Co.Design

How An Age-Old Chart Is Redefining Health Care

Mark Wilson — Fri, 24 May 2013 14:00:00 GMT

It’s “just” an electronic growth chart. But lurking inside is a disruptive new approach to medicine.

In a world where organ transplants and MRIs are commonplace, pediatric growth charts don’t sound very exciting. But after spending 30 illuminating minutes on the phone with Harvard researcher Dr. Isaac Kohane, a passionate intellectual who speaks with an infectious urgency, I’m a convert.

“For everything from a rare brain tumor to common garden variety obesity, the growth chart is probably the single-most useful tool to monitor the growth of kids,” Kohane tells me. And then he tells me something else. That with the advent of electronic medical records, the growth chart’s timeless utility has given way to the clumsy hand of clueless programmers, rather than doctors backed by smart designers.

So Dr. Kohane brought together the SMART Platforms Initiative (an organization backed by doctors at both Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital to rethink electronic medical records) and service design firm Fjord to redesign the paper growth chart as an app. And then they made it open source to shake things up.

Why Growth Charts Matter

The Growth Chart is essentially a few line graphs on the same piece of paper. A doctor enters a child’s height and weight (and sometimes head circumference) at various ages. This child’s development can then be compared alongside the standard growth curves, at a glance.

“As we adopted electronic health records, many didn’t have growth charts at all, or they’d have stats like z-scores that say how far you’ve deviated from the mean, which isn’t nearly as sensitive as the human eye is at spotting deviations from curves,” Dr. Kohane explains.

Even slight deviations from the norms are critical, as after the age of three, children follow very precise developmental trajectories. And the way these trajectories interrelate is of the utmost importance. Normal weight mixed with delayed height can signal very specific problems, like thyroid disease or growth hormone deficiency, while normal height mixed with delayed weight might point to obesity. But electronic medical records hid these important relationships.

“The first electronic attempts made the incorrect assumption that it was not necessary to view all three measurements at once, and were created with the premise that by viewing one at a time they could show a larger view,” Brian McLaughlin, visual design lead at Fjord explains. “Doctors and other medical staff were not consulted, and the result was that they did not recognize the importance of understanding the correlation between all three measurements.”

Why They Weren’t Fixed Already

So electronic growth charts stink for both doctors and their patients. Fair enough. Why not just wait for the big medical software firms to fix them? Well that’s exactly what the industry has been doing, to no great progress. Here’s where Dr. Kohane gets really riled up at the whole medical system.

“How is it that we’re comfortable shoving deactivated viruses into people’s blood, or moving embryonic stem cells to build new organs, or using biomaterials to replace joints, and that’s routine!” Kohane rants. “That’s routine innovation in health care, but health care has taken health IT and said, ‘That’s not our problem. We’ll leave it to some high priesthood and they’ll figure it out.'”

Kohane blames the intersection of “monolithic” IT firms, running medical records on “1980s client server systems” with a culture of doctors who, for some reason, don’t demand the same innovation in professional software as they would consumer software. (Though to the industry’s credit, this is all part of a larger trend of enterprise-level software offering substandard interface for no good reason beyond that it’s corporate.)

So the boon in data visualization--something the original growth chart was a bit ahead of the curve on--has been inaccessible to our doctors, who are incapable of running technologies like modern HTML5. These closed systems are also immune to the disruption of the countless developers driving the app market and, to some extent, all of the Apples, Microsofts, and Samsungs driving personal technology forward.

“How come when we work in our professional lives, it’s back to the '80s,” Kohane asks, “and we go back to our kids at home, we see their phones and the tablets they’re using, and all of the sudden it’s fast forward to 2013?”

A New Approach To An Old Idea

Kohane has given up on changing the industry from within. Instead, SMART teamed up with Fjord to rebuild the Growth Chart as what it should be today: The best parts of the old analog tool with all the benefits of electronic infrastructure.

Fjord/SMART started by paring down the charts to minimize visual clutter and improve the legibility of curves--garnering feedback from doctors as they went. It was only with this updated visual language in place that Fjord reconsidered interface and interactions (which I’m told is a total opposite from the way the company would normally approach a project but necessary because the established visual tropes of medicine require relatively strict bounds).

With the graphs in place, they enabled some pretty powerful options, like overlapping several different Growth Chart standards at once (developed by the CDC, WHO, Fenton, and even custom sets). They also use streamlined data inputs to minimize the mathematical errors that paper charts were prone to contain, and backend calculations double check for strange outliers that signal user error. And finally, the app includes a means to translate all this esoteric growth chart data into a clear graphic that families can understand. In other words, a single app is able to visualize information for the doctor to both better understand and better explain the data.

Kohane calls the app--which won’t make its way to the App Store but is free and open for companies to build upon and integrate with--a “statement piece.” It’s meant to disrupt the industry by showing purely what’s possible today.

“The prevailing meme to health-care standards is we have to pay hundreds of millions to large health-care IT vendors, and they’re going to offer safe ways to explore the data,” Kohane says. “Our expertise as clinicians is secondary because this [computer stuff] is a completely new medium! But the fact is, with the right tech, we can make things look like we want them to look. Adoption would be nice, but it’s secondary.”

To learn more about the SMART program, go here.

A Ruthless Email App With Just Two Functions: Keep Or Delete

Kyle VanHemert — Fri, 24 May 2013 12:45:00 GMT

Triage gives you a single, simple tool for getting your inbox under control.

For most these days, email is a nuisance, if not an outright problem. Which means there’s a big opportunity for a mobile mail app to help us mitigate the daily flood. Mailbox, founded by a former IDEO designer, has been one of the most promising attempts to do so, introducing a smart swipe-based interface for rapidly sorting messages and a "snooze" feature for putting off messages 'til later. The app is based around a single, sound concept: Our smartphones are better suited for email triage than full-on engagement. A new app for the iPhone--actually called Triage--takes that principle to its most ruthlessly efficient extreme.

There are basically just two things you can do with Triage: Keep a message in your inbox or banish it to an archive. Messages get displayed one by one, as little square cards, with the oldest unread messages appearing first. You assign them to the appropriate place simply by flicking up or down on your screen--up to archive, down to keep. The app lets you do a bit more than that, if you must--there’s barebones functionality for replying to a note, and you can set the upward flick to 'mark as read’ or delete instead of archive--but in the main, Triage is all about, you know, triage.

That stripped-down approach will be too stripped down for some, I’m sure. But Amnon Ben-Or, the app’s lead designer, says his team was always aware that it was creating a complementary e-mail app, not a primary one. "What we wanted to do was shed most of the baggage of traditional email clients," he says, "and focus on what we really wanted out of an email app that you use on the go: a way of quickly checking new messages, and at the same time, taking the stress out of your inbox by making a decision on the spot about whether each message requires further action or not."

The point Ben-Or makes about the essential nature of email triage--deciding whether a message requires further action--is an important one. A good deal of email overload simply stems from the volume of messages we have to process at any moment, not necessarily the effort it will take to actually process them. Much of the stuff that clutters our inboxes can be dismissed without a second look--newsletters, deal offers, incessant updates on our Twitter followers, etc. It’s just that they can seem like a lot of work when they pile up.

Triage addresses that problem in two main ways. For one, it ditches the standard inbox view and presents messages one at a time. That might seem exceedingly inconvenient to power users, and it is irksome that the app doesn’t offer a way to flip to a list view, but the single message presentation does go a long way toward eliminating the paralyzing effect that can occur when you find yourself staring at a dense list of untamed messages. When you’re just given the oldest untouched email in your inbox, that’s all you have to worry about. The UI is sort of like horse blinders in that way. There’s no need to panic, it assures you. Don’t get distracted. Just deal with the message in front of you.

The second key to Triage’s approach is the interaction for dealing with that message: a simple vertical swipe. It still incredibly satisfying, even as we’ve seen it crop up more and more frequently in our smartphone apps for uses more productive than flinging birds. "It’s whimsical, and it doesn’t feel like work in same the way that tapping does," Ben-Or says of the humble swipe. "It requires less concentration and coordination."

Triage’s particular brand of the gesture is especially simple, and Ben-Or points out that a vertical swipe is a little bit easier to execute than a horizontal one, only requiring you to hinge your thumb on its knuckle, rather than moving the entire digit side to side. The vertical axis also made a bit more sense based on the functionality it was being used for. "There’s something fitting about flicking something away from you to discard it, or toward you to keep it," Ben-Or points out. "It’s almost as if that mechanic removes a layer of abstraction from what you’re doing."

The app’s all about removing layers from mobile email, putting you in a more intimate inbox environment where you can quickly process one message at a time. It’s not going to be full-featured enough to replace your go-to mail app--it ignores whatever system of labels and folders you might currently employ; it doesn’t let you search through your inbox to find messages, or see all your emails at a glance, or, frustratingly, deal with them in chronological order (there’s a reason I’m letting those old messages languish!)--but it does offer one powerful, well-honed tool for getting things under control.

Grab Triage for $2 in the App Store

Image: Shutterstock

The Future Of Technology Isn’t Mobile, It’s Contextual

Pete Mortensen — Fri, 24 May 2013 11:30:00 GMT

Next up: Machines that understand you and everything you care about, anticipate your behavior and emotions, absorb your social graph, interpret your intentions, and make life, um, "easier."

You’re walking home alone on a quiet street. You hear footsteps approaching quickly from behind. It’s nighttime. Your senses scramble to help your brain figure out what to do. You listen for signs of threat or glance backward. What you learn may prompt you to turn down another street, confront the person, or relax. Whether he or she turns out to be a mugger or a jogger, your brain rapidly cycled through many scenarios seeking an answer.

