The challenge of staving off sickness from sleep deprivation suddenly has a direct correlation with chair design. A class of fourth-year Architecture students at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts may be use to sleepless nights by now and even more ready to prove they have the chops to join the design elite. Each…

Handheld scanning. We haven’t seen enough of it. There are a lot of moments when I wish I had a simple, easy-to-use and cheap scanner readily available. Say, I break my favorite cup after trying to escape out the window from wild dogs. Why are there wild dogs in my house. NO IDEA. So, I want to…

Let me ask you one thing. Have you ever spent 299 hours doing one, single thing? Besides eating? or sleeping? or jumping in place as you strum your ukulele to the sound of wet marshmellows hitting your bare belly? I didn’t think so. People who design and engineer machines or make instruments and art have…

I love a car with personality. Just today, I had a chat with a friend of mine who recently bought an old Honda, a ‘beater’ in desperate need of a paint job. He has a talent for the arts – Paint runs through his veins, so to speak. So, I recommended he graffiti his car.…

Ah, the camel. The friendly ungulate that provides transport, milk, meat and possibly the foulest breath you have ever smelt. Saddle their fatty humps with some medical supplies and you’ve got a mobile, milk-producing ambulance brigade that can reach speeds of 40mph, survive days without water and keep you company with its toothy, guttural melody.…

If you enjoy the plasticy smell of fresh cut PVC in the morning and iconic chair design, you’ll love the new butt hugging iteration from Kenneth Smythe. You’ve seen the asymmetric permutations of his designs before – open-source designs based on musical variation. But where those use materials that are more difficult to work with,…

Kickstarter is awash with iPhone, iPad and other Apple paraphernalia – it speaks the website’s yuppie creators and contributors – not that it’s a bad thing (Apple user here). After going through the website to make a long-overdue edition of Solidsmack’s ‘Wisdom of the Crowd’, I discovered that many of the best, most funded projects…

Do you have a soft spot for hardcore hacks, fanatical fabrication, robots, steampunk and funnel cakes? Do we even need to ask? It’s exactly why we were at this year’s Bay Area 2012 Maker Faire featuring all of that and a mass of 3D printers, tons of guest speakers, Tesla coils set to music and…

How are bikes made? In 1945? A film from the British Council helps us relive the experience of factory workers 70 years ago with a look at the machines, methods and process of bicycle making from start to finish. It’s a feast of machinery and manufacturing process at a time WWII was just ending, that…

You’ve probably seen the tiny, vibrating Hexbugs that flitter about. Well, they’ve got nothing on this completely spectacular, totally customizable upscale DIY version. We were out at the Bay Area Maker Faire over the weekend and one project we were sad to miss was DiYhumbugs project for kids. The vibrating brush bot that uses a…

I have a thing for fountains. Not the fancy, ornate sculptures you toss coins into or position amongst an unreasonable amount of concrete lawn ornaments. My fountains are the installations that are engineering feats in themselves. If I had a choice I would have fountains surrounding my house… my house would be a fountain, and…

So, you’ve started a Kickstarter project. You’re one of 12 contenders for a $25,000 dollar prize. It all relies on one thing… The vote OF THE MASSES. I know, maybe you’re not one of the 12, but someone, somewhere in the depths of crowd-funded project dependence is, and feels pain just like you, the pain…

Raise of hands. How many have a chair made of recycled New York City water tower sitting in their living area? No? How about outdoor armchairs made of Indonesian scrapwood? (the best kind of scrapwood, I might add.) No again? Well, you may very soon want one of both. There’s an earthly aura about fine…

There’s a place we’ve been warned about called, THE FUTURE. I’m not so sure it exists. But if it does, there are present trends that are certainly shaping it and how we experience everything from structures to shopping. Stuart Fingerhut has a firm grasp on what’s setting the pace. You’ve heard him on EngineerVsDesigner. Now,…

Oh, to drown your mornings in a scalding hot cup of java. Perhaps you recognize the Octo cup from Shapeways – you can buy it in white ceramic for $56. The eight-handled cup was designed by Cunicode design agency as part their ‘One Cup a Day’ project. Over a single month, new cup designs were…

Hubless motorcycles, people. Some designs are awesome. Others are so badass, they make your skin tighten around your face and leather chaps instantly appear on your leg meats. The Indian Gorilla V4 is no exception and is one of the coolest examples of two-wheeled engineering design and vehicular magnificence you’ll find. It also happens to…

