Industrial Design News
Core77 Weekly Roundup (2-10-25 to 2-14-25)
Here's what we looked at this week:
FOLD is an origami-based recyclable cardboard alternative to EPS foam packaging. Apple research yields "expressive and functional" non-anthropomorphic robot, inspired by Pixar's logo lamp.Architecture student Lotte Scheder-Bieschin has invented "Unfold Form," a brilliant formwork that reduces concrete & steel usage in vaulted structures.
Re-Grip is a cleverly-designed product for installing new handles on old tools.
The VanAir Door is a sleek-looking door with a hidden ventilation channel. It offers privacy without compromising airflow.
The Optima Steamer: A better way to clean your car (and more) using steam, not chemicals.
Maker Pipe: These single-tool connectors make it easy to build things out of conduit.
A brilliant UX detail on these Shinwa "Pick Up" rulers.
Tool & technique tips for quickly removing carpet staples.
The Tellus bench, by Swedish designer Emma Olbers, is the world's first piece of furniture made from fossil-free steel.
Brought back from the '90s, industrial designer Sebastian Bergne's simple Candloop is a low-tech candelabra.
Architects ask: What to do with these decommissioned marble fireplace mantles?
This "Illoominated II" installation is by Todd Moyer Designs, an "experiential design" firm.
The Planck SSD rethinks the form factor of the USB flash drive, altering the orientation to improve UX for video capture.
Yea or Nay? Tile-based lamps, by industrial design firm Unknown Untitled.
Industrial Design student work: Avants, by Juliette Masson of ECAL, is technical clothing made from natural materials.
Aluminum tariffs will mean more expensive beer.
The Honey Dipper, by Dutch designer Stijn van Aardenne, was 3D-printed using a unique tilting bed he designed.
Industrial design case study: Spanner tackle's iFixit's sleek soldering iron system.
Industrial Design Case Study: iFixit's Sleek Soldering Iron System
iFixit, the company dedicated to teaching people how to repair their own products, has plenty of engineering expertise. What they don't have is industrial design chops. When they wanted to create their own soldering iron system, they turned to ID consultancy Spanner to create a powerful unit that would be consistent with their brand. The resultant product is called the FixHub.
iFixit FixHubAt Spanner, we're passionate about collaborating with innovative companies to bring amazing products to life. That's why we were thrilled to partner with iFixit on the FixHub, a soldering iron that's more than just a tool – it's a portable powerhouse designed for the modern fixer. It reflects a commitment to empowering people to take charge of their repairs.
The FixHub isn't your grandpa's soldering iron. It's a high-performance system that combines rapid heating, portability, and smart features to meet the exacting standards of today's repair warriors. This is the tool that makes soldering as mobile as your gadgets, letting you conquer fixes wherever you roam, from the field to your workbench.
Spanner played a pivotal role in bringing the iFixit FixHub to lifeOur expert team was instrumental in devising, designing, and engineering this innovative, portable soldering iron. We worked closely with iFixit to ensure the FixHub aligned perfectly with their brand, delivering a product that was not only high-performing but also visually appealing and affordable. Our contributions to the FixHub included:- Strategic Design Direction: We helped define the overall product vision, ensuring that FixHub was a perfect fit for the iFixit brand and the needs of iFixit's customers.
- Mechanical Engineering: Our engineers designed and refined the FixHub's mechanical layout and feature details, considering factors like manufacturability, assembly, cost, and, repairability (of course).
- Industrial Design: We established the general design aesthetic for the FixHub with considerations for a broader product line, ensuring a consistent and visually appealing look.
- UX Design: We played a key role in designing the seamless interaction between the soldering iron and the hub, including the innovative cap that doubles as a stand.
Together with iFixit, we created a portable soldering station that empowers people to repair their devices with ease and efficiency. The FixHub's success is a testament to our collaborative approach and our commitment to delivering exceptional products.
