The Internet Archive discovers and captures web pages through many different web crawls.
At any given time several distinct crawls are running, some for months, and some every day or longer.
View the web archive through the Wayback Machine.
"Blinput" is a concept intended to make the lives of the visually impaired that little bit easier.
Baring something of a resemblance to Gordon Bell's legendary, lifelog pendant-cam, this concept harnesses the capabilities of the smartphone to allow the user to engage with an increasingly networked world. Blinput uses the phone camera to interpret the user's surroundings—as well as certain hand gestures, providing something of a navigation interface.
Developer Erik Hals, a recent Edinburgh College of Art graduate, had originally envisioned a new smart product to address the needs of the blind, but soon found that the network and camera technologies in the already widely available, and relatively cheap, smartphone were more than enough to build a solution around.
Blinput, still at a conceptual level, may need some work and testing—we're wondering, for example, how comfortable a visually impaired user would be in impairing an otherwise healthy sense of hearing with headphones—but you've got to give credit to Erik for an undergraduate project well presented with the video below.
Speaking of Tron, an unusual collaboration between Disney and Cappellini has yielded the Tron Armchair, designed by NYC-based Dror Benshetrit. The chair will make its official public debut in just a few hours, at Design Miami/Art Basel.
Dror's mission is to articulate the complex meaning of objects in the simplest of ways. Their uses become a part of their narratives, expressed in transformations that are both metaphorical and literal. Raw Data forms a jagged and angular landscape, serving as a muse for a chair that is comprised of intersecting layers and textures of 'digital' rock. Constructed of composite material consisting of impregnated fiberglass with polyester resin processed with manual layering, these Special Production Walt Disney Signature TRON Armchairs invite you to "sit off the grid."
Hit the jump to see some of the funky limited-edition paintjobs the chair will get.
Held October 8-10, 2010, at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, the AIGA Design Educators Conference "New Contexts/New Practices" offered a panoramic view of a transforming profession. By investigating how developments in technology, business, social priorities and even the very definition of design have roiled the field, the event sought to map a new, relevant landscape for design education and practice in the 21st century.
This mission was supported by a unique format. The conference, which was organized by NC State graphic design faculty, was divided into six topics: changing conditions, shifting paradigms, social economies, design research, interdisciplinarity and designing for experience. Each topic was introduced to the entire body of attendees by a provocateur, who raised questions intended to set conversations in motion. Such discussions focused on the trends, dilemmas and opportunities inherent in each subject area and involved the provocateur along with a group of scholars, or co-authors, selected by the conference organizers based on prospectuses submitted before the event. Each co-authoring session was led by a moderator and recorded by a writer. Conference attendees rotated among the different authoring sessions and were given opportunities to participate as well. At the event's conclusion, the moderator/author pairs presented summaries of the six sessions.
A crucial aspect of this format was that ideas generated during the three-day colloquy find a life and audience beyond it. Final presentations are posted on the conference website. In addition, the writers, employing their unique perspectives and voices, have synthesized their observations into the six reports that follow. Taken together, these essays provide a detailed overview, and their impact is being proliferated through simultaneous publication on Design Observer, Core77 and AIGA Voice.
Thanks to the conference organizing committee — Denise Gonzales Crisp, Meredith Davis, Amber Howard, KT Meaney, Matthew Peterson, Santiago Piedrafita, Alberto Rigau and Martha Scotford — for raising these important topics and extending the ripples.
As sophisticated software is increasingly used in hi-tech filmmaking for rendering, pre-visualization and so on, an interesting side effect has emerged from the special effects: Autodesk has enough juice, and fans of their stuff in positions of Hollywood power, that they can often finagle exclusive screenings.
You may remember from our coverage of Autodesk U. 2009 that we got to see Avatar footage (and tons of it) wayyyy before anything was floating around the interwebs. This year Cliff Plumer, CEO of digital production studio Digital Domain, showed up at the conference with exclusive Tron Legacy footage.
One of the things I really appreciate about AU is perks like this. While sci-fi clips are often screened at Comic-Con to take the audience's temperature--indeed, Comic-Con audience response to the initial Tron Legacy pitch clip reportedly helped the film get green-lit--AU has a different agenda: They show you unseen and finished product for no reason other than that it's freaking cool. In other words they're not asking "Hey, would you pay to see more of this?" It's more like "We have this stuff, we made it using Autodesk products, and we already know it's awesome. Check it out!"
