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.

Episode 11: Pensa!

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The "Women in Industrial Design" will be on view this weekend, on Saturday, June 14, for one night only at Astro's design studio on 348 6th St, as part of San Francisco's design week festivities. Of course, today's guest, Ti Chang, only moonlights as the organizer of the show: By day, she's 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 exhibition, which, remember, you are going to this Saturday night at 6pm.

Episode 20: Ti Chang

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?

Episode 19: Craighton Berman

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.

Episode 18: Michael DiTullo

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.

Episode 17: Caroline Baumann

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.

Episode 11: Pensa!

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