image via Harrison Krix's Volpin Flickr page

image via Harrison Krix's Volpin Flickr page

image via Harrison Krix's Volpin Flickr page

image via Harrison Krix's Volpin Flickr page

image via Harrison Krix's Volpin Flickr page

(Video: Watch this video on the post page)

lthough I’m not the biggest fan of Daft Punk (I know, crazy, right?), I will say that I have always enjoyed their visual aesthetic, specifically pertaining to their costumes. So when I saw this prop work by Atlanta graphic designer Harrison Krix, I was completely blown away.

Apparently, Harrison decided that he wanted to produce his own Guy Manuel Daft Punk helmet. Obviously he nailed it, but the amount of time and dedication to seeing this through to its completion is what I’m most impressed with. This type of dedication and hard work by Harrison and people alike will always beat out the run-of-the-mill crap that others try to pass off as “great” in my honest opinion.

Just look at the subtle details of the helmet, and the LED (diodes). You can’t just make something like this overnight. This obviously takes a lot of planning, frustration, trial & error, and above all, patience.

Mad props (no pun intended) to Harrison for producing such an amazing likeness. Also, be sure to visit Harrison’s Flickr to see his photo journal of his 17-month-long journey for producing this beautiful helmet (and yes, it actually did take him 17 months to make this). Now that’s dedication.

t’s difficult to decide what my feelings are towards luxury games: vegetable-dyed calfskin dominoes with inlaid leather pips, or the black-lacquer beech case that cradles them. (The only dominoes I’ve ever played with came in a cardboard box, and I really only used them for building chain reactions.) Then there’s the rubik’s cube. (One time, when I was in the third grade, my sister told me she’d pay me five bucks to solve the rubik’s cube by the end of the day. I totally cheated. The colored stickers were pretty easy to peel off and reaffix, little did she know.) This rubik’s cube, however, is made with inlaid leather and chrome, and if you have one to play with, you probably don’t need to cheat because you’re already a rich bastard. It’s not even meant to be timed against the clock, because it’s made of metal, and it’s “not nearly as forgiving as the plastic you grew up with.” Zontik, the maker of these luxury games, even goes so far to say that “sophistication requires no solution.” And finally, the chess board. Do I even have to say at this point that the flat planar pieces are made of leather? Well, more specifically, made of butter-soft calfskin. It’s so obvious. The chess board is pretty fancy, too. It better be, since it’ll cost you almost ten grand.

Let’s talk about the design, because really, that’s what initially got my attention. Yes, it’s pretty and shiny and oh-so buttery-soft, and it’s obvious that it’s very well designed, and it’s also supposed to be over-the-top indulgent. According to Zontik’s mission, they “procure the most gorgeous games from around the globe, because they believe that recreation is exactly that: the re-creation of something that is more than the sum of its parts. Their equipment won’t make you a better player, but it will enable you to enjoy better play. After all, this level of prestige isn’t an indulgence, it’s a necessity.”

I should say that there is a level of truth to the idea of enjoying better play; if you’ve read Donald Norman’s book Emotional Design, you know that psychology plays a huge role in design, and the more attractive the product, the more pleasurable experience the user will have, and that in turn will result in being more forgiving of any functional flaws.

“Every time we encounter an object, our reaction is determined not only by how well it works, but by how good it looks to us, and by the self-image, loyalty and even nostalgia it evokes in us. When a product is aesthetically pleasing and plays to our ideas about ourselves and society, we experience it positively. That’s why some people are willing to spend thousands on expensive handmade watches even though a cheaper digital watch keeps time just as well.”
-Excerpt from Emotional Design

I do disagree with Zontik that prestige is a necessity; honestly, it sounds like something an asshole says to sell you a solid gold diamond-encrusted iPad. There’s nothing wrong with indulging in something that makes you happy, but it is a problem if your entire cachet is in owning luxury parlour games.

