Xuxu Chair explores furniture design in a deconstructive and minimalist sense. This work seeks to make something unique and different in an area that is overrun with continually "new" designs.

View the full project here

With multiple hurricanes and now a second earthquake in the news, it's a hell of a time for natural disasters. Mexico experienced its second earthquake in two weeks just yesterday, on the precise anniversary of a devastating quake that rocked Mexico City in 1985.

What's different between then and now is that now everyone has a camera in their pocket. Seeing footage on Twitter drives the disaster home in a way that reading about it doesn't; just what the hell do you do when everything around you starts shaking? Obviously you want to get out into the open and away from buildings, as you'll see below.

Footage of Buildings Collapsing

Aquí el momento donde un edificio, al parecer en la Colonia Roma colapsa. pic.twitter.com/rAYKX0lJjm

— REFORMACOM (@Reforma) September 19, 2017">

Usuarios grabaron el momento en que un edificio se colapsa por el sismo pic.twitter.com/W8hamukccw

— REFORMACOM (@Reforma) September 19, 2017">Fireball Explosion

Video captures building exploding after a 7.1 Earthquake strikes Mexico City. Please pray for Mexico. pic.twitter.com/tOytBnYQuR

— Mauricio Cantu (@mcantu06) September 19, 2017">Trapped Children Being Discovered and Rescued

See the moment children were discovered and rescued from a school after a 7.1M earthquake hit near Mexico City https://t.co/fTxSCzPU61 pic.twitter.com/HvPfPb5l5H

— CNN (@CNN) September 20, 2017">A Woman's Very Narrow Miss

Shocking footage as a woman narrowly misses being hit by a pane of glass during the Mexico earthquake pic.twitter.com/a6gxzEAOMw

— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) September 20, 2017">

At press time the death toll was estimated to be 225, with scores more still missing. Today rescuers are going through the wreckage as best they can, with reports of some residents digging through the collapsed rubble of a school with their bare hands, in hopes of finding the 30 children reported to be inside.

After Hurricane Irma struck Texas in August, the Mexican government offered to assist the United States. The Guardian reports that following yesterday's quake, the U.S. President tweeted "God bless the people of Mexico City. We are with you and will be there for you." Political differences aside, it appears neighboring countries are still willing to assist one another.

The four prestigious design awards programs mentioned below—including a shameless plug to our own Core77 Design Awards—bring together the best designs across many categories, ranging from transportation to footwear design. 

But what's better than winning an award? Receiving an awesome trophy to either start or add to your collection. The awards themselves are coveted, but the trophies that come with them are as well designed as the projects that won in the first place. All of these trophies highlight a different process related to design, which is exactly why we've decided to dedicate a post to them.

IDSA's International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA)

IDSA's IDEA Awards program has been curating a tight list of winners across the many fields of industrial design for years, and this year is no different. Our favorites from this year include a dial that has designers all riled up, a scooter/storage hybrid for the elderly and bouncy flatpack furniture. 

Also worth noting is the 2018 IDEA Awards' rebranding by Yves Béhar's fuseproject. The rebranding includes a swanky new trophy, where the letters in IDSA join together like a puzzle to form a freaking cube. Entries for the 2018 awards open January 2, 2018.

Our Favorite Winners

Microsoft Surface Dial won Gold in Digital Interaction.Scooter for Life won Gold in Automotive & Transportation.Sai Flatpack Furniture won Gold in Student Designs.Fast Company Innovation by Design Awards

The most recently announced award winners were those that took home one of Fast Company's Innovation by Design Awards. The innovation by Design awards select a single winner for each of the 13 categories. From this year's awards, a pair of digitally fabricated sneakers, a hairdryer designed by a vacuum company and a modular airplane concept caught our eye. 

More images here.

The Innovation by Design Awards trophy is simple, but its extruded shape is a nod to a popular process well-known across many industries, from food processing to industrial design. 