It’s called situational awareness. The way we respond to the world around us is so seamless that it’s almost unconscious. Our senses pull in a multitude of information, contrast it to past experience and personality traits, and present us with a set of options for how to act or react. Then, it selects and acts upon the preferred path. This process--our fundamental ability to interpret and act on the situations in which we find ourselves--has barely evolved since we were sublingual primates living on the Veldt.

Here’s the rub: Our senses aren’t attuned to modern life. A lot of the data needed to make good decisions are unreliable or nonexistent. And that’s a problem.

Contextual Computing: Our Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth senses

In the coming years, there will be a shift toward what is now known as contextual computing, defined in large part by Georgia Tech researchers Anind Dey and Gregory Abowd about a decade ago. Always-present computers, able to sense the objective and subjective aspects of a given situation, will augment our ability to perceive and act in the moment based on where we are, who we’re with, and our past experiences. These are our sixth, seventh, and eighth senses.

Hints of this shift are already arriving. Mobile devices with GPS deliver location-based services, which sets a baseline for the many ways your phone can gather information it will use to make your life easier down the line. Amazon’s and Netflix’s recommendation engines, while not magnificently intuitive, feed you book and video recommendations based on your behavior and ratings. Facebook’s and Twitter’s valuations are premised on the notion that they can leverage knowledge of your acquaintances and interests to push out relevant content and market to you in more effective ways.

These merely scratch the surface. The adoption of contextual computing--combinations of hardware, software, networks, and services that use deep understanding of the user to create tailored, relevant actions that the user can take--is contingent on the spread of new platforms. Frankly, it depends on the smartphone. Mobile technology isn’t interesting because it’s a new form factor. It’s interesting because it’s always with the user and because it’s equipped with sensors. Future platforms designed from the ground up for contextual computing will make such devices seem closer to toys than to a phone with cool tools.

For that to happen, computer scientists, technology companies, and users all need to understand and buy into the requirements and possibilities of contextual computing. It’s a cultural moment that’s not dissimilar to the way in which graphical, and then networked computing, were introduced in conceptual and technical forms 10 years before reaching commercial success.

You Need Four Data Graphs to Make It Work

At Jump, we’ve identified four data graphs essential to the rise of contextual computing: social, interest, behavior, and personal. Some are well-established and others have emerged seemingly out of thin air in the last few years. By mastering all four of these graphs, players seeking to dominate the next era of the web will be wildly successful.

There are legitimate ethical concerns about each of these graphs. They throw into relief the larger questions of privacy policy we’re currently wrestling with as a culture: Too much disclosure of the social graph can lead to friends feeling that you’re tattling on them to a corporation. The interest graph can turn your passions into a marketing campaign. The behavior graph can allow people who wish you harm to know where you are and what you’re doing. And revealing the personal graph can make it feel like an outside entity is quite literally reading your mind. We’re all trying to understand what to do about this from an individual standpoint, let alone a legal one.

Despite the ethical ambiguity around contextual computing, what matters is that companies are actively constructing these graphs already. These products and services are in the market today, but most in existence target only one or two of these graphs. Few are pursuing all four, both given the immaturity of the space and a lack of clear targets to shoot for. This has the unintentional effect of highlighting the risks of using such services, without demonstrating their benefits. For the potential of contextual computing to be realized, these data sets must be integrated.

The Social Graph Is About Connections

This data set shows how you connect to other people and how they are connected to one another. It also reveals the nature and emotional relevance of those connections. Most people associate this with Facebook, but it’s actually an idea and data set that spread far beyond its walls. In an ideal contextual computing state, this graph would be complete--so gentle nudges by software and services can bring together two people who are strangers but who could get along brilliantly and are in the same place at the same time. It could be two people who share a friend and who simultaneously move to Omaha, where neither person knows a soul.

Only when this graph is open to a wide variety of services will it reach its potential. And all the social data in the world won’t be helpful in the slightest if you know little about a specific person’s beliefs, activities, and interests.

Your Personal Graph Contains (Gulp) All Your Beliefs

This is the set of data relating to a person’s deepest held beliefs, core values, and personality. It’s what makes a person unique in the world, just as the social graph helps to show what makes her similar to others. The data set is under-developed at the moment, and it’s quite difficult to design for, even conceptually.

Given that psychology still struggles to explain exactly how our personal identities function, it’s not surprising that documenting such information in a computable form is slow to emerge. There are early indicators that this will change, however. For example, Proust.com, a relatively new (and struggling) social-networking service, asks users to document intimate details of their lives and their beliefs based on the idea of the famed Proust Questionnaire. People have, quite reasonably so, been reluctant to share such information in a publicly viewable social network.

A more successful example is Evernote, which has built a large business based on making it incredibly easy and secure to document both recently consumed information and your innermost thoughts. Scraping such intimate files for data is currently the questionable realm of the NSA, however. Entirely new solutions will need to be created if the potential of the personal graph is to be reached.

The Interest Graph--What You Like--Is About Curiosity

Your tastes and preferences are largely organized around the subjects that tend to correlate with one another. It’s also about the overlaps in taste between the individuals whose lives closely resemble your own. Many companies have made early bets in this arena; Twitter is a fan and believes it’s well on its way to fully charting how all subjects connect to all others.

For now, such applications are notoriously narrow. For example, a book site like Goodreads.com is capable of predicting what other books you might read based on your expressed interests. What’s problematic is that the interest graph falls far short of depicting your real interests and tastes. It cannot yet tackle the way your curiosity might lead you to new directions. And it could never effectively recommend a restaurant or a vacation spot based on what it knows you read.

Your Behavior Can Be Easily Graphed

It’s easy for data to depict what you actually do instead of what you claim to do. Sensors do the job. So do, if less elegantly, self-reporting mechanisms. This data can sit in pivotal contrast to the interest graph, allowing computers to know, perhaps better than you, how likely you are to go for a jog. It would be useful, too, for a travel site that notes how you tell friends you’d like to visit China but records that you only vacation in Europe. Rather than uselessly recommending vacation deals to Beijing, a smart travel app would instead feed you deals to Paris or Berlin. The behavior graph provides the foundation, to some extent, of Google Search, Netflix recommendations, Amazon recommendations, iTunes Genius, Nike+ run tracking, FourSquare, FitBit, and the entire "quantified self" movement. When mashed against the other three graphs, there’s a potential for real insight.

In the Best Possible Light, Contextual Computing Helps You Out

The real potential of contextual computing isn’t about just one of these graphs. It’s about connections that resonate between them and which get tailored to different kinds of experiences. Early entrants like Google’s Now and Glass projects, Highlig.ht, and Siri are just beginning to experiment with these technologies. Just as the visionaries at Xerox PARC (who developed the foundational technologies of every desktop PC) could not have fully grasped the long-term impact of the mouse and graphical computing when they began working on them in 1973, we cannot say now which contextual applications will emerge as most vital. The way to the future will be paved on many thousands of interesting failures.

Granted, true contextual computing is a little further around the corner than the most optimistic pundits would have you believe. That should not be mistaken as a caveat that it’s unlikely to fully arrive. As Bill Gates astutely pointed out, “There’s a tendency to overestimate how much things will change in two years and underestimate how much change will occur over 10 years.” (Notably, the tablet computers he introduced in 2001 didn’t achieve commercial success until the launch of the iPad in 2010.)

Within a decade, contextual computing will be the dominant paradigm in technology. Even office productivity will move to such a model. By combining a task with broad and relevant sets of data about us and the context in which we live, contextual computing will generate relevant options for us, just as our brains do when we hear footsteps on a lonely street today. Then and only then will we have something more intriguing than the narrow visions of wearable computing that continually surface: We’ll have wearable intelligence.

[IMAGE: Cursor via Shutterstock

Can This Sleek Lighter Challenge The Zippo?

Sammy Medina — Thu, 23 May 2013 21:30:00 GMT

Alessi’s new Sushi lighter is at home both in your pocket and your kitchen.

Design is a search to perfectly integrate form, function, and meaning. A single design can take years of iterations and refinements and still may never embody that ideal. But if it becomes iconic--think the Coca-Cola bottle or, for our purposes, the Zippo pocket lighter--it ceases to be in flux and moves beyond time and style.

But, and sooner or later, change needs to be introduced--either directly injected into the design itself, or at the very least, by admitting alternative forms into the cycle. As every designer knows, neither is easy to pull off. Especially the latter: Exactly how do you go about making something that aims to displace or rethink an icon?

“It is very difficult and challenging,” says Rodrigo Torres, the designer behind Alessi’s new Sushi lighter. Torres and his team had to figure out how to move away from the classic Zippo lighter, first introduced in the '30s, then popularized by U.S. forces in World War II and seen in a bazillion action movies ever since. What he came up with looks to the past as much as it looks to contemporary design.

The Sushi lighter is a new typology, Torres tells Co. Design, one that’s pocketable and attendant to your smoking habit but also handy to use at home, where you can use it to light your gas stove or those pesky narrow glass candles. The abbreviated aerodynamic lines and the quirky pastel color schemes reference midcentury automobile and kitchen design. Torres explains: “I wanted to create an iconic, domestic, and sympathetic object. A product that, by using the 'collective memory’ embedded in its shapes and colors, reminded the user of the emotiveness and warmth of that period of time when home appliances told a story through simplicity, joy, and a very strong identity.”

As for the name, the designer says he derived it from one of his initial concepts for the lighter. “It came from the idea of ‘wrapping fire,’ one of the directions that I was exploring during the brainstorming stage of the project.” After he made his first sketches, which would become the final design, the curvy, compact shell reminded him of a “beautiful sushi wrap.”

The "Sushi" lighter is currently being distributed in Japan and Europe, with North America to follow soon after.

Farewell, It’s Been A Privilege

Cliff Kuang — Thu, 23 May 2013 20:45:00 GMT

Co.Design’s founding editor bids adieu.

