Planetaki Planet Design

15 Minutes with CityEngine and Lumion....

2012-02-11T07:07:30Z

A quick weekend post - following on from our first look at CityEngine and Lumion we have expanded the visualisation to add in various standard items from the Lumion library along with a surrounding terrain and waterside setting:

Total development time is 15 minutes with rendering 1.5 hours, its getting quicker to make cities....

Core77 Photo Gallery: Designs of the Year 2012

2012-02-11T07:03:01Z

Photography by Cemal Okten for Core77

Now in it's fifth year, the London Design Museum's Designs of the Year exhibition presents a snapshot of industry heavyweights across seven categories including: Architecture, Digital, Fashion, Furniture, Graphics, Product Design, and Transport. The show features 89 nominations, the winner for each category and overall winner for 2012 will be announced later this year in April.

We're pleased to see Massoud Hassani's Mine Kafon included in the Product Design category. It sits along side nominations such as; The Learning Thermostat by Nest, Jawbone JAMBOX by Yves Béhar, TMA-1 Headphones by KIBiSi, the Invisible Cycle Helmet by Hövding, the Carbon Black wheelchair by I Imagine, and not so surprisingly The London 2012 Olympic Torch by Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby.

There's some interesting statistics posted over at It's Nice That breaking down the type of entries that were nominated, "In the last five years, exactly one third of the nominations for Designs of the Year have been self-initiated, which is a sobering/inspiring thought depending on which way you choose to look at it".

Checkout our gallery for highlights from all the categories, and definitely make an effort to visit the museum's top floor if you find yourself in London before July.

» View Gallery

Designs of the Year 2012
February 8 - July 15, 2012
Design Museum
Shad Thames
London

(more...)

Is That Carbon Fiber? Nope. Say Hello to Tegris

2012-02-10T23:12:18Z

There's an exciting new material on the block, and it's showing up in...luggage. Baggage manufacturer Tumi is now using Tegris, a polypropylene thermoplastic composite developed by textile and chemical giant Milliken, and is rolling it out in their new Tegra-Lite collection, starting with a carry-on.

So what is Tegris, and why is it better than, say, the polycarbonate used in Pelican cases? Here are the talking points we think will be of interest to product designers:

(more...)

Fancy - Green Tea Cream Puffs

2012-02-10T22:55:14Z

via http://www.thefancy.com/things/286464757/Green-Tea-Cream-Puffs

Yes to the Idea of an Indoor Park

2012-02-10T23:13:41Z

Today’s CreativeMornings/NewYork with Charles Renfro was generously hosted by Park Here, a gallery turned indoor park. It was packed and seriously fantastic. What a fun venue! A big giant thank you to the team at Open House Gallery for hosting us. Here’s a short video about the space and the idea behind it all:

Parke Here is only open for a few more days. They are starting to break it all down on the 15th, next week. If you’re in NYC, make sure to stop by asap.

ParkHere.info

Designed in USA Brand Certification

2012-02-10T23:12:18Z

RKS, the California-based design consultancy, has recently launched their "Design in USA" brand certification mark to help, "enhance and broaden the 'Made In' labeling."

There is no doubt that American design is currently experiencing a renaissance of sorts—"From Apple to Zipcar, creative design is at the heart of entrepreneurial success in the USA," explains Bill Moggridge, Director, Smithsonian/Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. As Ravi K. Sawhney, CEO of RKS explains, "Better branding our design community is one simple but powerful step to make our voice and value better known. I hope the creation and use of this brand will be a catalyst for a broader emergence of recognition, pride and optimism for the incredible things designers are creating every day in America because of our diversity, ingenuity and spirit."

In a time when the strength and value of American manufacturing has come to the forefront of public discussion, it is a curious move to shift the focus to the more opaque conversation of a product being designed in the United States. What are your thoughts for the brand certification? Do you have plans to use it for future products?

(more...)

Design in the Wild: PLAY Category Winners and WORK Open for Submissions

2012-02-10T23:12:18Z

It's Friday and we are so ready to do some PLAYing over the weekend. To get you inspired, we've got this round's winners for the Core77 and Braun Design in the Wild photo challenge. Readers from around the world submitted every day objects of PLAY ranging from nostalgic toys from childhood to whimsical found landscapes. We loved that some PLAY-things are iconic no matter where you're from: ropes for tug-of-war, boardgames, legos and rubik's cubes. But most importantly, we recognized the joy and delight in everyday objects for play.