Our Favorite Winners

adidas Futurecraft 4D won the Products category. Read our thoughts here.Dyson's Supersonic Hairdryer won the Fashion and Beauty category. Read our reader discussion on the hairdryer here.Transpose modular airplane by Airbus won the Experimental category.Core77 Design Awards

It's difficult to choose favorites from our very own awards program because, of course, we are excited about all of them. However, the three projects below we're deeming out "favorites" stand out because they are one of the many projects that directly help people—whether it's to find their way or remind themselves of home. 

A recent shipment of Core77 Design Awards trophies, manufactured by Firsthand Fab. Read about their process here.

Furthering our support of hard-working industrial designers and our obsession with process, each Core77 Design Awards trophy is a personalized, solid metal mold. Each mold comes stocked with wax in our signature orange hue—giant crayon, anyone?—but we're convinced the brilliant designers receiving these trophies can think of plenty more creative uses. Stay tuned for more information on how to register your work for next year's Core77 Design Awards cycle.

Our Favorite Winners

Google Wayfinding won our Visual Communication awardThe IF Platform won our Commercial Equipment awardA Taste of Home won our Design Concept AwardA' Design Awards

The A' Design Accolades are organized in a wide range of creative fields to highlight the best designers in all disciplines. Our favorite three winners from the 2016-2017 cycle are a wearable tool for woodworkers and sculptors, an umbrella dryer for city bus stops and an experimental automotive steering interface.

The trophy is a 3D printed, diamond-shaped metal structure that reminds us where most of our industries are headed—digital fabrication. The trophies are chromed/electroplated depending on which level of honor you receive. If you're interested in submitting your work to the A' Design Awards, you can already do so here.

Our Favorite Winners

Happaratus sculpture tool was a Prosumer Products, Tools, and Machinery Design winnerUltraDry bus stop umbrella dryer was a Social Design winnerStewart II Human Machine Interface was an Engineering and Technical Design winner

*****

A Design-driven product development company working in the toy and gift categories, we seek a talented assistant to join our team as we expand our marketplace presence. Re-marks is a woman-owned Seattle-based venture and a triple-bottom-line employer (people/profits/planet). Established in the '90s, we manufacture all of our current products in the USA. Our content is both original and licensed.

View the full design job here

Here's a great example of an architect becoming enamored of a new, flashy concept while failing to consider real-world behaviors. In 1881, architect William H. Brown patented the following design:

That's the plan and elevation views of a rotating jail. The circle contains eight pie-shaped jail cells and there's only one door. The cell rotunda rests on ball bearings, and a guard rotates a manual hand crank to spin the entire structure.

The supposed benefit of this design was that only one guard would need to be hired to watch the single door. But the downsides are manifold. Never mind the increased construction costs; in an emergency, say a fire or a flood, the one guard must stand there and painstakingly rotate each prisoner out. The larger, more gruesome problem is that the lone guard has no way to see what's going on in the cells on the other side of the circle. If, say, a drunk arrestee has passed out with his arms sticking out of the bars, well, guess who loses those arms when his cell rotates and lines up with an immovable wall.

Amazingly, a dozen or so versions of Brown's design were actually constructed, and though all were decommissioned as the design's demerits came to light, some are even still standing. YouTuber Tom Scott visited the Rotary Jail Museum in Crawfordsville, Indiana, and got a demonstration of how it worked:

Camera manufacturer Leica was formed nearly a hundred years ago, but their factory looks like it was built 100 years in the future. They've released a video inside their Wetzlar factory that was supposed to draw attention to their cameras, but instead we were stunned by the gleaming, pristine environment and the white-uniform-clad, plastic-hairnet-wearing staff. If you told me these were stills from an upcoming Ridley Scott or Christopher Nolan movie, I'd have believed you.

Here's the vid:

Perhaps it's no coincidence that the facilities are so photogenic. I looked into it and the factory is integrated into Leica's "Experience Center," where visitors can peer into the production facilities through three panoramic windows. The compound also contains a Leica store, gallery and exhibition spaces, a café and a restaurant.

