Core77 Gallery: Postcards from Asia, Manufacturing

Industrial Designer

LEGO
Billund, Denmark

You will: have a high level of general creativity and the ability to communicate these through hand and computer illustration; have a general passion for toys and developing characters/ boys action figures; be able to confidently articulate your designs to various stakeholders at all levels; have the ability to think beyond the 3D product, to the entire consumer experience; be familiar with using customer insights and research methodologies; and more.

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The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.

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As designers, we spend much of our time making things better, but what if to improve someone’s life, we had to make something worse? Recent RISD grad (alma mater shout out), Erik Askin recently published “Designed to Annoy: A theoretical look at designing inefficient packaging”, a thoughtful twist on the ubiquitous cigarette package. The idea of making something harder to use to encourage a user to rethink their consumption is poignant. I love the thought process and the visual exploration Erik shows. Check out the full project here.

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Design Researcher

IDEO
Cambridge, MA

The IDEO Boston office is looking for Human Factors Specialists with an edge, a spark, a knack. In addition to being empathetic, creative, and strategic, here are some of the qualities we’re searching for: Passionately curious – We want people who are excited to be in the field and as inquisitive about other people and their stories as they are empathetic. Captivatingly articulate – We want compelling storytellers who can get people out of their seats and bring tears to their eyes. Provocatively thoughtful – We want people who can challenge conventions and inspire teams and clients to translate keen observations into compelling ideas. Sensorially inspired – We want people who are inspired by emotions and engaged in all of the senses.

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The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.

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Core77 readers have loved Matt Brown’s “Design Fancy” columns (featuring Carlo Heckman, Kurt Manchild, and Berit Kalmar) for awhile, so now we’re making it official! Core77 welcomes Matt as one of our monthly columnists, who will provide fantastic (and fantastical) design fictions and artifacts on a regular basis.

Matt Brown is a designer from the Chemical City (Midland, MI) and works at IDEO in Boston. He studied Industrial Design at Kendall College of Art and Design in Grand Rapids, MI and got his Masters in Interaction Design from the Umeå Institute of Design in Umeå, Sweden. You can see Matt’s work on his website, and read more on his blog.

Welcome Matt!

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Art Director

Sony
San Francisco

Sony Network Entertainment + Sony Ericsson – Human Interface Design team is seeking a technology forward, confident, personable, Art Director who is a Designer at heart, someone who has a passion for mobile lifestyles and a solid understanding of design (typography, color theory, composition, etc.) You should encompass knowledge of Flash and motion design as well as visual/interactive/motion design trends. You are fluent in simple executions that make big statements. You should have an ability to direct film/video shoots from both a talent and production workflow sense. You are an expert in the visual vernacular and have real-world experience in bringing technology solutions to market that are based on profitable product strategies.

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The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.

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Starting Out is a new series by Core77 about designers who have recently struck out on their own. More than a string of studio visits, the series profiles talented, risk-taking professionals all around the world. We hope their anecdotes will inspire your own entrepreneurial spirit.

First up is Stewart Smith of Stewdio, a designer, artist, programmer and American transplant in London. We visited him in his shared studio space in Dalston. Read the interview below, or click through the jump to see some of his projects.

Top: Stewart Smith. Bottom: Browser Pong is a traditional Pong game played not *in* a browser window, but *with* browser windows. Play here.

Core77: What do you do exactly?

Stewart Smith: I’m a graphic designer, programmer, and artist. At the beginning of the year I relocated from New York to London. I run my own little shop called Stewdio and share work space with architect James Payne and fellow designer / coder / artist Jürg Lehni.

C77: What are you working on right now?

SS: I’ve got three kettles on the stove. The first is a low-fi, computer-generated music video for Tomas Halberstad, a musician in Gothenburg, Sweden. The second is a data visualization piece for SFMoMA’s upcoming exhibition “How Wine Became Modern” that opens in November. Finally—and a bit further down the road—is a data viz piece for an exhibition titled “Global Art and the Museum” that will open at ZKM in Germany next summer. The latter two are collaborations with musician / engineer / architect Robert Gerard Pietrusko. Meanwhile I’ve also become very excited about Jürg’s “Scriptographer” tool for Illustrator. He and I have just been talking about how we might channel that enthusiasm.

Top: Stewart shows us some data visualization sketches in Processing. Bottom: Exit (Terre Natale) is a 45-minute immersive visualization of human migration data in six narratives.

C77: Describe your toolset.

SS: I’m handcuffed to my MacBook Pro. From the moment I wake up to lights-out I’ve got it open, grinding away on something. Email and video chat take up an appalling slice of my day—coordinating projects and syncing up with collaborators in various locations. Although I’m up early I usually arrive at the studio late because by morning coffee I’m already hooked into solving some aspect of a project. Sometimes it’s difficult to push things aside long enough to put myself together and walk over to the studio space.

Right now my one-two software combination is TextMate plus Terminal. Recently I tried to answer this question about what tools I use but found myself failing miserably. I code quite a bit, but I’m increasingly interested in writing. There’s an oft neglected connection between the two. Writing good source code is like writing poetry. One wants to be concise but also expressive. (Did I mention I’m a rather big fan of Ruby?)

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Concept Designer

LEGO
Billund, Denmark

You will: work with Buildable Action Figures, such as BIONICLE®, Hero Factory and Ben10. You must: have 2+ years experience; have the ability to express your ideas/ concepts through hand sketches and computer illustration; be able to confidently, verbally communicate and ’sell’ your ideas both internally and externally; have a demonstrated ability to work across consumer touchpoints, eg packaging, web; have a passion for toys and sculpted/digital characters as well as an interest in comics/video game characters/stylized film characters.

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The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.

