This holiday, share your Ultimate Gift Guide with Core77 for a chance to gift yourself some fun prizes. We're on the lookout for your favorite 5 holiday gift ideas and will reward the best gift guides with awesome rewards, including gift certificates and designer-approved products. It gets better—one Editor's pick will take home a Spin Bag from IAMRUNBOX, and one Community Choice winner with the most votes will win a Core77 ~Mystery Box~!

This week, three submissions chosen by our editors have earned their curators a $25 gift certificate to Tetra and a spot in the running for the grand prize come December 18th. And remember, the more guides you submit the better your chances are of one of them getting selected!

Here are our 3 Editor's Picks:

Oscar Salguero's "A Holiday from the Panopticon" gift guide is all about identification, whether it's identifying electronic "birds" or concealing your identity from biometric facial recognition technologies. Creepy, but we like it.

Dogs have feelings too, and if yours has been a good boy this year, treat them with the high quality objects found in Sam Watson's "Top Dog" gift guide. Only thing missing? Anything with peanut butter.

We love a good steal, especially when it's coming from a world renowned designer. that's why we gravitated towards the Revision Team's "High Brow, Low Budget. the Biggest Designer Names Under $100" gift guide—bonus points for the creative title. Stock up, people! 

____________________________________

NEXT WEEK

Want in on the fun? MAKE YOUR OWN ULTIMATE GIFT GUIDE HERE— three of next week's winners will be receiving a gift certificate to MOO. If you didn't win this week, get your friends to vote for your guide, and you could still be crowned the Community Choice winner!

Reid Schlegel is a NYC based designer and educator. He is currently a Senior Industrial Designer at Aruliden and previously worked at frog and SMART Design. Reid teaches at the Parsons School of Design and lectures at universities globally. Additionally, Reid runs an Instagram account with 140k+ followers showcasing his work and other design related content.

View the full content here

Which book do you place at the end of a row on your bookshelf? Regardless of which, our favorite books, our paper friends, need bookends. And for those Italo-meets-Madrileño design-loving bookworms on budgets, new design brand TORTUGA Living presents these colorful little partners: Dumbo Bookends, designed by Ciszak Dalmas.

Two styles, three color ways. They're friendly, serve as solid support for classic stories, and are just modular enough to blend quietly in one space and pop in another.

Oh, and they're relatively affordable. The small bookends are $28, the mediums are $30 and the larges are $32. On TORTUGA's website, all of their modular products are divvied up this way. The categories "small spaces," "medium spaces," and "large spaces" conscientiously separate their products by scale. Call the two-woman team at TORTUGA nuanced, or call them as they see their designs—timeless.

Laguna FamilyAlpine Family Sahara Desert

And their colorful collaborators, Ciszak Dalmas, share similar values: "Resourcefulness, inventiveness and entrepreneurialism inform their designs," said TORTUGA CEO and Founder Andrea Hill about the Madrid-based designers.

A collection of bookends in brass, copper and stainless finish are coming soon, but for now, treat your favorite bookworm to an affordable design that will make them think more carefully about which book to snuggle at the end of each row.

This year, we've watched the foam-as-furniture trend emerge and develop at shows during Milan Design Week and NYCxDesign. The use of foam blocks is intriguing from an artistic choice standpoint, but within the white hallways lined with brightly colored furniture at this year's DesignMiami lied something even more intriguing—a furniture designer that develops and designs his own foam that's ideal for functional furniture. 

South Korean designer Sang Hoon Kim's family has been operating a foam factory for the past three generations, and after taking up a job at the factory, the designer became fascinated with the manipulative properties of the material. Equal parts science and chance, his Foam Series speaks quite accurately to his current mindset—a structured designer who wants to break free and experiment with a more fluid material and aesthetic. 

I expected the furniture to sink in when sat on, but Kim's unique foam formula is feels almost like the memory foam found in mattresses but with a tougher exterior shell. Even through two densities are experienced, the furniture is entirely made from the same foam material. We sat down with Kim to learn more about this material and his process of combining science with design:

Core77: What inspired you to divert from your previous style to work with foam for this collection?

