When it comes to the expansive community of product designers focused on 3D printing as their medium of choice, few have offered more in the way of pushing the boundaries of what’s possible than Emerging Objects. Between printing a Utah Tea Set out of actual tea to creating a 3D printed house that you’d actually…

As anybody who has worked freelance knows, getting actual client work done is only half the battle; the other half is spent doing boring but necessary office administration tasks including account management, expenses and of course, time tracking. Thankfully, a number of Cloud-based solutions have helped streamline these tasks to put more actual work time…

Despite the growing number of options for connected note taking and options for sharing analog documents in the Cloud, most team interactions still rely heavily on the mother of all note taking surfaces: the whiteboard. Although modern smartphone apps are capable of digitizing a meeting’s whiteboard notes in a single snap and uploading them to…

Despite more recent efforts to clean up plastic waste in our oceans, a recent prediction by the World Economic Forum forecasted that the total weight of plastics will be larger than the total weight of fish – specifically due to the overall rise of global consumption. But what if at least some of those numbers…

The future of virtual reality promises immersive experiences that will completely redefine how we create and consume content. While we may not totally be there yet, some non-gaming VR “utilities” have been springing up that give further insight into what kind of experiences a VR headset will offer those who might consider using one for…

Although the sport of lacrosse may elicit thoughts of East Coast prep schools, the game was in fact invented by a confederacy of six Native American nations – the Iroquois – whose territory once stretched from Lake Erie in the west to Lake Champlain in the east. Unlike the contemporary lacrosse sticks of today that…

In most cases, using a 60,000 psi waterjet to cut material is a perfectly safe and sane process. For those who have an appetite for the recent phenomenon of object destruction videos, it’s also the perfect tool for cutting everyday objects perfectly in half to see a real-world cross section. On the ‘object destruction’ YouTube…

Despite revealing their anticipated new iPhone SE and a smaller iPad Pro at their Keynote last month, the most impressive announcement from Apple came in the form of Liam, an industrial robot designed to tear apart discarded iPhones. Announced onstage by the company’s Vice President of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives, Lisa Jackson, Liam is…

While Ready-to-Assemble or “flat pack” product designs have been in existence for over a half-century, the majority of these designs – more often than not from IKEA – have existed in some form or another as a piece of simplified furniture. With the more recent introduction of low-cost DIY electronics and methods of digital fabrication,…

As conventional casting methods have taught us, the best way for reliably manufacturing multiples of any object is to start with an accurate and sturdy mold. For their recent Fabric Forms explorative material study, however, architects Joseph Sarafian and Ron Culver wanted to do something that was anything but conventional. Working with the Grasshopper plug-in…

After raising nearly $1 million from their Kickstarter campaign last October, graphic designers Jesse Reed and Hamish Smyth successfully brought the original 1975 NASA Graphics Standards Manual to thousands of space and design geeks – a piece of exploration history that was previously thought to have been lost. Designed in 1974 by Richard Danne and Bruce…

Like our favorite woodworking YouTuber Frank Howarth (AKA Frank Makes), blacksmith Niels Provos has an uncanny ability to balance the craft of videography with working in the shop. The results – which are almost always narrated step-by-step – offer a peek over the shoulder of a master at work. Unlike Howarth – who focuses solely on wood-related…

Jack Lennie is a recent Edinburgh-based product design graduate with a first class honors degree, a SolidWorks certification and a national award under his arm. He also just released a downloadable build kit for manufacturing a motorcycle in nearly any modern workshop. Not bad. Designed to breathe a “new lease of life into damaged or…

Although you may not have heard it by name, there’s a strong chance that you’ve heard it in song. Analog Moog Synthesizers have been used by nearly every well-known pop musician over the past 50 years from Damon Albarn to Frank Zappa. Now, you can build your own Moog with a little DIY ingenuity and…

After reading a 2009 article that declared ‘the speed of human cognition dictates that 18mph is a comfortable speed at which to travel through and perceive the world’, Rhys Newman – a former VP of Advanced Design at Nokia and bicycle racer – decided to further explore the human relationship between bicycles and the many connected…

Despite the growing excitement around some of the latest additive manufacturing technologies, producing multiple plastic parts is still best left to traditional manufacturing methods – particularly injection molding. That said, there’s no reason why the two can’t continue to live in harmony as different respective steps of the design and production process. To further explore the…

After becoming increasingly concerned by the state of design around him in the early 1980s – or what he called “an impenetrable confusion of forms, colors and noises” – industrial designer Dieter Rams established for himself what is now known as the Ten Principles of Good Design. To date, these principles have provided the foundation…