What’s going on in the world of Crowdfunding? Amazing things! But before I get into this edition of “Wisdom of the Crowd”, I’d like to point out that Maxifab has beat its target of $5,000, pulling in a whopping $24,393 and iZen Bamboo Keyboard past its goal of $18,000 reaching $26,436. Pretty kickass if you ask…

To me, PLM always sounded like something that should be plastered across an anvil that Wile E. Coyote drops onto his own head. You could say that Road Runner represents happiness, and the coyote a frustrated humanity: the harder we work for happiness, the more our hackneyed schemes get the better of us. We’ve had…

Japan has Godzilla, Russia has META-ELK. The idea is to deploy them in the thousands as… massive powerline pylons. Perhaps this is the next transmutation in the evolution of electrical Elk lords? We knew it was going to happen and these design renderings by Russian firm Design Depot put it all in perspective.

Sure, you could be boring and screw wood and metal together – but what if you could drop-forge molten metal into the woodwork? Hello SPECTACULAR. Well, that’s exactly what Hilla Shamia has been doing. The wood is cut to size, a mould is placed around it and molten aluminum is poured in, filling in all the cracks…

If drool is a requirement for your sound-pounding listening experience, you know a preamp is a crucial part of any system, be it for car, personal or production audio. Antelope Audio is known for the amazing quality they bring to studios around the world and now, they’re putting their clocking technology into a new DAC…

I appreciate the idea of traveling lightly, unless it means you can’t pull up to a panoramic view, open your trunk and take a shower against the scenic landscape. Fortunately, there’s a box for that – a swissRoomBox to be exact. It houses just about all you would need to enjoy the comforts of home…

Nevermind the rug in that photo above. It’s a technique used to cover up the blood spray after you’ve blasted an offending intruder across the floor with your two Mossberg 930’s. How did you get to them so fast? Simple. They’re stored in your bedframe – the BedBunker – locked away, hidden from those interested…

Dirk Vander Kooij, winner of the 2011 Dutch Design Award, has developed a very elegant solution to all that trash sitting around. YES, you know where I’m going with this. Why should it be sitting around, when it could be doing something useful. Like being sat upon?

If you’re an iPad user soaking in the retina display rays of the latest tablet tech, you’re flipping open a cover that’s flimsy, only allows viewing at 10 degrees off a flat surface and doesn’t even stick to the magnets you’ve embedded in your abs. That’s about to change in a flippin’ big way. The…

You’ll likely opt not to eat off of this table, but if you do, the site of precision gears while you’re chowing down on a flank steak and side of greens may be good for the digestion. The elegantly mechanized ASTROLAB Dining Table from the Design Studion of Roche Bobois is a site to behold…

I know you’ve had your eye on a pipe organ, but you’ll change your mind after you see this. This is the Aeolus, a massive Aeolian wind harp sculpture built by UK artist Luke Jerram. You would think it summons the mighty power of the wind to create crushing, ethereal sounds and rhythmic pulses of…

Great ideas don’t mean squat if you can’t market them properly. The invention of the modern automobile, developed by the dynamic duo known as Karl and Bertha Benz, is no different. Bertha had invested much of her own dowry into Karl’s workshop in 1871 – 17 years later his patented vehicle was ready for sale,…

Prepare to project your bat signal or latest car concept in STYLE. The Kreios G1 LED image projector has won a highly-prized Red Dot Design Award for Product Design, selected amongst the ‘Best of the Best’ products within 1,800 entries. The extremely energy-efficient projector was developed by our friends over at Cambridge Industrial Design for…

3D printers and designers have been doing some fancy footwork recently. The Smithsonian has put out a great article covering several new designs. Here’s my favourite, by Hoon Chung for the London College of Fashion.

I have a new favorite app. It’s called Paper. Now, before you think I’m trying to be clever and slap me upside the ear, read this. Paper is a new sketch/design app for the iPad created by an entrepreneur, a designer, an engineer, a filmmaker and an inventor. It takes the creation of ideas and…

I came across Eva Friedrich’s work last year and thought it was really thought provoking material. I’ve always had a fascination with Voronoi diagrams (I shamelessly attached a picture of a piece I will be printing with the DShape soon – made with Voronoi diagrams.) Here’s more about what they are, where you see them…

I often use my scimitar to slice through furniture. Typically, it’s to access something like a pen or cookie and sometimes to free feral cats that have made my desk their home. In much the same way, minus the scimitar and cats, Alessandro Busana created the Cutline project to explore the natural aesthetics of wood…