After three-and-a-half years as founding editor of Co.Design, I’m departing to pursue another opportunity. But it’s just me leaving. Co.Design’s talented staff, which has made this site what it is day after day, is ready to take it to the next level.

From the outset, Co.Design was built upon a two-part strategy: To provide cutting-edge thinking, ideas, and inspirations to a talented audience of designers shaping the future, but also--and perhaps more importantly--to raise design’s profile in the broader conversation about where our culture is today. Put another way, we want to serve people who have the word "designer" in their job title but also the broader audience of people who, in myriad different ways, are creators and designers in their own right.

I think we’ve gotten there, and an email I received recently from a designer I admire underscored that point:

I’ve been in the industry since I was 19. In that time, I never consistently looked at any website about design. None of them really seemed that good. That changed when I discovered Co.Design. For me, it was the first time a site was actually talking about things I was interested in, all the time. So: thanks.

I can’t help but contrast that quote with one from an editorial consultant who weighed in during Co.Design’s planning, telling my boss, "Who gives a shit about any of that stuff?" Millions of people, actually.

Anyway, publishing is a hard industry, and it’s rare to get much by way of recognition or praise, so I wanted to reprint the preceding quote as kudos again to the amazing staff at Co.Design, who I believe is, pound for pound, one of the best in the business.

There is already a terrific slate of stuff that you all will see in the coming months: Having just finished with the shortlists for the Innovation By Design Awards, I can say that it’s the best collection of design work I’ve ever seen in any American design competition; the October design issue, in which the award finalists will be announced, will be filled with some of the most fascinating, ambitious design stories in recent memory; and the awards gala and design conference already has an inspiring line-up of speakers and sessions.

It’ll be up to the next editor-in-chief of Co.Design to figure out whether the site will pivot in some way, or grow more gradually in new directions. Either one will be exciting to watch.

My former boss, Noah Robischon, one of the savviest digital-content strategists working today, is presently looking for my replacement. If you’re interested--and have a compelling vision for Co.Design’s next stage--email him at nrobischon AT fastcompany.com. Make sure that your email subject line is "Co.Design Editor," and include your clips, resume, and an initial pitch for the site.

As a final note, I would like to thank our readers for all of their passionate support and often intense criticism. I’ve loved telling and curating stories for you all.

As a parting shot, I offer the picture above of my dog Snow, whom a couple of you might recognize from her various appearances on Co.Design’s homepage. Here she is getting her first look at the Pacific Ocean.

Watch Musical Water Dance Inside A Bottle Cap

Mark Wilson — Thu, 23 May 2013 20:15:00 GMT

A simple DIY rig becomes a beautiful, interactive exploration of music flowing through water.

Amongst all the CGI dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, the visual that’s etched most deeply into my memory is a simple glass of water. As the tyrannosaurus loomed closer, ripples in the water’s surface grew larger. We couldn’t see the monster yet, but this simple image demonstrated how outmatched the puny humans were about to be.

Sonic Water, by Sven Meyer & Kim Pörksen, is a flowing, undulating art installation that explores the same phenomenon--cymatics (or the study of vibration)--as the Spielberg classic. Though in Sonic Water, the dinosaurs have been replaced by music. And music is a stand-in for the most primal, sonic building blocks of the universe.

“Cymatics is like a magical tool that unveils the substance of things not seen. Sound does have form, and you can see that sound can affect matter and cause form in matter,” Pörksen tells Co.Design. “So maybe in the beginning there was sound, which shaped all matter. Indeed, we think sound has a fundamental influence on the formation of the universe itself.”

Of course, Pörksen points out the more simple by-product of cymatics: It’s “the coolest sound visualizer” built from near scraps. Because as stunning as their installation may be, it’s little more than a speaker (playing music), topped with a plate (which vibrates), topped with a bottle cap filled with water (which translates the music’s frequencies into hypnotic patterns). It’s a rig simple enough for anyone to build, simply retrofitted with a dSLR and projected on the wall for extra visual flare.

“My guess is that it’s not so special for the people as they first see the projection,” Pörksen admits. “But when they come to the cube with the speaker and they suddenly understand the mechanism, people are really amazed that such a simple setup can create such amazing visuals.”

Even still, this is just “an icebreaker” for what’s to come. Because from here, the viewer is invited to a DIY lab to create their own cymatic visualizations with music of their own choosing. It’s a celebration of pop culture and a physics lesson in one.

“What does it look like if they hum loudly their favorite tune into the microphone? What does 'Gangam Style’ look like in cymatics?” Pörksen asks. “They become the Big Bang and part of the Genesis.”

Genesis to the soundtrack of Genesis? Sounds good to me.

You can find Sonic Water on display at Berlin’s Olympus Photography Playground.

See more here.

[Hat tip: designboom]

Gorgeously Complex 3-D Printed Sculptures You Can Eat

Sammy Medina — Thu, 23 May 2013 19:00:00 GMT

The Sugar Lab makes geometric confections, fittingly, from sugar.

Much has been made about the game-changing uses and applications for 3-D printing. The technology has made headway in every field you can think of--from prosthetics and bionic organs to design and architecture to, yes, functioning firearms. There have also been plenty of printing experiments with food, an idea not everyone finds so appealing. Printers can be modified to print both cooked and raw foods, whose shape can even be customized.

It was just announced that NASA is investing in 3-D printer food prototypes that use “cartridges” of oils and protein-enriched powders to print meals for astronauts. In the coming weeks, the developers behind the system will attempt to print their first savory food--a freshly “baked” pizza. But what’s for dessert?

How about a sugary confection from the Sugar Lab. The LA-based studio prints edible sculptures and food ornaments using just pure, unadulterated monosaccharides, i.e., white sugar.

Founded by husband-and-wife team Liz and Kyle von Hasseln, the Sugar Lab developed out of a simple desire: The couple wanted to make a cake for a friend’s birthday. At the time, the pair were graduate students at SCI-Arch, where they would later invent a novel form of 3-D printing using UV light. They were living in a small apartment, complete with a tiny kitchen that, of course, had no oven. "When we realized we couldn’t bake our friend Chelsea a cake for her birthday, we decided to try to 3-D print one instead,” Liz tells Co. Design. “After a period of trial and error--during which her actual birthday came and went!--we managed to print a simple cupcake topper that spelled out 'Chelsea’ in cursive sugar.”

Needless to say, the friend loved it. The von Hasselns were intrigued by their foray into printable treats and decided to continue the project. After graduating last fall, with a $100,000 grant (the “Gehry prize”) under their belts, they relocated to a new studio in Silver Lake, LA’s trendiest neighborhood. The larger space allowed them to prototype larger and more complex sugary sculptures.

So what’s the recipe? Von Hasseln describes the process as being comparable to any rapid-prototyping project, with one major difference. A 3-D digital model is made and iterated to account for aesthetic, structural, and material considerations. Whereas with most prints, a synthetic material like resin is used to cast the form, the von Hasselns use sugar to print their works. They alternate strands of the sweet stuff with layers of a water and alcohol solution that wets and hardens the sugar. “If you’ve ever made frosting and left the mixing bowl in the sink overnight, you know that moistened sugar gets quite hard. That’s the underlying concept of 3-D printing with sugar.”

The results are surprising. The vortical shapes and double-curved geometries fully test the sugar’s structural properties while exploiting the formal freedom made possible by the printer. The von Hasselns are currently collaborating with cake artists to produce a set of extravagant cake stands and sugar tiers that will support equally impressive sculptures. What’s exciting for them is how they can expand the project in not just form but also size and function. “3-D printed sugar can be used to sweeten or to ornament, and it can also start to define the form of the food instead of the other way around.”

Renovation On The Sly: Same Footprint, Twice The Volume

Margaret Rhodes — Thu, 23 May 2013 17:00:00 GMT

Christopher Polly’s eco-renovation of the Cosgriff House is a study in thrift.

Families grow and need space to stretch out. Just not in the last few years; economic woes halted people’s enthusiasm for renovation projects. That’s poised to change: Home improvement spending is expected to bounce back, post-recession, at the rate of about 17% this year. In response, architects are being calculated about what they propose: renovations that are beautiful but easy on the wallet.

Christopher Polly's overhaul of the Cosgriff house doubled the size of the property--but is neither a gut renovation nor a showy extension onto the original home. To turn the two-bedroom, one-living-room house into one with double of each, the architect, based in Sydney, Australia, decided to insert a living room on the ground floor, where a foundation didn’t exist. Intent on preserving the original shell of the home, Polly decided to embed the new room into the original footprint.

“A lower ground living volume is sensitively inserted beneath the original fabric to harness the fall in the site towards the rear,” Polly tells Co.Design. The new room transforms the house by extending “beneath the existing dwelling, and outwards towards the garden.”

Polly took pains to push the new structure into more environmentally friendly territory. A box of windows on the roof improves access to natural sunlight, and the house operates on passive ventilation (with assistance from ceiling fans and a roof venting system). He salvaged demolished bricks, then upcycled them into the masonry walls. Polly also built in clandestine rainwater reservoirs for watering the garden, and solar energy fixtures for hot water. Water-saving fixtures and energy-efficient light fittings are scattered throughout the house.

Green features aside, what really impresses is the subtlety of the renovation. The original home is packed in tightly next to neighboring structures, so any expansion risks disrupting the street aesthetic or blocking sunlight from other homeowners’ yards. It does neither. The Cosgriff House is as humble as they come--and it’s two homes for the look of one.

Minimalist Posters That Reduce Your Favorite Movies To Basic Shapes

Sammy Medina — Thu, 23 May 2013 15:30:00 GMT

Graphic designer Michal Krasnopolski creates 22 movie posters that are head-scratchingly metaphorical.