JURY WINNER
Let's Play a Tune!
Paul Bennett, United States
This is the Floyd-Rose style floating bridge on my Guitar. I love to play surf music and the floating bridge makes it a snap. Sometimes adjustments can be tricky but it is worth it in the end. The colored balls are the strings, each size string has a different color to help prevent them from getting mixed up during restring operations.

POPULAR WINNER
2,000 filaments
Jennifer DiMase, United States

The Koosh ball has always been a favorite toy of mine. Colorful, soft, tossable, lively. It's a delightfully simple concept: a ball composed of 2,000 natural rubber filaments.

(more...)

99 problems but money ain't one

2012-02-10T22:54:49Z

When the Series A check clears, most startups send out a bragging press release, the equivalent of flashing your grill. The VC backing is supposed to mean that the company has experienced hands in its corner. That it’s financially solid. A shoe-in for a puff profile piece in a magazine. Eligible for lunch conversation in Silicon Valley.

But if customers actually think about what a venture capital injection entails, it’s not all California Love. The company’s cash concerns might have (temporarily) vanished, but they’re replaced with a new list of problems. As a user you might be looking at any one of the following:

1. The Pivot
Sure, the product as described today sounds great, but if that hockey-stick growth pattern doesn’t emerge in six months, the product you wasted your time and money on might quickly turn into something else entirely.

2. The Talent Acquisition
Big companies like Google love to buy small bands of developers their VC friends tell them about (the risk easily triples if said band comes with Stanford or MIT pedigree). When the developers behind the app are acquired for their “talent”, you can expect a “sunset” to follow soon thereafter. That combination is the perfect euphemism for fuck the app and fuck the users.

3. The Runway
They don’t call it venture capital because you’re supposed to put it back in the bank. No, fool, that green gots to get spent. The quicker the better. So while $10 million dollars sounds like a lot, it might only just buy a company 12 months of runway. You know, once the swanky office in San Francisco has been decorated and the 100 programmer rockstars, designer ninjas, and bizdev suits have been bought.

4. The Pressure Cooker
Once a company takes millions of dollars of other people’s money, they’re instantly under extreme pressure to perform LIKE A TIGER. This kind of pressure can easily lead otherwise decent people to do indecent things with your data, your privacy, or anything else you hold dear. Because the scoreboard has already been set: winning means blowing it out of the park. And hey, sometimes a playa gots to cheat a little to make the magic sparkle, if you know what I’m saying.

5. The Acquisition Graveyard
If the product is strong enough to prevent a talent acquisition, you earn a few more years of fun and games before the product acquisition is likely to happen. With great fanfare some big company will announce what awesome synergies are in store now that the youngsters have “access to all the resources they need to take it to the next level”. The founders will spend two years on “integration” with the acquiring company’s legacy systems, and then – wait for it – their golden earn-out handcuffs will unlock and they’ll be long gone, along with any chance of the product ever getting better.

Of course, every now and then the clock that’s stopped tells the proper time. The fantastical success story somehow ends up being enough to swallow a hundred bad ones, so the crowd still cheers. See, world, we were there when this wee little lad got his first series A round and just look at him now!

Don’t fall for it. Given the odds involved, if you’re a user, or worse yet, a customer of a product, and the company behind it announces venture funding, the proper response is aahhhh, shiiiiiit.

Take a Flying Tour Through the New Whitney Museum

2012-02-10T23:12:19Z

Even though Renzo Piano's design for the new Whitney Museum in downtown New York City was unveiled in 2008, this is the first time we've been treated to a flying tour of the space. When it's completed in 2015, the Whitney's new location on Gansevoort Street at the southern entrance of the High Line will be the museum's fourth home. The first was in Greenwich Village when sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney opened the museum in 1931. In 1954 it moved to Midtown, a space it easily outgrew, and then, just a decade later it moved to the Marcel Breuer-designed space, where it still stands, on the Upper East Side.

