Invented just one year after the invention of Scotch tape in 1930, the tape dispenser is a unique package design-tool hybrid that can be found in just about every household. Due to the frustration of finding the loose end of tape on a roll, 3M Engineer John A. Borden invented the serrated-edge dispenser to keep the end of the tape away from the roll. Almost a century later, Japanese designer Kouichi Okamoto has redesigned the tape dispenser to create a liquid-like form from the resulting tape cuts.

Liquid Tape Cutter

Based in Shizuoka, Japan, designer Kouichi Okamoto has designed a unique tape cutter for decorating walls and objects with various lengths of black duct tape. Using a thin piece of formed sheet metal featuring a bendable arm to hold the tape roll, Okamoto has effectively redesigned the tape dispenser so that the cuts are convex rather than flat. By alternating between the different convex curves, Okamoto is able to give off the appearance of dripping paint in a relatively fast amount of time:

While this unique tape cutter would sell like hotcakes to DIY’ers, Okamoto designed the tool for himself to use at his studio Kyouei Design, based in Shizuoka, Japan.

As the number of 3D printers purchased each week increases exponentially, many proud new owners of a 3D printer are also learning the limitations of their new device. Chances are, an entire weekend may have been spent calibrating your printer or waiting for that very first test print. But what about the other limitations of your material? Recently posted on Kickstarter, the 3D Printer Test kit offers eight unique sample chip files that allows a user to test everything from ridges to flexibility to overhangs so you’ll know exactly where the limitations and strengths are for your 3D printer…whether it’s a Replicator 2 or a Fortus.

For Pros and Consumers

With the rise of consumer-level personal manufacturing, there will oftentimes be a disconnect between the understanding of material properties and expectations for a final product. As professional toy developers, the designers at 3DKitBash have no doubt done their homework and deciphered an affordable and accurate method for teaching both professionals and consumers how far they can stretch their 3D prints.

We want to help Makers, Inventors, and 3D Explorers do their thing Better & Faster. It’s a passion of ours and one that keeps us constantly on the move.
-3DKitBash

The kit consists of 8 ‘Tolerance Chips’ that each highlight a unique material characteristic to see how your 3D printer performs with various shapes and forms. While your 3D printer and material may excel in one characteristic, it may not do so hot in another, which can ultimately save you a lot of time and money down the road.

The Tests:

The 3D Printer Test Kit Starts at $30 on Kickstarter.

This week’s Spotify-powered SolidSmack Radio Playlist brings an entirely new face-smack of great music to help propel you through those laborious, tedious design tasks for the next few days. This week we’ll be laying down the island vibes with some reggae tunes that will ensure positive vibes all day, mon. Turn up the bass and kick back a little further in your chair as we fire it up with the Expanders and move through a reggae odyssey including Eek-a-Mouse, Yami Bolo, Rebelution, and the wise words of Jahmings Maccow. All fruits ripe, mon!

Have any suggestions for next week’s playlist? How about a playlist specific to a design task? Let us know in the comments!

Ezra Caldwell’s father was a custom wood furniture maker. He grew up playing in the wood shop. He now lives in Harlem and builds custom steel bicycles. He was also diagnosed with cancer, both devastating to his life and what he had built his life around. He was given 8 months to live. That was in 2008. Made by Hand has released another film in their series that covers people who make things by hand. The new film is called The Bike Maker and features Ezra, who tells his story and shows how making bicycles is as much about making time for what’s important as it is about working within constraints.

Living in the Fast (Bike) Lane

“Actually making stuff has always been a drive.”

Fast Boy Cycles is where it all happens–A one man shop that takes on everything from design to fabrication for the one of a kind bikes designed around the person. Many years earlier, he had started out on the path of Industrial Design until he became disenchanted with how almost everything he saw was being formed from Styrofoam or done behind a computer. In a moment of inspiration, he switched his major to Dance. He taught dance for many more years and as the years went on, the realization that he didn’t like dance at all grew more pronounced. Trying to quit, he ended up getting paid to teach dance for 9 hours a week, leaving more time and an interest from students in his commuting habits via bike. Once he did finally leave dance altogether, he realized that building complete bicylces for people is what he wanted to do. That was only the beginning of his adventure. The 10 minute film from Made by Hand tells the rest of the story.

