This is one of the more fascinating experiments in small-space living that we've ever seen. Seattle-based engineer Steve Sauer wanted to see if he could turn a 182-square-foot storage unit with a single window into a liveable space, and he then decided to build it himself. Not only do we feel he's succeeded admirably, we're not sure which we admire more: Sauer's incredibly creative use of multi-level space, his unwillingness to compromise on materials, his self-machined plumbing, his IKEA-hacked surfaces... the list goes on.
The design of this space and its various features would be impossible to explain through still photographs, so thankfully there's video. Check out how bike-nut Sauer fit multiple bikes inside, peep his in-floor soaking tub, the ingenious kitchen-bin shower cubbies, and the bike shift lever in the showerhead mount. Sauer earns his living designing aircraft interiors for Boeing, but we wish he'd spend more time designing spaces down here on the ground.
Current projects: Developing a new lightbulb. Planning my next video. Designing the business. And building hundreds of chandeliers.
Mission: To always ask "What if...?" To design with care. To believe in what I put out there.
One of the latest versions of Adelman's Branching Bubble chandeliers. Photo by Sam Kweskin
Above and below: Adelman's studio in New York City. All remaining photos by Lauren Coleman
When did you decide that you wanted to be a designer? I first heard about industrial design when I was 22, working for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. I was walking through the exhibition fabrication department, and a woman was carving fake French fries out of foam. It looked like a lot more fun than my editorial job. I asked what she was—and she told me, an industrial designer. So I applied to RISD and that was that.
Education: I have a B.A. in English from Kenyon College and a B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design.
First design job: I suppose it was in grade school, because I always did the programs and posters and props for all our plays, even though I did not know what design was. And of course I signed them really big.
Who is your design hero? There are many throughout history, but right now it's Nendo.
Above and below: Blowing glass and applying gold foil to an Adelman chandelier-in-progress
Dave's sculptures start as an idea and proceed to hand sketches, notes and drawings. If the design looks like it will work, it's rendered accurately in AutoCAD. If AutoCAD doesn't expose a fatal flaw, a rough working prototype is built, and then final construction. David uses found and re-purposed objects, and builds from wood, plastic and various metals. He incorporates gears in his sculptures because they symbolize machines and industry, and they are shorthand for the workings of the universe. He loves gears: planning them, cutting them, and watching them work.
David Butts' Mad Dog Garage exists in the iconic Allen's Radiator Shop in the NW neighborhood of downtown Portland, OR. A bevy of fabrication implements: lathes, milling machines, an assortment of saws, drill presses and other tool miscellanea are used to create his work - interactive kinetic sculptures that can be experienced by passers by in his "sidewalk gallery."
Yahoo! is focused on making the world's daily habits more inspiring and entertaining. By creating highly personalized experiences for their users, they keep people connected to what matters most to them, across devices and around the globe.
This is your opportunity, if you're a User Experience Designer who is passionate about creating intuitive and engaging user experiences, to join the Yahoo! Finance team. You'll need 8+ years working in a fast-paced environment on high-profile consumer facing media sites for mass audience and demonstrated excellence in typography, interaction design, visual design, information architecture, and solid understanding of UX design principles.
Over the next few weeks we will be highlighting award-winning projects and ideas from this year's Core77 Design Awards 2013. We will be featuring these projects by category, so stay tuned for your favorite categories of design! For full details on the project, jury commenting and more information about the awards program, go to Core77DesignAwards.com.
Professional Winner
Project Name: Smartphone-charging Handbag Design for Vodafone and Richard Nicoll
Designer: IDEO + Vodafone xone + Vodafone UK + Richard Nicoll
A tech-enabled leather handbag that can power an iPhone, Android device, or other "smart" digital tool through two full charges, seamlessly integrating high-end fashion and inductive charging technology. Thanks to Tusting, a world-class British leather goods company, fashionistas can power the purse through several layers of leather by simply slapping a magnetic "tap" unit to the bag's exterior. Once the purse is charged, users can then power their gadgets on the go by plugging them into a pocket inside the bag. A Bluetooth-enabled LED "charm" on the bag's exterior animates silently to indicate battery status and incoming calls, texts or notifications.
- How did you learn that you had been recognized by the jury?
We were informed by our partner IDEO that we were the honoree of the Core77 Design Awards.
- What's the latest news or development with your project?
The successful delivery of the project captured tremendous attention during the catwalk with the audience as well as within Vodafone. We are currently evaluating potential commercial opportunities. This is a great example of the use of mobile technology beyond its traditional practice.
- What is one quick anecdote about your project?
As mobile technology is permeating into nearly every facet of our daily lives, the Vodafone xone team is thrilled to play a leading role in bringing these innovative trends to life by designing, engineering and applying disruptive technology from inception to commercialization. Applying mobile technology to fashion industry to build a practical product has definitely been a unique experience for us and all parties involved in this project. Vodafone xone has applied its motto of "embracing the unknown" and exploring diverse opportunities in this project. We developed a product (the charging unit) in an iterative design and process with our team.