Love ’em or just plain prefer something else, there’s a reason why Nike stays at the top of the innovation food chain. Going all the way back to the original concept of making a shoe from a waffle iron, thinking outside the box has been embedded into the brand’s DNA since day one. Like Apple’s…

Although short films that document manufacturing processes are as popular as ever, some of the most shining examples have existed for decades. In 1958, Dutch filmmaker Bert Haanstra paid a visit to the Royal Leerdam glass factory where an army of chain-smoking glassblowers delicately crafted crystal wares by hand. He also visited another factory that…

Although support material is a necessary part of the additive manufacturing process, it is far from desirable due to the time required to carefully remove it and finalize a print’s surface quality. But what if the support material became an actual part of the design of a product itself? In a recent collaboration with Materialise,…

According to industrial designer Oscar Diaz, despite the performance and display capabilities of today’s tablets, many are underused when sitting idle on the desktop. Frankly, we couldn’t agree more. The London-based designer, who set up his own practice shortly after graduating from the Royal College of Art in London in 2006, set out to create…

As far as DIY weaponry goes, Joerg Sprave of the Slingshot Channel knows a thing or two about turning otherwise random objects into near-deadly projectiles. Among his expansive portfolio of ingenious solutions for surviving a zombie apocalypse, the Slingshot Zombiehammer with Skull Ejector and Skull Splitter Zombie SlingSword are surely weapons that you don’t want…

Like many other designers and engineers who work in front of the computer all day, robotics engineer Mike Parris was tempted to leave the office environment for good in favor of working directly with his hands. At the time, Parris was working as a robotics engineer at Carnegie Mellon developing the technology that would later…

According to researchers at Princeton University and the University of California at Los Angeles, students who take handwritten notes generally outperform those who type via a computer. Not surprisingly, those who write their notes by hand are able to comprehend new material better while retaining that information for longer. But in a world where we…

As a teenager growing up and living in Venezuela, architect and illustrator Rafael Araujo became enamored by the intelligent patterns found in nature, particularly after learning about Phi – otherwise known as the Golden Ratio. The ratio, which equals 1.618 and is represented by the Greek letter ϕ, is commonly found in nature as natural…

We may still be quite a few years off from the Mattel hoverboard we were “promised” after multiple viewings of Back to the Future (sorry, self-balancing two-wheeled millennial movers don’t count), but that hasn’t stopped many of us from dreaming. Among others, London-based animator Garth Lee has taken the obsession to a new level and…

It’s no secret that the announcement of Carbon’s M1 3D printer is big news – but it’s not the only 3D printer that’s turning heads this week. Aiming to empower designers and engineers with the ability to 3D print nearly any product in a single process, Stratasys yesterday unveiled the world’s first 3D printer capable…

Forty years ago, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne established Apple to sell the Apple I Personal Computer Kit. Designed and built by Wozniak himself, the first units of the Apple I Personal Computer Kit would go on sale just a few months later for $666.66 ($2,772 today) and effectively put into motion one…

With an estimated 1 trillion plastic bags being consumed worldwide each year, it’s unfortunate to know that less than 5% of those bags ever end up being recycled. This effectively leaves roughly 95,000,000,000 opportunities for toxic chemicals to end up where they shouldn’t be. While thought leaders, lawmakers and grocers continue to find alternative solutions…

Since storming onto the 3D printing scene with a jaw-dropping TED presentation in March of 2015, Dr. Joseph DeSimone – CEO and Co-Founder of Carbon (formerly Carbon3D) – has fought relentlessly to bring his revolutionary CLIP (continuous liquid interface production) technology to market. Now, just a year later, the public can get their hands on…

When Harley Earl popularized the concept vehicle in the 1950s, it was used as a way for automakers to showcase new stylings and technologies – most of which were years ahead of any feasible production date if they even made it to production at all. In more recent decades, auto manufacturers have pulled out all the…

With the recent release of the Oculus Rift, it’s become clear that the age of consumer VR headsets is now upon us and it could only be a matter of time before “plugging in” to a virtual experience is scarily more exciting and immersive than what could be feasible without death or injury in real…

While most people prefer to park their car on the street in favor of using their garage as a workshop or walk-in utility closet, stuntman and woodworker Ben Tardif had other plans: he converted his entire garage into a giant marble rollercoaster. Called Marble Mountain, the ‘still under construction’ marble machine consists of 25 sections…

When it went off the air last month after 15 successful seasons over 13 years, most people thought that hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman were hanging up their MythBusters hats for good. While we may not be seeing Savage and Hyneman personally behind the MythBusters blast shield anytime soon, the franchise itself is being…

