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.