This week’s Spotify-powered SolidSmack Radio Playlist knocks you in the pop sockets with head-boppin’ groove tuneage to help propel you through the work week in style. Whether you find yourself inking markers until they’re dry, grinding material through a bandsaw or working that 3D geometry all day, consider these tracks as a tool for your process. This week we’ll start things off with the classic “Mambo Sun” from T. Rex before working our way through Tricky, Primal Scream, Future Islands, Beck, Cut Copy and others before wrapping up with “Natural” from Clams Casino. Have suggestions? As always, let us know what you listen to, what you want to hear and…

If there’s one threat I’ve always given when being kicked repeatedly in the lung sacks, it’s “If you kick me one more time! I will open my steampunk spectacle! After which you will incur the wrath of 5000 hungry steampunk ladybugs! That willst shoot from my steampunk face orb! Engulf your body! And commence dismantling your putrescent flesh!” Or something along those lines.

Despite revealing their anticipated new iPhone SE and a smaller iPad Pro at their Keynote last month, the most impressive announcement from Apple came in the form of Liam, an industrial robot designed to tear apart discarded iPhones. Announced onstage by the company’s Vice President of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives, Lisa Jackson, Liam is programmed to detect each and every part of the iPhone for intelligently disassembling the device for proper material processing at the rate of 2.5 phones per minute – meaning, Liam is capable of saving 1.2 million iPhones a year from the landfill. While we knew at the time of the announcement that Liam was capable…

Cloudalize is a company you’ve probably never heard, but you’ve certainly heard of desktop virtualization. You know, accessing all your apps (CAD, CAE, BIM, etc.) from the cloud via any browser or mobile device? Yes? Well, up until now Frame has been the headliner showing the possibilities, with quick creation of a virtual workspace, and SolidWorks, Siemens and others using them as a cloud solution.

While Ready-to-Assemble or “flat pack” product designs have been in existence for over a half-century, the majority of these designs – more often than not from IKEA – have existed in some form or another as a piece of simplified furniture. With the more recent introduction of low-cost DIY electronics and methods of digital fabrication, however, some of today’s forward-thinking product designers are using that same strategy to keep production costs down while adding another layer of interaction to their consumer electronic products. More recently, Italian designers Lorenzo Appiani and Ludovica Vando of design studio Sinestesia harnessed their passion for designing multi-dimensional product experiences to create their latest product design,…

As conventional casting methods have taught us, the best way for reliably manufacturing multiples of any object is to start with an accurate and sturdy mold. For their recent Fabric Forms explorative material study, however, architects Joseph Sarafian and Ron Culver wanted to do something that was anything but conventional. Working with the Grasshopper plug-in for Rhino and a pair of 6-axis Kuka robots, the designers developed a new method of manufacturing that couples the precision of 6-axis robots with the flexibility of fabric – a combination that can rapidly produce variation in cast objects. Using the durable Lycra fabric as their flexible mold material of choice, Sarafian and Culver…