Hasta La Ideas

Here’s a cute little video from Maya Research that illustrates the hugeness of our digital future: trillions of networked computers representing all scales of information and objects will make up the edgeless ecology of information that we’ll be floating in. This is but a small preview of a larger project, so be sure to stay tuned.

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To celebrate the launch of their limited-edition Brixton Boot by Alden, Core77 friends Epaulet visited the Alden Shoe Company in Middleborough, Massachusetts, and shot a 12 minute video documenting the entire shoe crafting process. Founded in 1884, Alden is considered by many to be the best shoe manufacture in the US–and to this day–you can still send your shoes back to the factory for resoling.

One of their loyal customers includes Indiana Jones who wears Alden 405’s, more commonly known as the “the Indy Boot.” When Harrison Ford landed the role, he refused to wear anything else and wore his own personal pair of 405’s from when he was a carpenter.

Click through for photos from the factory visit.

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I love this video from MIT–showing a state-of-the-art CAD system from, wait for it, 1982–because for some reason the presenter cannot bring himself to make eye contact with the camera. (It was taken from an article by Joseph Friedlander on Next Big Future called “The Future of CAD 2019 as predicted by Solidworks” and is presumably meant to make us feel better about current-day CAD limitations.)

C’mon, it’s not that embarassing, that was the best you guys had back then! Although it’s true that the mechanical part he’s working on looks only slightly more complicated than an Oreo cookie.

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We wanted to make sure you didn’t miss Fast Company’s 2009 Masters of Design selections, announced late last week. The masters include David Butler, the head of design strategy at Coke; David Adjaye, architect of the new National Museum for African-American History; Lisa Strausfeld, a partner at Pentagram; Alberto Alessi, lead of design company Alessi; and David Rockwell, of Rockwell Group.

The site features stories, bios and a ton of supplemental media about the designers, their work and their process. For example, here’s David Rockwell on playground design:

And a behind-the-scenes video at Alessi:

Much more material here.

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0300tv recently shot this video of Atelier Bow-Wow’s studios in Tokyo, designed by the firm themselves. From the footage, it’s almost impossible to tell what the building looks like as a whole—instead, it’s all about situation. The most important spaces found inside and outside the building are highlighted, revealing how they are occupied, used and cluttered. This idea seems central to Atelier Bow-Wow’s practice, which they’ve illustrated so well in their books Graphic Anatomy, a commingling of architectural drawings and everyday scenes, and Pet Architecture, an index of tiny buildings that have been squeezed into leftover spaces.

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