SHK: My interest in architecture has allowed me to apply the methods and elements used in architectural ideas to my work. However, I grew tired of my previous design work because it was not different enough in design language or method from what other architects and designers are doing. The Foam Series is totally different than my previous work because it is very free and intuitive. I designed as if modeling with clay or drawing pictures without any formalities. I wanted to design differently from other designers, so I tried to find my own way to make furniture. 

Why did you choose foam as a material to express more design freedom? 

My family business has been operating a 'foam factory' over the last three generations, so experimenting with this 'flexible foam' material came naturally to me. I became interested foam as a material when I joined the factory to develop a new mattress line in 2015. I was able to learn about the characteristics of foam materials and discovered the possibility of making unique furniture with them. I found the properties and advantages of the foam materials and tried to apply them to my furniture. I would practice and study the properties of foam materials after I finished working at the factory and on the weekends.

Color mixing process

The Foam Series is the result of 3 years of research about the material 'flexible foam'. Flexible foam is widely used to make artificial skin, medical goods, artificial leather, mattresses and pillows like TempurPedic. It is harmless to humans, and it has no smell. Polyurethane foam (memory foam) is made by a chemical reaction of different solutions including Polyol, and I learned this particular technique from working at the factory. It allows me to modify the mix ratio of chemical solutions so that I can adjust the foam from a soft to hard feeling and change it to various colors. The surface increases the density of the foam so that it does not tear easily, and it delays foaming time to express my desired shape and texture. These forms become a new piece of work due to their adhesiveness. The pieces don't need a finish like lacquer or paint because the foam builds its skin itself. Flexible foam is a very suitable material for furniture because it feels very comfortable.

What was your design process like for the Foam Series?

The Foam Series is made with a very different process than other furniture. I do not need to drill, cut or finish anything. I use an electric scale, mixer and scientific formulations to make the furniture. The furniture is basically made out of chemical reactions, so I can control the properties and make some spots soft like cushion and other spots hard to support the structure.

My design perspective has begun to change after studying and using foam materials. I've become interested in naturally occurring phenomenon that happen everywhere in nature. The foam material brought my interest to reality. I only plan basic ideas when I start to make a piece of foam furniture, and then the specific design details come during my making process.

Each piece changes in design and color many times during my design process. It is very free and intuitive. I try not to be affected by trends or any ideology with this collection, so I add colors very freely. I improvise with my favorite color of the day according to my mood. I change and layer the color of each piece daily as I work on them, and I consider them finished when I feel that the color looks complete. Sometimes I even change the color and shape after I finish because everyday involves different feelings.

Foam Series is currently on view at Christina Grajales Gallery's booth at DesignMiami.

Now out of the city, I do miss writing those Urban Design Observation posts. Down here in farmland I thought about writing a rural variant, but haven't been able to get it to work yet. That's because I'm rarely off-farm, and when I am, only see things like this aisle-capping Spill Response Station at the nearest Walmart:

I know, it's hardly interesting enough for a blog post: It's just some cleaning product and pole-based cleaning tools for when someone drops an open bottle of Mountain Dew. Perhaps what is interesting, is that those spill response stations' days are numbered. Walmart is rolling out autonomous robot floor cleaners.

What I found most interesting, is that the rep states that the machine frees up employees to do other things. Like…apply for unemployment?

Make no mistake: Your job is less likely to be stolen by someone with a foreign name, and more likely to be stolen by something called C-127A-15X.

Go back to your factory!

This week the Twittersphere witnessed an unusual PSA: Actor Tom Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie, taking a break on the set of "Top Gun: Maverick," urging you to turn video interpolation off on your television set.