Before the iPad Pro, truly useful designer-friendly apps for iOS devices were a dime a dozen (arguably, they still are). Along the way, the Morpholio suite of apps proved to reinvent the creative processes for designers, engineers, architects artists, photographers and other creative individuals with their suite of cloud-based design utilities for multiple stages of…

According to acclaimed industrial designer and recording artist Karim Rashid, 3.5 days of your life are spent untangling cords. Together with industrial designers Richard Smiedt and Phil King, the designer is preparing to launch what he thinks is the ideal solution for device charging and cord management in the form of ‘Bump’. Consisting of a…

Since announcing their TV show “America’s Greatest Makers” at the Intel Developers Forum last Summer, the chipmaker has had high hopes that the armchair inventor-based show would build off of the success of their “Make It Wearable” digital campaign and take mainstream interest in hardware tinkering to the next level. This Tuesday, April 5th, we’ll…

The wild and unpredictable color combinations that result from melting crayons has been the cornerstone of many an arts and crafts project for decades – but why haven’t we seen a wood shop project yet? Whether or not you have a particular fondness for the Grateful Dead and funny tasting mushrooms, it’s hard to deny…

As a research group focused on making user experiences more seamless, natural and integrated into our physical lives, MIT’s Fluid Interfaces research collective exists at the forefront of what’s next in interaction design. Founded by tech pioneer Pattie Maes, the goal of the group is to design and develop interfaces that are a more natural…

Unless you have the same songwriting chops as Bob Dylan, it’s probably best to stick with putting bananas on your breakfast cereal rather than pursuing them as a musical instrument. In any case, that may soon change. Ableton, makers of the hit professional music production software Live, wants users to set up new and experimental…

As the world of IoT continues to reveal new ways of doing the same things better, certain applications have clearly been better than others. The BRIXO blocks from “lifelong restless tinkerer” and Quantum Physicist Boaz Almog is one of those few applications. Almog, who also gave a 2012 TED talk about quantum levitation, has been…

If failed 3D prints, Futurama toys and mini-LEGO Architecture buildings just aren’t cutting it for desk toys anymore, how about replacing that valuable desktop real estate with some glowing dinoflagellates? Unlike the crudely mass manufactured plastic vessels for mail order brine shrimp (AKA Sea Monkeys), the interactive glass Dino Sphere from BioPop is a true…

While you were tucking into Easter Breakfast or carefully organizing the Cadbury eggs in your basket this past Sunday, Henning Pedersen of Norway was delivering easter eggs via parachute with a hen mounted to a drone. It is 2016 after all. Pedersen, whose Norway-based company MAKEADRONE sells easy-to-build drone kits for kids, teachers and parents,…

Ten years ago, Brooklyn filmmaker Gary Hustwit began filming what he described as a “geeky side project”: a documentary about typography and graphic design called Helvetica. What started as a side project soon turned into a mini-phenomenon that became the foundation for two other documentaries: Objectified, which focused on the human relationship with manufactured objects,…

It’s been a little over a year since Microsoft first introduced the HoloLens, and while we’re still waiting for it to become a polished consumer product, the company is gearing up to release the $3,000 Developer Edition of the device – which could be shipping as early as this week. While we’re still yet to…

It was just last week when Valve announced that they were making the CAD files for the external parts of their Steam Controller publicly available for users to mod, accessorize and 3D print. Now, Amazon wants to get on the DIY wagon, too. Organized and published to GitHub by Amit Jotwani, Amazon’s senior evangelist for…

In what is likely going to be a more commonplace business strategy for some hardware developers, Valve, creators of the popular Steam gaming platform, have released the mechanical CAD geometry for their popular $49.99 Steam Controller. Under Creative Commons licensing, the geometry for all of the externally visible parts is free to download in a…

Unless you’ve been under a rock, you’ve likely seen a lifetime’s worth of ‘Maker’ videos since the movement took off as a choice of narrative for both independent filmmakers and marketing teams alike nearly a half-decade ago. Unsurprisingly, the movement has been met with a fair share of parodies over the past few years – but…

During the late 1920s – just before The Great Depression – those who were fortunate enough to own an automobile preferred the bright highlight of a whitewall tire to contrast against the increasingly gloomy and dark surroundings. Ironically, because blackwall tires required less effort to maintain after curb scuffs due to a greater amount of…

Why does modern furniture have to either be expensive or low-quality? Such is the pressing question that a team of 9 designers from California-based online home goods brand SWENYO recently asked themselves. Aiming to bring premium products that embrace a balance of form and function to today’s average consumer, the design team turned their attention…