Flat-pack designs are among my favorite when it comes to simplicity and intelligent thought. Not only are they creating 3D space out of 2D packaging, but they almost always incorporate some sort of origami-like thought in the design process and solve often-overlooked problems. The Applique Pop-Up Corner Light is one of those designs, and solves…

The well-orchestrated ‘Low-Tech Factory’ contains a selection of machines designed by Bachelor’s and Master’s students of Industrial Design and Products at a workshop led by industrial designers Chris Kabel and Tomás Král at the ECAL University of Art in Switzerland. Now, if only all manufacturing processes could be this charming….

Inspired by handmade wind-powered toys that he and his neighborhood friends lost in minefields in Qasaba, Kabul as children, designer Massoud Hassani revisits his homeland with an updated design of the toy that beautifully detects and destroys the mines.

While we may not have microwaves that Tweet us when our scalding-hot bean burrito is finished, or a voice activated toaster that we can command to eject our toast as soon as we catch the first whiff of burnt crust, this touch-screen fridge concept is perhaps one of the more interesting ideas in the line…

Once every 10,000 years or so, you think back on life. Frolicking in new civilizations, rise and fall of governments, the best pie recipe conjured by humans… Then without a second thought to the present, thoughts turn to the next 10,000 years. What do you do? If you’re The Long Now Foundation you build a…

It use to be that nothing made us happier than duct tape, a pile of cardboard scraps and a pair of sharp scissors. We could make anything. Just this past week, I watched as my kids made a jetpack from a cardboard box, PVC pipe and an ample amount of broken toys and colored duct…

You have probably seen so many 3D printed corn starch and resin trinkets (BACON!) that you’d like to punch your neck, but before you inflict pain and blood-choking upon yourself, there’s news on the 3D print-for-manufacturing side. And by print-for-manufacturing, I mean, production-ready parts straight from the printer. Stratasys recently announced the availability of new…

While it may at first appear to be a colorized version of Joris Laarman’s bone furniture, the Multithread collection of 3D printed furniture is anything but. Design duo Kram/Weisshaar developed a software application that automatically modifies joints to support asymmetric force loads–followed by painting the units to show where the force is being distributed in…

For those ‘Paper Junkies’ out there, your world just got a whole lot more colorful. FiftyThree has released a much-anticipated color upgrade to their Paper app, as well as a new touch sensitive feature for your iPad masterpieces.

When your fingers are slammed in a trunk or car door, you’ll experience a great, yet painful, appreciation for the tolerances that are built into the gaps. When your double mocha latte goes flying into the dash and you spend the weekend cleaning the crevices with Q-tips and your favorite soundtrack, even more so. There’s…

In a short but sweet video recently released by the future-forward online media hub Crane.tv, Marc Newson provides some interesting insight into the current industrial revolution and how “you don’t have to be a designer to design anymore.”

Raising money on Kickstarter might be the next most difficult undertaking to raising children (or a crop of heirloom tomatoes), but a few projects have made it look easy. Bright Ideas is a book–a Crowdfuding Almanac–that goes straight to the source, with stories, lessons learned and a good dose of thick, gritty process from many…

You know, lately, it’s like the internet got all kinds of excited and threw up 3D all across your web browser. It’s actually quite a few companies who are tickling the tummy of the web, causing all sorts of sites and ideas about how we can view and interact with 3D within the browser. Most…

I challenge you to find a better looking iPad stand at the cash register. You’ve probably seen a few small businesses using an iPad and a Square Card Reader to push consumer purchasing power into the future. I see it more every day. Many stand awkwardly holding the iPad as they ask me to jab…

More web-based model viewers?! Say it isn’t so. Yes, yes it is so. Sketchfab has actually been around for a bit, but there’s more to upload-n-go site than meets the eye. While many of the 3D web viewers are focused on building in a high level of collaboration, battling back and forth with each other…

I’ve got a soft, gooey spot for vintage designer chairs. Mostly, just for looking at them though, thinking, “That looks like a chair I could sit in with a pipe, a tumbler of scotch and an expensive looking mustache.” The Eames chair is exactly one of those types of chairs. It’s manufactured at the Herman…

Bacon. Impossible to eat while working on a touchscreen. It’s an awful, AWFUL problem that needs to be dealt with. Ya know, we’ve toyed with the idea of touchscreen interfaces for interaction with CAD data, but it’s always been a bit of a transitional solution to working in 3D. I don’t know why grabbing loose…

Back when I was in design school my fellow students seemed to have one of two traits that were exceptional in their own right: Sketching or CAD Modeling. Ketchup or Mustard. Peanut Butter or Jelly. Alone these things are ‘okay’. Put them together and you have an unstoppable force capable of breaking the outer limits…