In the future, when the history of the Internet is taught alongside social studies and algebra in middle school, there will be a brief, marginal mention of minimalist posters and how they, for a moment, encapsulated a bit of the late-aughts web. Curious students may do a little research of their own, going on to discover just how much of a hold the design trend once exerted over the popular imagination (or, at least, that of micro-bloggers). They may even come across Michal Krasnopolski’s set of minimalist classic movie posters.

Speculation aside, Krasnopolski’s posters are the latest to crop up in the meme’s short but copious history. The typical minimalist poster combines movie iconography and a pared-down midcentury aesthetic, something we’ve seen again and again and again. But don’t roll your eyes just yet. Krasnopolski’s designs are not just more of the same.

After spending months developing a series of movie posters that was going nowhere, Krasnopolski decided to start afresh. “I was about to abandon the project,” he tells Co. Design. “Then I just drew these two lines, one red, the other green, and had a ready Return of the Jedi poster.” From this scheme, he constructed a two-by-two gridded template that he used to make a batch of 22 new poster designs. The result: The most minimal minimalist posters you’ve ever seen.

The designs rigorously adhere to the same mold: a circle overlaid by two diagonals, all inscribed in a square. The structure seems stringent, but, as Krasnopolski found out, it could actually yield “plenty of possibilities.” His poster for the original Star Wars, for example, consists of a grey circle diametrically bisected by a single line and set on a black background. (Hint: it’s the Death Star.) A diagonal red line, partially dissolved at the bottom end, signifies the Man of Steel’s fiery takeoff into the sky in Superman. A dial of red tick marks, each more faded than the last, references the submarine radar screen from The Hunt for Red October.

Don’t expect every theme to be, well, abundantly clear. Krasnopolski cautions: The posters “require some knowledge of movie genres and are a riddle game for movie enthusiasts.” Still, film buffs might have a hard time deciphering the imagery behind Full Metal Jacket, which, Krasnopolski admits, is “a stretch.”

Krasnopolski is undecided about continuing the series. “I could do more, but some of the ideas are beginning to mirror each other,” he reasons. One of Krasnopolski’s friends, attempting to prove the inflexible nature of the template, bet Krasnopolski that the system would be incapable of producing a legible poster for 101 Dalmatians. Krasnopolski won the bet.

Could Bondsy Become eBay For The Instagram Era?

Mark Wilson — Thu, 23 May 2013 15:00:00 GMT

Bondsy is an iPhone app that allows you to sell your things for more than just money.

Over the last five years, the web has become a lot more personal. The buzzword “social” really doesn’t do it justice, not when you compare the transaction-based interactions that practically founded the Internet--PayPal, eBay and Amazon--with the ability to see photos of friends and family on Facebook and Instagram. But as things have shifted so much, to be so much more personal, e-commerce has been left behind. Buying and selling things online feels very much the same way today as it did a decade ago.

Enter Bondsy, an iPhone app for buying, selling--and maybe most interestingly, trading--things with friends. Its chief brainchild is designer Diego Zambrano, who’s worked as a creative director in advertising for some of the biggest firms (Ogilvy, R/GA) and clients (Nike, IKEA) in the world--though his greater claim to fame may be that he hasn’t shaved since 2009. With a new five-person team in Dumbo that snacks at a “nut bar” and prefers to work in “sexy mode” low light, Zambrano is rethinking what it means to sell things online--not to the anonymous masses of e-commerce but to your own friends and friends of friends.

“It’s beyond sales,” Zambrano tells Co.Design. “It’s about connections and how we interact with each other.”

That’s a pitch that probably sounds like BS, until you actually try the app. Because while Bondsy looks and works like the social networks you already know--allowing you to add friends to a feed, then see their listings in the large, square images popularized by Instagram--this very personal interaction model actually redefines how it feels to buy and sell things online. Namely, people speak to one another like they’re humans on a social network rather than customers on eBay. And it helps that your items don’t need to be purchased in money: As Zambrano explains, “When you’re not restricted to paying for things with cash, things get a lot more interesting.”

I found this out for myself while scanning through my feed--past old stereo equipment, homecooked meals, and even an apartment rental--when I came across a large towel decorated with the lower male anatomy. (Technically it was listed as the “dick towel” from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.) The towel’s price was--well, I wouldn’t exactly call it free--that “you have to bring it with you on your next beach trip.” Now it’s funny reading about naked towels in my feed, but it’ll be even funnier if someone actually takes that towel to the beach.

“It’s about exchanging things that people can’t necessarily put a price on,” Zambrano explains. “And it sparks some fun conversations that wouldn’t happen with strangers.”

Indeed, by removing the entire cash/checkout process--even items that are sold for cash are “grabbed,” with the details ironed out over email--sharing items becomes a lot more satisfying than just selling, and the things people are willing to share become a whole lot more quirky. Bondy’s test users have exchanged Playstations for popsicles, clothing for charitable donations and T-shirts for plumbing services.

Because after all, I’m happy enough to cook any of my friends a free meal whenever they’d like to stop by. But if I can convince them to wear a penis towel on the ride over, it’s all the more hilarious.

Download it here.

The Hilarious, Befuddling Charts Of The U.S. Congress

Kyle VanHemert — Thu, 23 May 2013 14:30:00 GMT

Floor Charts catalogs the visual aids--good, bad, and ugly--that drive Congressional debate. Okay, mostly they’re just bad and ugly.

A few weeks ago, we brought you the story of Jonathan Schwabish, the intrepid Congressional Budget Office employee who’s trying to harness the power of data viz for the benefit of our elected officials in Congress. Inspired by one of Edward Tufte’s data viz courses, Schwabish started taking the dense, doorstop-heavy reports that came through his office and distilling their most salient findings into concise, easy-to-follow charts--visual crib notes, essentially, that he hopes will encourage members of Congress to delve deeper into complex issues. It’s a noble project, to be sure.

But it’s not like Congress is totally unfamiliar with the power of a good visual aid. Far from it. Members of the House and Senate routinely come prepared with graphics of one sort or another when they make their arguments on the floor, and thanks to a dedicated C-SPAN employee who’s been archiving screen caps of those moments on Tumblr, you can follow along with all the Congressional data viz action right from home.

"The origin story is really quite simple," explains Bill Gray, a producer at C-SPAN and the caretaker of Floor Charts. Last November, a Huffington Post reporter was tweeting about a floor debate in which Illinois Senator Dick Durbin was making use of a placard bearing a giant bottle of 5-Hour Energy Drink. The HuffPo writer mentioned that someone should be documenting these types of visual follies, and minutes later Gray had taken it upon himself to do just that.

Since then, the site has seen a steady stream of new content. With over 800 posts, it’s a fairly exhaustive repository of charts that have popped up in both the House and Senate. Some of the visuals are simply poster-sized enlargements of Powerpoint slides; others are charts and graphs of varying efficacy dealing with things like the national debt and entitlement spending. Sometimes, devoid of their context, the visuals just end up as delightful non-sequiturs--or, depending on your outlook, proof that some of our congresspeople are indeed off their rockers. In all, it’s a highly amusing look into a strange little corner of congressional protocol.

But not a new one. Such charts have long been a fixture of Congress, Gray explains--a few months back he posted a snapshot of Joe Biden, flanked by a nice big poster, from the early '90s--though these days they’re easier for TV viewers to spot than ever, thanks to recent enhancements in the floor’s camera setup. Still, the producer’s been combing C-SPAN’s archives in his free time in search of more vintage visuals to add to the collection.

Gray says his colleagues at the network know about his side project, and even help him out on occasion when he might be missing good content. "I’ll get an e-mail every once in a while on a day off, or if I’m out of the office if an especially good chart or poster is on the floor," he says.

The fact that Gray resists adding commentary of any sort has probably helped ensure the project’s longevity. It would be easy to cherry-pick some of the, um, less accomplished visual aids and say, "Oh, those idiot Republicans" or "Oh, those idiot Democrats" or "Oh, those idiots in Congress," but Gray maintains his interest is purely that of an objective archivist. "I’ve got what I call the 'C-SPAN itch,'" he says. "Pointing the camera, recording, and sharing--then leaving it up to the public."

See more over at Floor Charts.

Mailbox, The Innovative, Inbox-Taming Email App, Comes To The iPad

Kyle VanHemert — Thu, 23 May 2013 12:00:00 GMT

Mailbox brings its swipe-based brand of inbox nirvana to Apple’s tablets.

To see just how badly people want a better way to deal with their email, all you have to do is look back a few months to the launch of Mailbox, the clever iPhone client that emphasizes triage over full-on engagement. In the weeks after its debut, nearly a million users put their name down on the app’s waiting list--yes, that’s a waiting list…for an iPhone app--to see if novel features like swipe-based sorting and email snooze could bring a measure of sanity to their inbox routines. Judging by the sterling App Store ratings from some 30,000 users, for many, it seems to have done the trick.

Though Mailbox was designed as a smartphone-first experience, Gentry Underwood, the Ideo alum behind the app, has been clear from the start that his team’s ultimate aim was to bring a better approach to email to all platforms. Today, they’re taking the first step in that direction with the Mailbox iPad app.

The new app, the first release since Mailbox was acquired by Dropbox, in March, is a straightforward update for the tablet’s larger screen. The main view splits the screen into thirds, showing your inbox in the center column. Swiping messages shuttles them off to various inbox destinations; a long drag to the right sends a message to the trash, for example; a short flick to the left lets you schedule it to pop up in your inbox later that afternoon, or next week, or on a date of your choosing.

With the extra room to stretch out in, you can now see a full message while keeping the inbox on the screen, but for the most part, things will be familiar to users of the iPhone app. And that was very deliberate. "We tried to resist the urge to take that real estate and make a more complex product," Underwood says.