Note that the restaurant is called "Casino," that's not an actual casino. Leica presumably prefers to take your money the old-fashioned way, by building desirable products.

If you want to visit the place, it's about 40 minutes outside of Frankfurt and you can learn more here.

Sole Stacks was founded out of a love of shoes and a need to create a better alternative for shoe storage and display. We're a two man team made of myself, with a background in footwear design, and my partner Demont Campbell, with a background in architecture. The shoe displays we make, unlike traditional shoe racks or plastic drop-font containers, show off the personality of your shoe by displaying their sides while still remaining space efficient.

Sole Stacks started in 2014 and grew with a successful Kickstarter launch in 2016. Since our launch, we've added more products such as our Wall Mount Stack, which allows you to store your shoes directly on your wall.

View the full project here

Anyone familiar with the woes of freelancing knows that hourly time tracking can be a genuine hassle. While it's true that many common software programs for personal accounting are trying to tackle this with digital solutions, it can still at times feel difficult to accurately track your time on the job. The founders of a new tech product called Tiller that launches today on Kickstarter are hoping the ultimate solution to this problem doesn't lie in an app or software program, but a desktop accessory that allows you to clock in and out with the tap of a finger. 

Co-founder of Joan, the digital agency developing behind Tiller, Nick Hallam told Core77 the original inspiration behind the product's hardware was simply to come up with a solution that best fit the problem: "When we looked at time tracking, it felt like almost all companies had spent their time improving what you can do with your tracked time data, but not actually spending time asking the question of how can we make it easier and a better experience for a human to track their time? If you ask that question and truly try and answer it, I would be surprised if you came up with a mobile app, desktop app or Chrome extension. Adding hardware to the software improves the whole experience and makes it that much easier to do."

The team behind Tiller conducted years of prototyping and design research in order to get to their final form. Their main motivation behind the hardware was to make tracking time with a new device as intuitive as possible, so they built a simple tap-and-turn system that allows you to clock in and turn the device to easily switch between projects.  "After many iterations, we came up with an ordered list that appears on top of all your other windows. If you want to stop your timer because you're going out to lunch, you can tap Tiller and you'll get a small notification on the screen. That's it," notes Hallam. One question Tiller says they always get from curious individuals is why the device isn't wireless, and they emphasize that this was a completely conscious decision. Eliminating the need for Bluetooth or Internet connectivity eliminates the chance for error and results in a more reliable device.  

Such a product serves as a reminder that no matter how magically convenient certain apps and software can be, often the object its encased in can make or break how successful it is with the general public. "There is that saying that if you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and that's what a lot of technology companies do when trying to solve a new problem. So to a software company, time tracking will, of course, require an app," the Tiller team mentions. 

The question at this hour is certainly whether or not this is a problem many people can relate to, which is why Tiller is an ideal product to be funded on a platform like Kickstarter. Already at $12,000 since launching earlier this morning, it looks like it may be fulfilling a few fed up freelancers' needs.  

For decades we've seen the military develop expensive technology—radar, GPS, microwaves—that trickled down to the consumer sector and became affordable. Now the consumer sector is apparently returning the favor.

The U.S. Navy's Virginia-class submarines are $2.7 billion nuclear-powered fast attack vessels bristling with the latest technology. Old-school periscopes have been ditched in favor of two photonics masts that provide a 360-degree view. To control these masts, a sailor uses a joystick similar to what you'd find in a helicopter.

Note: This is an example of a helicopter control stick, not the actual incumbent design. [Image credit]

A Navy survey seeking pain points turned up complaints about "the controls for the scope," Lt. J.G Kyle Leonard, an assistant weapons officer, told the Virginian-Pilot newspaper. "It's kind of clunky in your hand; it's real heavy."

Lockheed Martin and the Navy put their heads together and came up with an interesting solution: Use off-the-shelf Xbox controllers instead. 