"Like the soldering iron they helped design, the Spanner team was fast, responsive, and highly skilled. They quickly grasped our users' needs and delivered an intuitive, user-friendly design with impressive efficiency."— Brett Hartt, Chief Engineer, iFixit
"Working alongside the iFixit team to bring the FixHub to life was an incredibly rewarding experience. We were driven by the goal of creating a tool that would empower people to repair their devices with ease and efficiency. Spanner was proud to contribute our expertise in design, engineering, and manufacturing to ensure the FixHub met the highest standards of quality and performance. Enabling the positive impact that the FixHub will have on the repair community is truly inspiring."— Spanner Senior Product Designer, Alyssa Kinoshita
You can see more of Spanner's work here.
3D Printing on a Bed That Can Tilt and Move Yields Unique Objects
Take a look at this object, which is obviously 3D-printed. Ask yourself: How did they do it?
In this case, "they" is Dutch designer Stijn van Aardenne, whose Maze Lamp caught our eye last year.
More recently, van Aardenne has been teasing a new "revolving print bed" he's developed:
It was used to produce the piece shown up top, which he calls the "Honey Dipper:"
"The Honey Dipper is the first output and proof of concept of a new 4-axis rotary printer prototype I've been developing, designed to align layer orientation with the flow of the geometry. A perfect match with transparent materials and light!"Aardenne is pretty prolific, so with any luck we'll see market-ready product soon.
Aluminum Tariffs to Raise Price of Beer
An unfortunate knock-on effect of Trump's tariffs on aluminum imports will hit the packaging sector. While Coca-Cola is currently available in aluminum cans, the company revealed in an earnings call that "if aluminum cans become more expensive, we can put more emphasis on PET bottles." Reducing plastic use is not a priority of this administration, and Coca-Cola's shift won't ruffle any governmental feathers.
Breweries and beer drinkers will also be affected. Tour average beer manufacturer doesn't have the diverse portfolio of packaging options of a Coca-Cola, and those breweries heavily invested in aluminum packaging will have no choice but to raise prices.
Microbreweries in particular will be hard-hit. These smaller outfits lack the deep pockets of name-brand breweries, and being on the crunchier side of the market, have largely shifted to aluminum over bottles for environmental reasons. They also use tanks, kegs and brewing equipment made of steel, which is also subject to the new tariffs. They will need to raise costs in order to survive.
Also: Did you know that Coca-Cola has been experimenting with reusable glass bottles? Those make up 8.8% of their packaging portfolio—though sadly, they're primarily used overseas, in countries like Germany, Austria, Spain, South Africa and Vietnam. The company says they're available in "select restaurants" in the U.S., but doesn't name any. America remains a laggard in recycling concerns.
Industrial Design Student Work: Technical Clothing Made from Natural Materials
This excellent Avants project is by Industrial Design student Juliette Masson. Done as her diploma project at ECAL, the project expores the use of more environmentally-friendly materials for technical clothing.
"Synthetic fibers are now a common feature of sportswear, including in the hiking world. These are popular for their technical properties: lightness, elasticity, low absorbency, and wrinkle resistance, among others. However, the environmental impact of these materials is significant, both during manufacture and throughout their life cycle."
"In response to this issue, Avants propose an alternative hiking outfit made from natural materials: Linen, selected for its thermo-regulating and hypoallergenic properties; waxed cotton, known for its durability and water-repellent qualities, chosen to provide protection against rain and abrasion."
"The design of these outfits drew inspiration from historical garments and their fastening systems, while being adapted for contemporary and functional use."
Tile-Based Lamps, Yea or Nay?
These UU Tiles are by Unknown Untitled, a Paris-based industrial design firm. They're essentially tile-based lamps.
"UU Tiles…began as a research initiative and evolved into a full tile collection thanks to a collaboration with a historic Normandy tile manufacturer. Challenging the prevailing focus on mobility and flexibility in interior design, UU Tiles explores sustainability via permanence and integrated functions. It comprises plain tiles, ceramic hooks, and lamps. A sense of modernity arises even though the enduring quality of the material supports the search for timeless forms."
They've yet to release images of the hooks.
While I understand the importance of experimentation in design, is it just me, or is this product crazy? Your average wall-mounted lamp can easily be installed and moved, with the biggest pain being the snaking of in-wall wiring. This one adds another level of installation complexity: It has to be part of a larger tile body, and now we're getting mastic or mortar involved, so it's never coming off of the wall.
That said, the product is currently sold out, so apparently there's demand.