That consistency between the new iPad app and the original one for the iPhone can be seen as proof, in a sense, that Underwood’s original thesis was right: Users don’t need a miniaturized desktop client on their phones so much as a new set of tools entirely, an experience designed specifically for processing their daily flood of incoming messages.

Some users have clamored for certain new features--support for Gmail labels is a big one, Underwood says--though the team has been wary to oblige. "Sometimes giving people more control--even though it might feel good in the short run--sets up a situation where you end up eroding the core benefit," he explains.

That said, the core benefit for the smartphone app is the speed with which it lets you sort your mail, part of which means setting messages aside to deal with later, on a bigger screen. That triage-first approach might not be quite as much of a draw on the iPad, where the bigger keyboard makes actual composition less of a hassle, and it certainly won’t make sense on a desktop client, which Gentry says is still very much part of the plan for the future.

Good thing, then, that there are plenty of other problems Mailbox can tackle besides triage. One that’s common to smartphones and tablets is the general issue of attachments--a handoff that’s become especially awkward with the rise of the discrete app model. Thankfully for us, Mailbox’s new home at Dropbox puts them in a unique position to figure that mess out too.

Grab Mailbox for the iPad in the App Store.

A Real-Life Tricorder That Lets You Scan Your Vitals At Home

Margaret Rhodes — Thu, 23 May 2013 11:45:10 GMT

A NASA-based startup and Yves Béhar bring you the Scanadu Scout: an emergency room for your pocket.

In the 1960s, on the set of Star Trek, the original tricorder was invented (for the uninitiated: a tricorder is a handheld device that allowed for sensor scanning and data collection at Starfleet. Very high tech.)

Now the tricorder is back, reincarnated in the form of the Scanadu Scout, a portable device that promises to ignite a personal health revolution. Scanadu is a startup based out of NASA’s Ames Research Center, and the company has labored for two years to create a medical tricorder for consumers. This week, with the official launch of its final, Yves Béhar-designed model on Indiegogo, they’ve succeeded.

The Scout is small and round--about the size of a double-stuffed Oreo cookie--and by holding it against your temple, it measures temperature, heart rate, and hemoglobin (that’s what carries oxygen in your blood) levels in a mere 10 seconds. It has a 99% accuracy rating. That information then transmits via Bluetooth to a smartphone app, giving users the ability to track and analyze their own vitals, from home.

Scanadu’s Scout closely simulates the doctor’s office experience, but from a tactile standpoint it’s different in almost every way: no scratchy nylon cuff squeezing your arm, no cold stethoscope on your skin, and no awkward handoffs of bodily fluids. Most important, patients don’t actually get to leave the doctor with any of that information. Scout gathers all of this data noninvasively and provides a safe little warehouse of information on your phone.

Scanadu sits at a crossroads in the current ecosystem of tech and health products: It’s a health sensor, part of the big data boom, and a contribution to the burgeoning “mHealth” business. Scanadu co-founder Walter De Brouwer, a Belgian futurist and entrepreneur who created an early backpack-size prototype of a tricorder in the late 1990s, points out that the Scout differs from other trackers by drawing our attention outward: “Everyone in the market is making clips or bracelets or watches like Basis. And now Apple is too. But in the end all these devices are very narcissistic because they continuously track, but they do not bring out the healer or the empathy in us.” Even if the person you’re healing is you, the process is more action-oriented than checking your daily calorie count.

The products are designed specifically to pop for consumers perusing aisles at the drugstore. To do that, De Brouwer brought on fuseproject’s Yves Béhar, the designer behind Jambox and Jawbone’s Up band to Scanadu. “Medical diagnostic tools are made to look medical, essentially,” Béhar tells Co.Design. “They’re cold and unapproachable and a bit scary. Our design brings the consumer beautiful, clear shapes and clear indications. When you look at Scanadu you see how any sized hand would be comfortable--without any of typical faux ergonomics.”

Now what to do with the data on your phone? “These are pretty boring things, by themselves,” De Brouwer says. “Flour, water, and tomato are also boring ingredients, but together it makes pizza.” Translation: The big picture here is much sexier than just a read on your blood pressure. Besides the convenience of at-home diagnostics, Scanadu also offers geo-location and sharing capabilities, so that users start to see larger health patterns. The gadget does not yet have FDA approval, but Scanadu plans to launch a usability study with the early Indiegogo adopters to collect feedback on functions and consumer friendliness.

Scanadu is rooted in one key philosophy: We become the tools we are. “What is the tool of the 21st century?” De Brouwer asks. “Data itself. The great thing about that is we can change the data. If you know the present, you can change the future.”

Pre-order your Scanadu Scout here, for $149.

A Design Collective Creates Its Own Economy In El Salvador

Margaret Rhodes — Wed, 22 May 2013 21:30:00 GMT

The Carrot Concept is bringing Salvadorian design to international markets.

The short list of global design destinations includes obvious places, such as Sweden and Italy. Soon, thanks to the efforts of a grassroots movement, the tiny Central American country of El Salvador could make that list as well.

The Carrot Concept launched this year, during New York Design Week, but the project actually began in 2007, when El Salvador ran its first furniture and design exhibition. The show, Contempo, went well. It garnered press and attention for local designers, but, problematically, it presented more one-hit wonders than it did a viable industry. In need of something that could win serious international attention, the designers, architects, and entrepreneurs involved, along with Bernhardt Design (the furniture company based out of North Carolina), placed their bets on a different model: intensive collaboration.

Today, “we are creating an economy around Carrot,” Roberto Dumont--one of the founders--tells Co.Design. The Carrot Concept collaborates with about 30 designers who work at one or two studios. Those studios also employ a handful of people. Dumont estimates that in total, Carrot has created employment for around 300 Salvadorians. Carrot operates its own little design incubator: Graphic designers who have prints and patterns they’ve labored over but no real product to show, partner with Carrot’s multidisciplinary team to turn their ideas into placemats, coasters, aprons, or even teapots.

Dumont identifies a common trend in the collection: outdoors-y stuff. The founders say the weather’s perfect, the people laid back. It’s a way of life, in El Salvador, to hang out on terraces or to stroll around outdoors with woven baskets. While many of the furniture pieces take on modern forms, many nod to traditional Salvadorian weaving techniques. Others use leather straps or handles expertly made by artisans who used to craft horse saddles when there was a market for such trades.

At its core, the Carrot Concept is about resourcefulness and rejuvenation. In any part of the world, old technologies fall by the wayside when newer innovations come along. But in smaller nations, such as El Salvador, becoming obsolete is arguably even more complicated than it is in larger, more industrious locales. Some of Dumont’s own pieces are built from fiberglass, which was used heavily during a time in which McDonald’s and Hardee’s boomed and needed the material for benches and interiors. Now, plastics have made fiberglass manufacturers outmoded.

Apart from the collection launched at Wanted Design, Carrot has around 20 projects in the pipeline and is taking on a more holistic approach to sustainability. The architect Guillermo Altamirano is the group’s “sustainable conscience” and keeps a careful eye out for ways to improve on environmental design--such as converting old paint buckets into pots or improving traditional clay water filtration systems so that homeowners actually want them in their kitchens. Carrot has also partnered with the local company Turbococina, which makes efficient wood-burning stoves that have won NASA’s admiration but which are still not properly designed for home use.

Read more about The Carrot Concept here.

15 Artists Celebrate 150 Years Of The London Underground

Jordan Kushins — Wed, 22 May 2013 20:15:00 GMT

Four key stations showcase the Tube-inspired posters of contemporary artists.

When London’s Metropolitan Railway made its debut way back in 1863, the steam-powered trains offered a novel way of navigating the city. Now, over a billion locals and tourists depend on the Tube to efficiently (as possible) take them between the network’s 250 stations.

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the subterranean system, and in an effort to celebrate and make commutes a bit more visually engaging, Art on the Underground has commissioned 15 contemporary creatives to contribute poster-sized works for a limited-edition series. The select group represents an interesting mix of local and international talent (and some big names, including Lawrence Weiner and Gillian Wearing), who were given an open-ended brief: “They were each given a brief to create an image which celebrates the Tube and will be a lasting visual legacy for its 150th year,” Rebecca Heald, curator for Art on the Underground, tells Co.Design.

As such, the results are incredibly varied, with some more explicitly addressing the mass-transit theme than others: Colin Swarn’s "Waiting for a Tube" is a lovely distillation of the diversity on any given platform; "NUD" by Sarah Lucas could be viewed, in this context, as a tangle of flesh from an über-crowded rush-hour; and "Freischwimmer "by Wolfgang Tillmans evokes staring through a steamy window on a cold day.

The concept is actually one of a handful of projects being rolled out in honor of the sesquicentennial, alongside Mark Wallinger’s Labyrinth series (and challenge) and including screenings of Underground-themed films from the BFI archives. Catch the posters up at Gloucester Road, Southwark, St. James’s Park, and London Bridge stations from June; however, if you can’t make it to town but are keen to incorporate a bit of the British spirit into your home decor, limited-edition prints will go on sale June 6th for £60 to £550. Sign up here for updates and more details.

(h/t It’s Nice That)

These Are Some Of The 68 Million People McDonald’s Serves Every Day

Sammy Medina — Wed, 22 May 2013 19:00:00 GMT

A photographer found himself people watching at McDonald’s and came away with a Supersize photo essay.

Americans on average consume nearly 30 pounds of French fries a year. Fried spuds don’t make a meal on their own: We also eat about three hamburgers a week, averaging 156 burgers per person a year (that’s more than 48 billion meaty hockey pucks). And many Americans they get their fast-food fix--about 1 billion pounds of beef and 3.4 billion potatoes--at, you guessed it, McDonald’s.

McDonald’s remains a cultural institution, but it’s also increasingly the target of our collective frustration with all sorts of things. Any mention of the Golden Arches on major media outlets or in well-meaning documentaries is followed by spools of data linking Big Macs to rising obesity levels and greenhouse gases, among other damaging effects. As photographer Nolan Conway puts it, “McDonald’s makes itself a pretty easy target for attacks from the media and from artists.”