Now the Whitney's permanent collection of over 19,000 works requires an even larger space. Their new video sweeps through Piano's 200,000-square foot museum that includes 13,000-square-feet for outdoor exhibitions as well as an 18,000-square-foot temporary gallery, "the largest column-free museum gallery in New York City." With the ever expanding High Line, the Whitney and all the smaller businesses that are sure to follow, Chelsea and the Meatpacking District can no longer be called an industrial wasteland, but a bustling cultural center. Watch the tour after the jump:

(more...)

This turns me ON

2012-02-10T22:55:14Z

via http://thisturnsmeon.tumblr.com/post/17316855679/cute

Corning Updates Their Futuristic Visions with "A Day Made of Glass" Part 2

2012-02-10T23:12:19Z

One year ago Corning, the upstate-New-York-based glass manufacturer, released a concept video called "A Day of Glass." The five-and-a-half-minute spot featured Microsoft-like depictions of a family living in a world where interface designers appear to have solved more problems than we knew we had, and the vision resounded with viewers (to the tune of 17.5 million YouTube hits and counting).

Now Corning's at it again with "A Day of Glass 2," below. Released almost exactly one year after the first vid, it continues to depict Corning's vision of "how highly engineered glass, with companion technologies, will help shape our world." Be sure to check out the medical stuff that starts happening around 4:03--how could would it be if you could do that with cross-sections of particularly troublesome parts of your product design?

While the cynics among us can't help but project the infrastructure and behind-the-scenes design required to make all of this stuff work--"Ah, I guess there's a server in the closet," "So that little rectangle is cloud-enabled," et cetera--it seems even tighter than the Microsoft vids.

Corning has also released a sort of "For Dummies" version of the vid where an on-screen narrator cuts in to explain the fanciful technologies that the characters are interacting with. Hit the jump to check it out.

(more...)

Converse Loves Marimekko, Spring 2012

2012-02-10T14:56:40Z

Now in its third season, the arrival of the most recent Converse Loves Marimekko collaboration feels like the first signs of spring. We love seeing the bright and whimsical Finnish prints adorning the canvas of iconic Converse silhouettes.

The latest Converse Loves Marimekko collection features five signature Marimekko prints including Poppy in Navy and Yellow. The iconic Chuck Taylor All Star shoe is featured in the popular Unikko (meaning "poppy") and Lokki (meaning "seagull") prints design by Maija Isola and the Kameka print designed by Annika Rimala. The Jack Purcell Helen gets a boost of color in the Muija (meaning "woman"), Lokki (meaning "seagull"), and Appelsiini (meaning "orange") prints also designed by Maija Isola. See the collection after the jump!

(more...)

Helsinki WDC Pop-Up Cafe: Building Design Awareness Through Bad Design

2012-02-10T14:56:40Z

How do you make people with no interest in design become aware of design in the first place? One approach taken by creative studio Perfect Fools is their Kauko Cafe pop-up installation for Helsinki, part of the World Design Capital 2012 list of events. The two-pronged concept behind the cafe is 1) to add a measure of user agency by enabling them to alter the heights of various surfaces, and 2) to populate the cafe with bad design, like sugar shakers and napkin holders that are intended to work poorly, as you'll see below:

I'm not crazy about the second part of the approach, drawing attention to design by making it annoying; I've never been a fan of, say, those uncomfortably-designed chairs that "force the user to recontextualize the concept of seating," et cetera. But I suppose there's no arguing with the efficacy. What do you think of the approach, and/or how would you have done it differently?

(more...)

Maison & Objet Spring 2012: Tokujin Yoshioka, Creator of the Year

2012-02-10T14:56:40Z

Reporting by Marc Thorpe. Images courtesy of Tokujin Yoshioka Studio.

Paris' semiannual design tradeshow honors the creative genius of designers across architectural interiors, furniture and product design through their design à vivre "Design of the Year" program. 2012's nominees the Campana Brothers, Hubert le Gall and Tokujin Yoshioka showcased their work through special installations at the fair.

We were particularly taken by Tokujin's exhibition of his Crystallized project, an ongoing meditation on the "relationship between [the] power of nature and human beings." Through his series, Tokujin attempts to create a new portrait of nature, manifested in crystalline structures. The exhibition debuted a new crystallized painting series grown by the vibration of music, "Rose," a video art piece, and "VENUS - Natural Crystal Chair" (2008).

