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We were lucky to get a tour of the Patient Safety Training Center in the basement of the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center (DHMC) in Lebanon, NH. Although the name sounds rather banal, the Center actually operates like a "hospital within a hospital" used for medical simulations. The purpose of the facility is to train any hospital employee who might come in contact with a patient during their stay, whether it's a doctor, a security guard or even a janitor.

Since opening three years ago, the Center has seen between 5,000 to 10,000 educators and trainees pass through each year. The main hallway is lined with a nurses' station and an assortment of rooms, including an ICU, clinic rooms, a neo-natal room and an Emergency Department which can be reconfigured into an operating room. Likewise, each of the various rooms takes on a variety of roles depending on the simulation's needs, akin to a television set. A room used for clinic rotations for Dartmouth Medical School students in the morning might be transformed into, say, a living room for training nurses in home care in the afternoon.

The Patient Safety Training Center has also taken their simulations outside the fake hospital hallway. For the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Advanced Response Team (DHART), the hospital's medical transport helicopter crew, the Center put together a simulation of more theatrical proportions. In order to recreate a fire in the patient compartment of the DHART helicopter, the Center's staff put a helicopter on a moving lift inside the DHART hanger and added in dry ice, recorded sounds, and a strobe light to simulate the spinning rotors. While helicopter fire training sessions may be few and far between, the staff at the Patient Safety Training Center "like to think we can do anything down here."

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2011 has been a hard year. Global Revolution! Natural disasters! Bankruptcy! What's next? We're not hedging bets for 2012 just yet, but in case things don't turn out the way you'd expected, we've got you covered. Core77's Ultimate Gift Guide has everything you need to get through these hard times and survive through the... end times?

Today's pick is from Hand-Eye Supply.One part vocational haberdashery, one part supply store and one part gallery, Hand-Eye Supply is Core77's Portland, Oregon retail flagship. The store features hard-to-find workwear, supplies, tools, books and gifts for creative-types.

Survive Outdoors Longer's (SOL) "Survival Blanket" is exactly what it promises: its space-age "vacuum-metalized polyethylene" reflects 90% of body heat and resists shredding. But Survive Outdoors Longer has gone the extra mile by brilliantly printed wilderness survival tips directly on to the blanket... so if you do manage to survive (outdoors) long enough to make it back indoors, you can keep it for future reference.

See the full gift guide HERE.

A special Thank You to this year's Gift Guide sponsor: Felt & Wire Shop offering a selection of curated paper goods direct from designers.

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A year ago Nathan Bestwick was an industrial design student at the UK's Sheffield Hallam University. Now, after receiving guidance and support from UK-based business incubator Incub, the recent ID grad is preparing to launch his own company and self-designed product, the MillMii.

The MillMii is a manual pepper grinder embracing the principles of universal design. For those with arthritis, the difficulty of working a manual pepper grinder means they're relegated to using battery-operated ones, which of course leave behind a larger carbon footprint. Bestwick's innovation was to design a manual grinder that can be operated without the user needing to form a grip: They hold the device between two palms and perform a hand-rubbing motion to create the action.

Bestwick will be launching his kitchenwares company, Yormii, in February of 2012 with plans to produce more items already in the works. And in an era when designing a new product for mass production means you'll shortly be getting on a plane to China, Bestwick is keeping things local, relying instead on a Sheffield-based manufacturing facility called The Hog Works.

"It's generally understood that in order to manufacture products you have to source them from the Far East to be able to compete on price," Bestwick told Housewares Live. "I put this myth to the test and have found that Yormii is able to match Far Eastern production prices, whilst having the added benefits of greater control over the manufacturing process, the quality of the products we produce, and vastly lower shipping costs with a smaller carbon footprint."

Here's a news clip of Bestwick from earlier this year (sharing airtime with local artisan and jewelry designer Jessica Flinn) describing his plans:

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Artist: lunchbreath
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Showroom & Retail Designer
Thomasville Furniture
High Point, North Carolina

Thomasville Furniture is seeking a showroom and retail designer with a passion for home furnishing & accessories and a deep understanding of retail spaces. The ideal candidate has the ability to work both independently and in a group setting; to format strategic long term planning for showroom build-outs; to plan year showroom calendar for multiple showroom locations; and to understand and support marketing objectives. He or she will be responible for maintaining budgets and projecting yearly spend for showroom expenses, as well as working with merchants to plan showroom layout and best product presentation.

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The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.

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If you're serious about your 3D scanning then chances are good that you are already using the Geomagic suite of software to help clean up and translate scanned data into usable data needed for downstream applications. If not, welcome to one of the more robust point cloud, data crunching, file translation software packages on the market. Geomagic 2012 is the newest release and is packed in with some fresh enhancements just waiting to be unleashed.