Last week Luxology and The Foundry announced a merger. The CG/VFX scene was all abuzz and many a product designer head was popping out of cubicle, office windows and coffee shop to see what the craziness was all about. We caught up with Luxology CEO Brad Peebler to get the lowdown on the merger and…

Rumors were swirling of the launch of a new 3D printer by a relatively unknown, yet pedigree group of MIT grads who call themselves Formlabs. And yesterday, they unveiled the Form 1 3D Printer on Kickstarter. Backed by glowing recommendations of John Hirschtick and Skylar Tibbits, the Form 1 seems to be an ‘it’s all that’…

I was really excited about this project (and still am) but Kickstarter has left a bad taste in my mouth with their silly policy change banning product renderings and simulations. That said, I’ll focus on the excitement I have for a project I jumped on earlier last week. Boys have robots, LEGO, and a ton…

I’ve marked today as the day I’ve seen the largest number of ‘WTF’s ever recorded by man… in the field of product development. Three new policies for product design and hardware projects were set in place by Kickstarter as described in their blog post, Kickstarter is Not a Store. It’s a game changer for those…

You’re in a meeting discussing schedule. The manager pauses mid-sentence and says, “Pop!” The boxy device in the middle of the table fires a fluffy popcorn morsel directly into his gaping mouth hole. Buttery, popped-corn heaven. The Popinator is a device from purveyors of fine popcorn snacking, Popcorn Indiana. They’ve revealed an internal project, designed…

Combining new and old, Ross Barber, at the London College of Fashion, has been stitching leather with 3D Printed pieces to create these absolutely superb ‘Future Noir’ shoes. It’s beyond commercialization at this point, so it’s not going to be available at Target soon or something you could buy and rock out with at a…

Hey, we haven’t done one of these in a while! What’s going on in Crowdfundland? Brilliant ideas? Or Annoying ones? We probably only notice the brilliant ones, because Kickstarter filters search results to prevent the unsuccessful campaigns from appearing. Hey Google indexes the internet so I only get the most ‘cited’ pages out there. Same…

When cycling, you typically don’t want invisibility to be any part of your ride. However, if you have a high sense of fashion and enjoy the wind flowing through your stylish locks, you will be glad to know there’s an alternative to the traditional bicycle helmet. The Hövding is the design thesis, brought-to-life brain-child of…

Wood, steel, concrete. It’s a match made in design studio heaven and the perfect combination for an iconic, highly-priced reimagining of the chunky WWII era searchlights that entire Battalions were formed around. Having seen that New Duivendrecht launched the Barrel Lamp light design from design duo Tim Smit and Erik de Nijs of Nieuwe Heren,…

M.C. Escher, one of the great rappers of art and mathematics, whose work has been plastered across college dorm rooms and famous galleries alike for decades. His work has been given a new twist – literally. All those impossible shapes you saw on the cover of your grade 11 algebra textbook (just to give you…

You know when you show up to the coffee shop (or office) and pull a small bamboo case from the inside pocket of your tweed jacket, people are gonna drop jaws, followed by their fraps and microwaved scones. The PHX-1 from Big I Design is a creation of the big idea duo Chadwick Parker and…

We usually save the less designy, more artisticy stuff for the Friday Smackdown, but these images are just too good to pass up. Mars: Adrift on the Hourglass Sea is a surreal vision of life(?) on Mars as photograpghed and digitally enhanced by Kahn & Selesnick. The aspect we find fascinating is not only the…

RichRap out of Gloucester, UK has been colouring his work with a new type of multicolour and multi-material extruder. 3 filaments enter – only one can leave. That sounds like an epic extruder in my book. RichRap’s extruder produce vibrant yet oversaturated coloured prints – not really the fidelity you need to make exact replicas…

How do you stop sending your kitchen sets to the dumpster bin? If your IKEA, you bring on the power of 3D rendering. The massive Swedish furniture manufacturer is transitioning part of its photography effort from the studio to the screen, bringing on more virtual showrooms to tantalize your consumer tastebuds and at the same…

Have you tried to touch and move something on a screen that isn’t touch-sensitive? As my computer-screen will attest, my kids try it ALL THE TIME – flipping through photos, tapping ‘OK’, spinning 3D models – can’t be done on my monitor yet. We’re in that transition, and if the research that a PhD student…

The iPhone 5. Weeks away, yet there’s sure to be someone already camping out in anticipation of launch day being announced. Well, you yourself don’t have to neglect your better senses quite yet, and can get your iPhone accessory-buying fix before news of the phone even hits the web waves. FurnLab just launched a new…

