Hasta La Ideas

While manufacturers are always trying to make laptops lighter, the Kix Berlin design studio is trying to make portable memory heavier. Their USBeton flash drive, which they’ve dubbed “a contemporary fossil,” is made from concrete.

Assuming the insides last, archaeologists will dig these up in 10,000 years and view the measly 4GB devices as our “primitive tools.”

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Intention-wise this is less of a manufacturing video and more of a commercial, but it still provides a good, if fleeting, look at the various processes required to make a sneaker.

New Balance’s US574 kicks are customizable via their website, and if you’re wondering why the turnaround is so fast for U.S. customers—just 4-8 business days, versus the weeks or months you’d wait for a NikeID product—it’s because New Balance does something unusual: They actually manufacture them in the United States. I know what you’re thinking—”What? There’s actually a company that forgot to close their U.S. factories and fire all the workers?” But for reasons unknown, New Balance keeps 1,200 New Englanders in jobs out of five different facilities.

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Nucleo, a Turin-based interdisciplinary art and design collective, is pleased to present two new tables at “IL FUTURO NELLE MANI, Artieri domani” (The Future in the Hands, Artificers tomorrow), an exhibition celebrating the 150th Anniversary of the unification of Italy. Where the exhibition itself, curated by Enzo Biffi Gentilli, is “inspired by the international expos of industry and work hosted by Turin in 1911 and in 1961,” Nucleo’s works allude to Italian history as it might be embodied by contemporary design.

Piergiorgio Robino and Stefania Fersini’s “Carboniferous” refers to the “illegal congregation of the Carbonari and tells the Italian story of secrecy and conspiracy.” The aggressive, crystalline form immediately evokes graphite or charcoal, though the faux-anthracite surface is actually composed of honeycomb cardboard covered with fiberglass, finished with carbon fiber.

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Footwear design is always a favorite undertaking for industrial designers, at least insofar as certain shoe silhouettes can be as iconic as those of automobiles, furniture or even architecture. The New Balance 577 fits the bill, and here we see the classic style re-imagined by ceramic artist Jon Lawrence, “hand-crafted and glazed from authentic Cumbrian clay quarried just a stones throw away from NB’s Flimby factory.”

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The shape of the original light bulb is a beautiful thing: Functional and manufacturable according to the glassblowing technology available at the time. The globular part distributed light more evenly and tapered down to the narrower “screw” part to keep light sockets a manageable size.

In the years since its invention we’ve seen the ugly spiral CFL shape and Philips’ alien-looking LED bulb, but now Alessi is really breaking the mold with their AlessiLux bulb collection, manufactured by Foreverlamp. Designed by Giovanni Alessi Anghini, Gabriele Chiave and Frederic Gooris, the AlessiLux bulbs come in more varieties than you can shake a stick at:

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