By the way, Buena Vista/Disney security is no joke. At last year's Avatar screening, 20th Century Fox had guards there scanning the crowd with night-vision scopes to nail would-be YouTube leakers. Buena Vista cranked security up a notch: To even get in to the presentation, we attendees first had to queue up in a separate area across the convention hall to hand in our cell phones, cameras and even laptops, to prevent any sort of recording. A phalanx of employees sealed our precious electronics in paper bags that were stapled shut and squirreled away, and you got a color-coded, numbered ticket that corresponded with your bag. (All of the images you see here are stock shots culled from the web.)
Then we marched back across the convention center to the gi-normous presentation room, using our tickets to gain access. At the door, another phalanx of guards performed bag searches, in case anyone pulled a Michael Corleone in the bathroom and pulled something to shoot with out from behind a toilet. Finally we were allowed into the huge room with 3D glasses on every chair.
After sitting through some initial presenting, we were asked to put the glasses on, the lights went down, and we were shown what felt like at least 15 minutes of awesome footage. I won't release any spoilers, and you've only got two weeks to wait before you can see it in theaters. Suck-ers!
It's called Autodesk University, and a large part of the experience are the classes. Once you register for the conference, you gain access to an online catalog of dozens of courses all designed to help you create more effectively.
The sheer breadth of classes is bananas, as Autodesk offers so many different products across so many industries. I met engineers, CAD guys, architects, materials experts, German people--I realize that's not a profession, I just forgot to ask them what they do--as well as construction-industry folks and one guy who introduced himself as "a gold mine designer. As in, I design gold mines." (I only spoke with him briefly, and afterwards regretted not asking him "Why do people always get trapped in coal mines and never gold mines?")
The broad range of attendees can admittedly make smalltalk tough; at one lunch I shared a table with an extremely cute female who told me she worked for a uranium mining company. I spent most of the meal moving my salad around while trying to think of polite questions to ask about uranium.
Anyways, back to the classes. I tried to locate every class I could that pertained to industrial designers and stuck my head in as many as I could.
Some were lectures, like the one run by Germany-based Creative Solutions expert Michal Jelinek, who showed how to use Alias, Showcase, and Mudbox to quickly generate concept drawings and reduce what he called "mouseclick kilometers;" others were hands-on labs run by guys like Autodesk's SketchBook Senior Product Manager Christopher Cheung (more on him later) and industrial designer Kyle Runciman, inviting you to follow along with them while they deftly executed drawings in SketchBook Designer and showed you shortcuts and tricks. Others were hands-on tutorials like the ones run by Tech Evangelist Shaan Hurley, who showed how to run AutoCAD on a Mac. Hurley offered these classes in two flavors: For those with AutoCAD experience but no Mac experience, and vice versa.
The hands-on labs and tutorials were pretty wicked because the classrooms come loaded with top-of-the-line machines. The Mac classes I sat in on had G5 towers, iMacs and 17-inch MacBook Pros you could choose from, all with high-end Wacom tablets and Magic Trackpads. Pretty bad-ass. (From what I understand, the PC-based labs come with high-end Dell and HP machines.)
The classes also come with printed handouts and downloadable PDFs that you'll save as valuable references for later. As a registered conference attendee I had access to all of these online, and I'm sorry I can't make them available for download here--a lot of the packets had proprietary information in them, for example excerpts from professional training manuals and "Learn Autodesk"-style books, sometimes with the authors even popping up in the classes.
Despite the broad range of attendees, I found plenty of classes beyond the drawing/rendering ones to interest the ID'er, for those of you who are weighing whether to attend next year. Some examples:
- Using Autodesk Inventor to Create Precision Sheet Metal Parts
- Digital Prototyping: A Case Study of Plastic Parts Design
- Injection Molding Warpage Prediction and Mold Correction
- Photo-Based Reality Capture: Turn Photographs into 3D Models
- Cross-Product Workflow for Industrial and Product Design
- Mudbox: Textures for Architecture and Design
- Brave New Mobile World: Creativity and Design on the Go
- Sustainable Design Techniques in Digital Prototyping
The list goes on and on.
The only minor gripe I had with the class set-up is that some of the descriptions were less than clear; for example I had to ask Hurley in person which Mac-AutoCAD class was which, as he was teaching two variants that had identical descriptions in the catalog.