Marc Thorpe explains that, "the most interesting aspect of [Tokujin's] exhibit is his understanding of time. The work is evolving and changing. It's never the same exhibit in detail. The objects created are not his design by physical hand, but our design by perception."

Tokujin Yoshioka adjusting his Crystallized project. Image by Marc Thorpe

Crystalized "Rose" and video "Rose" in background

Crystal Painting

Venus Chair

(more...)

Laurent Nivalle - photography - 2009

2012-02-09T21:48:14Z

via http://laurentnivalle.fr/LMC2010.html

Dead Fix ·

2012-02-09T21:48:14Z

via http://deadfix.com/

Looks like good Quattro Concept by Audi

2012-02-09T21:48:15Z

via http://lookslikegooddesign.com/quattro-concept-audi/

AEQUAM MEMENTO REBUS IN ARDUIS SERVARE MENTEM - Page 6 of 77

2012-02-09T21:48:15Z

via http://oldfashionedman.tumblr.com/page/6

LE CONTAINER

2012-02-09T21:48:15Z

via http://lecontainer.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2010-04-13T09%3A35%3A00%2B02%3A00&max-results=25

LE CONTAINER

2012-02-09T21:48:15Z

via http://lecontainer.blogspot.com/

On finding what you love…

2012-02-09T22:11:33Z

“From my experience, you can’t wait around to find what you love. You gotta work your ass off. And then you find what you love by doing piles and piles of work.”
- Kate Bingaman Burt

Kate Bingaman Burt, Illustrator speaking at CreativeMornings/Portland (*watch the talk)

tumblr_l9nfhsuZln1qak053o1_400.gif (GIF Image, 370x286 pixels)

2012-02-09T21:48:15Z

via http://theories-of.tumblr.com/post/1226469914

Jaineel Shah's Brilliant Pinch Hanger

2012-02-09T22:10:10Z

When hang-drying that favorite tee I can't afford to shrink anymore, I take a coat hanger and go in through the neckhole, doing that coat hanger version of a three-point turn. On a clumsy day I'll stretch the neck a bit, but manipulating the hanger by going in through the bottom of the wet, clammy shirt is even more irritating.

India-based industrial designer Jaineel Shah (a 3rd year student at DSK Supinfocom's International School of Design) has come up with the perfect solution with his Pinch hanger:

(more...)

LINX

2012-02-09T22:11:33Z

I just backed LINX over on Kickstarter. It’s is a super simple toy that will most certainly unleash your inner architect. All you need is lots of LINX and lots of drinking straws.

SHOT SHOW 2012: A Photo Tour of the Show

2012-02-09T22:10:10Z

Images and Reporting by Barbara Eldredge

The Shooting, Hunting, Outdoor Trade (SHOT) Show is a trade-only event and we were lucky enough to be able to attend and cover some of the newest design innovations from the category. Here's a quick photo tour of some of the trends, ideas and innovations from 2012 (and don't miss the timelapse of the show at the end!)

MEDIA DAY AT THE RANGE

The day before the SHOT Show opens its doors, Media Day at the Range provides a preview for that year's best new products while giving members of the press an opportunity to shoot and test the best new products for the season.

Charter Arms Chic Lady - Several smaller handguns were released onto the market this year including this little revolver made by Charter Arms. Marketed specifically towards women, the "Chic Lady" could easily be slipped into a purse. However, I found the double-action trigger pull to be a little difficult and the recoil more powerful than expected. I question how many casual gun users would train with it to the degree it would take to become comfortable wielding such a gun. Cuteness isn't everything.

Gatling Gun - An American invention, the Gatling Gun was the first successfully produced machine gun. It is a weapon that transformed the idea of automated mass production into automated mass killing. At the end of the 19th century, Gatlings were most often used to quell opposition to colonial expansion. This replica was brought to the SHOT Show by Colt as a promotional tool and was so popular they ran out of ammunition half way through the Media Day at the Range.

Graphic Gun Tattoo - The tattoos of this firearms company art director caught my eye.

Beretta Rifles - The middle firearm shown here has a rifle stock made of differently colored wood laminate that has been cut to emphasize contour. Its aesthetic is a long way from the stock of the military-esque injection-molded number on the front of the rack.

(more...)