Hasta La Ideas

The simple rule for designing any organization system, whether for tools, clothes, the top of your desk, etc., is: Everything should have a place for it—and the more clearly delineated that space, the better. If your desk is messy right now, it’s probably because it’s covered in things that don’t have dedicated places. It’s easy to scoop pens up and throw them into your pen cup, but it’s the uncategorizable things—that catalog you think you might need later, a stack of documents that’s important but not urgent, some business cards you’ve been meaning to file—that create the mess. And then you spend time sifting through all of it to find the thing you’re looking for.

Delineating areas for objects is also important, and ideally it should be one-to-one. From a design perspective, I don’t find dresser drawers very efficient, because they hold stacks of clothes, and I’m invariably digging through three items to get to the fourth. Ditto with toolboxes, where you spend five seconds of rummaging for every one second of grabbing. Multiply that wasted time over millions of tool-wielding workers that get paid per hour or per job, and you’re looking at a lot of man-hours down the drain.

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Hole reinforcers and pencils from Costa Rica, and Hen Chung in Istanbul.

Around the world in 80 writing utensils? That’s one way to describe Rad and Hungry, which aims to take lovers of interesting office supplies on a “world tour of limited-edition goods with lo-fi style, pushing design through travel and travel through design.” Founded by former graphic designer Hen Chung in collaboration with fellow globetrotters Sam Alston and Laura Dedon Oxford, the online shop assembles an ever-changing selection of country-themed kits stocked with imported pens, pencils, stationery, and other exotic desk goodies, all beautifully packaged. A Rad and Hungry subscription is the perfect gift for the design lover who has everything—except thumbtacks from Lisbon.

“We really try to make each kit speak to our travels in that country–the people we met, food we ate, design we saw,” Chung tells us. “As each layer is unwrapped, people share in our low-down travel. The whole experience transforms the lo-fi, often overlooked daily-diet goods into something sacred. Our ultimate goal is to connect far-flung groups of people who love style, design, and travel as much as we do.” She made time between scouting trips to answer our questions about creating the company, her favorite finds, and what’s currently on her desk.

What led you to create Rad and Hungry?
I was a graphic designer for ten years and it became time for me to move on. I knew I wanted to combine the things I love most—travel and design. One day I was sitting in my library room thinking about what my next move would be. I was staring at a section of shelves that store journals that I collected from my travels. They were all untouched–they were inexpensive journals I picked up in places such as corner shops and pharmacies. Didn’t matter that none of the pages contained any words or images, they were all so sacred to me because they reminded me of each country. And then it hit me—create a company that allows me to travel and share daily-diet design through office supplies.

You travel the globe hunting for new stuff to include in Rad and Hungry kits. What are some of your favorite finds of all time?
Probably my favorite item to date is the Soviet-era notebooks in the Latvia Kit. I love the yellowing pages, the faded mint covers, and the simple rubber-stamped logo. Close seconds are the copper-colored paper clips from our first Germany Kit and the flower-scented pencils from the Portugal Kit. I love the paper clips because they’re so opposite of what people expect of German goods—they’re delicate and not uniform in shape. And the pencils from Portugal are amazing. Their smell is unreal. Super fragrant but not in the cheap perfume sort of way. They’re made by an old pencil factory that’s still in business after all these years. I’m always stoked to discover a company with a lot of history ‘cause I’m a firm believer that old school is best!

You’re packing for a desert island and can only bring one writing utensil. What is it?
Hands down a goldenrod pencil. I figure I’ll be able to create a tool to sharpen it and find something to write on. But I don’t know what I’d do if I need a fire, hurting for wood and have to make the ultimate decision between fighting off the cold or having a trusty number 2 pencil.
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Earlier we wrote about Gerber’s GDC Hook Knife, a keychain-mounted device intended to cut you free from a seatbelt. We also mentioned that that’s a statistically unlikely need for your average motorist to have; if your car is submerged, the larger problem is going to be getting out of the vehicle before it fills with water. Back in the days of roll-down windows, you could crank them down if you got to it quick enough—once the water pressure got too great, it would trap the windows firmly within their rubber seals and you’d be screwed. However, with today’s power windows, you’ve got the issue of the motors shorting out if you’ve driven into the drink.

Every year some 400 Americans drown in their cars. (That’s just 0.01% of the population, but man, what a terrible way to go.) If you can’t get the window open in a sinking car, you’ll need to break it. And yes, there are objects designed specifically for that task, like the carbon-steel-tipped LifeHammer Plus and LifeHammer Evolution.

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When it comes to sketching, line quality is everything. To build up the desired thickness using ink, you can either switch between multiple pens or you can hit the same line repeatedly with the same pen, as Spencer Nugent has done above; if using pencil or a pressure-sensitive stylus on a digital device, you can hit the same line and/or press harder, as Michael DiTullo’s done below.

So this currently-under-consideration-at-Quirky design proposal has me curious. Designer “HSingh” is pushing for a pen with an adjustable tip, whereby a dial in the barrel somehow alters the nib’s width.

There’s virtually no explanation for how the thing would work, but the question is: Would you guys use this to change line weights, or do you prefer the old-fashioned way? And does anyone remember having to swtich back and forth from like, five different Koh-i-Noor Rapidographs in design school?

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The KUKA YouBot Omni-Directional Mobile Platform with Arm is a small, arm-on-a-skateboard type of robot that can perform simple tasks. Recently Ross Knepper, a robotics reseacher at MIT, and his team hacked up a couple of them to assemble store-bought IKEA furniture. While it was primarily an exercise, versus designing a commercially-viable product, we were pretty impressed by his solution for screwing the legs into the Lack sidetable that you’ll see here:

The YouBot doesn’t come with an “end effector” that can perform the rotating motion you and I would do with two hands to get that leg into the table. Knepper’s team devised an elegant workaround, using rubber bands attached to two different rings:

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