Of five people I randomly asked--I know, I'm not winning a Pulitzer Prize for journalism here--only one reported similar confusion, an Australian engineer who said something like "the class descriptions were a bit confusing, mate." (It's possible I added the "mate" part in a subconscious Australianization of my memory of him, but I do clearly remember that he rode in on a kangaroo, then caught a boomerang he had hurled seconds earlier to incapacitate a wombat.)
I asked the Australian if he knows Core77's own Glen Jackson Taylor, since they are both Australian. He assured me he grew up across the street from Glen, but in retrospect I think he was patronizing me.
We are a multidisciplinary design/build firm located in Park Slope, Brooklyn, specializing in custom fabrication, production, and installation for the hospitality, retail, and high-end commercial markets.
The candidate will use their design/industrial design knowledge to assess projects with a strong focus on the design, aesthetic elements, and manufacturing process. Key responsibilities include client interfacing, scheduling, quality control, budget development and cost control, adhering to aggressive deadlines, and interacting with multiple vendors.
Emily Pilloton of Project H was one of the speakers at this year's Autodesk University Keynote, and she delivered a fantastic speech that boldly touched on something we rarely hear designers speak on: Failure, and what we can salvage from that.
I founded Project H Design to take on projects that had social value. Our first project was the Hippo Roller redesign. The Hippo Roller was a device used and manufactured in South Africa to transport water efficiently. We took it on as a partnership with the company, Hippo Roller, to increase the shipping efficiency and lower the pricepoint.
This project was a massive failure on our part. We were sitting in San Francisco, designing for South Africa. We were disconnected from the user, from the manufacturing, from the context and the economics. And ultimately the redesigned version did not get made.
So it was a big failure, but in a way it was a success because we were able to pinpoint what not to do. And to write our future from there, [devising a set of principles, including] "Design with, not for." We don't want to just design for clients, we want to design with people and have a shared stake in the process with them. [Also] to start locally and scale globally so we will only take on projects in our own backyard that we understand and are invested in.
Pilloton then described Studio H, the new, and frankly ballsy, project that she and partner Matthew Miller have embarked on: Using design to teach kids, in a very hands-on way, a sort of shop class, in a failing school district in rural Bertie, North Carolina.
We realized really quickly that design for education only goes so far. And that to really bring design impact to public education, we felt like we needed to teach. And that there was something very unique that design could offer as an instructional framework; so we became high school teachers.
...Looking back to the Hippo Roller and where we started, I think the differences are pretty clear. For me design is not just about a product; it should be about a process. And not just about production and consumption but about education. And this is where design has real power. Where we're able to build creative capital in places where it did not exist before--outside of the design world, by the hands of underestimated individuals.
...For me, design doesn't get much better than this.
It's always interesting to take a look back at a year's worth of books, particularly from an industry still reeling from assaults to its very existence. This year, certain clear themes emerged from writers looking at the worlds of innovation and design.
Most clearly, we have entered the age of the individual. Emphasizing every person's ability to have an effect or make a difference was a theme touched on by many. The importance of cross-disciplinary innovation was another, with many outlining the powerful idea that innovation simply won't emerge from staring into a world you already know inside and out.
And even while many admitted that there are no easy answers to our time of global turmoil, there was an overarching sense of optimism too. Perhaps that's not entirely surprising--after all, who's going to buy a book in which an author stacks up the depressing evidence that we're doomed, doomed? But the cumulative effect was also somewhat inspiring.
Finally, this year's award for the Innovation Author's Preferred Hero of Choice goes to.... Johannes Guttenberg. Yes, some 560 years after the introduction of the printing press, it turns out that citing the German goldsmith is still seen as the best way to back up a theory about innovation.
Here then, in no particular order, are eleven books that made me stop and think this year.
This year's Autodesk University Keynote was delivered in a massive arena within the Mandalay Bay Hotel; thousands were in attendance. The scale of the space and the sheer amount of bodies filling it really drove home what a massive event this is, underscored by overheard snippets of conversation in every regional American accent and a myriad of foreign languages.
Autodesk CEO Carl Bass took the stage and asked the audience, "Why do we do what we do? Whether we're designers, engineers, architects?"
The answer comes down to a single word: Impact. We want our work to have a positive impact on our communities and our customers. So today we're presenting a goup of people who have had an incredible impact, or soon will, through their groundbreaking work.
