Pylon Sounds

Continuum continues their series Open for Branding, where they are sharing, from start to finish, their latest branding project for the new, nomadic Design Museum Boston.

Wow. Last week, we posted our Design Museum Boston branding concepts for feedback, and more than 1700 people checked out our survey and 274 completed it. The greatest part: everyone aligned--Continuum, Design Museum Boston, and you—on which directions were the strongest.

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This fall, you could be one of six clever individuals working side-by-side with 24 top PepsiCo leaders, helping them rethink and work through key business challenges. The company has partnered with Continuum to help them run an eight-session fellowship problem where they will bring in innovative, interdisciplinary thinkers to work on small teams with Continuum coaches to tackle real-world design challenges, moving through the process from user-research to rapid prototyping.

The first session will begin on October 15th and continue for eight consecutive weeks. In addition to the an opportunity to participate in the workshops, the six selected applicants will receive a $4,000 dollar stipend. Sessions will be held in New York City, Purchase, NY (PepsiCo HQ), and Continuum's Boston office.

You must apply before September 15th. For an application and guidelines, email innovationfellows (at) pepsico (dot) com.

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Guest post by Phil Patton.

Surprisingly self-effacing among the high profile wit and higher profile designers of Alessi, the new Ovale line of tableware from Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec may sum up the current design zeitgeist.

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You've got one month left to enter this year's Buckminster Fuller Design Challenge, witha monster prize of $100,000 each year for "comprehensive solutions that radically advance human well-being and ecosystem health."

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We love the new collection released bye eco-friendly undies line PACT in partnership with the Creative Growth, a contemporary art center in Oakland that "focuses on unlocking the creativity of adults artists with developmental disabilities."

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This year at the London Design Festival, the Shop at Jasper Morrison's studio, full of super normal household objects, will display a selection of trays from around the world— a selected few are pictured above. Morrison will also launch three new products of his own, The Country Trainer, designed for Camper; a telephone for Punkt, and a platinum grey ceramic R5.5 chronograph for Rado.

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TokyoFlash, that manufacturer of eye-catching, bizarrely-complicated timepieces, is seeking new watch design concepts through their Design Challenge. The language is murky as to whether or not winning submissions will see actual production, but the entries are coming in hard and fast all the same.

Think you can out-weird these guys? Enter the competition here, or peruse the incoming entries here.

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These days there are high-end hotels in Las Vegas that will sell you new versions of the luxurious sheets, pillows, and even toiletries that they stock their rooms with. But the casinos on their ground floors are a different story; no one wants to furnish their house with the gaudy trappings surrounding a roulette table.

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This is pretty nuts-and-bolts ID, but I believe we're looking here at an early, primitive version of a design that we'll see more refined versions of in the future. The Pallet Sign, by U.K.-based Fripp Design & Research, is a simple series of clips that cover the sides of shipping pallets and provide a surface for signage, angled upwards so standing consumers can read them. Why?

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After an eight month international search, Core-fave Rama Chorpash was selected to join Parsons The New School for Design School of Constructed Environments (SCE). He'll be taking a tenure track position as Associate Professor of Product Design, and as the Director of Product Design. As Director, he will be charged to help create an integrated academic vision for SCE, including the MFA in Product Design and other new programs. And though he'll surely have his hands full, Rama will still be running his Rama Chorpash Design consultancy.

You'll recall Rama's star turn in our Design, Wit, and the Creative Act event (we miss you Tobi!), and you can read more about Rama in this Nice NYTimes article on Rama from 2006 here.

Congrats Rama!

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Hammer 1.0 was a rock. Hammer 2.0 was a rock attached to a piece of wood, and the caveman that came up with that one must have been pretty pleased; he was the first ergonomicist.

Today we have tons of tools featuring a handle of one material and a head made of another, but there's an ecological problem with this design: The two things can wear out at different rates. In my lifetime I've thrown away scores of toothbrushes because the bristles were spent, but I've never thrown one away because the handle wore out.

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Guest post by Russell Maschmeyer.

On the final afternoon of Adaptive Path's UX Week, Iain Roberts (Partner and Co-Leader of IDEO Chicago) presented his team's remarkable work on My Ford Touch, Ford's new driver interface platform. I sat down with Iain and Gary Braddock (Ford's Chief Interior Designer) earlier that morning to discuss their research, prototyping, and production process and got a sneak peak at Gary's Lincoln prototype.

My Ford Touch is rolling out into vehicles next year, beginning with the 2011 Lincoln MKX and subsequently the entire Lincoln line, followed shortly by the Ford and Mercury lines. It's the most comprehensive update to driver interfaces the market has seen since the automatic transmission. The partnership between IDEO and Ford was aimed a producing a stronger connected platform for Ford drivers--to re-think the driver interface experience from the ground up. The results are pretty compelling.

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"Cheap, high quality, long lasting." These are the words that Enzo Mari bluntly lists as main goals for his Autoprogettazione project. That, in addition to, "If someone tried to build something, they would learn something" are the simple maxims that summarize the seemingly simple results of this far-sighted project, originally conceived in 1974 and now being revived through production of Mari's Sedia 1 chair by Artek.