he Thing is as the name suggests; it’s a thing, things, and secret things. A pair of black-framed glasses relating to Jonathan Lethem’s novel CHRONIC CITY, a Starlee Kine bamboo cutting board, a blank book by Allora & Calzadilla in which the lace of a single tennis shoe was sewn into the spine. And if you received the fourth thing made by Trisha Donnelly, you’re in on a little secret — what the thing is is known only to subscribers (however, feel free to reveal the secret to me at christy [at] colorcubic [dot] com as I’m excellent at mum’s the word). These are only a few examples of what you might receive with a two-hundred dollar subscription to the quarterly periodical that arrives in the form of an object designed by some known and lesser known artists. The four annual artists are invited exclusively by the editors Jonn Herschend and Will Rogan, and range from writers to artists to public radio producers — and now, actors, too.

The main idea of The Thing is to create a useful object that somehow incorporates text, but whether the object is actually useful is likely up for debate; for example, I’m not quite sure how I’d incorporate a bisected piece of Canadian white ash into my daily life, but I’m sure others might be more imaginative. On the other hand, as a piece of sculpture, I’d enjoy it very much, especially since the angles of the wood were worked out by an astro-particle physicist. (The mention of science and physics always pricks up my ears; dilates my pupils.)

So far, there’ve been ten issues, and the next four prove to be quite interesting. While printed matter is slowly being transfused into digital ink, periodicals like The Thing will probably survive the mass digitization culture (I hope) because it’s a defining tactile experience that, like architecture, requires space, time, context, and some form of utility to understand and appreciate.

ere’s a bookshelf that really makes a statement. It was designed by Save Our Souls, the Swedish design duo Johannes Carlström and Magdalena Nilsson. I love this, not because it has the most amazing design — it probably could have been constructed better — but because it’s a piece of furniture that’s honest. It speaks. And really, who doesn’t love furniture designed around typography?

cosa Village Pods are shelters modeled after Origami Architecture, inspired by the art of paper folding. The Folded Homes® technology is to “take flat sheets that have been stamped into a set of two-dimensional parts, fold them along their crease lines to make three-dimensional parts of the structure, and assemble those parts together to create a sturdy, rigid-walled shelter.” Made of 100% extruded plastic, these shelters are made for all seasons. Passive ventilation cools the Pod in hot environments, and its triangular windows can either be clear or opaque, giving the interior a wonderfully soft diffused light. These pods serve a multitude of purposes, from emergency to personal use applications, and were originally designed as humanitarian shelters to be used around the world since 2002.

For the first 3 ½ years, CEO Markus Robinson was the president and CEO of Icosa Village Inc. which pioneered folded-shelter technology. Through the start of 2006 Markus was directly involved in the installation of more than 140 Icosa Village Pod shelters in six countries. Lessons learned from the summer 2004 construction of a five month 40-Pod village at Forum Barcelona Exhibition in Spain and the winter deployment of 50 Pod shelters to Pakistani quake victims high up in the Himalayas in December 2005 with MSF (Médecins sans Frontiers / Doctors without Borders) were pivotal to Markus’ understanding of the challenges that must be addressed in large volume shelter deployments. Markus’ shelter-technology mantra following the Pakistan deployment was ‘simplify, simplify, simplify!’ and a return to the drawing board.

I wouldn’t mind having one of these as a design studio or a futuristic green house. A Brooklyn, New York tavern owner actually built a pod on the roof of his apartment just so he could practice drumming without disturbing his neighbors. It was, of course, fully insulated with sound-dampening insulation. Totally sweet.

henever she was reminded of her own childhood, which, more often than not, coincided with cutting checks to the Scholastic Book Club, my mother would tell me tales of her formative years in China. She was a voracious reader and writer and often won the annual school writing contest. The prize each year pretty much stayed the same: a certificate of achievement, and a pack of expensive pencils which were a more useful type of ostentatiousness. She would describe the way they looked, housed in marvelously designed cases that she’d stash away for safekeeping, only pulling one out when it was necessary to write like one was inspired by their tools. And that’s the idea. Tools should inspire you to create great things. A pencil, for designers, is Photoshop in its simplest form.