Made by Hand / No 5 The Bike Maker

Key takeaways,

• Working in an artform where there are people you look up to provides a lot of excitement and encouragement.
• When you find out you have rectal cancer, and you like riding bikes, and the doctor tells you you can’t ride bikes, your perspective changes.
• You might die tomorrow, but what happens if you don’t?

Ezra on the bicycle building process:

The nicest things I’ve made have been in response to clear constraints. Simply heading to the shop to make something, anything at all, can inspire a kind of paralysis that writers have a name for. As a set of constraints, the bike itself is a pretty good start. It’s an elegant, beautiful design solution. But even there, even with the requirements of a frame and fork and two wheels, there turns out to be a lot of room for variation. It helps me to have a rider in mind. For me, the gears really get turning when I’ve got someone’s personality, skeleton, and needs to work around. So I’m looking for riders. I want to make you a bike that is built to your likeness. Your bike portrait.

If you’re interested in having a COMPLETE bicycle built by Ezra, you can order one though Fast Boy Bikes. Starting at $2200 US for a frame and fork, they don’t come cheap, but you can be sure it will be “built to your likeness.” Ezra also has a process blog on the site and a few process videos on his personal Vimeo channel, showing just what goes into making the custom steel bicycles.

Imagine a crate of trucks that can be shipped on-site, built within a day, then sent to the four corners of the country delivering food, people, animals, medicine or a new shipment of mobile devices. Our first world problem encompass jamming 1000 pieces of $9.99 flat-packed furniture into small, hybrid cars. In developing countries, flat-packed furniture may have a market, but Sir Torquil Norman is betting millions that flat-packed trucks definitely have a market. The Ox, the philanthropic venture of Sir Torquil and in development by Global Vehicle Trust (GVT), is a truck being design and built in Britian with the goal of helping developing countries gain control over the transportation of needed supplies. Now, they’re seeking funding to finish the project.

The flat-packed Ox truck

The key focus for such a truck is developing countries and limited manufacturing. The truck is reportedly capable of being assembled in 12 hours and disassembled in half the time by three men with basic tools. It has various configurations that allow transport of supplies or people, with a 2.2 ton payload capable of a eight 44 gallon barrel hauling capacity or carrying 13 people plus three in the front seat. The Ox runs a 2.2 litre front-wheel drive, diesel engine and is also fitted with a power take-off (PTO) that can pump water, saw wood or run a generator. The cost savings come around shipment and assembly.

Uniquely, it is capable of being flat-packed within itself – so there is no requirement for an expensive box or individual pallets, ensuring freight costs are kept to a minimum. Six OX vehicles, including engines and transmissions, will fit into a standard 40ft hi-cube container. In addition, assembly labour is transferred to the importing country, such as Africa, where local professional companies will be found to assemble and maintain the finished vehicles.

So, what’s the price on one of these trucks? The cost will be between $15,300 US (£10,000) and $38,200 US (£25,000) with the intention it lasts up to 25 years. This is certainly less expensive in comparison to other transport trucks, but not exactly one you grab another of after the kids have been a little too rough with the first one. The target, however, is not the individual, but charities and aid organizations–which still does not quite put that price in the ‘affordable’ range. This is the first flat-packed truck in development, but Mobius Motors has their own Mobius Two SUV with a friendlier target price of $6,000, however you won’t be carrying 16 people or a boatload of supplies very easily in this one.

GVT has not turned to Kickstarter yet, but the announcement about the project was to drum up support and funding. “We have spent around £1 million bringing the OX to the working prototype stage and we need a further £3 million to take the project through to a production-ready status,” said Sir Torquil. “This is why we are now ‘going public’ to highlight the need for investment and support in order to progress the project to completion.” You can contact Sir Torquil via the GVT website to help out with the project.

Source: globalvehicletrust.com
Via Automotive World

File this under your ‘good uses for 3D printing’ stack. The Local Motors Lab Team has been actively using the MakerBot Replicator 2 3D Printer to print prototypes, scale-down versions of parts, and smaller replicated pieces. Lo and behold, one of these sample parts actually found it’s way onto the Rally Fighter as a final production part. How did the Local Motors team optimize 3D printing on a consumer-level 3D printer for a final production part?

