Core77

Either the Thunderbird or the Beetle had to go.

With a baby on the way and two vintage cars in our garage, one a red 1963 VW Ragtop Mike's owned since age 15 and the other a champagne 1963 Ford T-bird, a tough decision had to be made. One of them had to be replaced...

The year was 2006, and, believe it or not, these old-timers were pretty much the only cars we'd ever owned. With our purchase of a new car that winter, we made a 43 year leap in automotive technology overnight.

We quickly realized, however, that despite 43 years of automotive progress, with its advances in safety, efficiency, and manufacturing, the driving experience remains basically the same as it was in 1963.

After experiencing this somewhat disappointing time warp, we wondered how we could contribute a new point of view and perhaps spark more significant progress for the next 40 years.

The current climate gave us the final push--with the car industry lost, an urgent focus on global warming, awareness of oil dependency, and the economic down turn, the stars had aligned. It is time to sow seeds, to experiment. Armed with a small design studio, we set out to design a concept car in search of an optimistic new future. And it quickly became clear to us:

A shift must take place from styling cars to redefining them.

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I was proud to present at this year's Compostmodern Conference in San Francisco, and prouder still of the student work I was able to share with the attendees. Now the videos of the day's presentations are up on the site, and the talk I gave, "Denting an Impossible Design Problem in 10 Sustainable Steps" is there to share.

The presentation centers around a 10-week project my graduate students in the SVA Designer as Author program completed around "designing a prosthetic arm," and we were incredibly privileged to have Aimee Mullins, Frank Wilson, John Kunniholm, and Elliot Washor come in as guests. Diana Lui shot portraits of the students at the conclusion, and I have to say that this was an incredible teaching (and learning) experience. Humbling, daunting, and elating at every twist and turn.

One of the students, Jackie Lay, is completing the project website which will include way more info on each of the student's work than I could include in the talk, but catch this video in the meantime for the story on the genesis, design, and development of the whole thing. I'll post a link to the project site as soon as it's up. Thanks again to all the students who made this happen--it was an incredible experience to be a part of.

Be sure to check out all the Compostmodern videos here.

Artist:
lunchbreath
More: View all Core-toons

Australian entrepreneur Bradley Wein had an idea for a device that would make changing halogen lightbulbs, which are trickier to replace than regular bulbs, easy. His ladder-free concept would also eliminate a common cause of injury among the elderly.

Wein approached a team of industrial design students at Swinburne University, who spent eight months developing the concept into a workable prototype. The resultant product, "Down to Earth Lighting," won the People's Choice Awards on Australia's New Inventors program.

How does the device work? Check out the (alas, unembeddable) video here.

via dexigner

"Wired to Care", a recent book by Jump's Dev Patnaik, is the response that came to a young grad student's lips after she heard my answer to her question yesterday on how I was liking being in Finland. Her explanation was that the book talked about small companies that grew around really really wanting to meet and exceed their customer's expectations but facing the challenge of holding on to this quality after growing beyond a particular size. Yes, that can be a problem but the topic on hand was the Finnish bureaucracy.

Let me explain: My answer to her question led me to expound on the biggest difference I've found here in Helsinki compared to living in a few 'hotspots' around the world (San Francisco, Singapore, Bangalore etc) What stands above and beyond any experience I've had elsewhere has been my interactions with the local government or public services. Call it service design, customer or user experience, the fact remains that the Finns have somehow managed to find an answer that works when it comes to leaving the end user feeling on top of the world. Yes, I may digress into hyperbole here but as any of you who have faced the experience of dealing with customer service that's so regimented according to prescripted interactions that if you miss some required paper or information you're instantly incapable of being assisted would recognize, the opposite is bound to be a pleasure.

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Hamburg-based Tobias Bexten's STEM urban commuter bike (above) and VW Caddy Topos prototype (below) were both done while he was a student at the University of Art Braunschweig; now that he's on the prowl for work, we're looking forward to seeing what he comes up with next.

Check out the rest of Bexten's book-in-progress on Coroflot.

As Carl is our resident CAD/3D expert, it takes a lot to make the guy say "These are the most photorealistic renderings I've ever seen in my life." But that casual honor's now been conferred on Studio Sweden founder David Cathro, whose rendering of a 1971 Plymouth Satellite (and others) is so absurdly real, it makes real life look fake.

Check out the rest of Cathro's stuff on Coroflot.

It's not exactly Man vs. Wild. UK communications company Orange has partnered with US design consultancy Kaleidoscope on the Glastonbury Solar Concept Tent, which uses photovoltaic fabric to capture the sun's energy. The tent then turns that juice into heating for the tent-floor, as well as powering cell phone chargers, an LCD control panel and, um, wireless internet.

Furthermore, if you're having problems finding your tent--not out in the wild, but in a crowded festival setting, like Glastonbury--punching a code into your cell phone will make your tent glow in a particular color.

Egads. What would Bear Grylls say?

via born rich

We've all seen those product development firms that purport to take your idea and turn it into manufactured reality; do they really work? One of them did for Joy Clymer, who's not even a product designer--she's a medical transcriptionist. But she had an idea for a product:

[Clymer] wanted a neat and simple way to transport deviled eggs to get-togethers. She had taken a dozen deviled eggs to a barbecue in a pie pan covered with plastic. By the time she arrived, they were a mess. Joy knew there had to be a better way, but she couldn't find a proper container in the stores, so she decided to invent one....

She brought her idea to product developers Davison International, and the result was the "Party on the Go" food/dessert travel caddy seen above. Following its invention it was licensed by Davison collaborator Xtraordinary Home Products (XHP), and subsequently featured on QVC, which virtually guarantees massive sales and, you know, cha-ching!

So, guys and gals--if a medical transcriptionist saw a market hole and filled it herself, surely a trained product designer can do it as well, no? Put those thinking caps on!

We wanted to make sure you saw this video documenting Sophia Gardiner's development of a low-cost, low-impact, and highly sanitary loo, with the hope of transforming the (on average) two-pounds-per-person-per-day of human waste into a usable commodity.

If you're interested in hearing more from Sophia about poo, you can find her January review of Rose George's The Big Necessity: Adventures in the World of Human Waste here.