This week’s Spotify-powered SolidSmack Radio Playlist brings an entirely new playlist of face-melting great music to help propel you through those laborious, tedious design tasks for the next few days. So whether you find yourself inking markers until they’re dry, grinding material through a bandsaw or flying through a CAD model, consider these tracks as a tool for your process. This week we’ll start off with a remix of Beck’s “Broken Drum” from Boards of Canada and work our way through some Hollie Cook, The Gaslamp Killer, Neon Indian, Houses and others before wrapping up with the classic “Tick of the Clock” from Chromatics. As always – do you have…

With many large touchscreen displays – such as Microsoft’s 4K 55- & 84-inch Surface Hub Displays set to arrive next month – commanding up to $20,000, it comes with little surprise that some hardware developers have been dedicating their time to bringing similar user experiences to the masses for significantly less. Among others, Touchjet just might have found the sweet spot. Earlier this year, the Bay Area-based company found success with their Touchjet Pond, a palm-sized device powered by Android KitKat that gives users the functionality of a projector combined with a tablet. Unlike similar palm-sized projectors, the Touchjet Pond is capable of turning any surface – whether it be…

One might not normally associate basic design and engineering education with Nerf Blasters, yet the past year has seen some Blaster releases that play double-duty as an interactive learning tool for basic engineering principles. Back in January of this year, the brand announced their Nerf N-Strike Modulus ECS-10 Blaster – a design that encourages kids to create their own designs using a combination of functional modules – and in June of this year, the company announced their Doomsland line of blaster which include clear plastic housings that reveal the working internal mechanisms of each of the Blaster designs. Now, the design and engineering education has expanded to include some insight…

Don your favorite bath robe, cream that coffee and get comfortable with this weekend’s SolidSmack Weekend Reader. This week we saw everything from the new P70 ThinkPad Workstation from Lenovo, a new exhibit from Coca-Cola that highlights the design process behind their iconic curved bottle, how one Japanese designer has upcycled thousands of pieces of discarded ceramic tableware and more… So lay back, relax and take a load off while reading the top ten stories on SolidSmack this past week. Oh and uh…don’t forget to shed some much-needed sunlight on your face, too.

And so it went, on and on, the taps against the wood, the cracks along the grain. It went dark, and the sound all but stop. A long breath out to test the air, I peeled back the skin of the unearthed larvae casing, and push the squirming cychlid into these links. Nima Sprout – Refreshing sketch print and illustration of woodland creatures, treescapes, environments and pop culture. Paper Motion – If you’ve alway meant to do more stop motion work with paper, Tom McCarten provides plenty of inspiration. WallTherapy – It may be all about building community in Rochester, New York, but even if it wasn’t the art is…

With more than $650 billion in North American retail sales alone, the outdoor recreation industry has been one of the fastest growing product categories within the past few years – despite having been around since the early days of the American Frontier and brands including Pendleton and Red Wing. Aiming to help their design students become better prepared for designing products and experiences to be used outside, Utah State University has become the first school in the US to offer an Outdoor Product Design Degree, an undergraduate design degree that focuses on the design, development and manufacturing of outdoor products. The degree was approved by the Utah State Board of…