Late last year, Conway set on a new kind of American odyssey. He traveled thousands of miles to document the human face of our fast-food addiction. The resulting series of photos--180 portraits of McDonald’s patrons--cast the food chain in a curious new light.

“I made a point to go to McDonald’s as often as possible,” Conway tells Co. Design. He visited 250-400 restaurants (he lost count) in the two months that he worked on the photo essay. Not every location, of course, was flush with interesting subjects. “There were good days when I came across many subjects and would only visit a few. Then there were bad days when I was desperate for subjects and would visit more than 20.”

Conway literally stumbled onto the project while on a road trip pursuing a photo assignment. One night, he stopped over at a McDonald’s in Nampa, Idaho, (for the Wi-Fi, not the burgers) when, the photographer says, “a gentleman walked in with an open carry pistol strapped to his belt.” Initially intrigued, he then decided to leave when a young girl traipsed in wrapped in a blanket. The moment was defining. Conway began pulling off at every highway Mickey D’s he came across to scan for photogenic diners--a search that eventually spanned 22 states. Needless to say, “By the end of that trip, I’d nearly forgotten about my other project.”

The portraits encompass nearly every demographic. There are youthful groups of friends crammed into a booth, aging couples who haven’t lost the romance, families huddled around a mountain of fries, and inveterate loners enjoying their Value Meals in peace.

Rather than villainize the McDonald’s corporation or fault customers for failing to exercise more discriminating modes of consumption, Conway says he wanted to understand the customers. “So many of the people in these photos are unique and unusual--and frequently in ways that might be construed negatively by sophisticated urban audiences,” he says. “But these people are not ashamed of who they are.”

Braun Reissues A Dieter Rams Design Classic: The ET 66 Calculator

Kyle VanHemert — Wed, 22 May 2013 17:45:00 GMT

The classic adding machine--inspiration for the iPhone calculator app--can be yours again.

It’s no secret that many of Apple’s products over the last decade have been deeply indebted to the designs of Dieter Rams. Less known, perhaps, is the fact that many of Apple’s apps have borrowed from the master, too. In some cases, like the much-maligned podcast app that lifted its look from the Braun TG 60 tape recorder, the results were unwieldy, to say the least. But in the case of the ET 66 calculator--the inspiration for the iPhone calculator app--the digital facsimile proved just as functional as the plastic product that inspired it.

The classic adding machine, designed by Rams and his longtime design partner Dietrich Lubs, was first released in 1987. It launched a raft of imitators over the years, essentially establishing our collective understanding of a pocket calculator’s perfect form. Its round, convex buttons invited fingers, and its clever use of color distinguished functions from numbers, with the all-important equals button jumping out with a high-contrast, black-on-yellow scheme. A sturdy, hard-plastic slip case has ensured that many original units have survived to this day.

Of course, the design also endured in digital form, on the iPhone’s home screen. Alas, the current version of the iPhone’s calculator app has been tweaked to be something closer to an homage than an out-and-out rip-off--the buttons have morphed into a square chiclet shape, and they’ve been moved around in a place or two--but the understated color scheme is still there.

Whether you use that app or not, it’s almost certain that at some point you’ve encountered a calculator that shows evidence of the ET 66's legacy--one that privileged functionality over flare. Now, once again, you can own the real article.

The reissue will ship this August; you can pre-order it for $49.

A Web Series For Kids Aims To Be The “Elmo for Engineering”

John Pavlus — Wed, 22 May 2013 16:30:00 GMT

Limor Fried created "Circuit Playground" in order to get young kids interested in hacking and making--REALLY young.

It’s hard to beat classic episodes of Sesame Street for timeless, near-universal educational appeal, but engineer and Adafruit Industries founder Limor Fried still saw an unmet need in the educational-video space. "We looked around and didn’t see an 'Elmo for engineering’ or a kid’s show that celebrated science and engineering," she tells Co.Design. "Every kid seems to have a cell phone or a tablet, but they know more about SpongeBob than how a LED works on the device or TV they’re watching, and we wanted to change that." So she and her team at Adafruit created Circuit Playground, a Youtube series that combines chirpy puppets with hackery know-how. Here’s the first episode, "A is for Ampere":

"If I had to describe what we’re going for," Fried says, "I would say we’d like to be 'Sesame Street meets Mr. Rogers meets Connections meets Peewee’s Playhouse meets Bill Nye.'" That’s pretty ambitious for a low-budget in-house production, but like those hit series, Circuit Playground does emphasize physical demonstrations and puppetry--a rather refreshing approach in a web-video landscape otherwise filled with flat motion graphics. As a design strategy for the show, it makes sense: How are you going to ever convince kids to get up the gumption to take apart a clock radio if your show takes place in an entirely virtual, antiseptic world where there’s no dirt, no breakage, no heft to anything?

Fried also tapped the educators on staff at Adafruit to help craft the show’s content and voice. It paid off: "After we released the first episode, we were immediately contacted by a few television networks," she says. The next episode is called, naturally, "B is for Battery." Fried says that the show is meant to be enjoyed by kids with or without their parents--"We know if we do a good job parents and kids will watch it together and their imaginations will spark"--but there’s nothing wrong with checking out an episode yourself. Let’s face it: Do you know how a battery works? Maybe you should.

[Read more about Circuit Playground]

A Skyscraper-Style Treehouse With Soaring Mountain Views

Sammy Medina — Wed, 22 May 2013 16:30:00 GMT

The Tower House, designed by GLUCK+ Architects, reflects back the forest canopy.

Architects like wordplay. It’s a fun and effective way to condense the main thesis behind a project without resorting to archi-speak. It’s also a good bit of marketing. A simple subversion like “horizontal skyscraper” immediately makes a potentially interesting (or uninteresting) project that much more compelling. Another example: the Tower House.

Designed by GLUCK+ architects, the Tower House looks exactly like it sounds--that is, it takes the form of a skyscraper and shrinks it down to the scale of a house. The four-story-high-building is configured to resemble Lego blocks, an analogy that extends to the house’s bright yellow and green color scheme. A vertical bar, the “tower,” is bisected at its summit by a wide horizontal volume, which appears to conquer gravity with the most minimal of supports.

The house was designed and built for GLUCK+ principal Thomas Gluck and his family on land owned by Gluck’s architect father, who founded the firm (until recently, Peter Gluck and Partners) in 1972. The estate is sprinkled with small follies that the senior Gluck has built over the years, including a guesthouse and studio. The Tower House crowns the sprawling grounds and commands privileged views of the Catskill mountains beyond.

Yet the house’s sensationalist form came almost as an accident, the result of a spontaneous what-if proposition. Asked about the rationale for lifting the house up toward the treetops, Bethia Liu, Gluck+ Director of Strategic Projects, says that the architects “suspected there might be great views up there.” “But,” Liu continues, “you can’t build a house like this on a whim, so we built a 50-foot-tall scaffolding tower to check to be sure.”

The views turned out to be quite spectacular, and the architects proceeded to develop their soaring scheme. The built structure, which bears a striking resemblance to El Lissitzky’s conceptual tower project (and early wordplay adoptee) “Cloud-Iron,” packs all of the home’s three bedrooms and its full-height, yellow-painted stairwell into the vertical volume. The block is split into three modules: The bathrooms are in the middle, with the rooms on one side facing the scenery; the zigzagging stairs are on the other side, sculpturally framed behind a shear glass wall; and the living areas and kitchen fit into a wedge-like prism that locks into the tower’s fourth floor.

As you might have guessed, the house’s quirky shape--what the GLUCK+ office describes as an “adult tree house--presented a significant structural challenge for its designers. “Given the height and the very narrow 14-foot footprint,” Liu explains, “the overturning forces were very strong.” To counteract these, the entire structure had to be fastened to the site by drilling a series of stainless-steel anchors into the bedrock. The end of the cantilevered box also had to be balanced on thin steel stilts.

The seasonal use of the house posed its own set of issues. As a vacation home, it would be sparingly occupied. That meant the architects had to devise a sustainable, efficient way to maintain the structure year-round. They concentrated all utilities in an insulated core, which constituted just 700 of the house’s 2,500 square feet. By doing so, only the core needs to be heated in the cold months. Additionally, they oriented the bedrooms to obviate air conditioning in the summer. The south-facing glass stairwell acts like a “solar chimney” that whisks the hot air out of the house through rooftop vents, while cool air is funneled down into the living spaces. The system, the architects claim, cuts energy costs by half.

A Beautiful, Unbreakable French Press Made From A Mason Jar

Jordan Kushins — Wed, 22 May 2013 15:15:00 GMT

So long, shattered glass! The Portland Press comes with a lifetime guarantee.

You don’t have to be a coffee snob to know that French presses are delicate. Anyone who’s ever so much as picked up one of the java brewers knows that the glass beakers are incredibly, almost uncomfortably, thin. But Mason jars? Sure, they’re ubiquitous, and yeah, they can be a bit twee, but those babies are nothing if not sturdy. Bryan Kappa and Rob Story, the creative and business brains behind Bucket, combined the best of both into the Portland Press.

“The difficult part was finding an existing, mass-produced mason jar with a round cross-section and no lip,” Story tells Co.Design. “Without that, the internals--we call them the ‘guts’--would require a very complex spring system.” Their timing was fortuitous--right around the time brainstorming began, a pint-and-a-half version was introduced, giving them precisely the solution they needed to carry on.

Keeping all aspects of the concept’s construction in the Pacific Northwest was critical for the duo. Sourcing the materials--wood, wool, and steel--and producers for each of the unit’s parts took some time, but the experience introduced the pair to talented makers in their region. “If one shop didn’t have the capability to manufacture a certain component, they almost always recommended another shop in the area,” Story says. Local craftspeople and artisans helped assemble everything together.