Blending Science, Nature, and Business - It Sets the Tone
The Core77 Design Awards Sustainability category features any designed product, service, or system tackling issues around sustainability in a thoughtful, research-backed manner through strategies ranging from materials, production methods, efficient systems, packaging and shipping, etc.
If there is one thing Kara Pecknold worries about in the world of design, it is: "that we will avoid some of the deep work and thoughtful intention that is required to be active participants in supporting the shape of a livable future that sustains both people and planet." This concern for sustainability has shaped Kara's career path and motivates her future.
As the VP of Regenerative Design at frog (the reinvention and experience partner part of Capgemini Invent), Kara has spent 20 years helping clients develop new products, services, and businesses – particularly those that will benefit people and planet in the Eco-Digital Era™. Kara serves as the global lead for sustainability and focuses on insights that exist at the intersection of people, products, and systems. Her work has touched organizations across industries, from consumer products and services to health care, energy management, mobility, and education. Earlier in her career, Kara pursued a master's degree in design and operated her own research design consultancy in Vancouver, Canada. Today, she is based in Germany, where she leads a design team and speaks, teaches, and writes about design, sustainability, and building creative capabilities in organizations.
Kara finds herself most enthusiastic about the "intentional and blended emergence of science, nature, and business" in her practice, which she believes is "setting a tone for a refreshed narrative for design." To designers entering projects for consideration in the Core77 Design Awards, Kara advises: "Be intentional with the holistic story of your design. Ecosystems thinking reveals how your design will journey through the world and highlights both social and environmental impact."
Butlr 2024 winner of the Sustainability Category fuses AI and body heat sensing technology to shape the future of sustainable buildings for working and living.
The 2024 winner in the Core77 Design Awards Sustainability category was Butlr, the AI Data Platform for Anonymous People Sensing. This system combines AI with body heat sensing technology to understand movements in a space, generating insights about how a space is being used – and ultimately helping improve a building's safety, comfort, and energy efficiency.
If you have a design that could help people and planet thrive together, submit it to the 2025 Core77 Design Awards.
Enter your best work in the Core77 Design Awards today!
Low-Tech Candelabra: Industrial Designer Sebastian Bergne's Simple Candloop
British industrial designer Sebastian Bergne designed this Candloop way back in 1999. Made of stainless steel wire and aluminum for the candle holders, it's a simple way to turn a wine bottle into a candelabra.
This is low-tech '90s design, when design was still fun.
It's recently been brought back into production by German housewares brand Details Produkte. They run €20/$20 a pop.
An Eye-Catching Installation: Lasers as Unspooling Thread
Todd Moyer Designs practices "experiential design," combining art and technology to create installations. Their "Illoominated II" piece, below, caught my eye. It was inspired by textile looms, and gives the illusion that the threads are lasers:
An earlier iteration of this piece, "Illoominated I," featured just the thread spools. The newer iteration added the woven rug.
"Illoominated II" is currently on display as part of the Portland Winter Light Festival.
Architects Ask: What to Do With These Decommissioned Marble Fireplace Mantles?
A lot of architecture think-tank stuff loses me, but this one I can both follow and get behind. Amor Immeuble is a Paris-based quartet of architects interested in material research and experimentation. They recently encountered a series of beautifully-crafted marble pieces that were once prized and are now considered waste. With their "Deposees" series, the group considers how best to preserve these pieces and integrate them into modern life.
Essentially, the group notes that as fireplaces are no longer needed for heat, they're often removed during renovations to free up floor space. However, they often have ornate marble mantles that were the must-have interior design feature of the 19th century.
They were sold by catalog, as the group explains:
"Nineteenth-century marble-makers flooded France with these kit dressings by the wagonload, standardizing catalogs with a limited series of model-types, utilitarian syntheses of historical styles.""The ambivalent status of these standardized ornaments—architectural archetype or decorative product, indispensable figure in the domestic landscape or cumbersome antique—is inevitably debated during interior renovation projects.""What position should we, as architects, adopt in such situations? What is the value of this ornamented interface, ultimately stripped of all function when the ducts are condemned? What place should be given to the many pieces that have been deposited? Among these sheet-rock facings, consoles and modillions stand out, more elaborate and massive in their function as projecting supports.""The generic nature of the fragments collected enables us to turn them into three-dimensional assemblies that temporarily occupy the domestic space of the gallery: the rock, reduced to an ornamental motif, is used here for its structural capacity, and the contoured form becomes a framework component, abstracted from its original orientation and symbolism."