In celebration of their 75th anniversary, Artek has partnered with Mari to 'produce' the Sedia 1 chair, meaning they are selling a kit that includes a stack of wood (pre-cut pine boards), nails, and blueprints for the chair. Along with the project, Artek released a lovely little documentary, "Enzo Mari for Artek: Homage to Autoprogettazione," which debuted at the Triennale in Milan in April, and was shown at an event at the Conran Shop in NYC last Wednesday. The film allows Mari himself to tell the story of the project. Alternately smoking a cigar and getting down to business building a Sedia 1 himself, the 78-y.o. working designer recounts why he started the project, and why he is thrilled (in that low-key straight-faced Mari way) that Artek chose to produce the Sedia 1 now.

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Fuseproject
Industrial Design Intern
San Francisco, CA

The intern's role within the product department is primarily to support all areas of design with specific tasks including; document layout and production, research (with image gathering), preparation for presentations as well as conceptual sketching / ideation and model-making.

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The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.

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As various print magazines like Gourmet scramble to reinvent themselves as Ipad apps, we are happy to see that some people still believe a physical printed product can be quite nice. A staple in our daily blog roll of creative delights, It's Nice That, is going against the grain with the fourth issue of their bi-annually printed publication. The publication serves as an archive of the blog's best editorial content, as well as a venue for more in-depth stories, and this issue sounds juicy with features, tons of work, and interviews with Neville Brody, Miranda July and others.

Issue #4 is now available for pre-order, with an incentive for those who appreciate cute illustrated blob-men and the lovely details in printed matter: a free screenprint by James Jarvis (two-color with spot UV gloss, unfolded at 185 x 245 mm).

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Aside from some beautiful shots of the cast off-camera, Rolling Stone's coverage of Mad Men also caught some delightful moments capturing the contrast between life in 2010 and 1965. Enjoy.

Don Draper (Jon Hamm) checks his iPhone 4.

Roger Sterling (John Slattery) looking more suited for Brooklyn than Madison Ave.

Kenny Cosgrove (Aaron Stanton) and Harry Crane (Rich Sommer) perhaps admiring the new iTunes 10 on a MacBook Pro.

Given Mad Men is so well-respected for its attention to period detail (i.e. the Helvetica poster we all saw in the new creative lounge at SCDP early this season) I find this even more entertaining and jarring in their mid-century environs.

Via Armin Vit.
Photos by James Minchin III for Rolling Stone.

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We're excited by the recent trend toward open-source design approaches, with Continuum's Open for Branding project, Betacup on the Jovoto platform, and the recent announcement of Open IDEO. So, we're especially thrilled to be able to announce and track, first-hand, Open Planet Ideas, a promising collaboration between Sony and global conservation group WWF, utilizing the Open IDEO platform.

This challenge is a great one for designers: using existing Sony technologies, either on their own or in unique combinations, how can we address key sustainability issues in new ways? Sony provides information about all their available tech, the WWF provides all the latest environmental facts and figures, and participants provide their fresh inventor minds. Casting a wide net, Sony is betting on the myriad of ideas that can come from a community of people both interested in environmental issues and capable of re-purposing anything from GPS units to dye-sensitized solar cells. Participants can also propose disruptive new applications from nine 'seed' technologies, used alone or in new combinations.

Today kicks off the initial inspiration phase, open through October 1, in which participants upload inspirations and observations in the form of photos, stories, or videos. With community input, the best insights will be synthesized, and the challenge will be re-framed to kick off the concept phase.

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The Delft University of Technology's Industrial Design Engineering department has posted their "Delft Design Guide" online, for free PDF download. The content in the guide is drawn largely from five of their design courses: Introduction to Industrial Design, Concept Design, Fuzzy Front End, Materialization and Detailing, and their Final Project course.

Posted alongside the guide is this video interview with Jeroen van Erp, an alumnus, faculty member, and part of the Dutch creative agency Fabrique. (Warning: The sound is horrible, as if it were recorded with one of those snazzy DSLRs with amazing video capabilities but a terrible microphone. Get ready to lean in close to your speakers.)

Hit the jump to learn more about what's in the Guide.

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Danish industrial design firm KiBiSi and Danish bicycle manufacturer Biomega have teamed up with Puma to release the Mopion cargo bike, a sort of pickup-truck version of the Puma Boston bike:

[The Mopion] mixes city bike features and cargo bike features, making it a sturdy companion. It comes with a super-size innovative front carrier for heavy duty transport of your groceries or other needs. Developed for city dwellers, Mopion features a light aluminum frame, making it a one-of-a-kind lightweight cargo bike weighing only 22 kilos. The geometry holds the body in a slightly inclined, but still heads-up position for navigational ease and exceptional balancing.

The stretch two-wheeler will officially launch in mere hours at Eurobike and goes on sale in Spring of next year.

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I once accidentally shot a girl I was trying to date in the head with a champagne cork. She was standing next to me as I opened the bottle; the cork slipped my grasp, shot straight up, hit the ceiling, and came down squarely atop her noggin. It all happened in a second and I didn't even realize what had happened--I basically opened the bottle, heard a pop and then she fell down, holding her head and going "Fuuuuuuck!" (Afterwards she was fine, though our budding romance was not.)

The amount of pressure inside a champagne bottle, in addition to being calibrated to destroy my relationships, is much greater than what's inside a bottle of beer. To prevent explosions, champagne bottles are made extra-thick and extra-heavy, nearly two pounds each. Multiply that by the 300 million bottles of Champagne that France ships every year and you've got a lot of carbon emissions. To combat this, the French are developing a new, slimmer-walled champagne bottle that weighs less.

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