Hasta La Ideas

The type of person who buys a Buell motorcycle is “known as the hands on engineer type,” explains designer Michael Kritzer, and it’s for them that Kritzer designed the Buell Cratetable. The box that the motorcycle arrives in is pre-cut to be assembled into a useable workbench.

Kritzer designed the Cratetable for one of his earlier jobs, while working at Crispin Porter + Bogusky. The Miami-based designer now runs design firm Simple Artifact and product creation company Habitco.

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Perforated steel, photovoltaic glass, board-formed concrete made from recycled materials, Swedish army snow camouflage fabric: It seems architecture firm Cigolle X Coleman spent months in the archives of a materials library to weave together this unnamed Southern California private residence.

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Here’s the difference, as seen in painting machines, between a lone artist creating for the sake of creation, and a rather lame street marketing team trying to make a viral video.

Mudlevel’s bicycle-based robo-rainbow, which we posted about back in February, is an engaging “complicated technical solution to aide in simple acts of vandalism.” On the other hand we have V Energy Drink’s truck-based 840-barrel Paintball Machine, which promises to be awesome, then you watch the overproduced video and see the final result and go “…meh.” Or in the words of one YouTube commenter, “This is kinda fail.”

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Dieter Rams is in New York to help celebrate 60s 606 is 50, the 50th anniversary exhibition of his 606 shelving system. Rams designed the 606 as a 28-year-old man back in 1960, and the wall-track-based system is still being produced by original manufacturer Vitsoe. In a time when Ikea product lineups cycle out every few years, five decades of continuous production for the 606 seems even more impressive.

The Times caught up with Rams for a quick Q&A, worth a read for some personal tidbits. Check it out here.

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Right now the trend in flashlight design is to go with the “tactical” aesthetic, with everyone skewing towards that rugged I’m-a-Navy-SEAL look. But it’s nice to see at least one company, Icon, doing something different. The Solo, up top, is a pen-sized flashlight designed to clip into a pocket. The Link flashlight, below, has an integrated carabiner and comes in bright orange so that a) you can always keep it clipped to you and b) if you do happen to set the thing down, it should be easy to spot amidst the clutter of your other tools during a job.

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