If you’ve surrounded yourself with thousands of lighted spheres like I have, you’ll be interested to learn of the potential for incredibly cool design living within each of the precious glowing orbs. Andre Baran of formendesign.de knows, and has animated a spherical surprise to impress upon you the true nature of transformation as applied to…

Seriously, no bullets are gonna help, no alliance with the undead or any sort of blunt object or girly scream. The end… is near…. and where ever you run, the werewolf hordes are approaching. Fortunately, you’ve already been bitten and eventually you’ll feel a a sharp bone shifting jab as technological morphotypes wrap their corpuscular…

I know you enjoy the magnificence of your hairy knuckles as much as the next guy, but after you take a look at this ring, you may be reaching for razor. Ben Hopson and entrepreneur Glen Liberman of Kinekt Design are collaborating together on a series of kinetic jewelry pieces. This Gear Ring is the…

Well, it’s happened. Someone at SolidWorks had a few too many no-doze with NOS chasers (and I’m almost positive) shot through the Concord office with fire spraying from their back screaming, LET’S GO DESIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGN!!!!!!!!! It was effective. Starting last week, LetsgoDesign.tv is up and running. There’s not any actual video yet, but the tone is…

Many of us are plugged directly into the monitor, starting and ending the design process within the confines of a virtual 3-dimensional prototype. Rubbish. What if that was only a small part in the middle of the entire process? The Futures Channel slaps the spectacles off the idea of 3D CAD and rapid prototyping with…

If you’re like me, you’ve been a bit uneasy and perhaps bitter that you didn’t get the foam projectile device you wanted so badly for Christmas. Wipe those tears, because it’s a new year and there’s something even cooler you’ll want to get your hands on. Phil Sluder of Triaxial Design has all the boys…

I know, you think school desk and B-movie horrors of being eaten by one while creepy freckled children laugh scream their way back into memory… while you’re in the middle of a presentation… for a multi-million dollar contract. Not good. Fortunately, Phelan Miller has a fresh take on school desk for the learning establishments of…

For those of us not born with carbon composite cruising wheels for legs, doomed to walk the dry earth and swampy grassland, someone has finally had pity on us. Michael Jenkins from Adelaide, Australia has spent the past three years developing the best possible solution to mount large wheels to your legs while not looking…

I’ve always wanted to let up for a few minutes, take a break from marking all over my face and arms and really get into the nitty-gritty of making my 3D sketch shapes look magnificent. Fortunately, Spencer from IDSketching is here to show us how to do just that. With the following video, he makes…

Lame. You so, do not have enough playful-looking, plastic figurines sitting on your desk or hanging out of your pockets. (This is the part where two small Korean children suddenly appear with giant smiles and laughter.) 훌륭한춥구나때려때려!! Sumajin Flex Champion!! Yes. I agree. “awesome cool slap slap.” Sumajin, maker of iPhone cases and other tech…

Well, the last poll showed people overwhelmingly think our robots servants should keep management quarantined. For good reason, no doubt. We all want to frolic in the freedom of designing and rendering awesome bits of plastic and metal in our favorite 3D program. There’s probably a time in your life that you remember 2D being…

Before the end of this post you will be Sugru-ing a ceramic cup to your face or you’ll want to. We missed the big news last week, but better late than taken unaware and slapped with a silicon oven mitt. You may have heard about Sugru a few months back, but last week it happened.…

I don’t know about you, but the Tauntaun scene in Empires Strikes Back was EPIC. In one captivating scene, it taught us the single best way to survive a blizzard is to have the carcass of a very large, very smelly animal with you. Scott Holden was equally inspired and decided to create his own…

Good news for all of you who inadvertently stick your hands in the front fork of bicycles from time to time. You’re gonna have to go back to sticking them in the chain with this new, totally functional bike design from Olli Erkkila. Olli, graduate of Lahti University Institute of Design in Finland, not only…

Out of the list of awesome things you’ve accomplished, including bathing a kitty, chopping celery and catching a pineapple in your mouth, there’s some other things as a human being, and even more, as a design engineer, you should be able to do. If not, you’re doomed. In response to a guest post here on…

Don’t you just love tops. I’ve always liked them. They just make you feel like stripping out the carpet, painting yourself red and spinning as many as you can right before the in-laws walk into the room. That, however, has nothing to do with the design and inspiration behind the Herman Miller Select series of…

I know the number one thing you are wondering as you tumble down a rocky cliff on your snowboard is, how the heck am I going to get back up there to do this all over again. Problem solved… at least for Ken Block it is. He, along with Rally America and a handful of…

