Hasta La Ideas

As if first dates don’t come packed with enough over analyzation as it is, there’s now a cutlery set that looks so far into designing a less awkward dinner date that it actually might be cutting back on your culinary meet-and-greet anxiety. First Date Cutlery, the creation of London-based designer Cristina Guardiola, “aims to smooth over some of the potential anxiety of a first date dining experience by facilitating good table etiquette and encouraging interaction.”

(more…)

As a small child, I never noticed the slight grade changes in the sidewalk of my neighborhood unless a ball happened to get away from me. But once I got my first skateboard, I then became sharply aware of each incline, crest and decline for blocks around.

Similarly, as a new member of NYC’s Citi Bike bikesharing program—and as someone who previously had not ridden a bicycle literally since childhood—I now see the city in a completely different way. To run an errand ten blocks away is pleasurable to do on a bike, but requires some planning and forethought; one-way streets, a car-and-truck culture, taxi fares swinging doors open and a marked dearth of bike lanes make it impossible to travel smoothly and in a straight line.

Why are cities like New York so bike-unfriendly, and what can design do to remedy this? In the following TED Talk, urban mobility expert and bicycle infrastructure specialist Mikael Colville-Andersen, the CEO of Copenhagenize Design Co., discusses how bike lanes came to be, and what they could become. (One fascinating case in point is the Netherlands, where they are installing weather sensors on bicycle traffic lights at intersections; in rainy, snowy or cold weather, the lights are then automatically gamed to give cyclists priority, so they can get out of the foul weather quicker.)

(more…)

During several wintertime visits I’ve made to the Scandinavia, I found the nearly 24 hours of darkness novel; but living there, I’d find it depressing. It’s natural to crave sunlight, and now the Norwegian municipality of Rjukan is enacting a nearly 100-year-old plan to bring some Sol into their town square. Three huge mirrors (totaling 100 square meters) known as heliostats will be placed atop a nearby mountain. Sensors and motors will adjust the mirrors to reflect sunlight directly onto the combination town square/skating rink, providing a sunny spot where people will naturally want to gather.

The concept isn’t new; the long-since-passed town founder and engineer Sam Eyde reportedly first had the idea in the 1920s, but lacked the technology to make it work. And at least two other sun-starved municipalities developed similar plans: Austria’s Rattenberg looked into installing 30 heliostatic mirrors in 2005, though their US $2.4 million plan was ultimately scuttled. The tiny Italian village of Viganella, however, successfully installed their own 8-meter by 5-meter mirror the very next year.

Viganella’s story in particular was unusual and interesting enough that filmmaker David Christensen made a documentary about it. Called Lo Specchio (“The Mirror”), the trailer is below:

(more…)

What promises to be a fascinating discussion about life as an industrial designer is currently taking root on the Core77 Boards. The original poster, presumably a student on the verge of making a crucial decision, started out with a vague (and impossibly broad) query on whether industrial design is a financially lucrative profession. In our members’ efforts to answer, the topic is beginning to veer towards the quality of an industrial designer’s life.

We would need to identify some parameters in order to ballpark your average ID’er’s quality of life. As mentioned before, industrial design is an impossibly broad field, since you can loosely define it as designing anything produced from a factory (and these days, even that is changing). Our readers work everything from plastic widgets to automobiles, appliances to furniture, environments to user interfaces. Some are one-man or -woman studios, others work in consultancies, still others at large corporations.

So what are the commonalities? For one thing, because we often design things that will be produced by machines whose cost far exceeds our own means, we’re often at the mercy of others with larger pockets or a firmer hand on the pursestrings. Which is to say, we are not in positions of absolute power, generally speaking. (Kickstarter and low-cost RP are changing this somewhat, but I believe the impact is fractional.)

Secondly, we work in a fairly obscure profession; when a child talks occupations they want to be a firefighter, a doctor or a police officer when they grow up, not the junior designer on staff at a structural package design firm responsible for low-cost cleaning solution bottles targeted at the Latin American market. Because most people don’t understand what we do and why it’s necessary, there is a degree of skepticism and don’t-get-it-ness that the lesser-established among us are used to dealing with, from engineers who don’t take our profession seriously to marketers who feel our primary task is to change the CAD model into a color of their choosing. For every famous Behar, Starck and Rashid that have earned the power of sway, there are thousands of us who understand we will continually deal with conflict and opposition. To an industrial designer, it’s not a strange sensation to design some cool feature—then instantly start thinking about how you’re going to justify and defend it to others involved in the process.

(more…)

New Yorkers take their sidewalks seriously: With over 12,000 miles of sidewalk in the city, there is a lot to care about. So who wouldn’t like the idea of making one of the most used urban features just a bit nicer? The recently funded Kickstarter project Softwalks makes small design tweaks to drab New York sidewalks, transforming them into fully-fledged public spaces. At launch, the Softwalks ‘kit’ consists of four parts; seat, counter, planter and light reflector, all directly attachable to preexisting scaffolding using an adjustable clamp system. The team is also developing an additional screen, bench and game board to expand the kit.

Designing for existing urban structures isn’t exactly a new idea; projects like Michael Karowitz’s paraSITE immediately come to mind. Still, urban planning is a big job, so why not start small? By designing for scaffolding that covers many of New York’s sidewalks—technically known as ‘sidewalk sheds’ to protect pedestrians from debris—the project has the potential to make a pop-up park practically anywhere. Considering that New York City currently has approximately 189 miles of sidewalk sheds, it shouldn’t be a problem finding a sidewalk in need of sprucing.

(more…)