Hasta La Ideas

While not all of our readers can relate to the American tradition of tailgating, where we gather in stadium parking lots prior to sporting events and hold barbecues out of the back of our trucks, most of you can relate to loading up a car with a lot of gear, as when you’re moving. Anything square and boxy is easy to stack and pack; weirdly-shaped things with rounded tops, like barbecue grills, are a nightmare.

Industrial designer Eddie Licitra’s Traverse concept solves the tailgating issue handily. It’s a flat-fold propane-fired grill with a slim breakdown shape that makes it easy to tuck into a trunk.

That would’ve been good enough for us, but Licitra’s gone a step further and also turned the Traverse into a handy way to get all that BBQ paraphernalia out of the house and into the car: It doubles as a handtruck.

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Images via DesignWeek UK

In 1950s America, few people at all were pursuing careers in industrial design. Charles “Chuck” Harrison was one of them. He had talent and degrees from both the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Illinois Institute of Technology, but after applying to Sears for an ID gig, he was rejected for a single reason: Because he was black.

Sears’ hiring manager, however, recognized Harrison’s talent and was able to secure freelance work for him. Not having any African-Americans on staff was the unwritten rule of the time, but the freelance workaround enabled Harrison to start gaining real-world experience.

One of Harrison’s former professors at Chicago was Henry P. Glass, the Viennese architect and designer. As a Holocaust survivor, Glass knew the ugly face of discrimination well, and having observed Harrison’s skills first-hand, helped him secure work at a design firm. In 1958, while working at Robert Podall Associates, Harrison updated the design of the popular View-Master toy, creating the iconic form many of us recognize today (even though Harrison’s Bakelite had given way to plastic by the time of our childhoods.)

By 1961 American society had begun poking small holes in the racial barrier, and Harrison got a phone call from Sears: They wanted him on staff. Harrison accepted, and embarked on a prolific career in design.

The breadth of Harrison’s work is like an industrial designer’s dream: Over the next thirty years he designed Craftsman power tools, radios, hairdryers, sewing machines, kitchen appliances, steam irons, televisions and more, spanning objects that you’d find in every room of the American house, including the garage and the toolshed.

Harrison’s favorite project was a humble one with a profound effect: The first plastic garbage can. At the time of its release all other garbage cans were metal, which made a terrific racket when the trucks came to pick up the trash each morning. Harrison’s plastic can was decidedly quieter. And he doesn’t mind that his contribution is largely unsung: “As an industrial designer especially, your audience is neither history nor fame,” he writes, “but a couple who worked hard to buy their first home on a quiet street and would love just one more hour of sleep in the morning, even on trash day.” On the practical side, he designed the can to nest, meaning they took up far less space for shipping and warehousing.

Harrison, who became Sears’ first African-American executive, retired in 1993. Throughout the 2000s he taught product design in Chicago. His full story is captured in his memoir, A Life’s Design: The Life And Work of Industrial Designer Charles Harrison.

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Prompted by the photo above of yet another type of snow-clearing train, this one in Alaska, I wanted to find video of the various types of snowblowing trains in action. Armed with these monster circular blades–it kind of looks like the tunneling machines we looked at last year—a train like this can clear snow in one pass when the level is manageable, i.e. less than half the height of the train:

But once the snow reaches a certain height and/or density, the snowblowing train has to go at it jackhammer-style:

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The American northeast is still digging out from Friday’s blizzard. Core77 HQ and the rest of NYC got off relatively easy, with just under a foot of snow. Up in New England, Coroflot HQ was buried in the two-foot range, and Massachusetts got walloped with closer to three.

While our Yankee snow removal techniques are not as involved as Japan’s Tateyama-Kurobe Alpine Route, New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority at least has some pretty bad-ass machinery. The MTA’s job is to keep the tracks clear, and they use this thing for the outdoor subway lines:

That’s a jet-powered snowblower, which sweeps, grinds and launches the snow up to 200 feet away, where it becomes someone else’s problem. But for clearing the Metro-North rails, which run proper trains up and out of the city, the MTA uses this beast:

That’s one of three jet-powered snow melters the MTA’s recently tuned up. While they move along the tracks via a conventional diesel motor, it’s a powerful turbine engine designed for aircraft that does the melting.

The engines produce exhaust that’s 600 degrees Fahrenheit, which virtually vaporizes snow. “If the jets do the job right, all you see is steam coming off the steel,” said Peter Hall, Foreman of the Maintenance of Way Equipment Shop in North White Plains. “They produce 2,500 pounds of thrust, which makes them very good at getting under heavy, wet slush, ice and crusty snow.”

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People go on amusement park rides not because they’re amusing, or fun. Board games are fun. Amusement park rides are meant to be thrilling. Whatever’s on your mind is temporarily displaced by acceleration, gravity and G-forces. As your body is hurtled through space in completely unnatural ways, your mind is temporarily set free; no one can calculate a mortgage payment while upside down doing 100 miles per hour at 2.7 Gs.

In his entertaining mockumentary The Centrifuge Brain Project, digital artist, designer and filmmaker Till Nowak posits that amusement park rides actually increase brain function. We see a fictional scientist/engineer (brilliantly played by Les Barany) explaining his research—and showing video of mind-bendingly fantastical rides—at the fictional Institute for Centrifugal Research. This is your must-watch of the week:

Via Colossal

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