Makerbot x Local Motors

The current stock side mirrors on the Rally Fighter are slightly modified from the Dodge Challenger’s design. The modification came in the form of an integrated 1” machined mirror extension that allowed the driver’s field of view to extend around the wide body of the Rally Fighter. These 1” extensions proved to be both time consuming and expensive to produce.

Thanks to the DIY-spirit that is ultimately responsible for the entire Rally Fighter from wheels to engine, the LM Labs found a DIY solution with the $2,200 desktop 3D printer. After enough testing the team was able to print the 1” extension with the appropriate curvature and were able to fit it accurately to the existing side mirror design. After the vehicle undergoes a wrap, the extension is hidden and seamless.

via Local Motors

Perhaps the most widely-respected industrial designer of all time, Dieter has inspired thousands—if not millions of designers with his perspectives on ‘good design’. From Apple’s Jony Ive to budding design school students, the Ten Principles of Good Design is just as relevant today as it was in the early 1980’s when Dieter began to recognize “an impenetrable confusion of forms, colors, and noises” in the world of design and manufacturing. In honor of his 81st, perhaps take a moment to reflect–yet again–on Rams’ ten principles. Like a good book, I find myself reading from a different perspective every time I read them. Enjoy your cake, Dieter!

Good design is innovative

The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself.

Good design makes a product useful

A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.

Good design is aesthetic

The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products we use every day affect our person and our well-being. But only well-executed objects can be beautiful.

Good design makes a product understandable

It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product talk. At best, it is self-explanatory.

Good design is unobtrusive

Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user’s self-expression.

Good design is honest

It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.

Good design is long-lasting

It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years – even in today’s throwaway society.

Good design is thorough down to the last detail

Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the user.

Good design is environmentally-friendly

Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment. It conserves resources and minimizes physical and visual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product.

Good design is as little design as possible

Less, but better – because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials.

Back to purity, back to simplicity.

Have you ever wondered what Willy Wonka’s factory would be making if it ‘existed’ in 2013? After attempting and failing to 3D print a cake for a friend years ago, Silver Lake-based husband and wife design team Kyle and Liz took their understanding of complex geometry and did something Wonka himself would be proud of: they created a 3D printed sugar design lab.

The Sugar Lab

Back when they were graduate students, Kyle and Liz found themselves in an absolutely horrible predicament: they wanted to bake a birthday cake for a beloved friend, however they didn’t have an oven. Being the design savvy couple that they are, a 3D printed cake of their own design seemed like the best alternative. After a period of trial and error that lasted well beyond the friend’s birthday, they managed to print their friend ‘Chelsea’ a cupcake-top decoration that spelled her name in cursive sugar. Not surprisingly, Chelsea loved it so much that Kyle and Liz decided they would set out to bring 3D printed sugar to the masses post-graduation. Thus, the Sugar Lab was officially born. Perhaps someday soon we’ll be putting Rhino Grasshopper-generated sugar hexadecagon cubes in our coffee……well, we can wish.

The Sugar Lab

Shouts of hooray and songs of delight are going out among fans of Tinkercad this morning. My kids are ecstatic and honestly, I am too. Tinkercad is back. Over the weekend, Tinkercad announced a deal has been inked that will put Tinkercad site and technologies into the deep development pipeline of Autodesk. On top of that, the various plan types have been consolidated into a single free account with unlimited designs and all import/export functionality available (limited time through the transition). Autodesk has also announced that it will be incorporating elements of Tinkercad into 123D. Surprised? Shocked? Here are the details.

Stay Tinkering and Carry on

For many, the news of the acquisition wasn’t as much as a surprise as it was a shock–You hear of Tinkercad shutting down, you grieve, you move on. Looking for alternatives, you find there is no match, then struggle each day learning SketchUp, Blender or the like. Then as quickly as it’s gone, it returns–When software dies, it dies, right? That’s it. Unless it’s a perfect opportunity for a larger company to make a play, as it happens.