This not only saves money, but vastly reduces the training time:

The Xbox controller is no different than the ones a lot of crew members grew up playing with. Lockheed Martin says the sailors who tested the controller at its lab were intuitively able to figure out how to use it on their own within minutes, compared to hours of training required for the joystick.

The Xbox controller also is significantly cheaper. The company says the photonic mast handgrip and imaging control panel that cost about $38,000 can be replaced with an Xbox controller that typically costs less than $30.

"That joystick is by no means cheap, and it is only designed to fit on a Virginia-class submarine," said Senior Chief Mark Eichenlaub, the John Warner's assistant navigator. "I can go to any video game store and procure an Xbox controller anywhere in the world, so it makes a very easy replacement."

Mattel, Inc. is seeking an experienced and self motivated Project Designer to join its Toy Box product design team. The Toybox Vehicles team focuses on delivering exciting innovative product for a wide range of brands such as Matchbox, Fast and the Furious and Jurassic World. The group is focused on creating new product opportunities for the boy’s division; by understanding the consumer, trends and technology that are then translated into successful product. This involves creating and communicating toy concepts in 2D and/or 3D models to design and marketing management.

View the full design job here

Nike's Flyknit has become synonymous with the brand, now used in everything from sneakers to sports bras. The knit material is more sustainable than many materials used in footwear and fashion, mainly due to its minimal waste production. But since Flyknit's conception in 2012, Nike has been more focused on silhouette than material development, providing a hole for competitors to fill with a plethora of sustainable options. 

It seems as though a fire has been lit under Nike's butt, as the company just announced its latest sustainable effort, Flyleather. The name Flyleather may sound like a sick biker jacket worn in Grease, but the material is actually a valid alternative to real leather, as it's still made from at least 50% of the real thing.

Nike Flyleather Tennis Classic

Instead of reinventing the wheel entirely, Nike is taking resources they already have access to and putting them to better use through a more sustainable production process. To create Flyleather, Nike collects real leather scraps discarded from regular sneaker production, turns the scraps into fiber and then combines the scraps with a polyester blend using a high-pressure hydro process.

Even though leather is only the 10th most used material by Nike, has the second highest environmental impact for both carbon and water. According to Nike's research, the hybrid material will use 90% less water and the carbon footprint will be 80% lower than traditional full-grain leather. Flyleather will be produced on a roll, which will improve cutting efficiency and further reduce waste. In terms of performance, sneakers made with Flyleather prove to be 40% lighter and five times more durable.

Nike Flyleather Tennis Classic

The first product to feature Flyleather is the Nike Flyleather Tennis Classic. Keeping it simple, the sneaker is all white and steers clear of any crazy design additions. 

In the coming months, Nike will also release Flyleather versions of the Air Force 1, Air Max 90, Cortez, Jordan 1 and an updated Tennis Classic. If you're in the US, you can sign up to win one of the new pairs here.

When looking at the sneakers mentioned above, you can really see what Flyleather is capable of:

Nike Flyleather Jordan 1Nike Flyleather Jordan 1 toe box detail 

The slight perforated detail of the Flyleather proves that this is a material easily manipulated either digitally or manually with the hydro process. If Flyleather becomes a regularly used material, at the very least, Nike will be able to significantly lower their carbon footprint.

To help designers of all levels fine tune their sketching skills, Advanced Design Sketching (in partnership with Autodesk) will be hosting SQ1CON, a two-day conference specifically focused on design sketching. The Advanced Design Sketching organization began as a small summer workshop for a handful of design students, but the students and instructors agreed there should a next step. From there, SQ1CON was born. The event will be held in downtown Chicago at the Motorola Mobility HQ and UIC School of Design on October 6th and 7th.

The conference's name is right in line with the organization's mission to help teach the importance of design sketching in a collaborative environment. SQ1 refers to Square 1, a restarting phase designers are all too familiar with. Instead of only highlighting the beauty of a final sketch or design, Advanced Design Sketching hopes SQ1CON will help attendees embrace failure, encourage process and inspire creativity. 

