Hasta La Ideas

We love seeing designers speak with passion, and it’s a bit startling, though satisfying, to see when the designer in question works for a large corporation but has not had that passion beaten out of him. If anything, it’s quite the opposite in the case of Ralph Gilles.

Something appears to be going very right over at Dodge, where CEO Gilles is both an industrial designer and relatively young at just 40 years of age. As Gilles describes himself in an interview with Forbes,

I don’t see myself as the classic car designer that’s all about style. I’m always thinking about the business case, the big picture implications of whatever we’re working on, the engineering challenges. A true industrial designer is more of a problem solver. A true artist tends to make a singular piece that stands almost in a museum by itself, whereas an industrial designer is designing a solution for millions of people.

Anyways, back to the passion—check out this vid of Gilles speaking the design gospel at the Los Angeles Auto Show after the jump:

(more…)

I’m not sure what this says about me (though I’m sure you readers will not be shy about sharing your diagnoses in the comments section): I had a variety of reactions to this duplex penthouse NYC apartment making the blog rounds for having a slide built into it to connect the two floors.

My first reaction was “Hey, neat.”

Then, noticing the view of the city beyond the windows, and given that the apartment is listed as being in the East Village, I determined it was that stretch of the East Village around 4th and Avenue D—right next to the PJ’s. And suddenly having two apartments combined into a duplex and adding a slide, all within view of several hundred families living off of food stamps in the projects, seemed crass and decadent. I went from a reaction of “neat” to finding the design almost offensive.

(more…)

I’ve used pegboard to organize tools, of course. And when those fugazi pegboard hooks would fall out, I’d occasionally placed a wood backing behind it and used sheetrock screws driven to different depths to mount tools of different thicknesses (a rubber mallet versus a regular claw hammer, for instance). Of course, it never occurred to me that the screw heads could be painted, that the evenly-spaced pegboard holes could be the basis for pixels, and that screws driven to different depths could be used to create depth perception. And that’s why Andrew Myers is an artist and I am just a blogger who writes about artists.

More on Myers and his process here.

(more…)

When working on a studio project, there’s nothing more satisfying than those moments when you sweep all the trimmings and detritus off the table and onto the floor, allowing you to focus on only the pieces you’re working on. Of course, it also makes a damn mess you’ll have to sweep up later (or not at all, depending on how Mad Scientist you are).

Jack Talbert, a second-generation inventor who hails from Kansas, has a simple solution for this: The Portotrash, a simple rig that clips to the table and holds an ordinary plastic shopping bag you can sweep everything into. You can even store extra plastic bags in the chunky plastic part in the front.

The Portotrash is a Quirky project up for presale at $20 a pop. At press time Talbert’s got just 148 out of the 1,000 committments necessary to see production, but you’ll change that, right?

(more…)

The upshot to not owning a couch, as I don’t, is that unexpected guests recognize that they cannot disrupt my daily life by crashing here, since there’s no place for them to sleep. Thus I don’t get 2am door buzzes from my degenerate friends who’ve drank too much and would rather vomit in my conveniently-located abode rather than fight pukery in the back of a cab.

Those of you more hospitable and barf-tolerant than me are perhaps happy to offer up your couch, and maybe you even own a folding cot. But I guarantee that if you own a folding cot, or have ever even seen one, you’ve never slept on it voluntarily. Folding cots, with their thin, ineffectual mattresses and protruding springs, seem designed to break your back a few REM cycles at a time.

But now a company called Sleep Innovations is making a cot that strives to be not only comfortable, but useful even when you’re not putting people up. Their BOB (that’s Bed-Ottoman-Bench) has a memory foam mattress, does double duty as a bench, and triple duty as an Ottoman when it’s folded up. I suppose I would buy one of these…pending an effort to find some classier friends.

(more…)