At present there's no practical application for the salvaged mantle fragments, but the constructions pictured here were exhibited at the DNL Gallery in Paris.
The World's First Piece of Furniture Made from Fossil-Free Steel
Plastic is made from fossil fuels. Steel isn't, but we must burn an awful lot of fossil fuels in order to produce it. Iron ore must be pulled out of the ground, typically using gas-powered machinery; we then have to burn coal to make coke, in order to extract that iron in a blast furnace, which is also powered by coal.
Incredibly, Swedish Steel AB has come up with a way to make fossil-free steel. Their ore supplier, LKAB, pulls the stuff out of the ground with electricity-powered mining equipment. Rather than coke, green hydrogen (made using wind, hydro and solar energy in Sweden) is injected. The furnaces are electric, also powered by renewables. The casting is done using electric induction heating rather than the material being molted in a coal-fired furnace.
Veteran Swedish furniture designer Emma Olbers has designed the world's first piece of furniture made from fossil-free steel. Her Tellus bench, intended as street furniture, features armrests wide enough to rest a cup of coffee on, and the seating angles were created with ergonomics in mind.
The Tellus bench is in production by Norwegian outdoor manufacturer Vestre.
Below Olbers discusses her design philosophy and what she was going for with the bench. (Interestingly—perhaps this is a translation thing—her take on "form follows function" is "forms follow planetary boundaries.)
Rethinking the Form Factor of the USB Flash Drive
This Planck SSD (Solid State Drive), by mobile accessories startup Planck, rethinks the form of the USB flash drive. The change is a tiny one with a major impact: Moving the plug from the short end to the center of the long end.
This was done so that you can plug it into the bottom of your phone, without adversely affecting the overall form. (Imagine trying to do this with a standard flash drive.) It's aimed at those who shoot lots of video, and it allows you to record directly to the flash drive rather than eating up your phone's memory.
Of course, it can also be connected to your tablet or laptop. They also offer a hub if you want to connect multiple units.
The Planck SSD will be available in 1TB ($125) and 2TB ($199) capacities. It's supposed to launch on Kickstarter this month.
Tool & Technique Tips for Quickly Removing Carpet Staples
When removing old carpet, it's really a three-phase job. The first phase is pulling up the carpet, which is pretty easy. Around the perimeter of the room are tack strips. These have vertically protruding tacks that pierce the carpet. These tacks offer great lateral resistance but practically zero resistance against uplift, so if you grab a section of carpet and pull straight up, you can free it with minimal effort. Indeed the most arduous part of carpet removal is cutting it into pieces you can roll and cart off.
The second phase is pulling up the old carpet underlayment. This, too, is simple and straightforward, at least with a foam underlayment as shown here. The parts that are dry are readily pulled up by hand; the parts that are badly stained and stick to the floor can be removed with a floor scraper.
The third phase is the most difficult: Removing the fasteners. Prying up tack strips is easy and straightforward, but pulling the hundreds of staples used to tack the underlayment down is not.
In my arsenal I have upholstery staple removers and stationery staple removers, and neither will suit here. You can also try a flathead screwdriver, a hammer and pliers, but you'll be there for days.
In search of a faster solution I tried two new-to-me tools. The first is this $19 Zenith Carpet Staple Puller, by Danco. The images made it seem promising. The tool promises to speed the task by removing multiple staples at once across its wide, toothed edge.
In practice, that promise collided with reality. I found this tool can only remove multiple staples at once if the staples are all aligned in the same direction. What I've found, at least on the underlayment pictured here, is that the original installer fired the staples at random angles. That cleanly negates the tool's multi-staple ability.
The second problem I found with this tool, can be seen in the usage diagram below:
In the diagram under the "Lock" step, you can see that the staple must be placed all the way at the back of the teeth in order to be cleanly lifted out. In practice, I've found the only way to get the staple that far back, is to slide the tool forward quickly and with force, driving it under the staple and seating it in one move. It requires your aim with the tool be perfect, otherwise you risk snapping the staple with the forward momentum, and then you've got to grab the pliers and pull both halves out.