Once again 3D is hitting the iPhone with a fearsome tenacity that makes you just plain ignore regular phone users. But this time the 3D goodness isn’t in the iPhone, it’s on it… and it’s on it in a not-over-the-top-at-all, ultra-fashionable way. FreshFiber, with the styling skills of Janne Kyttanen, has launched a fresh line…

It’s been a while since your uncle that glues batteries and LED’s to his face has visited, so you may be getting a little anxious to view blinking lights and oddities that boggle the mind. Lucky you. Today we have a light-emitting creation from the mind of Paul Pounds. It stuffs 133 surface-mounted LEDs into…

I’m positive. If you could wrap yourself around a Subaru Turbocharged Car Engine and tear down the road, you would, you so would, and so would I. But the difference between you and I, is that I would have six bike flags and a license plate that read WHEELIE. No matter how you cruise, there’s…

If there’s anything that cramps your daring sense of style, and your flaring lower back muscles it’s an inadequate office chair with absolutely hideous lines and a crushing lack of support. To counter those effects, Herman Miller has launched another stylish chair. The Setu. If you recall the Embody chair, you’ll know a lot went…

You remember, as a child, when you would take your little brother’s head, cover it with mud and hope he would lay still long enough for it to dry so you could crack it open and see if he was an alien? Well, nice try, but your childish antics have got nothin’ on what a…

USSubs, like SolidSmack, is 100% 2D free. They may actually be a little more 2D free. What exactly do they engineer? I’m glad to pretend you asked. They engineer Personal Luxury Submarines. I imagine their sales pitch needing more than just those three words. Personal luxury subs, you say? I’ll take five, I say. They…

3D slicin’ spiders are cool and all, but how would you like to harness the power of VACUUMS… and LASERS? Well, guess what, some fancy group called ‘NASA’ has done just that. The claim is they can melt certain heat-sensitive metals layer-by-layer into parts, with advantages of decreasing waste and forming it around electronics or…

I’m serious as printed Nutella when I say this. You’re about to get silly thoughts in your head. Silly thoughts about fabbing up this type of trinket or that type of trinket, in a really different way than ever before. CloudFab is set to provide you with more options for your sly design fabrication needs.…

It’s so not cool when someone looses a finger or five or when a movie like Body of Lies shows one way it could happen. Fortunately, there are companies working on impressive new ways to give those fingers back. Discover Magazine has an article on Sucking the Real World into your computer via 3D Scanning.…

We just know how you love to climb into a steel barrel or tractor tire and roll yourself down a steep, rocky crevasse. Ahhhh, the small joys and severe skull fractures of life. There are actually better ways to navigate the rough and tumble terrain you adore. One of those would be a very large…

If you could shake yourself into a dazzling display of idea-producing power, you would still have just that, an idea. Some get lucky and have a prototype, but mostly we just sit on our ideas. C. Sven Johnson is going one step further with the 100K Stray Toasthed Pull Toy project. He has taken an…

Hold onto your highly polished, aluminum chassis car buffs. One of the most incredible stories of car design and engineering has just rolled onto your screen. Think of this. What if you were building a roaster, a custom roadster for the CEO of Oracle, Larry Ellison. What if money was no option. What if you…

How many times do you see a product design and think, “How could this possibly be manufactured at a reasonable cost?” The ‘YellowClip’ Clothesline Clip designed by Paul Sandip is just one of those designs that brings up such questions. It’s curvy, it doesn’t rust, it’s available in a variety of colors and it looks…

You’ll need 67 terabytes just to contain the excitement your storage-deprived mind is about to feel. How do you build huge cloud storage? This is how. Online backup company, Backblaze, now providers of one of the cheapest cloud storage solutions known to man, gives you the cloud storage step-by-step scoop. It’s storage on a budget…

Sometimes, even for the gifted such as yourself, it takes more than the power of the mind to form massive chunks of steel into structures that look cool and don’t crumple when hanging bits of mountain from it. For Corbett Griffith of Instinct Engineering, it’s completely natural. Since graduating Georgia Tech with a BSME and…

On a slow, muggy night I’ll sit back, pop open a can of high density polyethylene and take a look at all the activity happening in the world of 3D fabrication. It’s invigorating. I highly recommend it. Recently, on such a night, I came across two bits of info from my two favorite fab sites,…