In my own youth, I shared the same voracity for pencils as my mother did and coveted them like they were going out of style. After all, the thing can draw a line 35 miles long; that’s an average of 45,000 words if you take pleasure in counting, and probably hundreds of juvenile drawings that Franz Cizek would have proudly sponsored as the purest form of art.

At age three, I watched NOVA for the first time. The program showed images of astronauts floating weightlessly, held by long umbilical cords. I studied the shape of the suits, then carefully and repeatedly drew my own renditions of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Men. An entire half pencil and infantile right hand were exhausted during my private Apollo mission. Soon after, I learned that tilting the pencil at an angle could produce a desirable shading effect. And to compound my initial discovery, shading against various textures would result in rubbings that mimicked the original surfaces. From that point on, my puffy white men fashioned suits of stucco, cement, and stone.

Then there’s the eraser, the other end of the pencil that pioneered the function of modern technological necessity: edit -> undo. The first pencils didn’t actually come with erasers, though. When Hymen Lipman (what a name!) issued a patent combining the pencil and eraser in 1858, it sparked much controversy and a legal battle that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. When the pencil manufacturer Faber (now known as Faber-Castell) tried to patent another way to attach erasers, Lipman went after the company for money. The Supreme Court eventually revoked both patents, since the combination of both pencil and eraser was a marriage of two existing inventions, therefore in union, could not be considered a new invention.

At school, particularly between grades one to eight, the pencil was a freedom stick. To use the lavatory would require a hall pass, but nothing of that sort was needed to visit the wall-mounted Sanford Giant, the steely, one-armed beast that made a distinctive growl when you fed it lumber. And it only ate lumber. Ryan once fed it a Bic for effect, and it cried blue ink. I could itinerate to and from the hand crank several times in one class period, passing blame on cheaply manufactured plumbago or wood casings when really, an appendage became unconscious or I was bored out of my little mind. Sometimes, the stomach of the Giant became full and needed emptying. I always enjoyed that part. I liked sticking my finger into the soft mound of shavings before sprinkling the dust into the waste basket. The six-position guide was rarely set to an unusually large diameter, but when it was, I was keen to suspect the kid with the noticably corpulent piece of wood, characterized with a round, bright yellow exterior, a purposeful color that, if history class taught anything about pencil history, indicated America’s aim to inform the commonwealth that their sunshine-coated sticks contained Chinese graphite.

Around the time that Kris Kross debuted on MTV, I received a pen for Christmas. It was an AG7 Fisher Space Pen, the same model used on the Apollo 7 space mission in 1968. Their slogan was, “Space Pens doing the unexpected!” It was forged from solid brass, coated generously with nickel, and cold and heavy in my small hand. The ink cartridge, pressurized with nitrogen, was designed to give the middle finger to gravity. It could write upside down, under water, in freezing cold, and in desert heat. The pen was fancy, sure, and like the slogan advertised, it did the unexpected: it failed to impress me. But isn’t the pencil just like a space pen without all the overly-technical bullshit? A pencil works in zero gravity, writes in any direction, is lightweight and inexpensive, and most notably, is largely taken for granted. It’s not a matter of generation, because really, the pencil isn’t an obsolete tool. It never will be; it has just been overshadowed by newer, more convenient means of technology — like computers — case in point, I’m currently writing this on a mobile phone from a moving car.

As a designer, I still use a pencil. Almost every single day. Spending at least twelve or more hours a day in front of a computer and Wacom tablet is far from being the hardcore pencil user that I herald, but once I’m home, neither a computer or internet connection exists, save for my mobile 3G connection. It’s a set of extremes that I enjoy; a daily routine of binge and purge. At home, I create entirely with pencil and paper. It’s where I conceptualize everything from wireframes and logotypes to posters and prose. And to tell you the truth, I think that’s where my best work is made. If he were still around, Frank Lloyd Wright would reiterate that “man built most nobly when limitations were at their greatest.”

