Hasta La Ideas

I love Forstner bits as much as I hate spade bits. Is there anything as satisfying as boring that smooth-sided, flat-bottomed hinge-cup hole in a cabinet-door-to-be? If your application requires you to go all the way through your workpiece, sure, you can get some nasty tear-out; my solution is to use a backer board of wood a different color than your piece. That way, when you see differently-colored shavings start to come up, you know you’ve gone all the way through.

All Forstner bits are not created equal, of course. I own several makes: Irwin, Freud, and some crappy no-name Made in China and Made in Taiwan bits I bought at the local mom-and-pop hardware store (before I was thrown out and permanently banned after getting into an argument with the owner over a sink aerator. Ah, NYC). The Freud seems to do the best job of evacuating the chips, while the others require more corkscrewing/hula-hooping and/or mid-drilling vacuuming. I know Freud manufactures in Western Europe, and I suspect Irwin manufactures in China, perhaps explaining the quality discrepancy. And now I’ve caught wind of a kind of super Forstner bit, this one out of Germany.

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For those of you with access to a full shop—I’m looking at you, ID students—if I gave you a half-dollar coin and asked you to turn it into a wearable ring, which tools would you turn to? The drill press and bench grinder are probably the first to come to mind. That’s why it’s all the more amazing that this unnamed craftsperson did the same using little more than a hammer and a handheld drill (old-school style at that, corded and with keyed chuck) with a variety of attachments, some store-bought, some seriously jury-rigged.

The safety-minded among you will cringe—this man has no regard for his fingers, and while he never damages them on camera, it does look like the “Don’t Do—” part of an industrial safety training video. Yet you can’t help but be impressed by the results, and by the sheer range of uses this guy gets out of his drill.

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In the early chapters of The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance, Henry Petroski speculates about the uncertain origin of a certain species of writing implement, proceeding to chronicle a fascinating (albeit at-times long-winded) account of its eponymous subject matter. A civil engineer by training and professor by trade, the author takes the pencil as a vehicle for tracing a loose history of his chosen profession over the course of some 300-pages.

As in Petroski’s account, FiftyThree’s latest product represents far more than the everyday object that sits on or in our desk. Its name and form factor transcend mere etymology and superficial skeuomorphism: “Pencil” captures the very essence of its namesake—typically the first tool that we use in earnest as a means of recording words and drawings—a stylus that significantly expands the power of their breakthrough app, Paper. But beyond a tightly integrated hardware-software ecosystem, Pencil marks a first step towards smarter accessories in general.

“We really want the materials to be authentic—it’s a big part of our brand, craftsmanship and authenticity.” -Jon Harris

Pixels, in some ways, represent a digital equivalent of graphite—discrete pigment deposited on a virtual surface, which can be restored to its original state by erasing these particles. If the physical evidence of a Dixon Ticonderoga consists of an infinitesimal amount of matter transferred from one object to another, then the digital machinations behind, say, the brush tool (in your sketching software of choice) is even less tangible. With their first product, Paper, a versatile drawing app, FiftyThree harnessed this unseen magic to reveal the potential of the iPad as a mobile creativity device.

But the artifact itself endures, and that much was clear at FiftyThree’s New York HQ last week, where co-founders Georg Petschnigg and Andrew Allen offered us a hands-on demo of the production version of Pencil, which launches this very morning; Director of Hardware John Ikeda and Design Co-Founder Jon Harris are also on the line via videochat from Seattle. The handsome Bluetooth-enabled stylus comes in sustainably-sourced walnut and black brushed aluminum, and it’s hard to decide which one is superior. Ikeda clearly prefers the former: “We try not to coat or treat the wood too heavily—just enough to protect it from humidity and those kinds of thing—but what’s really nice about them is that after a handling them for a while, they take on their own character.”

Like many of his colleagues at FiftyThree, including the three co-founders, Ikeda previously worked at Microsoft: “We always wanted to build a product that we could describe with the word ‘patina!'”

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The design process is such a wacky, open-source process that it’s easy to get lost in the creativity and excitement of a new idea and forgo the basics. But—as we all know—they’re called basics for a reason. Recently, we’ve seen designers bring their design processes to a new environment in an attempt to bring their ideas to the top—the classroom… but not as students.

Professors are bringing their own projects-in-progress to the students in an attempt to educate on the importance of the design process. As we investigated with Kickstarter’s role in Bruce Tharp’s entrepreneurial industrial design course and his project, the “Cut Once” ruler, it’s obvious that professors are also picking up a thing or two when it comes to revisiting the basics of the design process.

Now, Karl Ulrich, Vice Dean of Innovation at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School who has been teaching product design courses for 25 years, has a hands-on classroom experience has a massively open online course (MOOC) to thank for his newest design: Belle-V, the newest addition to the long line of ice cream scoop evolutions. Designed in collaboration with Lunar, Ulrich has developed a scoop that’s righty/lefty friendly—and easy on the eyes.

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It takes balls to redesign a screw, if you’ll pardon my French. The incumbency of standardization is a difficult hurdle to overcome, particularly if you’re going to change the screwhead pattern into something new; I don’t know anyone who enjoys having to change driver bits from Phillips to #2 Phillips to square-drive to Torx, but different manufacturers’ ideas of what shape will drive best without stripping necessitate it.

Still, a team of guys comprised of an industrial designer, a mechanical engineer, a contractor and “some business guys” reckoned they could invent a better deck screw, and having put in two years of development time, they’ll shortly be bringing it to market.

They’ve named their screw Outlaw, and it’s easy to see why: The driver system doesn’t look like any you’ve ever seen. While it’s hexagonal, like an Allen key, it’s also tiered, which technically provides 18 points of contact between the bit and the screw head. This, they reckon, will make it strip-proof. (I do wonder, though, what the lack of cam-out will do if the screw is accidentally driven in an irresistible-force-meets-immovable-object scenario; will the head break off?)

The second benefit of the Outlaw bit/head design is that screws will stay on the driver non-magnetically, like it does with a square-drive set-up, allowing one-handed driving. Maybe I’m just a klutz, but whenever I need to drill one-handed with a conventional Phillips-head screw-—usually when I’m up on a ladder and have to stretch—that’s always when the screw comes unseated from the bit and dangles from it magnetically at a weird angle, which is almost more irritating than if it would just fall off.

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