Over the next couple of days my colleague Jocelyn and I’ll be blogging live from the Economist ’s Redesigning Business Summit in London for Core77. Under the title ‘ The Big Rethink ‘ the event sets out to develop some fresh ideas on how design thinking can be used to seize business opportunities in our increasingly volatile world. Over the two days we’ll be hearing from over 30 speakers from across business, academia... 

Here’s a neat material technology you can integrate into your next product concept: Thin film tactile surface sensors. Sensor Products Inc. is a company specializing in the mapping of tactile pressure, and the data they glean can lead to design improvements for everything from windshield wipers to mattresses to body armor. A few examples: Their Tactilus Real-Time Surface Pressure Mapping Technology , for example, is an electronic skin... 

More fun for spring: Sight Unseen has published their visit to Confetti System’s studios in New York CIty, where Julie Ho and Nicholas Andersen design, yes, party decorations. It doesn’t get much more fun than this: shimmering, geometric pi  Read More →

Nothing beats a good design school education, but for the cash-strapped there is also an impressive amount of free educational materials online. A good case in point: Instructor Mario Malagrino of the Florence Design Academy has posted a free Studio Max illumination tutorial , intended for his students but available to all, on how to simulate photo studio lighting techniques for product design renders. (We discovered it while rooting around... 

Maryland Institute College of Art celebrates Spanish design with a panel discussion that features graphic artists Ferran Mitjans and Oriol Armengou of Toormix, a graphic design studio based in Barcelona; Nacho Carbonell, a Spanish furniture designer whose furniture is featured here; and Vicente Guallart, a Barcelona-based architect who restores and builds internationally with focuses on nature and new technologies. The event is sponsored by... 

Standard Time originated as a 24 hour time-telling performance conceived by Mark Formanek and realized by Datenstrudel in Berlin in 2007. After several exhibitions, the performance has now been documented on video, and is newly available as a desktop application or DVD. In the performance, workers scramble to rearrange wooden planks by the minute to accurately reflect the time. According to …  Read More →

A presentation from Non-Format’s Jon Forss at Walker Art Center last month recently surfaced on youtube. It’s essential viewing for fans and inspirational for anyone questioning the reality of running a virtual office. Forss lives in Minneapolis and his business partner Kjell Ekhorn is based in Oslo, their accounts are managed in London and together they have worked for the past 10 years catering to an enviable list of global clients.... 

We often blog about auto design and furniture design because–and I don’t have the official stats on this, but in my perception–auto design is the largest, most corporate and most industrial of the industrial design offshoots and furniture design is the sexiest. Sadly, the two fields rarely see any project overlap. Until now, anyway. What you see here is a gearshift knob for the new Volvo C70 designed by Thonet , the firm founded... 

Last summer Ruby Sprengle, a product design student at the University of Oregon, and her friend Greg Peterson came up with the Utility Quilt , shown above. The Utility Quilt is made entirely out of recycled plastic bags using an extremely high tech and uniquely named process caused “Plastic Bag Fusing” which involves layers of plastic bags, just like the ones you get at the grocery store, a piece of tracing paper, and an iron. It... 

Sandbox produces a series of videos where they tie things to an unseen moving vehicle, drive it off and see what happens. Above is their amazing Ikea Product Test, conducted in just this manner. If you like that, check out their attempts to swipe a tablecloth out from under breakfast… Thanks, Thom! (more…)  Read More →

Eastman Innovation Lab brings us a video from Peter Booth, the managing partner and director of Tin Horse . Peter engages in “practice-based innovation” and looks to what people actually do with the stuff they have for insights into design. He says that “the remit of the designer has to be beyond just designing things, it has to be involved in looking at  Read More →

Excellent design writing, whether commentary, criticism or reportage, is valued very highly here at Core77. So, we are more than excited to announce that the 5th annual Winterhouse Writing Awards for has just opened this year’s competition. From the call for entries: The awards will be given for writing that demonstrates the greatest evidence of eloquence, analysis, perspective, insight and original thinking to further a public understanding... 

Probably best known for his Heatwave radiator produced by Droog, Dutch designer Joris Laarman opened his first solo show in the US last night at Friedman Benda. Titled ‘Joris Laarman Lab’ , the show spans work from the last 5 years and has enough mirror-polished surfaces to rival Ron Arad’s ‘Guarded Thoughts’ shown in the same gallery just over a year ago. Laarman’s beautifully engineered furniture is displayed... 

Last night Droog Design kicked off a series of New York City based events at the Soho House . This intimate lecture focused on defining the products and mentality of this now-oh-so-famous design collective. Art critic, co-founder and director of Droog, Renny Ramakers, presented a series of 300 images (picked at random) from the Droog archive. In true subversive Dutch fashion, the talk had a non-linear participatory format, encouraging guests to... 

You might guess that the carbon footprint from a carton of orange juice is largely due to packaging, transportation and disposal, but the findings from a recent PepsiCo study may surprise you. When the entire life cycle of orange juice was included, growing the oranges turned out to contribute the most to the carbon footprint—mainly due to the production and application of nitrogen based fertilizers. It’s important for designers...