This week’s Spotify-powered SolidSmack Radio Playlist brings an entirely new face-smack of great music to help propel you through those laborious, tedious design tasks for the next few days. This week we’re steppin’ in the time machine and heading back to 1960s California to do some sunset surfin’. We’ll start with the Mermen and move through some Dick Dale, Martin Cilia, The Ventures, Jack Rabbit Slim, and others before wrapping up with Speedy West.
To begin with, I don’t know whether to file this under ‘Fabrication’ or just plain crazy—but either way, it’s definitely a spectacle to behold. In preparation for the launch of the new Nike Free Flyknit (a mashup between the popular Flyknit shoe and Nike Free Midsole), Nike China decided to pull a ‘guerilla-yet-not-really-guerilla’ marketing campaign on one of the busiest streets in Shanghai. Starting with a plain billboard of a bare foot, what happened next is surely something that needs to be seen to be believed. Here’s the process…
After School Smack is a new feature here on SolidSmack where we talk with current design students about the current happenings of their budding design careers. We’ll discuss everything from how they’re approaching the wide-open field of industrial design to how they’re keeping their portfolios fresh and their mind in the game. To kick us off we’re talking with the talented Jason McGinnity, a senior in the Transportation Design program at Pasadena’s coveted Art Center College of Design.
Love it or hate it, McDonalds food is here to stay. While little can be done to ween people off of the iconic convenience food, simple ways of re-thinking existing design elements in the McDonalds ecosystem can have a dramatic domino effect worldwide—15% of the total weight of a McDonalds order is packaging alone. Take for example this ingenious redesign of the Big Mac packaging by industrial design student Rob Bye. Currently, when a Big Mac meal is ordered the customer receives a paper bag, a Big Mac box, a french fly sleeve, napkins, a paper cup, a lid, and a straw. Removing a single one of those elements could have a dramatic impact worldwide with not only a reduction in potential litter, but also through the reduction of various shipping and manufacturing costs to the environment. In his project, Bye not only seeks to remove these wasteful elements, but also provides an improved ‘on-the-go’ experience for McDonalds customers.
To coincide with the Design Museum‘s The Future is Here exhibition—a showcase displaying some of the most pioneering pieces of the new industrial revolution—the Museum caught up with iconic industrial designer Ron Arad to discuss his thoughts on 3D printing…and why he thinks it’s being abused now more than ever.