Love ’em or just plain prefer something else, there’s a reason why Nike stays at the top of the innovation food chain. Going all the way back to the original concept of making a shoe from a waffle iron, thinking outside the box has been embedded into the brand’s DNA since day one. Like Apple’s notoriously secretive Industrial Design studio, Nike’s own Innovation Kitchen – which explores materials and technologies for athletes that are as far as ten years out – has long been off-limits to the press and even most of their own employees. Needless to say, how Nike stays innovative has long been kept under wraps. This month in…

Although short films that document manufacturing processes are as popular as ever, some of the most shining examples have existed for decades. In 1958, Dutch filmmaker Bert Haanstra paid a visit to the Royal Leerdam glass factory where an army of chain-smoking glassblowers delicately crafted crystal wares by hand. He also visited another factory that mass-produced glass bottles. Using footage from both factory visits, he then crafted Glas, a dialogue-free 10-minute short that compares the two production processes against a backdrop of soft jazz music. Thanks to the lyrical editing and jazz backdrop, the film went on to take home the Oscar in 1960 for Best Documentary Short. Needless to…

Although support material is a necessary part of the additive manufacturing process, it is far from desirable due to the time required to carefully remove it and finalize a print’s surface quality. But what if the support material became an actual part of the design of a product itself? In a recent collaboration with Materialise, Eindhoven-based design studio Unfold explored how using support structure-generating software (in this case, Materialise’s e-Stage software) could be a final step in the design process – particularly, how could the otherwise discarded support structure be a desirable component of the final design? The project was partly inspired by the studio’s own longstanding fascination with “process as…

It rose, within a wave, and the shrieks were muffled but a second before the water shed from the five orifices, gasping the air and wrenching the deepest guttural sounds ever heard. We readied our blades, we steadied our base and triggered the liquid that would slay the beast with the oil of these links. Hendrik Visser – A unique cel shade, vector-ish style in his latest character and scene work, and sketch concepts loaded with texture and color. Rogue One – A Star Wars Story. The teaser trailer. Hands down one of my favorite trailers of all time. More. of. this. Rainbow Wasps – When paper wasps get colored…

According to industrial designer Oscar Diaz, despite the performance and display capabilities of today’s tablets, many are underused when sitting idle on the desktop. Frankly, we couldn’t agree more. The London-based designer, who set up his own practice shortly after graduating from the Royal College of Art in London in 2006, set out to create a solution for making tablets more useful. Says Diaz: “We realized that we use our tablets for drawing, reading or sending e-mails on the go, but when we are at the office or at home sitting at our desk, we put them aside as is always more comfortable to work using a large display. Why…

As far as DIY weaponry goes, Joerg Sprave of the Slingshot Channel knows a thing or two about turning otherwise random objects into near-deadly projectiles. Among his expansive portfolio of ingenious solutions for surviving a zombie apocalypse, the Slingshot Zombiehammer with Skull Ejector and Skull Splitter Zombie SlingSword are surely weapons that you don’t want to be on the receiving end of. More recently, Sprave turned his attention to something significantly less deadly: The Ping-Pong Hailstorm Fully-Automatic Slingshot Gatling Gun. Rather than warding off zombies, however, the Hailstorm is designed to “punish” game show contestants who give wrong answers. “Sometimes we do get interesting job offers,” explains Sprave. “The (Hailstorm)…