When it came time to find a platform to introduce their work and make the prototype a marketable reality, they turned to Crowdsupply. “We discovered them through word of mouth,” Story says. “They handle everything from funding to pre-orders to order fulfillment to long-term sales.” As such, the Kickstarter alternative is particularly suited to launching physical products, and (bonus) it’s also based in Portland. Pair it with a Mason Shaker and you’ve got a.m. and p.m. covered.

The Portland Press is Bucket’s debut, but they’re offering a lifetime warranty. As they say in their video: “A product’s life doesn’t start on the shelf, and it shouldn’t end in the trash.”

Support the Bucket’s Portland Press Crowdsupply campaign here.

(h/t Core77)

Infographic: The Signature Cocktails Of Your Favorite Fictional Boozehounds

Margaret Rhodes — Wed, 22 May 2013 14:00:00 GMT

Ernest Hemingway once said, "A man does not exist until he is drunk." Sometimes, neither do literary characters.

Don Draper drinks an Old Fashioned because he’s a man. Rocky Balboa drank his protein shakes--five raw eggs--for strength. Phil drank sweet vermouth because it was Rita’s favorite libation in Groundhog’s Day (and he was trying to get her into bed). And Alex and the gang from A Clockwork Orange drank their opiate-laced Moloko Plus’s to gear up for “ultraviolence.”

Some characters drink only what they can afford (not pictured: Homer Simpson’s cheap orders of the skunky Duff beer), and others are associated so closely with their drink of choice (also not pictured: Seabiscuit’s penchant for Budweiser, which personified both the horse and the beer as true Americans) that it’s difficult to separate the two. But when it’s an author or screenwriter playing puppet master, no drink gets ordered by accident.

The Cocktail Chart of Film & Literature, a new print from Pop Chart Labs, shows exactly where narrative storytelling and libations dovetail. “We started with what characters and drinks we could pull from the top of our heads. Then we researched, and got sort of lost in the close marriage of story and booze in the course of fictive history,” William Prince, Pop Chart’s managing editor, tells Co.Design. The team--whose past work charts the labyrinthine worlds of beer, wine, and martinis--had labored to create a literary-themed poster for some time. “As in all things, once we added alcohol," Prince says, "everything started to seem more attractive.”

Some notorious drink orders were easy to come by, like The Dude’s White Russian and Daisy’s Mint Juleps. Some stories actually need to be told without any alcohol at all, like the alien Edgar’s sugar water in Men in Black. But with only 49 signatures on the poster, some tales were, sadly, left on the bar room floor. “There were ultimately some tee-totalers that didn’t make the cut,” Prince says. “Captain Jean-Luc Picard’s, 'Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.’ was a hard omission to stomach.”

The Cocktail Chart of Film & Literature is available at Pop Chart Labs for $27.

Newsweek 2.0: A New Model For Online Magazines

Kyle VanHemert — Wed, 22 May 2013 12:45:00 GMT

Designed by Huge, the revamped, digital-only Newsweek aims to bring print mag qualities like cohesion and curation to the web.

When it was announced last fall that Newsweek, after nearly 80 years as a weekly news magazine, would ditch print and go all digital, it seemed to many like an ill omen--the first step toward an inevitable demise, sort of like when a network unceremoniously boots a faltering TV show to a Saturday night time slot. And indeed, the prospects for Newsweek's survival as a subscriber-supported, tablet-first magazine looked grim; consider the fate of News Corp’s much ballyhooed iPad-only mag The Daily, which was a complete and utter dud despite considerable resources and ringing endorsements from Apple itself.

Thankfully, that isn’t quite the path Newsweek is headed down today. Its new lease on life doesn’t just come in the form of a tablet app but a website, too, built with the help of Huge, the digital agency whose successes include the beloved HBO GO app and Google Think Insights. What they’ve managed to cook up for Newsweek is both compelling and, in terms of web publications, simply a little bit different from much else out there. The new Newsweek is a handsome digital experience that taps into the social and multimedia opportunities offered by the web, sure, but it’s also the rare website that shuns the Internet’s breakneck news cycle and sticks to the magazine’s original raison d’etre as a curated collection of relevant stories. And it’s going to do it at the same pace as its pulp predecessor: once a week, every week.

A WHITE SPACE IN THE MARKET

To readers who’ve grown accustomed to a constant flow of new stories from their favorite pubs--even the ones with staid print origins, like the New Yorker and the Atlantic--Newsweek's model of putting out new content every Wednesday, but only every Wednesday, might seem deliriously out of touch. But from the start, Newsweek and Huge were set on doing something different. And the throwback publishing schedule is just a part of that plan.

For the last few years, Newsweek's presence on the web has more or less been an unglamorous existence as a sub-section of The Daily Beast, the popular news site that merged with Newsweek in 2010. "It hasn’t really been able to breathe on its own," says Eric Moore, managing director at Huge NY. The new site gives it some room to breathe, certainly. But for Baba Shetty, Newsweek's CEO, the redesign was also a chance to do an entirely new type of web publication--something more like a magazine, really, than a traditional news site.

That meant staying true to Newsweek's original mission: giving readers a curated selection of stories from the week. In a digital media landscape dominated by speed and volume, Shetty hoped to preserve the idea of the "issue," he says, "and the coherence that brings to the reading experience."

"I think there’s actually a beautiful restraint with what Newsweek is," he explains. "We felt there was still a place in the media landscape for taking a step back, reflecting, and framing the week…this idea that there’s been a set of editorial decisions about what the most important things are to focus on."

But Shetty thought there was another way Newsweek could stand out from the pack, in addition to editorial outlook. The real opportunity, he thought, was in user experience.

"Most of professional media on the web has been crafted from a couple of conventions that work for the business but aren’t particularly good for the end user," he says. Here he’s talking about the irritating, pageview-grabbing tactics like splitting long articles up into a dozen smaller chunks, hiding visual content behind endless, slow-moving slideshows, and throwing any and all news against your screen in the hope that some of it will stick.

What it all amounted to, Shetty says, was "a tremendous white space in the market for an iconic media property that devotes itself to user-first publishing."

USER-FIRST PUBLISHING

One way the new Newsweek, which launched last week in beta form, can be seen as a user-first product is simply in how nice it looks. The site is a highly visual affair, built for engagement and enjoyment, not pure news-dumping efficiency. Upon arrival, readers are greeted with a cover story, complete with Newsweek word mark, that stretches across the entire width of their screen. The rest of the week’s stories pour forth below, though they’re arranged by importance, not by chronology. As Megan Man, the Associate Creative Director at Huge who led the project, explains, "We definitely didn’t want to make another daily news website."

The site was designed to showcase Newsweek's long form content, a format that’s "not typically done well digitally," Man says. The story pages themselves are clean and visual-heavy, like the homepage, with full-width banners up top and dynamic "image windows" interspersed throughout. The text runs in a clean column on the left-center of the screen, rendered in a generous 21-point font. Ample images interject from the right side of the screen, breaking up the lengthy blocks of text but never distracting you from it. That, Man says, was particularly important.

"We’re telling a story with this page, and that’s not just through the words," she explains. "But the supporting content, and the images that help draw your eye down the page and keep you engaged, shouldn’t actually be interrupting what you’re there to do in the first place. Which is reading the article. Readability was always first in our minds."

Other clever details can be found throughout. There are some that draw from Newsweek's print past, like a table of contents that can be summoned from any page on the site. Features that are commonplace on today’s news sites, like social-media sharing tools, are still deployed in thoughtful new ways. Instead of just dropping the stock-sharing widgets on every story page, for example, Huge created a gorgeous full-screen pop-up that gives users massive, click-friendly buttons for sharing articles. The way these buttons are presented--not as third-party doodads but as part and parcel of the Newsweek product itself--are just the type of considered details that lend the overall experience a cohesive, magazine-style vibe.

SCALABLE AND SUSTAINABLE

The result of all that care is a series of long-form pieces that are bold and beautiful--similar to the types of immersive, digital-first experiences we’ve been seeing more and more of lately, like the New York Times' celebrated digital opus "Snow Fall," published last December. That article, an incredible account of a fatal avalanche at Tunnel Creek in Washington, was a stunning marriage of first-rate reporting and bespoke, multimedia-heavy presentation.

But Huge wasn’t just tasked with creating a one-off digital extravaganza. It had to come up with a design that would work week after week. And as remarkable as "Snow Fall" was, Man points out, it took 15 designers to complete. "We just don’t think that’s a sustainable model," she says.

What they did instead was create a template that can work every week, regardless of what the lead story is about, how long it is, or what kind of multimedia material comes along with it. "We wanted to make sure this was something that could be maintained without too much editorial effort," Man says, a directive that became the "highest priority" as they fleshed out the design.

That, of course, meant that some ideas had to be left on the cutting room floor. "There were lots of features we came up with," Moore, the Managing Director, notes. "We tried to select the best that also were scalable to use on a weekly basis." But they hope the final product is one that will prove both flexible and simple--a template that doesn’t actually look like a template, from the reader’s perspective. Essentially, the aim was to deliver some of the visual dazzle and polish of "Snow Fall" without relying on a team of designers to custom-tailor the product every week.

BIG BEAUTIFUL ADS, USED SPARINGLY

But a scalable, user-first experience is only part of the equation. Web publishing is linked inextricably with advertising, and Shetty thinks the redesign has a chance to push the envelope there, too.

All the content will be freely available to start, though eventually the plan is to introduce a pay wall and a encourage subscription for frequent readers. In the meantime, though, Shetty thinks the site’s approach to on-screen ads could break new ground. Instead of a standard display ad model, Newsweek's pursuing a sponsorship system, where a limited number of brands will get prominent placement on the site.