Translating data collected from 3D scanning into something useful, no matter which scanner type or touch probe is used, needs some post-production work. It's similar to using Photoshop to 'touch up' an image to give it that extra TLC to make it shine. Whether the intended downstream application is quality inspection, translation to any 3D software or 3D Printing, the Geomagic software suite covers a versatile range of options. Some of the new features and enhancements in 2012 that stand out the most include:

• Sketching ability that will aid in the creation and editing of cross-section. This can come from either the actual point cloud data directly or from a polygonal model. This is useful especially when pushing the data down to your CAD program of choice.
• Remeshing tool that adds the ability to quickly and accurately "shrink warp" or retriangulate the data. Where this adds a huge boost and is extremely useful is in applications such as 3D Printing which needs "water tight" geometry.
• The new 'Patch' command offers a much needed functionality when it comes to fixing polygonal data.
• Native import of file formats from: NX, Catia, CREO elements/Pro, Spaclaim, and Solidworks. This adds an much tighter integration into your current CAD package without the possibility of data loss that can sometimes occur when converting to a neutral format.
• Quality Comparison is an aspect that's used to compared scanned data against 3D CAD models for surface deviation. The addition of 'Probe' allows for the testing of as built parts for first article inspection. The measurements gained from probing the physical model can be immediately compared to the digital version.

So whether it's the conversion of point cloud data to CAD or comparison and measurement to digital data the Geomagic suite—Studio, Wrap, Qualify and Probe—can be used in many various aspects of your process. You can download a free trial of the new Geomagic 2012 suite or see the patch command in action after the jump.

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WE-ARE-FAMILIA was co-founded by Jennifer Garcia and Christian Calabro nearly four years ago as "an extensive global network of creative individuals from all disciplines whom have come together to explore the powerful, complex ties which consciously and unconsciously touch all that we experience as humans." Their primary ongoing project has been a series of 25 unique keepsake boxes:

Each Keepsake Box is a sculptural assemblage of found, recycled and surplus materials [that houses] approximately 40 original 'mementos' contributed by its family of artists. Possessing nostalgic warmth yet employing contemporary forms of expression, the boxes provide a new and exotic understanding of ordinary things.

Last Thursday saw the opening of KIN CODA, a group exhibition comprised of boxes 12 through 25, at the Fritz Hansen showroom in New York City, which is home to the majority of the artists and designers. The latest installment of works completes the collection, featuring work by Brendan Ravenhill, Fort Standard, Chen Chen and Kai, David Weeks, Joe Doucet, UM Project, Nightwood, Silva Bradshaw, Steph Mantis, Kiel Mead, Iacoli + McAllister, Patrick Townsend, MN*LS, Brian Balderston and Garcia herself.

The challenge for each of the 14 artists and designers was to incorporate scrap material from none other than Fritz Hansen itself, including bits and pieces from, say, highly iconic Arne Jacobsen designs.

Fritz Hansen... donated a bulk of products and materials [that were] rejected, damaged or otherwise unmarketable. Fritz Hansen has long believed that sustainability, quality and design are all equally important. By creating products that are meant to last forever, even the remnants are considered useful.

A closer look at some of the pieces after the jump...

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At risk of incurring the wrath of, say, Harri Koskinen, we've come across yet another lamp-that-looks-like-another-lamp.

The name of designer Peter Bristol's latest lamp isn't a reference to the bathroom fixture company but the broader cultural phenomenon of standardization:

For better or worse, construction materials, methods, and dimensions are quite homogenized in the United States. From the 2×4 wall studs to the cheap light switches, it seems that when building a wall, location is really the only decision left to make. The utilitarian relationship between these standard materials, dimensions and parts comes together to create a modern icon that is hidden in plain sight. By deriving its character directly from this set of rules, the American Standards Lamp's is instantly familiar and intuitive to use (for people living among these standards). Flipping on the American Standards Lamp is as routine as unlocking the door. The lamp creates diffused light and provides an accessible extra power outlet.

Given that it's essentially a block of light—based on a standard construction measurement, no less—I'm surprised that the product photography doesn't show several "American Standards" lamps stacked like bricks (insert bad pun about the 'lightest' material known to man).

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Every wristwatch I've ever owned has the timekeeping device on one side and the fastening mechanism on the other; that's the established form factor. But demonstrating the seriously out-of-the-box thinking they've become known for, Art Lebedev Studio's Integralus watch concept throws that out of the window.

The Integralus turns the timekeeping portion itself into the clasp, dividing the hours and minutes into discrete sections that then snap together to close the circle, both physically and metaphorically. The adjustability that's been designed out of it is then provided by offering three different-sized wristbands.

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Back in the day at the Pratt ID studios, a truck would occasionally pull up, front-loaded with raw materials. If you were in the vicinity of the shop manager when this happened, you'd often be pressed into service to help unload stuff and manhandle it up to the fifth floor. Worst thing to unload: 4×8 sheets of plywood. Best thing: Those massive pieces of blue foam. Ever since then, I've always loved carrying huge things that are light as a feather because you feel like Superman.

Last week, it was announced that researchers at HRL Laboratories have developed a new material 100 times lighter than styrofoam, consisting of "micro-lattice cellular architecture" that is 99.99% air. Though technically a metal comprised of nanotubes, the material has surprising elasticity—"including complete recovery from compression exceeding 50% strain"http://www.handeyesupply.com/making it ideal for shock absorption, dampening, and whatever else HRL client DARPA can dream up for the stuff.

Dr. Bill Carter, manager of the Architected Materials Group at HRL, lays out the vision for these micro-lattice materials by drawing parallels to large structures: "Modern buildings, exemplified by the Eiffel Tower or the Golden Gate Bridge, are incredibly light and weight-efficient by virtue of their architectures. We are revolutionizing lightweight materials by bringing this concept to the materials level and designing their architectures at the nano and micro scales."

via pop sci

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