Sketching workshops will be lead by industry professionals, including our good friends Michael DiTullo and Spencer Nugent. During the workshops, you can expect to focus on:

Rapid Visualization, Visual Communication, Marker Rendering, Understanding Hierarchy, Product Relationship, Sketching Techniques, Speed, Sketch Notes and Storytelling

To get an idea of designers you can expect to interact with at the conference, we've pulled a few videos straight from the Advanced Design Sketching team. In the videos, each designer discusses their relationship with design sketching while showing off their sweet sketching skills:

Interested in attending SQ1CON? Learn more and purchase tickets here.

Homeless people need help, and in New York City they are not getting it. Our homeless population has exploded in recent years; last year the number hit a record-breaking 60,000. This has led some business owners in my downtown Manhattan neighborhood to hack their outdoor furniture.

The streets immediately around me have seen steadily-increasing numbers of homeless since NYC Mayor de Blasio replaced Bloomberg in 2014. At night they seek shelter under scaffolding, beneath awnings, in doorways and on benches; virtually any unoccupied horizontal surface is a potential bed.

For the most part they are harmless. Many of them are also visibly mentally unwell. They urinate and defecate near where they sleep—it's a fairly common sight—leading local business owners to shun them. Two nearby restaurants have modified their outdoor benches in the following manner.

Each night after they close, this restaurant lays these rusted rows of pointed teeth across their outdoor benches.

When it's time to open, the restaurant workers remove them...

...and replace them with padded seating.

Further up the block, this other restaurant removes the slats of their cast-iron benches each night.

In the morning, a worker re-installs the slats.

The slats slide into grooves in each side of the bench.

They are registered to the center support with unfastened carriage bolts.

Until the problem of homelessness is addressed, we can expect to see more business owners finding creative ways to make street furniture less hospitable.

What happens when you plug your Prius in? Are you ultimately drawing power from coal, nuclear, wind, biomass? It depends on where you live.

Most of us know that America generates its electricity from a multitude of sources, as shown in this graphic:

However, that pie chart doesn't accurately represent the breakdown in any single state (although Arkansas comes close), because state by state, electricity is generated from a cocktail of up to nine different sources. The Nuclear Energy Institute has posted a chart, current as of 2017, that shows the percentages of each source that each state uses.

The Washington Post has created the following image to give you some idea of the source by region:

Sadly we don't have an information designer on staff, but we took the NEI chart and dropped it into Excel to crunch the numbers a bit. While some of the findings were expected (like West Virginia running almost entirely on coal), some were surprising (Washington D.C. runs almost 100% on natural gas). Here's what we found:

CoalTop 5West Virginia - 94.4%
Wyoming - 85.9%
Kentucky - 84.7%
Missouri - 76.8%
North Dakota - 70.8%Bottom 5District of Columbia - 0%
Rhode Island - 0%
Vermont - 0%
California - 0.2%
Idaho - 0.4%NuclearTop 5South Carolina - 57.6%
New Hampshire - 55.9%
Illinois - 52.6%
Connecticut - 45.5%
Maryland - 39.6%Uses 0%:

Alaska, Colorado, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, Wyoming

Natural GasTop 5District of Columbia - 99.7%
Rhode Island - 95.6%
Delaware - 92.4%
Mississippi - 79.7%
Nevada - 72.9%Bottom 5Vermont - 0.1%
Hawaii - 0.4%
West Virginia - 1.7%
Nebraska - 1.9%
Wyoming - 2.4%PetroleumTop 5Hawaii - 66.6%
Alaska - 14.5%
Massachusetts - 1.3%
Maine - 1%
Delaware - 0.6%Uses 0%

Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Washington, Wisconsin

HydroTop 5Washington - 68.1%
Idaho - 59%
Oregon - 56.7%
Vermont - 55.6%
South Dakota - 39.9%Uses 0%