- What was an "a-ha" moment from this project?
Being always connected, hence being always 'on' these days is the inevitable fact of our everyday life. Instant access to the world from everywhere has become a mandatory extension to our physical presence. The thought of not being connected causes the feeling of isolation nowadays, thus having a smartphone available at all times is an essential asset for everyone.
We all may have observed that most women have just a "few" items in their handbags whether of high necessity or not. Women miss their calls over and over because they cannot spot their phones at once in their handbags amongst these "few" items. On the other hand, how many times have we witnessed that performing all of the functions for staying connected with our smartphones or tablets caused the battery to die by the time we need to pick up the kids or make an important phone call? The moment we became aware that we could provide an innovative solution which answers that question was our "a-ha" moment. Knowing that we could now enable a solution that ensures women will receive notification when their phone rings in their handbag and have the possibility to charge their phone without removing it from their handbag.
We are pleased to see that our teamwork with all our partners resulted in the first of its kind high-tech handbag for fashion diehards. We've created this trend and we're sure that it will trigger more creative work across the sector.
I must admit I was a little nervous when I started drafting up my profile of bicycle builder and sometime artist Ezra Caldwell—as I admitted in a footnote, it's a little nerve-wracking to portray a terminally ill Renaissance Man as a real human being (I also worry that the "Bike Cult Show Builder Profile" designation may have dissuaded some readers from the outset; biased though I may be, I'd recommend it to just about anyone). Nevertheless, I was glad to have the opportunity to share his story with those who may not have heard it before, and true to form, Caldwell sent a very nice thank-you note shortly thereafter.
Meanwhile, Caldwell's real-time autobiography continues to unfold on his blog, "Teaching Cancer to Cry," where he recently chronicled his preparations for the Bike Cult Show (he's also posted some photosfrom the show itself on his photography site). The two-day show was dedicated to him and served as the occasion to launch the charity auction of his last bike, the Ultimate Tight Ass (a.k.a. the UTA):
I put this thing together with the express purpose of building myself what I felt was the ULTIMATE mountain bike (the fact that it may well turn out to be the ultimate bike I build is a bit of a twist!), to ride until I was no longer healthy enough to do so, at which point I would auction it off for some sort of cancer related charity. In the end our decision was to donate the proceeds to the Visiting Nurse Service of NY Home Hospice Program.
This past Thursday, we had the opportunity to attend the announcement of the winners of the INDEX Awards, recognizing "Design to Improve Life." Once again, the esteemed jury of the INDEX awards selected five winners (from the 59 finalists) to receive prizes of €100,000 each, albeit with a different tack than in previous years. Not only did the organization introduce a new 'telecast' format for the fifth edition of the biennial event, but they held the festivities in a handful seaside venues in Elsinore, Denmark, about 45km north of Copenhagen for the first time. Following a VIP cocktail reception at the Kronborg castle, historic site of Shakespeare's Hamlet (where one speaker attempted an ill-advised riff on "To be or not to be"), attendees took their seats at the adjacent Culture Yard for the live announcement. The massive, hangar-like space was a Siemens factory as recently as three months ago, and the raw space offered a nice contrast to the slick movie set feel of the production itself. All told, the fast-paced and tightly-scripted presentation was a welcome change from the plodding ceremonies of the past, and the threat of rain cleared up for the warm reception afterward.
The winning entries themselves seem stronger than ever, not least for the fact that several of them have already made an appreciable impact in the real world, demonstrating the potential of design to improve life. Drum roll please...
Copenhagen Adaptation Plan
Along with execs from the INDEX Awards, Lord Mayor Frank Jensen made a few introductory remarks at the press conference, welcoming us to the lovely city of Copenhagen only to return to the stage just a few moments later. accepting one of the top prizes for the Copenhagen Adaptation Plan. Although the city has been considering plans to explore new models of urbanism for over a decade now, the crippling floods of 2011 sparked a renewed effort to create the city of the future.
And while the fact that the city is host to the awards—founded as a private initiative, INDEX now has government support—the Copenhagen Adaptation Plan is impressive both for its scope and the fact that it's on track to meet ambitious deadlines within the next few years and decades.
It's a common refrain: ambitious designers develop brilliant, potentially world-changing solutions to the large-scale problems... which never leave the poster presentation or PDF precisely because they're simply too far-reaching. Even when researched and developed to a degree of realizable specificity, few designers have the resources or network to actually execute their vision, and investors are more inclined to support the likes of, say, Rap Genius, as opposed to a water filtration system for the developing world, which may never see any kind of quantitative ROI.
Yet social problems such as lack of food and water beleaguer the everyday lives of billions, and (perhaps more insidiously) environmental issues haunt our existence with no ostensible consequences... until a 100-year storm ravages a city or nation.