The subsequent roster of speakers, all of whom use Autodesk products for their projects, was impressive: Core77 fave Emily Pilloton took the stage to talk about her new project (giving us enough good quotes that we're going to break her out into a separate entry, stay tuned). Cliff Plummer, CEO of effects house Digital Domain, talked about the years spent working on the forthcoming Tron and showed the internal pitch clip that sealed the deal. Escape Dynamics co-founder Dmitriy Tseliakhovich delivered an impassioned speech about his wicked, lightweight and low-cost space vehicle, powered by microwave beams fired at the vehicle from the ground, rather than using on-board chemical propulsion systems.
Of all the speakers we saw that morning, Tseliakhovich was the most mesmerizing, speaking like a man possessed by the notion of going into space on the cheap. The plan is for Escape Dynamics to ultimately engage in awesomely futuristic-sounding Space Mining. "Think of it," Tseliakhovich said. "A single nickel-iron asteroid in the vicinity of Earth's orbit has more platinum-group elements than have ever been mined in the full industrial history of humankind!"
Today, small teams of dedicated, passionate people are capable of accomplishing things that previously were possible only for governments and large corporations. With exponential developments in digital prototyping and the extreme evolution in software design development tools, we are able to take our dreams and put them into reality. We are able to develop our future.
A very cool moment came when Bass introduced Franz von Holzhausen, Senior Design Executive from Tesla Motors, who seemed to be a no-show as no one appeared; but then two large panels opened up and Von Holzhausen drove onto the stage, in Tesla's gorgeous Model S. The car is of course all-electric, so his entrance was jarringly whisper-quiet, as if the car was gliding across the stage by magic; the silence lasted just a few moments, as applause then drowned it out.
We were also excited to see Scott Summit, whom we posted about just a few days ago, also take the stage to talk about his work with Bespoke Innovations. We're currently trying to score an on-site interview with Summit, so stay tuned!
For the past 18 years, the Philadelphia Museum of Art has hosted a student design competition through Collab, a group that supports the modern and contemporary design collections at the museum. For
each competition, Collab chooses a distinguished designer to celebrate and poses a design prompt in the spirit of that designer. This year, Collab chose Alberto Alessi, and invited students to design a series of four tabletop accessories.
The winning prize for this year's competition is James Hughes for "Flow Series." James is currently a junior studying Industrial Design at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and he designed a series of porcelain dipping plates for oil and vinegar. Whimsically, he designed the form of a relief at the bottom of each plate, which uses the natural properties of each liquid to create a pattern that reveals itself during use. They are also stackable and feature a lip for pouring and draining excess liquid.
According to the designer, "The Flow Series is in line with both the history and aesthetics of Alessi's design sensibilities and American realities. The plates are simple yet elegant and heighten the experience of the user. A sense of thoughtfulness and tranquility is revealed during use, introducing a delicate sub-narrative to the dining experience. This subtlety epitomizes Alessi's playful attention to detail and speaks to the future of straightforward, honest design."
Behind the Scenes
CraftedSystems 
Dutch Design Week 2010 
Valencia Disseny Week 2010 
Influx: Meet the Makers 
Life Edited 
Book Review: Exploring Materials 
Book Review: Design is 
The Designers Accord Educational Toolkit 
The Designmatters Concentration at Art Center College of Design 
Coroflot's 10th Annual Designer Salary Survey
Starting Out
Sustainable Retrainables 
Powers of Ten 
Ars Electronica
London Design Festival
Maker Faire NYC
1HDC: Play-Doh Kicks
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BANGKOK INTERNATIONAL GIFT FAIR 2010
DUTCH DESIGN WEEK
VIENNA DESIGN WEEK
VALENCIA DISSENY WEEK 2010
My Concorde Thing
The Challenges of Teaching Sustainability: The RCA's Approach 
Politics Please, We're Social Designers 
The Design Response to a Wash of Green: Whole Systems and Life Cycle Thinking 
The Strategic Arc of Interaction Design: Moving Towards Holistic System Design 
2009 Design Salary Survey
Exploring Materials, by Inna Alesina and Ellen Lupton
Design is How it Works, by Jay Greene
Plastic Dreams, by Charlotte & Peter Fiell
77 RIGHTEOUS Gifts Under $77
Essential Tips for the Design Professional
Read our back-to-school guide for design students. A must!