Delaware, District of Columbia, Kansas, Mississippi, New Jersey, Rhode Island

GeothermalTop 6Nevada - 9.7%
California - 6.3%
Hawaii - 2.7%
Utah - 1.4%
Idaho - 0.6%
Oregon - 0.3%Every other state uses 0%!Solar/PVTop 9California - 9.6%
Nevada - 6.4%
Vermont - 4%
Arizona - 3.5%
North Carolina - 2.9%
New Mexico - 2.4%
Utah - 2.3%
Massachusetts - 2.2%
New Jersey - 1.3%Of the remaining states, these use 1% or less…

Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Maryland, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas

…and these states use 0%:

Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, District of Columbia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming

WindTop 5Iowa - 36.6%
South Dakota - 30.3%
Kansas - 29.6%
Oklahoma - 25.1%
North Dakota - 21.5%Uses 0%

Alabama, Arkansas, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia

Biomass and OtherTop 5Maine - 27.4%
Vermont - 24.9%
New Hampshire - 9%
Massachusetts - 6.4%
Hawaii - 5.5%All other states use Biomass at 5% or less. The remaining states us 0%:

District of Columbia, South Dakota, West Virginia, Wyoming

________________________

Here are some things that jumped out at us:

- Every single state uses natural gas.

- Isolated Hawaii is heavily reliant on petroleum.

- Sixteen states don't use petroleum at all.

- Every single state, except three and Washington D.C., use biomass, though in primarily fledgling amounts. That means more states (47) use biomass than nuclear (30), although the gross output is obviously vastly different.

- Solar uptake is shockingly small, with 16 states using 1% or less and 26 states using zero.

If you'd like to see how your own state stacks up, click on over to the NEI chart.

The FabricKeyboard is an experimental project at the intersection between engineering, design, fashion, and music. It is the first, sensor-rich, novel physical interaction medium in the form of fabric piano, developed by using both common and smart textile-based materials. Based on our multi-layer design, each key, the bulk fabric, and its extensions could detect touch, proximity, pressure, stretch, position and coupled electric field simultaneously, resulting in an expressive and deformable musical controller.

View the full project here

Shaving has been around for a long time. In the 4th Century B.C. Alexander the Great, an early proponent of shaving, ordered his troops to do it. Alexander had observed that beards were a martial liability for soldiers; if you didn't remove your own facial hair, your opponent would do it for you—by using your beard to grab your face.

View the full content here

As we recently learned, much of our planet's supply of drinking water is infested with plastic microfibers. Single-use plastic items like shopping bags and drinking straws are some of the culprits.

To combat the impact of discarded plastic bags on the environment, an Indonesian company called Avani has created a single-use bag you'd swear was plastic—but which is in fact made of Cassava (Yucca), an edible root.

These Bio-Cassava Bags contain zero actual plastic and are made from Cassava starch using a proprietary process. Being 100% bio-based, the bags will break down in a matter of months but, should they find their way into a waterway before then, they're completely safe for animals to consumer, unlike plastic.

Here Cassava founder Kevin Kamala puts his money where his mouth is, literally, by dissolving one of the company's bags in water and drinking it:

The current barrier to mass uptake is that the production process makes Bio-Cassava bags cost twice as much as regular plastic bags. With any luck Avani will be able to draw the interest of additional materials scientists and production experts who can figure out a way to bring the cost down.

Battle Sports otherwise known as "Battle" is the fastest growing football brand in the US. As such, we are looking to add a talented product designer to our team. We are also open to project work if the fit is right. Obviously project work would not require relocation. We are a young, well funded, aggressive team with demonstrated commercial success. Our products are sold in every major sporting goods retailer and online. Business is projected to double for the third year in a row and we are only limited by the talent on the team.

View the full design job here

The London Design Festival kicks off this weekend, bringing hundreds of design events to the city of London with it. The difficulty of narrowing down your schedule goes without saying, especially when each exhibition has so much to offer. That's where we're here to help—we've created this insider's guide full of our favorite exhibits, workshops, launches and events to help as you navigate your way through the maze of well-designed things.