What does this have to do with UI? Everything, but first a little background explanation is required. (Skip the rest of this paragraph if you already know what video interpolation is.) Video interpolation is a "feature"--really a fix--that new TV manufacturers came up with to compensate for a technological flaw. That flaw is that LCD and LED screens do not display frames at the same rate that they're shot in. When watching a fast-motion action sequence or sporting event, that motion becomes blurred by the LCD/LED that cannot accurately depict it. Video interpolation thus generates and drops in extra images between existing frames to fill the gap. Depending on how sensitive your vision is, this can lead to a jarring effect where something looks "too real."

Video interpolation, to Cruise and McQuarrie, essentially makes the action sequences they've worked so hard to execute, look like crap. So they want you to turn the feature off:

I’m taking a quick break from filming to tell you the best way to watch Mission: Impossible Fallout (or any movie you love) at home. pic.twitter.com/oW2eTm1IUA

— Tom Cruise (@TomCruise) December 4, 2018 " contenteditable="false">

Now you can see where the UI problem lies. First off, different manufacturers don't even call video interpolation the same thing. "Motion smoothing," "motion interpolation," "video smoothing" et cetera are some different names for it cooked up by each manufacturer's Marketing department.

Secondly, television interfaces have become incredibly complicated. There is no singular knob, button or switch by which you can turn the feature off; as Cruise and "McQ" (I heard Cruise call him that in a DVD extras) point out, you have to do a freaking web search including your brand of TV in order to figure it out.

This is what you call a hot mess

The lack of standardization in television UI design is understandable for manufacturers--and undesireable for consumers. It reminds me of getting into a rental car and figuring out where everything is (not least of which, which side the fuel door is on). Or going to a hotel and trying to decipher their climate control system, or their weird designey shower control interface. If everything was the same and we could undertake consistent actions to achieve results, without having to refer to some tome-like manual, that would be the ideal UX.

The problem is that manufacturers have zero incentive to get on the same page. The TV marketers think that calling video interpolation some sexy new name is a competitive advantage. Plumbing fixture manufacturers want some sexy new way to turn the shower on, when all consumers want is to be able to easily set the temperature and the water pressure.

How could intercompany standardization of UI be enforced? Well, there is one precedent, and depending on your political leanings, you may love or hate the two things that can lead to inter-company standardization: Government intervention and capitalism.

During the Industrial Revolution, manufacturers learned how to mass-produce their own fasteners. If you built a machine, you also built the nuts and bolts that held it together. With no McMaster-Carr in existence, you had no choice.

Other manufacturers of similar machines also made their own fasteners. There was no standardization of thread sizes, no possibility of attaching one company's component with another company's bolt. There was no Society of Automobile Engineers to impose SAE standards.

Screw standards, man

It was a Wild West of fasteners. But in the 1860s, the U.S. government decreed that anyone who wanted to bid on a government contract had to use fasteners with Sellers threads (a popular thread profile of the time because it was easy for machinists to produce). Around the same time, the major railroad corporations also moved to Sellers threads, presumably to make procurement and repairs easier.

This paved the way for the formation, in the early 20th century, of the Society of Automobile Engineers and their resultant standards, which we happily use today.

Now that that's out of the way: Do you folks reckon "Top Gun: Maverick" will be any good?

At quip, we design and deliver delightful products and services that keep your mouth healthy. In order to support our rapidly growing user base we are looking for an Industrial Designer to help continue with this growth. The ideal candidate would be an industrial designer to

View the full design job here

Aside from Japanese manufacturer Toto, toilet design is an area that gets little attention. To us in developed nations, toilets are something we take for granted, and a subset of us that are wealthy can buy fancy ones with heated seats and guided spray nozzles for arse cleaning.

For people in developing nations, toilets could mean the difference between life and death. When people have no alternative but to crap into the waterways that they drink from, disease and sickness follow. What's needed is a toilet designed to work without a sewage system, and that's precisely what the Gates Foundation's Reinventing the Toilet Challenge was meant to do.

We last reported on their progress here, and sadly the response was muted. We get it. No one wants to talk about shit. So maybe what's needed to build awareness is to send the Daily Show's perennially cranky correspondent, Ronny Chieng, to interview Bill Gates by opening with "What the fuck is wrong with you?"