The design and usage of a pencil has an illuminating and complex engineering history that is just as important as the invention of say, the automobile or microchip. Henry Petroski has enlightened and captivated readers for years with The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance, a book that covers the pencil’s evolution from the discovery of graphite in 1565 to the Industrial Revolution, even dedicating an entire chapter to the pencil sharpener. The Pencil should be required reading in all design and engineering curriculums.

In an Open Letter to Design Students Everywhere, Jessica Helfand gave some resonating advice to design students just out of school. Read the excerpt below, then go and make your own mark.

If you draw something every day, you will find, over time, that your facility with the pencil is a huge boon to thinking visually. If the notebook is with you all the time, you can afford to be a little unfocused. Later on, you’ll look at what you wrote and saved and drew and you will realize that without even trying, you created a time-capsule that is, itself, a manifestation of what mattered.

uthor Paul Collins once saw Tom Kelly’s house many years ago. It was built of 51,000 beer bottles in the year 1901. Collins recounted, “Dipsomania is a boon for such builders: a similar honeycomb-like structure of bottles and mortar, built by a pharmacist in Hillsville, Virginia in the 1940s, was nicknamed The House of a Thousand Headaches for all the hangovers it held.” That made me laugh. So yeah, people build stuff out of bottles, that we know, but few know of one particularly laudable endeavor undertaken by Heineken Breweries: the WOBO (World Bottle).

It has been exactly half a decade since its epiphanic inception, an idea that was mass-produced three years after Alfred Heineken walked the beaches of Curaçao in 1960. Bottles had accumulated in the sand as ineffectual discards, many of which were produced by Heineken. The island had no economic means of recycling nor returning the bottles to their makers. In Holland, the average bottle was used 30 times before being discarded. In Curaçao, bottles were used once and thrown out.

As the story goes, there usually exists a lack of affordable housing in lower-class societies. Alfred, the compassionate chairman, envisioned a solution to the problem and asked Dutch architect John Habraken to design the WOBO, a “brick that holds beer.” Martin Pawley noted in his book Garbage Housing that the WOBO was “the first mass production container ever designed from the outset for secondary use as a building component.”

The WOBO’s interlocking design was three years in the making, made to work like brick and mortar construction. Habraken explained that one of the construction challenges “was to find a way in which corners and openings could be made without cutting bottles.” A test run of 100,000 WOBOs were produced in 1963 in two sizes (500 & 350 mm) with the smaller bottle acting similarly to a half brick. A thousand bottles bonded with cement mortar could build a 10″ x 10″ shack, and construction would be simple because the instructions could be printed right on the beer label.

In 1965, a prototype glass shed (above) was built near Alfred Heineken’s villa in in Noordwijk, Netherlands. Sadly, it is the first and only WOBO house in existence. The WOBO did not impress the company’s marketing department and the whole thing eventually fell to the wayside. How could Heineken market itself as a premium beer if it would end up lining the walls of a poor person’s home? Other questions soon followed: What if a bottle fell loose and hit a passerby, or worse yet, an entire bottle house collapsed? Who would be responsible? Perhaps Mr. Heineken was too ahead of his time, however, the WOBO still remains an amazing example of forward thinking in utilitarian and humanitarian design.

Sources: Wikipedia; Cabinet; & Inhabitat

recently came across this extraordinary modular computer system called the Honeywell H632. Rolled out in 1968, and used as a high performance 32 bit processing computer system, the Honeywell H632 was definitely a unique blend of considerate modular industrial design with a beautiful color scheme. The Honeywell brand may sound familiar, as it should, since they’ve had their hand in all sorts of ventures ranging from aerospace, engineering and consumer products, i.e. thermostats (the roundish boob looking ones are most commonly seen in grandparent’s homes), etc…

Anyway, what really sold me on the H632 were the product shots. I just love the setting with the wood paneled slat walls, the wonderful gold color scheme of the massive Honeywell, and the 2 technicians hard at work. Such a beautiful mid-century modern setting. If I had the money, I’d buy this just to fill up a room with it. Oops, that’s the vanity talking.