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Significant Objects was founded by Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker in 2009, as a quasi-anthropological experiment analyzing how inanimate objects become significant via narrative—and it’s also turned into a literary journal secretly published on eBay. Most recently, it has become a fundraising outfit for good causes.

Glenn and Walker began recruiting writers to invent stories about doodads they had picked up in thrift stores or at yard sales. Their theory was that even imaginary narratives could add measurable value, and they tested this by selling the objects with their newly invented Significance on eBay. Once the experiment proved their point, they realized we could convert this insight into positive force. Launching a new round of story + object auctions, they raised more than $2,200 for 826 National, a nonprofit that tutors young people in creative and expository writing. Presently, Significant Objects v3 is raising money for Girls Write Now, which mentors at-risk young women in New York City. Along the way, the project has caused a remarkable body of fiction to come into existence, with contributions from William Gibson, Curtis Sittenfeld, Myla Goldberg, Nicholson Baker, Neil LaBute, Bruce Sterling, Meg Cabot, Colson Whitehead, Lydia Millet, Lucinda Rosenfeld, Ben Katchor, and many others.

This week’s objects were chosen and donated to the project by Paola Antonelli, senior architecture and design curator for the Museum of Modern Art. They have been given significance by Jim Shepard, Scarlett Thomas, Ron Currie Jr., Helen DeWitt, and Matt Brown.

The series kicks off today— stay tuned for all of our cross-posts.

Find out more about the Significant Objects at their homepage, on ebay, and on twitter. Read about Girls Write Now, the non-profit this series will help support, here.

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The Revo Heritage in its natural setting.

As an interaction designer, I steel myself for disappointment in almost every consumer electronics product that I buy, apart from those by that company in Cupertino. Practically every device I own falls into one of two categories. Some have decent product design chops, but the interaction design feels like it was created by another department who never even bothered to chat with the design team around the water cooler. The others have interfaces that work well enough, but the device itself looks like the worst excesses of a teenage boy’s doodles on the back of his schoolbook.

For a long time, I have wanted the device that does it all—docks my iPod, receives Digital Audio Broadcasts (DAB) and FM radio in addition to being Wi-Fi capable, but resisted the urge to buy yet another consumer electronics product that I was just going to end up hating. However, just before Christmas I treated myself to an early present—the Revo Heritage Radio. Quite apart from satisfying all my music needs in the kitchen (it also hooks into Last.fm), it’s a beautiful piece of product design.

I’m waxing lyrical about the Revo Heritage because it was evident from the outset that an awful lot of attention to detail had gone into designing not only the device but the interface. I felt praise was due and pinged an e-mail to Heritage Managing Director, David Baxter, who mailed me back straight away saying, “Thanks for taking the time to write, it really made my day.” I wanted to know more about this small company based in Scotland turning out such great products—the Heritage just won a 2010 Red Dot Product Design Award.

Revo’s other products have a more obviously technological look to them, but the Heritage makes a deliberate break from this, so I was intrigued by the influences.

In a reversal of process, these early sketches were actually done after the initial computer renders in order to quickly think through variations.

“As a brand, Revo was a relatively late entrant to the DAB digital radio market, with our first product (Pico) going on sale in December 2006,” says Baxter. “At that time, the market was dominated by a collection of retro-influenced radios housed in wooden cabinets. There was very little visual differentiation between brands, and in my opinion a general lack of imagination. My view was that Revo should go the other way, by producing radios with a very contemporary look and feel—anti-retro to a certain extent. Why would a retailer want to stock yet another me-too, wooden boxed retro-radio brand? We decided that design and modernity would be our point of difference. We boldly said that we’d never produce a wooden radio, and joked that we wanted to be ‘more B&O than B&Q.’

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An indoor forest at Machine Project created by Sara Newey and Christy McCaffrey; Not For You, 2006, galvanized steel, dimmer, bulbs, West of Rome, 2006.

If there’s one thing wide, sprawly Los Angeles can pride itself on having, it’s an abundance of space. But now, as I walk though neighborhoods filled with empty box stores and strip malls, I realize we may have far too much of it.

Luckily, we’re also blessed with an abundance of creatives who have the desire to occupy it. Emi Fontana has filled vacant retail stores with art installations, and even used an empty modern house high in the hills above Pasadena to install a site-specific installation by Olafur Eliasson. In L.A.’s Chinatown, Wendy Yao sells a collection of zines, handmade jewelry and records out of a miniscule strip mall, which has led to a variety of unusual temporary venues. Nearby, Mark Allen uses his small storefront as a place for identifying (and eating) edible insects, holding welding classes and orchestrating temporary takeovers of entire museums.

Last month I saw these three visionaries speak as part of a L.A.-focused program at ARCOmadrid, Spain’s contemporary art fair. The panel featuring Fontana, Yao and Allen, and moderated by UCLA’s Russell Ferguson, was entitled “Alternative Spaces for Art,” but for me, it had a far more entrepreneurial tone than that. Each of them have filled a very real need in the community and turned wasted, overlooked spaces into destinations in themselves. The fact that these three creatives have founded true cultural centers and succeeded in doing it in a place as notoriously scattered as Los Angeles makes me believe their concepts are true models for success.

I bring this up now because probably every designer, architect or artist I’ve ever spoken with has expressed the desire to open and operate a space: a gallery, a store, a classroom. And I would say this is the time. There’s a reason this is the age of the pop-up shop: space is available, and it’s yours for the taking. Use this moment when you’ve got a little extra downtime to inhabit the empty space next door, or some available space in your office that’s looking a bit lonely. Creating a space is the perfect opportunity to collaborate on a concept with other designers that helps all of you stay visible, busy, and creatively-fulfilled.

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