Though Tinkercad may may not be an attractive solution to 3D modeling for everyone, it is used by many a maker, educator, student, child and parent to learn, teach and explore 3D design. And, it’s certainly no surprise that they’re excited to see it back. The Tinkercad announcement…

If you remember the news of Tinkercad shutting down, you’ll recall the mention of Airstone, and that Tinkercad Gen6 geometry kernel inextricably linked and living on through the new realtime product simulation environment. So, how does this work with Autodesk buying the Tinkercad technology? From Kai,

Autodesk purchased all Tinkercad assets including the revolutionary Gen6 geometry kernel. When we initially announced the shutdown the source code was organized such that a separation of Airstone and Gen6 looked nearly impossible. A few weeks ago we had a serendipitous breakthrough in how Airstone is built which cut this dependency. Once this happened the deal suddenly became possible.

This is huge for Autodesk, they now own a new solid modeling kernel. A very capable, very powerful, web-based solid-modeling kernel. Autodesk has the plan to “incorporate elements of the Tinkercad technology and user experience into the Autodesk 123D family.” Some would say Tinkercad integration will improve the entire line of apps and could even, for the most part, replace 123D Design. The acquisition is a move that lines right up with Autodesk’s cloud computing initiative and their 123D platform, bringing design options out to a wider range of people, giving those who are interested in making and those who are just starting out in 3D design more resources to make it happen.

In a sense, the announced shut down of Tinkercad gave a curt perspective to putting your trust in storing ideas in the cloud. With Autodesk taking over the site assets, there’s likely a sense that ones data will be safer, but if Google is any evidence that a trusted service (Google Reader) can be shut down once it’s decided it’s no longer profitable, the reality is any cloud-based service provider could decide the same. I imagine Autodesk is in it for the long haul though and with the online and offline abilities they provide, I hope to see a consolidation of both that would truly make design accessible, regardless of connection.

Are you happy to see Tinkercad back?

I bet, next to those dusty engineering and design textbooks on the shelf, you have a few picture books that have led to endless inspiration since you were a child. No? A comic book? Dilbert? *cringe* Nothing? Well, perhaps you had a favorite as a child, There Are Rocks in My Socks! or Where the Wild Things Are. Over at Muddy Colors, Author/illustrator Adam Rex describes the process he goes through to turn an authors words into illustration that eventually become the 32-40 page picture book you buy for a child. Grab a cup of Keurig and delight yourself in the process of what it takes to make it happen.

Picture this

Adam Rex is an American author and illustrator from Tuscon, Arizona. You may have heard of Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich or a book he did with author Neil Gaiman called Chu’s Day. There may not seem like a lot to a picture book, but Adam puts the perspective into the process, starting with the manuscript.

So I print [the] manuscript out and start marking it up. I draw brackets around sections that I think ought to stay together on a page or a spread. This turns into a bit of a puzzle for at least a couple reasons–because you want to be deliberate about where your page-turns are falling, and because virtually all printed books have a page count that’s divisible by eight… Once I know what’s going where I can start sketching the thing out, and I always end up doing something like this:

Alex doesn’t side step the not-so-fun details. As with product design, there’s that stage where you get feedback and input from customer or colleagues. Changes are discussed, changes are made, re-made, sometime scraped and started again, refined, revised and finally released. Adam starts with a storyboard of thumbs, turns that into character sketches, creates a dummy book, then compiles that into a pdf version to present to the publisher.

Now’s when I start entertaining comments from the editor and art director, and make changes, and fight for things I don’t want to change… At this step I consider why I fail to meet deadlines, and why I’m such a constant disappointment to all who depend on me. You may want to skip this step, but I can’t seem to… Once the editor and I agree on everything, and the author either likes it or else the editor decides the author is wrong for disliking it and therefore doesn’t tell me, then I finish the illustrations.

Perhaps when you’re done with a project, you move on to the next. Maybe you obsess over the details that could have made it better. I tend toward the latter in almost anything I do, thinking of improvements, nit-piking, but there’s definitely a time when it’s finished to which eventually I focus on what I like about it. Adam relates a similar experience.

When I turn in the art I’m worried that it’s totally inadequate. When the book arrives in stores a year later I only see mistakes. A few months later I love it.