Brought to you by MAKO Design + Invent, North America's leading design firm for taking your product idea from a sketch on a napkin to store shelves. Download Mako's Invention Guide for free here.

Navigating the world of crowdfunding can be overwhelming, to put it lightly. Which projects are worth backing? Where's the filter to weed out the hundreds of useless smart devices? To make the process less frustrating, we scour the various online crowdfunding platforms to put together a weekly roundup of our favorite campaigns for your viewing (and spending!) pleasure. Go ahead, free your disposable income:

We have nothing else to say about Studio Cult Co's Photo Shop Picture Frame besides that it's everything we want in a picture frame and more. 

Salty is a lovely vessel designed for passing salt around the table and cooking. It comes with an accompanying magazine that goes in depth about the history of salt and explores how salt still connects us today.

LUNEdot is a candle holder that features a spring inside of its tube. As the candle burns, the spring pushes the un-burned candle up, creating the illusion of an "endless" candle.

Unlike many kids bicycles on the market, Monkeycycle grows with your child from 9 months to 6 years old. With its 8 different ride modes it can transform from stroller to bike and more. 

Marmals are vinyl figures that aim to create a community and enhance storytelling. Once you customize your own Marmal, you have the opportunity to connect with a whole Marmal community online!

Travel brand Vasco is back on Kickstarter with two different sets of their packing cubes. One set is marketed as for men and the other for women, but when it comes down to it, selecting the right one for you just depends on what you typically bring with you during travel. One set is made from leather and the other from nylon.

Do you need help designing, developing, patenting, manufacturing, and/or selling YOUR product idea? MAKO Design + Invent is a one-stop-shop specifically for inventors / startups / small businesses. Click HERE for a free confidential product consultation.

Industrial designer Eric Strebel recently got his hands on a vintage Wire-O Punch for spiral bindings. Using that and an acrylic pour technique, he shows you how to make custom sketchbook covers with a trippy effect:

Here's a great example of how learning to create or fix things can be translated across multiple design genres.

The city of Florence, Italy began erecting their massive cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore, in 1296. The construction work started and stopped multiple times because building things took forever, and architects and laborers had the annoying habit of dying in the middle of projects. One hundred and twenty-two years later, after more than a half-dozen architects and at least one plague, the thing was almost finished--everything except the dome.

"We forgot something"

The problem was, the dome was supposed to be YUGE, and nobody knew how to build it. Maybe one of the previous architects did, but they apparently forgot to upload the CAD file to the server before they uploaded themselves to heaven.

My Renaissance Italian is rusty, but in 1418 one of the city council members said something to the effect of "Cathedral without a dome ain't shit," another council member yelled "Word" and so they decided to hold a design/build competition for it.

The architects who entered must've all had crappy ideas, because no architect won the design competition. Instead first prize went to Filippo Brunelleschi, who wasn't an architect at all, but a freaking goldsmith. Master Goldsmith, fine, but still a dude whose main gig was making small, expensive metal things that you hide when your shady cousin comes over. He had no architectural training, but had been dabbling in it since winning a design competition for a set of bronze doors in 1401.

Obstacles to creating the dome:- Inventors of the time were too lazy to invent tall cranes, so there was no way to get heavy materials up there

- There was no way to build a central support for the top of the dome, meaning the sides had to be self-supported

- The dome had to be octagonal, not round, because the base of it was already finished in an inconvenient octagonal shape

- The finished octagonal base was janky and irregular, with no true centerNice job, idiots

There were many more obstacles than this, but Nat Geo's got a succinct animation explaining how Brunelleschi figured it out, designing not just a dual-dome structure but also the hoisting machines and support tricks that made building it possible. Watch the video to understand the goodness:

Whether you're an industrial designer, an ID student or a homeowner with a less-than-perfect house, learning how things are put together is of paramount importance. One way to learn this is by taking things apart. Disassembling something, then successfully reassembling it, will sear construction methods into your brain in a way that classroom learning cannot achieve.