If the staple is not seated all the way and you level the tool back, the staple can snap. Once again you must reach for the pliers, which is time-consuming.
In short, in this instance, I found the tool slowed the work rather than speeding it.
The second tool I tried is this $20 RockSteel staple remover.
This tool arrives extremely sharp and works well, with a caveat: If you want this tool to work quickly, you must be able to see the staple.
Here's what I mean by that. When you pull up carpet underlayment, it tears free at the staples, leaving little blobs of foam fastened to the subfloor. If you try tearing these off with your fingers, you'll be there all day.
Problematically, these blobs obscure the orientation of the staple. That means you come in with the tool multiple times at different angles, hoping to get lucky. With hundreds of staples to do, that's wasting time.
What I've found sped the task, is to take a quick pass with a stiff-bristled stainless steel wire brush. This swifly shreds the foam, allowing you to see the staple clearly. You can then come in with the RockSteel and get the staple in one pass.
The bent angle of the RockSteel tool works well for driving the tool forwards, but requires an extra hand for levering the staple out. I used the fingers of my non-tool-driving hand as the fulcrum.
I struggled to do the first room with the Zenith tool, and it took forever. There was a lot of pliers use, and a hammer for nailing in stubby snapped staple protrusions that resisted extraction.
The second room I applied the steel wire brush trick, and along with the RockSteel I completed the work in less than half the time of the first room.
That said, you will not be handing the RockSteel down to your grandchildren. The tips go blunt quickly, and one of the prongs is already starting to deform. This tool is effective but has not been designed to last.
From left to right: Hammer for split staples you can't extract. Zenith tool, which only works well if staples are aligned in the same direction. Pliers for extracting split staple halves. Steel wire brush for shredding underlayment foam. RockSteel tool. Magnetic pick-up tool for cleanup.
Other tools you'll want for this job, though not pictured, are: Kneepads, a headlamp for good visibility in dark corners, a respirator (when you shred the foam with the brush, it scatters a lot of dusty particles in the air) and safety goggles. I put the goggles on as a precaution, thinking I wouldn't really need them; but I was surprised at how many staples I popped that shot directly upwards and into the goggles.
Happy staple pulling, and if you've got your own fast method, please share below.
A Brilliant UX Detail on These Shinwa "Pick Up" Rulers
Steel rulers are a mainstay in many a workshop. From a design standpoint, you'd think there isn't much to them: Add a satin finish so they don't glare under shop lights, and make the numbers easy to read. With their "Pick Up" line of rulers, Japanese manufacturer Shinwa has met these first two criteria…
…and they've also added a brilliant third feature we've all needed, but never thought much about.
If you've ever struggled to pick up a ruler that isn't at the edge of your workbench, you'll appreciate it. The ruler has a slightly kicked-up tail, like on a skateboard. Once it's tilted back, you can easily grab the thing, even if you've just cut your nails.
To me, that's a designer or engineer going the extra mile. (Er, kilometer.)
Align your World Views with Teams and Clients
The Core77 Design Awards Transportation & Mobility category features vehicles, systems, or modes of transportation used to get people or objects from one place to another, for private, public, commercial, or industrial purposes. Examples include planes, trains, automobiles, buses, bikes, boats, mass transit systems, or transportation infrastructure.
Biomega EV, an electric vehicle designed for the future by Skibsted and his team.
You can get pretty far on a bike if you keep pedaling. That's certainly been true for Jens Martin Skibsted, who has climbed to the top of his field as an award-winning designer, entrepreneur, and design philosopher. Jens Martin is a Global Partner at Manyone who also helped found design consultancies including Skibsted Ideation and KiBiSi. He reached design peaks with his bike designs for Biomega, the Danish design brand he founded in 1998 to create bikes that could replace cars in urban environments. Jens Martin has collaborated with high profile designers including Marc Newson and Bjarke Ingels, and his designs can be found in the collections at the MoMA, LeCnap, Designmuseum Danmark, SFMOMA, and more.
Jens Martin and Christian Bason's book EXPAND: Stretching the Future by Design.
In addition to serving on the board of the Danfoss Foundation, Biomega, and Manyone, Jens Martin is the former Chairman of the Danish Design Council, Vice Chair of World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Design Innovation, Co-Chair of World Economic Forum's Global Future Council on Entrepreneurship, and a Young Global Leader alumnus. He is a noted speaker, blogger, and contributor to the Huffington Post, Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and Fast Company.
The BER Biomega's new e-bike from Skibsted.
Jens Martin's wheels really get turning over the BER, Biomega's new e-bike. "Outside of Biomega's unique bells and whistles, the charger sits in the head stem tube – making it the most comfortable e-bike to charge," he says. He's also excited about Manyone's new AI-enabled design process.
As far as concerns in the design world, Jens Martin worries that there might be "a little too little thinking in design 'thinking.'" He also expresses some trepidation over the leadership future of the world's three biggest nuclear powers and two biggest "gas guzzlers."
To Core77 Design Awards entrants, Jens Martin advises them to align their world views with their team and client – "and trust it."
Springtime Design for Scootility was the 2024 Winner in the Transportation Category.
The 2024 winner in the Core77 Design Awards Transportation & Mobility category was Springtime Design for Scootility, a utility scooter that's also a cargo vehicle suited to urban environments.
If you have an interesting transportation or mobility design that could really move the world forward, submit your work to the 2025 Core77 Design Awards.
Enter the Core77 Design Awards now.
Maker Pipe: Single-Tool Connectors Make it Easy to Build Things Out of Conduit
EMT (Electrical Metallic Tubing) conduit is affordable, reasonably sturdy and readily available. A company called Maker Pipe makes it easy for you to build stuff using EMT.
Their eponymous product is a series of steel connectors for joining the pipes. In addition to 45-, 90- and 180-degree connectors, they offer T-connectors, an adjustable-angle version, 4-way connectors and even 5-way connectors.
They come in different size and can cover ½", ¾" and 1" conduit.
You only need a single tool to work with these: A 5mm hex wrench. (Well, and a pipecutter.)
The connectors run roughly $3 to $6 a pop, with lower prices available in bundles.
A Better Way to Clean Your Car (and More): Using Steam, Not Chemicals
I own a pressure washer, and as satisfying as all of those cleaning videos on social media, the thing is a pain to maintain. It needs both a hose hookup and gas, and if you're not running it regularly, you've got to empty the tank each time to avoid the carburetor getting gummed up. That said, it's great for washing vehicle exteriors and the underside of mower decks.
A South Korean company called SJE developed a better solution. Their Optima Steamer has the portability and cleaning power of a pressure washer, but without the hose hook-up. Instead it has an onboard reservoir that you fill, and offers electric versions (in addition to ones featuring a diesel engine).
As the name implies, it uses steam rather than pressure to clean things, and no chemicals, solvents or soaps are required.
Here's a demonstration of it cleaning a filthy car:
Incredibly, the company claims you can wash an entire vehicle using just one gallon of water.
Additionally, because it's steam, you can use it for things you'd never dream of using a pressure washer for—like cleaning the interior of your car:
Pretty damn impressive. (I do think that those guys in the vids ought be wearing respirators; while there are no chemicals, it can't be good to breathe in all that atomized detritus.)
Additionally, the tool's steam spray kills 99.9% of germs and bacteria. In addition to car washing applications, the Optima is used by hospitals, healthcare facilities, the food & beverage industries, hotels, restaurants, mass transit operators and outdoor equipment maintenance crews.
A Sleek-Looking Door With a Hidden Ventilation Channel
As building science evolves to give us greater control over our built environment, modern structures are made ever more airtight. (When was the last time you saw a new office building with windows that could open?) While this solves one problem—the intrusion of outdoor air and the moisture it can bring—it creates another, which is that these modern buildings require mechanical systems to circulate fresh air.
A Vancouver-based company called VanAir Design has come up with a unique assistance method.
Their VanAir Door contains staggered ventilation slots, allowing airflow rates of up to 170 CFM. (For scale, your average bathroom fan moves 50 to 100 CFM, so this door is like having a couple of bathroom fans going at once.)
There are no internal fans; the air exchange is passive. As air circulates through a space, a closed door creates a pressure difference and temperature variation within the space it's enclosing. Air naturally seeks to even this out, and the door's ventilation channel allows it to flow through.