That’s it. For the last time you’ve tossed your bicycle over the bridge. The traffic is maddening, the weather is ruining your stylish hair, and you’ve had just about all you can take of your leg being eaten by gear teeth as you round that one curve. If only there were a human-powered, weatherproof container…

Guest Post by Matthew Loew of DAXCON I realize this will be a controversial subject, but I am compelled to raise awareness of how rare a breed the Design Engineer is in industry. The Design Engineer may be headed for extinction (at least in the US). There is a HUGE difference between a design engineer…

I bet two old tires and a bag of tortillas you’re a Engineer or Designer that loves to model flat-pack, laser cut designs in SolidWorks, but has never ventured to have them made, yeah? Or, maybe you’re curious about a company called Ponoko, but not sure how to get started creating your designs. Well, it’s…

You’re looking for the perfect beach cruiser, but nothing, I mean nothing, has tires fat enough to match the coolness you want to bring to dune dude. Your search is over. The Fat Tire Sand Bike designed by Mike Scarani could be the sand-spittin’ scrawler you’ve been looking for. He designed it using no 3D…

Don your cap and uncomfortable rubber mask bat fiends. Your friends await the sound of harrowing theme music as you serve up equal portions of fear and justice around the neighborhood. It’s just what you’ll be doing with your head sticking out the top of your very own Mini-Tumbler Go-kart. Designed in SolidWorks and constructed…

Prepare your drive systems and Plastruders my Cartesian coordinating friends. The great “Horn of DIY Fab” has sounded and the battle to maintain your 3D print fix and MakerBot units sold is EMINENT. Since MakerBot released it’s printer mid-April 2009, demand has been so high they’re turning to the MakerBot community to keep production of…

They’re among us. Little robots flitting about, busy with the task of taking over this part of the world and demolecularizing that part of the world, exploring caves and enjoying the natural setting of coastline and atmospheric radiation. It’s all but a few know of… till now. Cris Rose, supreme leader of all creatures mechanically…

Plug it in and crank up the DIY make machine baby, we’re about to roll out a huge vat of speculation. Last week at the SolidSmack Posterous site, I put up a tidbit on the new Shapeways 3D Part Database. I commented that it would be interesting to see 3DContentCentral, a user-generated 3D part library,…

There are a lot of silly things you can strap to your feet. but when it comes to saving someone’s life, there’s nothing silly about strapping on plastic booties with extendable ‘blades.’ It’s just the concept Edward Shelton of Oxford, UK came up with for his final year project at Loughborough University. Ed developed the…

OOoooo. Is this really a question that needs to be asked? Everyone uses 3D right? and if they don’t, the should be slapped upwards and forced to partake of the goodness that is 3D geometry. Do the manufacturers you work with use 3D data to create parts, build assemblies or get information not provided on…

I see that look in your eye. You want to see some sweet bicycle convertin’ design that makes falling off your bike and hitting a street sign look like fun again. Well, here it is. It’s called the ZWEISTIL [two style], named by the designers, Stefan Wallmann and Daniel Knüpfer, for it’s unique variable frame…

I hope you all are ready for a fun and enlightening experience. I know we’ve pushed this iPhone modeling in SolidWorks clear around the table, but this is the model that everyone is and will be looking at for the foreseeable future. Nelson Au was kind enough to share his model and his process for…

You are lookin’ sporty. Really, you are stylin’ the design and engineering process like no other and everyone wants to know just how you do it… or at least, we do. Is it possible that you use more than one process or program to design and engineer products? We may not even realized it if…

It’s not so much that everything in the future will be built around the idea that we’ll need a proper vessel to study the organs of extraterrestrial life, but you can imagine very quickly that it would need to look stinkin’ cool… and have lights and bolts and stuff. For instance, it would almost certainly…

I know, you have a few Class III Vault doors already and probably regifted a couple last Christmas, but maybe this will give you a little appreciation for the amount of torching and hammering these massive doors can take. Vault Structures has been creating security doors for a while. Their newest 9000 lb. vault door,…

The last time I saw something this lovable and all together creepy, Sigourney Weaver was watching mama Alien get sucked through a quarter-size hull breach. Shown at the D3 in New York as part of the FUTURE.city exhibit earlier this month, the ‘Autonomous Living Unit’ by Eduardo McIntosh, is the all-in-one The idea? That this…

If you’re an old hat at using public transit, or someone trying frantically to go site-seeing, in the bustling, historic cities of Europe, you’ll know how important bus information can be. Bus stops, as we know them, are about to get a makeover. They’re not just for use as a goal for small dogs anymore.…