If you take apart enough pieces of furniture, it becomes obvious that here lies a plug whose sole purpose is to conceal a screw. You'd be surprised by how many laypeople don't even notice the plug, let alone know what it's for.

You can exploit this ability for financial gain or to prettify your own home. For instance, if you're an ID student interested in furniture, go to a flea market and look for vintage furniture in lousy condition--something that would be desirable if it wasn't broken. You ought be able to scoop these unwanted pieces up for cheap. Then take them apart and see if you can repair them. Maybe you ruin the first few pieces, but once you start learning from your mistakes and perform a successful repair, if you've chosen your pieces well you ought be able to resell them at a steep profit.

Minneapolis-based Dashner Design & Restoration maintains a YouTube channel where the owner documents his numerous fixes in a step-by-step way. Here's an example:

Most of his repairs require very basic kit--a rubber mallet, utility blades for scraping, sandpaper, glue, finishes, some clamps. If you come through his archive of fixes you'll learn, for instance, that it's easier to scrape the finish off of a flat surface, but when it comes to curves, applying a chemical stripper is easier. 

Build up enough of these tips, put in some elbow grease and you'll be cranking these out in no time. You'll also, if you intend to go into furniture design, gain an advantage over your fellow students.

Poppin is looking to add a Production Manager to our growing Product Design team. This position will be responsible for accomplishing technical design specifications using Solidworks (3D modeling), testing procedures, and best practices for all new furniture products. The Production Manager will oversee and continuously be improving the cost, schedule,

View the full design job here

___________________

This "Tools & Craft" section is provided courtesy of Joel Moskowitz, founder of Tools for Working Wood, the Brooklyn-based catalog retailer of everything from hand tools to Festool; check out their online shop here. Joel also founded Gramercy Tools, the award-winning boutique manufacturer of hand tools made the old-fashioned way: Built to work and built to last.

Well, this just stinks.

Furniture designer/builder Timothy Wilmots is the guy who invented the incredible transforming shop cart we looked at last year. He maintains a YouTube channel in which he reveals both his creations and his workshop efficiency tips.

Shortly after posting the videos on the shop cart, his posts came to an abrupt stop. During the ten months of radio silence, fans like me hoped nothing had happened to the guy, and his in-box had a reported 10,000 unread e-mails.

This week we've received the terrible news that he's quitting furniture making altogether, and closing down that gorgeous shop:

If you're at work and can't sneak the video onto your screen, there's a print explanation for his unexpected retirement here. Long story short, his father is retiring and Wilmots needs to take over the family farm. On top of the fact that Wilmots is a new father himself, farming is a full-time gig that leaves no hours in the day for the furniture-making business. But there is one bit of positive news:

"I do…intend to go out with a bang," Wilmots writes, "and do something to transmit to others the knowledge I built up through the years, especially in terms of making goldsmith work benches. Which I was careful about not to show too much of in the past to protect my livelihood."

We'll keep you posted of any updates on that front, and we'll also begin mining his archives for useful shop tips and such.

And to Wilmots: Best of luck on your new journey!

I keep telling myself: Drama is relative. If I experience a setback at work, that doesn't compare to a coal miner's bad day at work. When my car is giving me trouble, at least I have a car to give me trouble and I don't have to hitchhike. And while I find health insurance dismayingly expensive, there are sick people in developing nations who would gladly devote the same percentage of their income to have access to a network of medical professionals.

The part I have to keep reminding myself of is that this goes the other way, too. Technology-loving folks with more disposable income than me also have their problems. One such problem is that, according to LG, for every 66 times the average family opens a refrigerator, they only retrieve items 34 of those times! Meaning there's 32 times they open the refrigerator, letting all that cold air escape, and find the contents so dissatisfying that they don't remove anything at all. What a waste!

"A window," you think. "They could solve this by putting a window in the door." Sure they could--but why not a 29-inch touch-enabled transparent LCD that only reveals the contents when you want it to, preserving an otherwise sleek look?

