timeless, trends like Maker culture open up new opportunities to unleash creativity. Our great friend and IDEO cofounder Bill Moggridge strongly believed that most people were vastly more creative and capable than they knew. We agree, and we’re glad more people around the world are starting to agree, too.

We define creative confidence as the natural human ability to come up with breakthrough ideas and the courage to act on them. Since everyone was creative at some point in their lives (consider kindergarten), the challenge for us is more about unlocking creative potential than generating it from scratch.

Both in David’s work at the d.school and in IDEO’s collaborative work with client teams, we’ve witnessed many personal transformations when people who do not self-identify as “creative” get exposed to design thinking methods—and then surprise themselves with just how creative they really are. We’ve seen over and over that when people experience a series of small successes, they gradually gain confidence in their own ability to generate creative ideas and act on them. Creative confidence, what eminent psychologist Albert Bandura would call “self-efficacy,” comes down to a belief system about your own ability to have positive impact in the world.

Creative confidence is like a muscle—it can be strengthened and nurtured through effort and practice. In our experience, the best way to do that is through action, one step at a time.

The anecdote about Akshay and Ankit [engineers who end up in a d.school class] definitely rings true: We often hear from engineers who realize they’d rather be designers but don’t know where to start. Do you have any advice for them?

If you’re an engineer, then you’re a problem solver. The way to move in the design direction is to move from pure problem-solving to need-finding. That’s the empathy part of it. So instead of just doing your normal job, look for ways to reframe the problem that you’re working on, ways it might be solved in a different or a better way. Complete the task you were asked to do and then do it again in a more creative way using design thinking tools. Present both directions to the boss.

What you need is a bias toward action, to jump out into the world. Engineers tend to shy away from the messiness of the human part. So if you’re working on a new cell phone, instead of just considering the circuits or the software, go out and watch people use cell phones. Watch people use cell phones in extreme situations. Watch unusual phone use, and watch regular phone use. Ask people questions about it. Ask people to draw their cell phones. Do whatever it takes to get deep into understanding what’s meaningful to people about cell phones, rather than just working on the technology.

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