Part of the reason you close an office door is that you want acoustic privacy. In terms of the Sound Transmission Class rating, the VanAir door (25 STC) stacks up between a solid-core door (28 STC) and a hollow-core door (22 STC).
The company also envisions domestic applications for the door, in bathrooms and laundry closets.
The door comes in standard sizes, and can also be ordered with custom dimensions. And yes, you could achieve the same as their product with a louvered door; the company reckons you can get the same airflow with a 12" by 12" louvered panel. VanAir's product, however, is designed to be easier on the eyes.
Architecture Student Invents Brilliant Formwork that Reduces Concrete & Steel Usage
For the foreseeable future, we're simply not going to stop building with concrete and the steel necessary to reinforce it, despite the carbon emissions producing those materials requires. So it would be better if we could do more with less.
Thanks to research done by Lotte Scheder-Bieschin, a PhD student of Architecture at ETH Zurich, we can. Scheder-Bieschin developed the "Unfold Form," a reusable formwork system for making vaulted concrete structures. Her method yields a vaulted form that is as strong as a conventionally-built variant and uses less concrete and far less steel.
Even more impressive is that Scheder-Bieschin also designed the formwork to be less wasteful. Creating forms for large, complicated concrete geometry often involves Styrofoam, and the forms are single-use. Scheder-Bieschin designed an origami-inspired reusable form that is easy to transport, as it folds down. It consists of flexible plywood strips joined by nothing more than textile hinges and staples. Each form weighs just 24kg, but can support a literal ton of concrete. And they're easy to move.
"I was looking for a solution that would allow me to use strength through geometry, not only to optimise the final structure but also the formwork itself," says Scheder-Bieschin. "This approach reduces material usage and makes the entire process more environmentally friendly." The formwork's distinctive geometric structure allows for reductions of up to 60 percent in concrete and 90 percent in reinforcement steel.
"The Unfold Form formwork can be produced and assembled without specialised knowledge or high-tech equipment," notes Scheder-Bieschin. One of her aims was to create a simple and robust system that could be used worldwide, even with limited resources. Currently, formwork for non-standard concrete shapes typically requires digital fabrication. "This creates barriers for sustainable concrete construction in developing countries, where the need for new buildings is especially high," she says.
The formwork can be produced cheaply. "The only things needed in addition to the materials are a template for the shape and a stapler," adds Scheder-Bieschin. The materials for the prototype cost only 650 Swiss francs in total.
The individual components are light and compact enough to transport easily. Scheder-Bieschin demonstrated the system's simplicity by assembling it herself during her pregnancy. "I wanted to ensure my design was simple enough for anyone to build, regardless of their circumstances," she says.
Thus far two structures have been built using the Unfold Form, one at ETH Zurich, the other in South Africa. Once Scheder-Bieschin has gained her doctorate later this year, she plans to bring the product to market.
Apple Research Yields "Expressive and Functional" Non-Anthropomorphic Robot
Apple has a Machine Learning Research department, and it's yielded ELEGNT, a robotic desk lamp clearly inspired by Pixar. The lamp can be operated by both voice and gesture, and the researchers gave it two modes of doing things: "Expressive," and "functional."
In the expressive mode it acts, well, cute, borrowing body language from dogs in order "to interact more naturally with humans. In the functional mode, the lamp simply does what you ask it to do (change the direction of the lighting, for instance) without the theatrics. This will make more sense once you see the demo video:
I like the gesture control and tracking ability, and the projected homework assistance is an interesting feature. But if I owned one of these as a product, I'd only ever set it to functional.
There's a reason for that. Previously, we looked at Disney Research's work in designing cute, expressive robots. Their goal was also to enhance human-robot interactions.
Last year I felt this was a promising direction of research, but I've rethought that position, giving the way things are going in the world. If right now you were to log onto any forum—discussing politics, truck accessories, gardening techniques, sci-fi books, dog training, whatever—and write a post disagreeing with or questioning a popular opinion, watch how quickly it devolves. It is very easy to get humans to behave rudely. Creating a future where robots are always nice, lulling people to form attachments to them while human-to-human interactions continue to unravel, may not be wise.