Perhaps high-priced, iconic sculpture added to a scenic seaside village leaves you yearning for a trip to the untainted wilderness, but if the site of carbon fiber and steel structures erupting from the earth make you feel alive, you’ll want to see the process of how this one was created. Bart Hoedemakers captured New Zealand…

Matt Strong has begun a Kickstarter campaign to sell the Tangibot, another 3D Printer. Wait it’s not just any 3D printer – it’s an exact copy of the Makerbot Replicator, and a relatively cheaper one at that. $1,199 instead of $1,749 for a single extruder and $1,299 instead of $1,999 for a dual extruder. Discussion and…

Feats of Engineering. 3D Visuals. There are plenty of both. Projection mapping and slapping animated light effects on historic building seems to be all the rage. However, the way AntiVJ is interpreting a massive architectural masterwork of the past, in light of the architect’s thinking of the future, makes your blood pulse as much as…

Thomas Edison would have been impressed if he was alive today and could see what’s coming out of Kickstarter. Zombie Edison is impressed and wants your braaaaains. Some argue, Edison never invented to much – he just had the money to hire the right people (like Nicola Tesla) and get them to churn out ideas, cherry picking…

If you’ve ever made your own speaker cabinet, you probably didn’t approach the project using long strips of wood veneer and a tea cup. Maybe I’m wrong and maybe you created it using exactly the same wood craft manufacturing technique that BUNACO uses. BUNACO is Japanese brand and maker of tableware, lamps and other interior…

Oh, how I love a good typeface. If you cut one open, a good one–a Helvetica or a Gill Sans or a Futura–you would see the inner workings of a technical process that is filled with passion, color and inspiration of the time period in which it was brought to life. Oh, how I love…

Whether you’re recharging your mind with coffee or recharging your iPhone, you want to do it with style, you want to do it with ease and of course say, you want to say, I saw it on Solidsmack and bought it on Kickstarter. This week we bring your two projects that are crucial to charging…

The Rostock by Johann Rocholl is a 3D Printer like no other. Instead of your standard xyz gantry system, the Rostock uses 3 arms that are attached to 3 vertical axes, each independently driven by stepper motors. The end result? High-speed positioning, fewer parts, lighter setup and a look that is guaranteed to turn heads.

Who would have imagined that sound and shape mix and mingle so effortlessly! Brazilian designers at Studio Guto Requena took the street sounds of São Paolo and used them to alter a set of classic chair designs creating these fantastic Nóize Chairs. Yes, your chair has been infused with the Portuguese chatter, Samba music and untuned motorcycles,…

It’s summer and what else is there to do but hit the road, eat Corn Nuts and jam to “Free Ride” by CCR on repeat? Dave Seliger, a contributor at Core77, recently went on an extended road trip. But this was no ordinary excursion. In an exposé named Route 77, Dave travels around America to…

This is a short video of three cars printed by Objet. These tiny 3D printed carsare all created the same way, re-sized and re-printed by the Objet Eden350 3D Printing machines. Watch this video – I couldn’t believe the resolution to make such small things was possible – printed, pre-assembled – My first thought? Monopoly pieces.…

Yep, we’ve looked at our stats. There are, in fact, a few Solidsmack readers in the frozen wastelands of Canada. If you were in my neighbourhood, and you like making things, you might have dropped into Vancouver’s mini-Maker Faire. Mini it was not! Hundreds of makers and vendors descended upon the Pacific National Exhibition grounds…

Need to prove how high you made your friend jump with that last rubber snake prank? Look no further, Nike’s new Nike+ system offers an internal computer that measures – you guessed it – vertical leap, among other performance measurement details. I was at the Portland, Oregon Niketown over the weekend (just about 20 miles…

If you’re part of a minibus fanclub or have often thought of joining an electric minibus revolution, this new concept from design group Entastudio, may make the cut to go on all your event flyers. Oktay Türkoglu and Ramazan Kaya are the founders of the studio, heading up the five person group based out of…

My question. Would you even ride a folding bicycle? And if so, bike shorts or totally gangsta? There seems to be an awful lot of folding bicycle designs. But I’ve yet to see someone actually riding one or carrying one. Not in the city. Not in the park. Not anywhere. Still, they’re an intersting experiment…

Nervous System is a design firm that churns out mathematically generated CAD files which are then printed and sold online. They make beautiful earrings, necklaces, bracelets and home decor, the perfect gift for your nerdy girlfriend, math teacher or CAD-lover. Really anyone with a pair of eyes and a beating heart in my opinion (except…