New York-based architecture and design practice Produce Design Studio recently relaunched. Its first new product, the Claus Desk, was just unveiled this week. Rethinking the contemporary work desk is a worthy endeavor, and Produce has done well. The Claus has a lightness to it, a refined style that should work in various contexts plus it makes the most of the natural beauty of its prime material, white oak, and the sturdiness of its powder-coated metal legs.
The Claus Desk is available through produce-design.com.
The Soccket soccer ball by Uncharted Play turns the kinetic energy created in a casual soccer game into electric light. Inside, there's a pendulum-like technology that converts the ball's movement into stored electricity for an on-board LED light. Young people in the developing world where electricity availability may be spotty can play in the day and read at night. The Soccket sounds like brilliant responsible design to us. Made in America, the Soccket is launching production via Kickstarter now.
At this point, there really shouldn't be much of negative stigma about pre-fabricated construction. The days of poorly built and aesthetically dull box homes are long gone, and new companies like Spain's Infiniski (an offshoot of the firm james&mau) offer modern, green, modular buildings at prices much lower than traditional construction. The strength of Infiniski's prefab lines is that they're almost infinitely customizable. They've used the same basic forms to build a one bedroom surf house on a beach, a multi-story condo building in Chile, dozens of rural homes, and even commercial buildings like a deli and retail shop. The environmental advantage of Infiniski is twofold: a percentage of the building materials is sourced from recycled suppliers, and each home can be customized with ventilation systems that minimize energy use.
Dedicated cyclists need no introduction to Rapha, perhaps the penultimate contemporary cycling brand, and its cult-like following. With warm weather on the way, we're eyeing some upgrades to our own cycling kit and Rapha's seasonal lookbook for training, racing, women’s wear, and city riding—shot by Ben Ingham in Australia and Corsica—is just the thing to get us inspired.
Find out more at Rapha, which has yet to announce its special collections for the season.
Before you even ask, the answer is "Yes, the loads these bicyclists of Shanghai carry are real." Photographer Alain Delorme shot them during an artist's residency in Shanghai, one in which he spent countless days biking and photographing the ordinary working folks of his temporary city of residence. We love the contrast of the modern and mechanical, the gritty and the sunny.
See more of the photographer's work at alaindelorme.com.
Jasper Rietman's illustrations look great on the printed page. Actually, they look great on the screen as well. His work is bold and colorful, and his cartoon and comic book-inspired aesthetic has a way of making the images' meaning almost immediately apparent. Rietman's work with color has a lot to do with this immediacy. Many of his illustrations feature a solid color background, which gives them a weight suitable for a web or magazine layout.
In addition to his editorial work for clients like The New York Times and Bloomberg Businessweek, he also maintains a triptych, wordless comic series aptly called TRI/P.
Three data scientists, James Cheshire, Ed Manley, and John Barratt, have analyzed around 8 million tweets sent from New York City to create an interactive language map of the New York Metro area. Some of the data is less than surprising. Midtown Manhattan appears to have an even blending of every language and the vast majority of non-English tweets, around 228,000, were sent in Spanish. Areas that have had an ethnic identity for decades, like the Russian community in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, are clearly represented on the map. One of the most surprising findings, however, is the prominence of Portuguese tweets. Even though Portuguese is the second most tweeted foreign language, at about one fifth the number of Spanish, there doesn't seem to be a concentrated population anywhere in the city, except for a small cluster in Newark, NJ.
Drill down on the data at ny.spatial.ly.
The Japanese housewares brand aeru is always looking for ways to make the lives of young families easier. Its latest product, a collaboration with the designers at Nosinger, is a line of handmade bowls that help young children learn how to eat on their own with fewer messy spills. The design is simple: starting with traditional Japanese flatware materials, a small ledge is built as a center ring in the bowl in order to help the eater-in-training push food back onto a utensil before taking a bite. According to Spoon-Tamago, the bowls come in three varieties: Yamanaka Lacquer, Ootani-yaki pottery, and Tobe-yaki porcelain, and depending on the materials, a set of three costs between $45 and $100.
Once the cameras on our smartphones started getting legitimate, a need for a good photo-editing app to drive the lens became apparent. We've been getting along with options like Snapseed and VSCO, but today Apple finally released the iPhone and Android version of their iPad app—Adobe Photoshop Touch. It does what those other great apps do (applying effects, cropping, sharing), but also provides some of those useful features familiar to users of the Photoshop desktop application (advanced selection tools, layers, filters). If you're a user of Photoshop and Adobe Creative Cloud, you can edit the same project from all of your devices—start a project at work and finish it on the train.
Find Adobe Photoshop Touch at Google Play or the App Store for $4.99.
Early last year, Unbranded Designs co-founder Sameer Dohadwala thought it would be easy to build his own custom desk. After a process he jokes was a miserable failure—all that was left were Home Depot receipts and a “pile of wood and broken dreams”—he sought out independent designers to help finish the job. That's when he had an epiphany. With co-founders Samer Saab and Max Greenblatt, he could create a better way to bring well-designed furniture to the masses.
That spark led to Unbranded Designs, a new online design community and furniture manufacturing concern in Chicago. Dohadwala met with independent designers and found that most had amazing prototypes and renderings in their studios, unrealized and unseen by the masses. “Their work was much more interesting than the mass-designed pieces we had been looking at,” said Dohadwala. “I wanted all of them in my apartment.”
These designs didn’t reach fruition, the Unbranded team learned, because designers lacked a combination of seed money, manufacturing know-how, and marketing and sales savvy to begin production. This inspired the trio’s concept, a kind of Threadless for furniture, which aims to provide technical and logistical support and a ready network of local and regional artisans and manufacturers. Users submit designs, such as Philip Royster’s R2 table (pictured above) which boasts a unique curved pattern built with fishing wire. Comments and feedback are exchanged and the more popular, unique pieces get built in small custom runs and sold by Unbranded. The catalog boasts over a dozen pieces, constantly cycled in and out; currently, the site’s offering the angled ISA chair by School of the Art Institute grad student Adele Cuartelon, built by DKE Design.
Business interest has been growing—Unbranded won the Chicago Lean Startup Challenge last fall and is finishing a new round of seed funding—and the startup now runs out of 1871, a tech space inside Chicago’s Merchandise Mart, itself an iconic building and a center of furniture and design. It’s a fitting home for a new type of manufacturing and design. “I think it’s as practical as it is symbolic,” says Dohadwala. “We’re at a place where we’re trying to disrupt the industry with technology.”
Have a design in mind? Bring it to unbrandeddesigns.com