The ad units, which will debut next month, will be "big and beautiful and highly impactful," Shetty says, but "used sparingly." Individual stories will have no more than one unit; the home page will typically show two. More importantly, Shetty says they’ll be "in complete harmony with the rest of the design of the product." Essentially, the approach to ads is the same the redesign takes to the social sharing tools: they’re not foreign material to be awkwardly shoehorned in, but rather part of the product itself. "It’s not going to be the sea of rectangles you typically see," Shetty says. "It’s all part of one piece of thinking. If we had a conventional business model, we’d have to have a conventional site design."

Of course, ads are ads, and they’ll still ultimately be a distraction. But if Newsweek is going to survive, they’ll be a necessary one. On today’s fast-flowing, source-saturated web, it’s going to be hard to operate purely, or even partly, on a subscription-based model, even with big, pretty pictures, deft curation, and a user-friendly reading experience.

But whatever its own fate, Newsweek's redesign does give an enticing glimpse of what web publishing could look like going forward. It’s a bet that some readers won’t be satisfied by quick hits and listicles, and that a weekly dose of thoughtful editorial signal can find a foothold amidst a web full of noise. Is that naive? Maybe. But it’s certainly readable.

Check out the new Newsweek here.

Microsoft’s Home 2.0 Will Connect Xbox One To The Internet Of Things

Mark Wilson — Wed, 22 May 2013 11:30:00 GMT

In an exclusive interview, Microsoft teases the Xbox One’s predestined future: A service they’re dubbing Home 2.0 that will become the hub for all your interconnected devices.

The Xbox One--Microsoft’s new console announced yesterday--will have eight times the graphical power of the last Xbox, connect to more than ten times the global servers to push content from the cloud, and deliver an Internet-integrated television experience that’s faster and more fluid than any other system we’ve seen.

But while these are all exciting ideas, they’re all just launch features of a next-generation game console. What will the Xbox One look like in, say, three to five years? Marc Whitten, Microsoft’s chief production officer of interactive entertainment, shared his vision for the future with us. And that future largely resides in a platform that his team has casually dubbed Home 2.0.

“I’m not saying it’s a good name,” Whitten laughs, indicating that it will most certainly change when the project goes public. But he imagines that Home 2.0 will allow the One to be more than an entertainment device for your living room. Rather, it could be your home’s gateway to the Internet of Things--the missing link for the inevitable future of interconnected lights, appliances, and more.

Home 2.0 would share the same space as platforms like SmartThings.

The Origins of Home 2.0

Home 2.0 may not be some official name, but the project is more than a hobby for Microsoft. Whitten points out that you can actually see its origins in Microsoft’s acquisition of id8 Group R2 Studios--specialists in home automation--earlier this year.

Home automation, of course, is a rapidly evolving idea. As dumb objects in our homes become smart, the role of home automation will become one less of window-blind opening than domestic-life coordinating. “You need those [devices] in a central hub as an experience to bring all these things together,” Whitten explains.

If Home 2.0 combines id8’s existing platform expertise with the Xbox One’s promised “open” support of third-party apps (support that hasn’t been entirely clarified just yet, but seems more in line with the Windows 8 app model), it could end up with a variety of discrete apps that represent the myriad of digital devices in our lives, all juggled underneath the central Home 2.0 umbrella.

Why Microsoft Makes The Perfect Fit

As the dedicated homebound PC has melted away, the Xbox--tethered to your TV--will make a natural fit as a hub for these objects. A console lives predictably in one spot (unlike your laptop or your phone), it’s naturally fitted with the largest display you own (your TV), and as it’s always on--or at least one “Xbox On” verbal command away from being on--communicating with the system requires very little human commitment.

Microsoft, of course, isn’t the first to take interest in the “Internet of Things” market. Products like SmartThings are attempting to be our connected device platform for the future. But the advantages Microsoft has over most companies are, maybe a bit obviously, their supreme software and hardware expertise.

"There will never be one single protocol for connected devices," Whitten insists, citing that any such smart hub will need to speak a variety of languages. Say what you will about Microsoft, but few companies can rival its experience in pure interoperability. This is a company that has supported and networked with basically every piece of hardware under the sun for the last two decades.

And as for the issue of convincing the public to invest in such a futurist platform, “Games like Forza subsidize the experience,” he adds a few moments later, pointing out that the Xbox One will represent an embarrassment of riches in local processing, networking hardware, and cloud support. They’re the powerful by-products of the Xbox’s entertainment experience--or what I imagine as the digital equivalent of buying a Ferrari for cruising around on the weekends, but using its engine to run your washing machine during the week.

Devices like Twine are very smart and have well-designed portals, but as we own more diverse devices, we’ll want a unified control for them all.

How Home 2.0 Might Work

Aside from Kinect, Whitten teases a few developments that might solidify Home 2.0’s general usability. For one, SmartGlass--the Xbox-to-tablet/phone integration that came out this year--will receive a major overhaul. While no one has seen it in action yet, Whitten promises the new SmartGlass works much better than the laggy, unpredictable experience we’ve seen on the current generation of 360. And SmartGlass will allow you to control your Home 2.0 devices from a Windows, Android, or iOS device--pretty much any touch screen you have in your pocket.

Then, aside from Wi-Fi and maybe Bluetooth connectivity, Whitten alludes to a lot of potential in “advanced IR blasters” (that’s communication based on infrared, which is the same invisible light technology that lets your TV remote change the channel and the Kinect scan you in 3-D).

"I hate to use the word ‘blaster’ because it gives you a lousy image,” Whitten admits, no doubt referencing the unreliable universal remote adapters of yore. Then he shares an anecdote that when the Xbox team was first testing Kinect, the IR was so powerful that it was shutting off TVs from halfway across the office. I began to piece together the potential of Kinect (along with a few IR extenders, maybe) blanketing rooms with odorless data. And while line-of-sight limitations seem like more than a challenge to design Internet-connected devices around, I’m intrigued by the possibility. (Besides, IR has a fantastic benefit beyond all others: It requires extremely little power to operate.)

Home 2.0 Isn’t Today, But It May Be Tomorrow

So, no, Home 2.0 won’t be available at launch, and it won’t be called Home 2.0 when it inevitably arrives on the Xbox One a few years from today. But even still, Home 2.0 has the potential to prove that the One isn’t just another video game console or entertainment device, some stubborn antique in a world gone mobile. With Home 2.0, the Xbox One is slated to become our first, widespread anchor to the promised Internet of Things. (Though, sure, it’ll play Halo, too.)

And I can’t overstate its importance: As Google tracks and anticipates our needs through search and Android, and Apple leverages countless iOS devices to learn about all of us, Microsoft has spotted its advantage over both companies in one key spot: The living room, and every bit of our domestic lives, connected to it.

[Illustration: Kelly Rakowski/Co.Design]

Experimental Lighting That Balances Like a See-Saw

Margaret Rhodes — Tue, 21 May 2013 21:30:00 GMT

Fort Standard’s debut lighting series put some experiments with physics to good use.

It’s either the most grown up hanging mobile, or the most secretly playful piece of high end design. The Counterweight Mobile light mixes polished white oak with brass, tone, and kiln-formed glass diffusers--all of which simply hang from a thread-like cord and sway in midair, once in place.

Just think of a see-saw, Gregory Buntain, one half of the Fort Standard design duo, tells Co.Design. “If the hanging point--or ‘fulcrum’--was even half of an inch in either direction, the balance of the lights would be totally offset.”

Most designers start with a project brief. The Fort Standard team, whose portfolio includes chic toys and magnets and the like, and retail spaces like the Warby Parker showroom, started differently in this case. They worked backward, selecting materials first: the kiln-formed glass came from an old glass facility that works in their building in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn. And the white oak wood? “At the time we were experimenting with the process of steam bending wood in order to make bows for archery, and we decided this would be a great way to create beautifully gestural designs.”

The Counterweight concept is also available in a pendant light, a floor light, and a sconce. All are available through Roll & Hill.

A Photog Unearths The Differences Among Like Objects

Margaret Rhodes — Tue, 21 May 2013 19:00:00 GMT

Ordinary objects take on a new language in Diana Zlatanovski’s Typology series of photographs.

You may have collected coins, stamps, or baseball cards as a kid. If you’re Jay Leno, you’re fortunate enough to collect cars. If you’re Angelina Jolie, you hanker after Renaissance knives (at least during the Billy Bob era). Part of the thrill of tracking down trinkets are the stories behind them.

Those stories are the focus of anthropologist and photographer Diana Zlatanovski’s body of work. “Objects are wrapped in stories and meaning,” she tells Co.Design. “I can bring out a collection of objects that at first glance appear mostly identical. As you keep looking, the differentiations between objects become more and more evident.” It’s appropriate, then, that Zlatanovski has named her work The Typology. In the same way that different letters have nuanced variations in shape--and communicate a larger meaning when strung together--so do the collections in her photographs.

Zlatanovski first began photographing object collections when she stumbled upon a batch of rusty old wrenches at an antique mall. Since then, she has documented a collection of cigarette holders, blue mussel shells, and vintage pieces of paper, among other objects.

Memories are the refrain in each assortment. The cigarette holders hail from the private collection of a woman who inherited them from her mother. Zlatanovski gathered the blue mussel shells herself, during her first trip to Maine’s Acadia National Park.

The scraps of paper were shipping forms from 1889, for the now defunct Grand Rapids and Indiana Railroad. Zlatanovski found them in a wooden box; they were being used to carefully wrap a collection of shells. “I’m left to wonder how these dozens of shells that were collected from a river in Tennessee ended up in scraps of shipping papers from a railroad that only operated between Michigan and Indiana,” she says.

Up next are iron eel spears and other collections from Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology.