Core77 Podcast

Designers Jesse Silver and Joerg Student met at IDEO roughly a decade ago, but the two have more common work experience than that: They are the cofounders of FoldHaus, an art collective that has designed and built several large-scale, LED-festooned kinetic sculptures for Burning Man. Student is now Executive Design Director at IDEO and Silver is now Vice President of Product at PAX Labs, but they maintain Foldhaus as a going concern, powered by a small army of volunteers. We spoke with Silver and Student about both of their careers, and also to get the skinny on what it's like to design and build something for Burning Man's famously dusty playa.

How to Fund Your Social Impact Design Project: Joe Speicher of Autodesk Foundation (Core Talk Ep 4) by Core77

PostlerFerguson talks with Core77 about their time spent designing consumer products—we discuss their favorite kinds of projects to work on, the pros and cons of working with small vs. bigger clients as well as what they are looking for in the 2017 Core77 Design Awards consumer product submissions.

Petrula Vrontikis, the Core77 Design Awards Design Education Initiative jury captain, talks with Core77 about her teaching methods that emphasize the importance of professional knowledge as well things she hopes to see evolve in the education of design.

On our first episode of "Core Talk", we speak with LAYER founder Benjamin Hubert about the future of design and what he's hoping to see from Core77 Design Awards submissions this year.

If you take away only one thing from this episode of Afterschool, I want it to be this: If you're in San Francisco this Saturday, June 14th, you have to, have to, have to go to the Women in Industrial Design show. As far as its organizers can tell, and this sounds crazy but it's true, this is the first American show in at least several decades to be dedicated to the work of women industrial designers. It’s being held at Astro’s design studio on 348 6th St, part of San Francisco’s design week festivities. It’s a one day only event running from 6-10pm on the night of the 14th. Tickets cost 15 bucks at the door and they cover hors d’ouerves, drinks, admission, and the cost of the non-profit event. The Women in Industrial Design show also happens to be run by today’s guest. Ti Chang, is an industrial designer and the co-founder of Crave, a luxury sex toy company based in SF. We talk about her path to starting Crave and how she came to organize the Women in Industrial Design show, which remember, you are going to this Saturday night at 6pm.

You’ve probably seen Craighton's work around before. He’s the guy who did that lamp made of an orange extension cord, or that pencil sharpener built into a mason jar to help quantify how creative you’ve been, or countless sketchnotes from design conferences and events. Craig is in the middle of a pretty formidable transition with his work. He’s combining most of it under a new brand which he is calling Manual as well as launching a new product called the Manual Coffeemaker or MCM. If you haven’t seen it before, it’s this beautiful glass terrarium-like, pour over coffee maker, that is more of a kitchen appliance than a tool. The MCM is in the middle of it’s Kickstarter funding right now, which is scheduled to end this Friday, April 18th. As of this recording it’s not yet fully funded, but it’s inching closer and closer. So I thought it would be the perfect time to talk to Craig about what this experience is like. What goes on in the head of a designer who puts their passion project out their for public approval?

If you’ve hung around Core77 for awhile, you’ve probably seen the name “Yo!” pop up on the Discussions boards and writing the occasional article on the main page. Yo! happens to be the alias of our good friend, Michael DiTullo. Michael is a super talented designer who has worked for Evo, Nike, Converse, Frog and is now the Chief Design Officer of Sound United. Sound United is a Southern California company responsible for the audio brands Polk, Definitive, and BOOM. Today, I talk with Michael about what’s it’s like to exhibit at CES, how he approaches getting Sound United’s products sold into retailers, the intense competition of the Bluetooth speaker market, and what the design scene is like in Southern California.

2014 promises to be a historic year for the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum here in New York City. Their wildly successful National Design Award program, which has quickly become the most coveted honor for American designers, is celebrating its 15th anniversary. 2014 also marks the re-opening of the museum’s East 90th Street location. The former home of Andrew Carnegie is undergoing a dramatic 16,000 square foot expansion that is both modernizing and preserving the character of the 110 year old mansion. To give us an inside look at their year of celebration and change is the Director of the Cooper-Hewitt, Caroline Baumann. We talk about the National Design Awards, the expansion, as well as the museum’s evolving role, and what it’s like to run the only museum dedicated to historic and contemporary design in the US.

We’re entering a news window where most of the major stories will revolve around sports. Last night we had the Super Bowl and this Thursday is the start of the Winter Olympics in Russia. Designers are notoriously uninterested in sports. I know this because I’m generally the only one of my design friends intently watching a game. But today, I’m going to try to help anyone who carries only a passing or even nonexistent interest in sports by finding something else to focus on: the aesthetics. Specifically, the design of uniforms. To help me with this we have, and this is not an exaggeration, the world’s leading expert on sports uniform design, Paul Lukas. Paul is a journalist who has been following the nuances of sports aesthetics probably since he was a kid, and started actively documenting them in 1999 for NY’s indie newspaper, The Village Voice. Today, he is the editor of one of my absolute favorite websites, Uni Watch, as well as a contributor to espn.com.

You probably know FiftyThree from their iPad sketch app, Paper. Unlike other sketch apps, which are loaded with pro features, Paper is notable for how pared down it is. By using just six brushes, a color mixing palette, and intuitive gestures, Paper gets out of the way of the sketch process and allows you to focus on getting your ideas down as effortlessly as possible. FiftyThree has brought this same philosophy to their first hardware product, called Pencil. Pencil is a stylus designed to compliment Paper, and just like Paper, it eliminates pro features, making way for more natural feeling ones—like an eraser and probably the smartest take on a blending tool ever. Today, we have three of the industrial designers responsible for Pencil's creation: FiftyThree's Jon Harris, John Ikeda and Audrey Louchart.

When I was in high school and just starting to think about college, I knew I wanted to get into design, but wasn’t sure what that meant exactly. I liked making things and loved all of my art classes, but design wasn’t talked about much back then, which made it hard to learn about. And then, the iMac came out. In the shadow of the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, it’s hard to remember what a big deal the iMac was, but it was a really big deal. Pretty much every computer at that point was a beige box, and then out comes Apple with this translucent, Bondi blue, space orb. The aesthetic was head turning, but it was the design of how people would use it that captured my 16-year-old attention. Plug in the keyboard and mouse, plug it into the wall, and start surfing the internet. An all-in-one, fully considered, user experience. The iMac saved Apple from bankruptcy and helped put design on the map in the late 90s. Its designers were actually featured in interviews. And those interviews ended up being my first encounter with both the term industrial design and the leader behind the iMac’s design, Jonathan Ive. From then on, I knew I was going to be an industrial designer. I think it’s safe to say that over the last fifteen years, no design team has had more impact than Apple’s. Even once you get past the success of their products, they’ve reshaped not only how the world views design, but how the design industry views itself. For all that notoriety and impact, we actually know very little about Apple’s design team. Today we talk about Jony Ive and Apple’s Industrial Design Group with author Leander Kahney. Leander is the editor and publisher of cultofmac.com and has written three books about Apple: Cult of Mac, Cult of iPod, and Inside Steve’s Brain. His latest is called Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products.

You probably know FiftyThree from their iPad sketch app, Paper. Unlike other sketch apps, which are loaded with pro features, Paper is notable for how pared down it is. By using just six brushes, a color mixing palette, and intuitive gestures, Paper gets out of the way of the sketch process and allows you to focus on getting your ideas down as effortlessly as possible. FiftyThree has brought this same philosophy to their first hardware product, called Pencil. Pencil is a stylus designed to compliment Paper, and just like Paper, it eliminates pro features, making way for more natural feeling ones - like an eraser and probably the smartest take on a blending tool ever. FiftyThree has brought this same philosophy to their first hardware product, called Pencil. Pencil is a stylus designed to compliment Paper, and just like Paper, it eliminates pro features, making way for more natural feeling ones - like an eraser and probably the smartest take on a blending tool ever. Today, we have three of the industrial designers responsible for Pencil’s creation: FiftyThree’s Jon Harris, John Ikeda, and Audrey Louchart.

The past couple of weeks have seen the release of two next generation video game consoles: The PS4 and the Xbox One. I love when new consoles come out. It’s such an infrequent occurrence that every console becomes a milestone for design and technology. So I thought it would be fun to break down the game industry’s efforts, as well as try to decipher where they’re going next, with my buddy Peter Rivera-Pierola. Besides being an avid gamer and tech nerd like myself, Peter is also an industrial designer and a manager of strategic concepts at McDonald’s in Chicago.

Comic book artist Paolo Rivera has done everything from lusciously handpainted origin stories of Captain America, Hulk, Spiderman, Xmen, and Fantastic Four to helping reboot Daredevil to an untold number of covers for titles such as Wolverine and Guardians of the Galaxy. His work has a graphic, hand crafted quality that mixes elements from many genres outside of the the comic world. Best of all? He’s our guest today on Afterschool.