There’s a little site called Kickstarter. It has a lot of amazing crowdfunded projects on it and, like us, you may have a mild, vein-slapping addiction to it. If so, these are two that you’ll want to check out. One has exceeded its funding by leaps and bounds. The other is just about to break…

I admit it, I was completely enamoured with the Human Birdwings Video. If you haven’t seen it, this is a video of Floris Kaayk (AKA Jarno Smeets, or as I like to call him, Harvey Birdman) strapping on a convincing-looking set of wings and taking off. Turns out it was fake and proves an uncomfortable reality…

You’ve seen the chair designs of Kenneth Smythe on SolidSmack before, but that will not be the last you’ll see. With hundreds of chair and table variations in the works, he’s elevating the visual function of sitting, above the seat and creating designs based on a musical passacaglia of furniture design floating in a narrative…

Luxury mobile phones are most often super-glam on the outside, and filled with outdated crap tech on the inside, but Swiss watchmaker Tag Heuer has a new class of high-end, Andriod mobile phone and it’s sure to squeeze your eyes right out of their sockets. We take a look at the new Tag Heuer “Racer”…

He’s finally done it. You may have heard of Jarno Smeets and his Human Birdwing project before, but this time he’s not trying to fly like a bird, he has flown like a bird. Has he actually cracked the mystery of human-powered flight?

The most awesome thing in the history of awesome things has just come to pass. The hack slappin’ crew at F.A.T. Lab has slipped the surly bonds of inoperable construction sets making it now possible to interlink your favorite blocks with the Free Universal Construction Kit. LEGO, Tinkertoys, Lincoln Logs and seven other sets are…

This is what I would truly call ‘a 3D movie.’ This ‘3Drehkino’ is a series of 3D printed figures of a man walking. An LED is triggered by each passing figure in his appropriate pose, illuminating it and giving us the illusion of motion. Tobias Krawutschke designs all kinds of Zoetropes (which you can see here),…

This is our new column “Great Ideas Never Die.” Here at SolidSmack we talk a lot about the future of Design and forget the History behind the tools, the inventions and the processes we use. Not to mention the rather kooky, inventive and slightly crazy designers behind them. So we decided to give them a…

At first you may think these are structures you lay on the ground and hide under. You wait for children (or old people) to walk by, then with one quick motion rise up like a life-size pop-up book bringing delight and enchantment (or horror) to the children. Architect and Designer Robert van Embricqs is bringing…

Do Samurais kick? I’m pretty sure they do. Especially after getting an arm or two sliced off. Sensable is taking the sword to 3D Geometry launching the new version of it’s flagship modeling software Freeform, slapping a big ol’ Version 12 on the box and shipping out an app that can take on anything from…

In the design consulting world, we’re accustomed to words like ‘Strategic innovation’, ‘qualitative and quantitative analysis’, ‘research synthesis’, and ‘concept ideation’. So much so, in fact, that it’s easy to forget just how pompous we sound to the rest of the English speaking world. The next time your significant other says “Honey, we really need…

We can slap some text into Photoshop, apply layer styles and churn out some quick LetterPress lookin’ crap, but the process that goes into creating the real thing is much, MUCH more time consuming. RISD students Phil Cao and Kebei Li show the intricate process behind the typesetting task of making one section of one…

That’s right, friends: modo 601 is here, and to say we are ‘excited’ would be an understatement. In fact, we burnt ourselves on some celebratory, half-baked brownies we cooked up for the occasion while feasting our fingers on new modeling and rendering tools, a slew of new shaders and – oh yes – character animation…

We’ve stretched back the jowls and have devoured our share of 3D viewing tech lately, but it’s not over. There’s sunglass.io, a web-based 3D viewer, and Maide Cotrol that brings 3d model interaction to the iPhone and iPad. Now, we have another viewer that allows import, smooth 3D viewing and sharing.

I’ve always had a little bit of a problem with sustainability software. You jam some criteria into it and it throws a comparison of materials, location, the impact your choices have on the environment, and a pretty report you can give to your boss or client to prove you’ve done your research. The thing is,…

After what I’ve just seen, I feel as if I could point my hand at a simmering pool of metal and shape it with the power of my mind. Dutch Designer Jólan van der Wiel is practically doing just that. He’s created a process (and a machine) to pull a metallic-formulated resin from a liquid…

AutoDesSys is peeling back the flexible underbelly of form-Z 7 and stuffing in a slew of new features. Form-Z has been around a while. It’s always had great features for architectural modeling, but this new version brings even more to the freeform table. New features increase the options you have for dynamic modeling of roofs…