The LG InstaView ThinQ Refrigerator also has a built-in Bluetooth speaker and comes with Alexa. As for release date, the company only says "Coming Soon."

Remember Ori, the mechanized transforming apartment system designed in a collaboration between Yves Béhar and MIT Media Lab? It caused a stir (okay, a design blog stir) when the concept debuted in 2016, and we gave them a Core77 Design Award in 2017. But selling an entire apartment system is a tall order, and now the company is marketing individual components as standalones; if we had to guess, this is to make market uptake easier.

First up is the Ori Pocket Closet, a sort of collapsible walk-in closet with a form factor that will be familiar to librarians and archivists:

Ori Pocket Closet from Ori on Vimeo.Some impressions:

1. One potential issue is with installing that floor strip along the wall; from the variety of apartments I've lived in and visited (in New York City at least), very few had perfectly level floors.

2. Another potential problem: There's a niggling safety feature that prevents you from "accidentally" crushing your roommate inside the closet after they've won your latest passive-aggressive Post-It note battle.

Ori has also posted a standalone video of their Cloud Bed, which is pretty stunning in its effect:

Ori Cloud Bed from Ori on Vimeo.Some impressions:

1. That's pretty nifty.

2. I don't know if you caught it, but the back support for the couch actually doubles as the headboard for the bed. I realize I'm in the minority here, but I don't like the idea of sleeping with my head near a surface that has indirectly come into contact with subway, bus and taxi seats.

3. I'd raise the question of apartments that lack perfectly plumb walls, but I suppose the installer could shim the supports.

4. I'd also be uneasy about attaching this to a partition wall, particularly in a city like New York where landlords often play fast-'n-loose with regulations (i.e. 1/2" sheetrock on studs that are a lousy 24" on center).

In any case, I don't mean to sound like a negative Nellie; Ori's furniture system is a wonderful idea that solves the persistent issue of urban living space, if you make enough to afford the pieces.

The Pocket Closet will start shipping in Spring 2019, with prices starting at $2,650, plus $299 shipping; installation is free. Prices and an official launch date for the Cloud Bed have not yet been announced, but you can keep abreast of the situation here.

Editor's note: Although this is not sponsored content, the subject, Xometry, is an advertiser at Core77.

Earlier we wrote up Xometry, the online, on-demand manufacturing platform that gives industrial designers instant quotes. With an existing network of producers equipped with machines that can do Selective Laser Sintering (SLS), Stereolithography (SLA), Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM), Direct Metal Laser Sintering (DMLS), and PolyJet, they've got digital fabrication pretty well-covered. But in an effort to be as comprehensive as possible, they've recently added yet another process to their offerings: Multi Jet Fusion.

"HP Multi Jet Fusion is an advanced technology that offers a variety of advantages for prototyping and production relative to other 3D printing technologies including faster print speeds, higher part quality, greater material variety and voxel-level design capabilities including new color options. Xometry will offer Nylon 12, Nylon 12 glass-filled, and custom material options at launch."

Check out Multi Jet Fusion's possibilities here.

With a background in industrial design, a good portfolio and some luck, you could land a job as a digital set designer for Hollywood. Their job involves, among other things, rendering cityscapes through which green-screened actors might run, fly or have car chases. But while the actors won't be replaced by computers yet, the days of designers specializing in cityscapes might be numbered.

That's because researchers at NVIDIA have managed to harness the power of AI to render not just single scenes, but entire urban environments, and everything you might expect to see in one:

"This is the first time we can do this with a neural network," said Bryan Catanzaro, Vice President of Applied Deep Learning at NVIDIA. "Neural networks – specifically – generative models are going to change the way graphics are created.

"One of the main obstacles developers face when creating virtual worlds, whether for game development, telepresence, or other applications is that creating the content is expensive. This method allows artists and developers to create at a much lower cost, by using AI that learns from the real world."

You can learn more about the technology here.