We saw Core, a “meditation trainer”, popping up all over at CES 2020, covered here! Now, they’re sharing the physical product engineering challenges behind creating this wellness device. And there were MANY engineering prob… er, lessons to be learned. Watch the video below to see our interview with Sara Weber, Director of Marketing & Partnerships, and Bashir Ziady, VP of Engineering. Disclaimer for Media Integrity-type Purposes: Core is a client of my optical engineering company, Spire Starter LLC. (It has parts that light up and where there’s light, there are optics.) Therefore, my overall opinion on the product will be totally biased. The engineering lessons below, however, are untainted. What…

Our favorite celebrity maker, design shaker is at it again. Since ‘The Big Life Fix’, Jude Pullen has been up to all sorts of shenanigans on his site and Instructables, including the prep of his super-human, inventive, problem-solving capabilities for a new show on UK’s Channel 4 – David Jason’s Great British Inventions. Here’s a look at the trailer: In case you didn’t catch it, David Jason is the older gentleman that is “on a journey of discovery’, out and about experiencing all of the great inventions that shaped products over time, Jude is the one that David apparently has fastened up in the shed creating all sorts incredible gadgets…

As purveyors of prime Grade A web content, the SolidSmack crew has done some of the heavy-lifting to make sure you get your Mondays started on the right track. Welcome to The Monday List. Every Monday, we link you up with some of the most insightful, informative, and socially-relevant stories to keep tabbed, bookmarked, reading listed, pocketed, or what have you to get your week started on the right foot. Be sure to check in each week for a new crop of freshly sprouted words curated straight from the source of your favorite homegrown ‘Smack. What We’re Reading This Week: The Wonderful World of Chinese Hi-Fi The best pair of $20…

Well, well, well. What’s this? We’ve left the previous two decades behind and with it the conference that defined the era for a generation of designers and engineers. SOLIDWORKS World is no longer, but that’s OK, because now we have 3DEXPERIENCE World to take us into the next decade with all the experiential experiencing we can experience. While we may not be entirely sure what the new conference name means for the user experience as a whole, we know the agenda is set, the parties are planned and the show must go on. Here’s what you need to know and where you need to be for 3DEXPERIENCE World 2020. Changes…

The second installment of Hardware Massive’s Hardware Summit took place in San Francisco, at Mind the Bridge, on November 6, 2019. In spite of fires raging around the Bay Area complete with power outages, around 200 hardware nerds came out to connect and learn. There were three talks with experts in the physical product space who have seen things. These were interlaced with networking sessions and time to chat with hardware startups and service providers at booths encircling the space. For highlights from each talk, you can watch the video below: The Strategy Panel This talk’s aim was to give guidance on the high-level plans for a HW startup’s development…

How many soap bottles do you throw out each year? Yeah, enough for the eco-terrorist elite and Leonardo DiCaprio to make you feel guilty for a few seconds while you mock their hypocrisy. All the while, despite our best efforts to rid ourselves of evil plastics, we still produce tons of waste which takes ages to decompose. But what if there were a zero-waste bottle option that dissolved (before?) by the time you were done with the contents? Jonna Breaitenhuber, a Berlin-based product and process designer, has come up with one such option. Her Soapbottle project (which features bottles which look less like containers and more like bars of soap)…