The organization also partnered with CNN to produce video 'vignettes' on each project
Thus, the INDEX Design Awards represents a new definition of design that is at once broader and more nuanced: moving beyond beautiful objects towards the intent to "improve life." The very premise of the award is that it might ultimately render itself obsolete—that humankind might eventually prevail over the various humanitarian crises that we face today, that we might achieve ecological homeostasis, that we might reach a point where there is nothing left to improve.
If it seems like a grand vision for what design could or should be, the organization is putting its money where its mouth is, with a total of €500,000 in prize money, as well as new initiatives to connect 'designpreneurs' with business training and savvy investors. And if the notion of "improving life" seems like too broad a directive, each of the finalists of the fifth edition of the biennial celebration of design offers a concrete solution to a remarkably broad range of issues.
The jury team winnowed the field of over 1,000 entrants down to 59 finalists, which can be viewed on the site (we'll have more on the five winners shortly). We've covered several of them before, but the INDEX Awards were a nice occasion to catch up with the likes of Massoud Hassani, who mentioned that his team is working on a new version of his much-lauded Mine Kafon; Dong-Ping Wong and Archie Lee Coates IV are hoping to launch the + Pool test tank in the East River next summer; and Scott Summit of Core77 Design Award-winner Bespoke Innovations, who mentioned that they'd actually started collaborating with another finalist, Ekso Bionics, just before we'd suggested that they work together in our write-up of the latter. We were also glad to see several previously-covered projects in the mix, including hydrogel, the Nest, Rabalder Parken, Skillshare and Wilmington Robotic Exoskeleton.
There are so many human foibles that English lacks words to explain, so we English-speakers have to steal them from other languages and italicize them to get by. L'esprit de l'escalier, "the wit of the staircase," is my favorite from the French: That's when you're at a party, someone hits you with a zinger that you have no comeback for, and you don't think of the perfect rejoinder until you're walking down the stairs and leaving at the end of the night.
What you see here is several more of these foreign words from Maptia, a website dedicated to sharing global stories. They've commissioned an illustrator to explain "11 Untranslatable Words From Other Cultures" that you're bound to get a kick out of.
We've devoted a fair number of pages and pixels to that singular design object known as the bicycle, and whether you're a leisure rider or all-weather commuter, weekend warrior or retrogrouch, there's no denying the functional elegance of the human-powered conveyance. Thus, when Harry Schwartzman reached out to us about lending our support to the inaugural Bike Cult Show, a celebration of the beautiful machine and a local-ish community of individuals dedicated to building them, we were happy to support the cause.
With the first annual Bike Cult Show just around the corner, we're pleased to present our fifth and final builder profile, a short film on the inimitable Jamie Swan by filmmaker Isaac Schell.
Swan may not command the broad recognition of, say, Richard Sachs or Peter Weigle, but he is certainly a legend in the cycling community, in which he is a self-proclaimed "Keeper of the Flame." At least some of Swan's renown is simply due to the fact that he's only built a handful of frames since he put together his first one back in 1981—they'd be grail bikes if he actually had a wait list—yet he's anything but a recluse. On the contrary, Swan is glad to take the role of mentor and spirit guide (for lack of a better term) for savvy up-and-comers: He admires the current generation of craftsmen who are making a living building bikes precisely because he's never had to do so.
"Brand New IDEO" centers on a 24-hour global Make-a-Thon taking place Monday, March 25th in IDEO's eleven offices around the world, starting in Tokyo and ending in San Francisco.
Portrait by Ira Lippke
One of the latest versions of Adelman's Branching Bubble chandeliers. Photo by Sam Kweskin
Above and below: Adelman's studio in New York City. All remaining photos by Lauren Coleman
Above and below: Blowing glass and applying gold foil to an Adelman chandelier-in-progress
Images courtesy of Ezra Caldwell
Biomimicry 3.8: What Would You Ask Nature
Changing the Face of Motocross
20 Years of Kikkerland
Discovering Chinese Design
Portrait by Isaac Schell
OUTDOOR RETAILER 2013
NEW DESIGNERS 2013
CAMPANA BROTHERS: CONCEPTS
NY DESIGN WEEK 2013 - WANTED DESIGN
Bruce Nussbaum on Creative Intelligence, from Connecting the Dots to Indie Capitalism
Diller Scofidio + Renfro Present the 'Lincoln Center Inside Out: An Architectural Account'
After the Mayan Calendar, Fernando Romero's You Are The Context
"Why Shrink-wrap a Cucumber? The Complete Guide to Environmental Packaging"
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Case Study: Designing Everything but the Food
WHY WE NEED A NEW HYPER-LOCAL MODEL FOR DESIGN ACTIVISM
IN THE HANDS OF GOD: INSIGHTS INTO DESIGN RESEARCH
WHAT THE FUTURE OF FISH CAN TEACH US ABOUT DESIGNING SYSTEMS
HarvardxDesign 2013: Event Recap