Update: you can view the photos above in a larger version from our Flickr feed.

‘ve always been endlessly fascinated with high-tech things, including futuristic vehicles. While digging through the Popular Science archives last week, I was reminded of a vehicle very ahead of its time — the Holden Hurricane. It was one of the most expensive experimental cars of the 60s commissioned by Holden of Australia, which helped the carmaker sell one million other Holden vehicles between 1969 to 1974. The Hurricane tends to be overshadowed by similarly styled supercars, particularly the 1970 Bertone Lancia Stratos Zero photographed by Benedict Redgrove, which is also an amazing car in its own right.

Some more history behind the Hurricane, via Cartype:

Finding the ”feasibility of applying aerospace techniques and materials to the manufacture of future Holdens’ was the companies’ motivation for the project. However, this rhetoric held little weight, and only the production-worthy engine found its way into the road cars. With this engine, the Hurricane started a trend that would have 500,000 Holden’s feature Australian-designed V8s.

What made the Hurricane special was elements that didn’t make it to assembly lines: it’s styling, electronics and engineering. Probably the most experimental aspect of the Hurricane was it’s styling. The low wedge shape was an upcoming trend for the period and was copied in previous years; the 1970 Bertone Stratos Concept, 1970 Ferrari 512S Berlinetta Speciale and 1972 Maserati Boomerang all share the Hurricane’s lines.

Inside, Hurricane had an array of extraneous instrumentation to convince any onlookers that the driver car could pilot to moon. Of these, the most notable was a “retro-gps” system called Pathfinder. It used magnetic signals built within the road to alert the driver of upcoming turns. Other electronic amenities included digital instrumentation, a rear view camera, lifting seats and an automatically opening one piece door.

At the core, the Hurricane used a tubular space frame, supporting a new Holden V8 and covered in an impressive fiber glass body. The engine sat mid-ship in the chassis and was attached to a four speed transaxle. Very GT40. A distinct feature of the chassis was the oil-cooled disc brakes. Used on the front, these discs used oil, and oil coolers to dissipate heat.

In conclusion, the Holden Hurricane might be the most exciting car made in Australia. Its motor sport engineering, glorious styling and funky electronics complete a concept that can still impress forty years later.

irst off, a big shout out to my friend Nafie, for turning me onto this dope workstation. Designed by Soren Rose, MILK is a workstation designed to not only minimize clutter, but to redefine a comprehensive and innovative workspace for the sake of enjoying where you work. I personally feel that a clutter free workstation makes work much more enjoyable, and additionally, I find that I’m more productive.

Overall, MILK seems to be a testament to Soren’s creative philosphy when it comes to anything design related:

“In a world where thousands of new products are born everyday, you really have to be able to offer something special. For the last 15 years, I have followed the design scene closely. Still, at the end of the day, my primary measurement has always been the same. It’s a simple question: Do I want this? I designed MILK for myself, not for anyone else. For me, it’s always personal. I needed a desk that was simple but never boring. Smart but not overly sophisticated. I wanted a desk worth falling for, so I created MILK. And to be honest, a year later, I’m still completely in love with it. Luckily, so are many fine friends all over the world, who, like me, appreciate a sleek aesthetic, smart function and good quality. In the future, I’ll continue to use my intuition and passion to create more great designs for myself, that I hope you will enjoy as much as I do.”

I really love how unpretentious Soren’s approach is when designing, especially for this table. Really encompassing a minimal aesthetic, it has everything that a workstation should have, without any unnecessary ornamentation or obtrusive features. Another plus+ is that MILK is built to last (as a workstation should be).

When you get the chance, be sure to visit milk.dk for more detailed specs.