Brooklyn-based design firm Pensa, is helping to pioneer the movement for consultancies to bring their own projects to market. Earlier this summer they partnered with Goal Zero and AT&T to develop Street Charge, a solar powered charging station that can be easily installed in public spaces. Today I talk with two of Pensa's partners: Marco Perry and Mark Prommel, about their new project--the DIWire, a desktop wire bender that launched today on Kickstarter.

If you're reading this, then you've probably had the same dream as a lot of us: You want to make and sell your own thing. You may not even know what that thing is yet exactly, you just know you want to do it. And that can be daunting. Maybe even feel nearly impossible. Well you're in luck, because today's guest, Rusty Meadows, is just the guy you want to talk to. Rusty is the founder of the Nearly Impossible conference, an event for people who make and sell physical products that's set to take place this November 7th and 8th in Brooklyn. The event is geared towards sharing stories about overcoming the hurdles we all face when trying to bring our ideas to life. Rusty's experience comes from his role as manager of Tattly, the designy temporary tattoo company that celebrated it's second birthday earlier this year.

No redesign affects hundreds of millions of people around the world quite like an update to an operating system. In September, Apple released a doozy: iOS 7 is one of the biggest updates in the company's history, marking the beginning of a new era for it's software and Apple itself. Like anything that has hundreds of millions people using it, any change big or small is bound to cause controversy, but we have the perfect guest to help us sort through iOS 7. Neven Mrgan is a designer and developer at Panic. Over the past 15 or so years Panic has established itself as the premier Apple indie software developer, releasing wildly successful apps such as Audion, Transmit, Coda, and Status Board. In his spare time, Neven is also an indie game developer, with two iOS games: The Incident and most recently Blackbar, a text-based game about censorship. As you would expect, we have a lot to talk about.

Our guest today is Catherine Bailey, the co-owner and Creative Director of Heath Ceramics. We talk about her career as an industrial designer and her path to turning around a beloved American ceramic studio and manufacturer.

Our guest today is Gary Hustwit, the documentarian behind The Design Trilogy which features the films Helvetica, Objectified, and Urbanized. We talk about the trilogy and the new book he has up on Kickstarter: The Complete Interviews, featuring the full length and unedited interviews from those films.

Our guests today are the two co-founders of Studio Neat, Dan Provost and Tom Gerhardt. Their design for an iPhone camera mount, called Glif, was the very first product design project to launch on Kickstarter way back in 2010. Since then they have launched two other projects, Cosmonaut, a wide grip iPad stylus, and Simple Bracket, an easy to use iPhone app for filling out March Madness tournament brackets. Now they're back with a new project called the Neat Ice Kit (video below), which is designed to help you easily make clear ice for cocktails at home. If there is a theme to their work it's this: smart, simple, and successful. We talk about their approach to running a Kickstarter campaign, how they pick projects to work on, our favorite cocktails, the new iPhone 5C, and vintage software.

Our guest today is Martin Kastner, the founder and principal designer at Crucial Detail in Chicago. One of his major clients also happens to be one of the world's top restaurants: Alinea. If it sounds funny to hear that a restaurant regularly works with a designer, well: The food they create at Alinea is so inventive and so unique that they literally had to design tools just so people could consume it. If you haven't seen this work before, you owe it to yourself to look at Crucial Detail's website before you get too deep into today's episode. Check it out at crucialdetail.com. Seriously. You're gonna want to see this. Last year, Martin Kickstarted one of the objects he designed for Alinea's cocktail bar, Aviary. It's a drink infusion vessel called Porthole, which absolutely smashed through his goal of $28,500 to raise nearly three-quarters of a million dollars. We talk about that too. If that wasn't enough, Martin has one of the most improbable designer origin stories I have ever heard of. Don't worry, I'm not going to ruin that for you.

There’s a certain quality to Joey Roth’s work. It could be the honest use of materials, or the quirky essentialness of his form language, or maybe it’s clean functionality of his products. From his Ceramic Speaker System, to his poster series, to his self watering planter, maybe all you need to say is this: Joey Roth’s work is really good.

This week's guest on Afterschool is Robert Brunner, the founder of Ammunition in San Francisco. We go deep on the creation of the Beats by Dre line of which Ammunition has helped develop along with Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre. We also talk about setting up Ammunition.

Host Don Lehman chats with IDSA International Conference Chair Paul Hatch about the event in Chicago, which starts today.

Core77 is pleased to present Afterschool with Don Lehman. Our very first guests are Theo Richardson, Alex Williams and Charles Brill of Brooklyn furniture and lighting design studio Rich Brilliant Willing