Material of the Year

This new exhibition was created to celebrate and explore the materials with the biggest impact on global design today. The first selected material? Jesmonite®!

Design Frontiers 

Design Frontiers will highlight the thinking and working practices of 30 leading designers from around the world, ranging in fields from automotive design to fashion design. A highlight of the exhibition will be the launch of nolii, a lifestyle-led tech brand co-founded by LAYER's Benjamin Hubert and tech entrepreneur Asad Hamir.

Plan your visit to Somerset House here. 

Enlightened Design II

Held in The Crypt Gallery of St Pancras Parish Church, Enlightened Design II will feature lighting designs by various Dutch designers that light the way as you walk through the spooky halls of the old church. The name of the exhibition is almost ironic.

designjunction

Here's what's on at this year's designjunction, home of all things spatial design. There's a lot to experience here, so we suggest getting tickets before it's too late.

Restoration Station x Yinka Ilori

This exhibition is an exciting collaboration between non-profit social enterprise Restoration Station and designer Yinka Ilori. Shoreditch-based Restoration Station runs workshops for people in recovery, teaching them skills in furniture restoration. Ilori will work with the program's participants to restore pieces of furniture in line with his signature aesthetic.

Country Showcases and Galleries at London Design Fair

The London Design Fair features booths organized by country, making it difficult and slightly intimidating to choose a favorite. We have our eyes on Portugal, Finland and the Netherlands, but the Netherlands is in the lead simply because their show's name is Dutch Stuff.

Balenciaga: Shaping Fashion

It's no secret Cristóbal Balenciaga was a master of couture and helped shape todays fashion industry. This exhibition will feature over 100 of his designs, along with contemporary designers working in the same innovative tradition.

On Repeat

A series of talks, workshops and events focused on manual repetition in the design process held by Universal Design Studio and The Office Group.

Edit '17

Twentyywentyone's exhibition of classic and contemporary designs is sure to reflect a creative mix of materials, construction and form. The show will focus the use of raw materials wood, metal and glass.

Urban Cabin

Architect Sam Jacob and MINI LIVING's Urban Cabin will be one of the Landmark Projects unveiled for the London Design Festival. The ongoing project by MINI explores the future of urban living—tiny spaces. 

Bodo Sperlein x Loewe

Designer Bodo Sperlein has teamed up with Loewe to re-imagine the future of OLED, and we can't wait to check out the sleek design in person.

Es Devlin’s set for Bizet’s CarmenThe British Land Celebration of Design Awards Exhibit 

Past recipients of The British Land Celebration of Design Awards include Zaha Hadid, Marc Newson, Richard Rogers, Paul Smith, Thomas Heatherwick, Ron Arad, Dieter Rams and David Adjaye. The exhibition presented at this year's festival will feature the work of all four 2017 winners—Es Devlin, Paul Priestman, Julian Melchiorri and Margaret Calvert.

There are so many more exhibitions to browse through that we had to omit to maintain our own sanity. Continue planning your schedule here. 

Furniture

This is a good, substantive watch for aspiring furniture designer/builders. Here Jay Bates meticulously walks you through the build of an "angled half-lap three tier shelf," explaining both his design choices and his fabrication methods:

Bob Clagett builds a corner desk and monitor riser for his office:

Production Efficiency

Matthias Wandel comes up with a crazy series of MacGyver-like hacks while simplifying the production of baseboard molding:

Frank Howarth figures out the most efficient way to create and install lots of French cleats for his in-progress pantry design:

Organization

Ben from HomeMade Modern designs functional built-ins for a laundry room:

April Wilkerson improvises a series of organizing/storage solutions for an outdoor shed:

Just Plain Nifty

La Fabrique DIY shows off their old-school mechanical screwdriver:

Laura Kampf creates a height-adjustable dual shelf, fashioning the hardware herself: