Episode 14: FiftyThree

The "Women in Industrial Design" will be on view this weekend, on Saturday, June 14, for one night only at Astro's design studio on 348 6th St, as part of San Francisco's design week festivities. Of course, today's guest, Ti Chang, only moonlights as the organizer of the show: By day, she's an industrial designer and the co-founder of Crave, a luxury sex toy company based in SF. We talk about her path to starting Crave and how she came to organize the exhibition, which, remember, you are going to this Saturday night at 6pm.

Craig is in the middle of a pretty formidable transition with his work. He’s combining most of it under a new brand which he is calling Manual as well as launching a new product called the Manual Coffeemaker or MCM. If you haven’t seen it before, it’s this beautiful glass terrarium-like, pour over coffee maker, that is more of a kitchen appliance than a tool. The MCM is in the middle of it’s Kickstarter funding right now, which is scheduled to end this Friday, April 18th. As of this recording it’s not yet fully funded, but it’s inching closer and closer. So I thought it would be the perfect time to talk to Craig about what this experience is like. What goes on in the head of a designer who puts their passion project out their for public approval?

If you’ve hung around Core77 for awhile, you ve probably seen the name “Yo!” pop up on the Discussions boards and writing the occasional article on the main page. Yo! happens to be the alias of our good friend, Michael DiTullo. Michael is a super talented designer who has worked for Evo, Nike, Converse, Frog and is now the Chief Design Officer of Sound United. Sound United is a Southern California company responsible for the audio brands Polk, Definitive, and BOOM. Today, I talk with Michael about what’s it’s like to exhibit at CES, how he approaches getting Sound United’s products sold into retailers, the intense competition of the Bluetooth speaker market, and what the design scene is like in Southern California.

2014 promises to be a historic year for the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum here in New York City. Their wildly successful National Design Award program, which has quickly become the most coveted honor for American designers, is celebrating its 15th anniversary. 2014 also marks the re-opening of the museum’s East 90th Street location. The former home of Andrew Carnegie is undergoing a dramatic 16,000 square foot expansion that is both modernizing and preserving the character of the 110 year old mansion. To give us an inside look at their year of celebration and change is the Director of the Cooper-Hewitt, Caroline Baumann. We talk about the National Design Awards, the expansion, as well as the museum’s evolving role, and what it’s like to run the only museum dedicated to historic and contemporary design in the US.

We’re entering a news window where most of the major stories will revolve around sports. Last night we had the Super Bowl and this Thursday is the start of the Winter Olympics in Russia. Designers are notoriously uninterested in sports. I know this because I’m generally the only one of my design friends intently watching a game. But today, I’m going to try to help anyone who carries only a passing or even nonexistent interest in sports by finding something else to focus on: the aesthetics. Specifically, the design of uniforms. To help me with this we have, and this is not an exaggeration, the world’s leading expert on sports uniform design, Paul Lukas. Paul is a journalist who has been following the nuances of sports aesthetics probably since he was a kid, and started actively documenting them in 1999 for NY’s indie newspaper, The Village Voice. Today, he is the editor of one of my absolute favorite websites, Uni Watch, as well as a contributor to espn.com.

When I was in high school and just starting to think about college, I knew I wanted to get into design, but wasn’t sure what that meant exactly. I liked making things and loved all of my art classes, but design wasn’t talked about much back then, which made it hard to learn about. And then, the iMac came out. In the shadow of the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, it’s hard to remember what a big deal the iMac was, but it was a really big deal. Pretty much every computer at that point was a beige box, and then out comes Apple with this translucent, Bondi blue, space orb. The aesthetic was head turning, but it was the design of how people would use it that captured my 16-year-old attention. Plug in the keyboard and mouse, plug it into the wall, and start surfing the internet. An all-in-one, fully considered, user experience. The iMac saved Apple from bankruptcy and helped put design on the map in the late 90s. Its designers were actually featured in interviews. And those interviews ended up being my first encounter with both the term industrial design and the leader behind the iMac’s design, Jonathan Ive. From then on, I knew I was going to be an industrial designer. I think it’s safe to say that over the last fifteen years, no design team has had more impact than Apple’s. Even once you get past the success of their products, they’ve reshaped not only how the world views design, but how the design industry views itself. For all that notoriety and impact, we actually know very little about Apple’s design team. Today we talk about Jony Ive and Apple’s Industrial Design Group with author Leander Kahney. Leander is the editor and publisher of cultofmac.com and has written three books about Apple: Cult of Mac, Cult of iPod, and Inside Steve’s Brain. His latest is called Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products.

You probably know FiftyThree from their iPad sketch app, Paper. Unlike other sketch apps, which are loaded with pro features, Paper is notable for how pared down it is. By using just six brushes, a color mixing palette, and intuitive gestures, Paper gets out of the way of the sketch process and allows you to focus on getting your ideas down as effortlessly as possible. FiftyThree has brought this same philosophy to their first hardware product, called Pencil. Pencil is a stylus designed to compliment Paper, and just like Paper, it eliminates pro features, making way for more natural feeling ones - like an eraser and probably the smartest take on a blending tool ever.

The past couple of weeks have seen the release of two next generation video game consoles: The PS4 and the Xbox One. I love when new consoles come out. It's such an infrequent occurrence that every console becomes a milestone for design and technology. So I thought it would be fun to break down the game industry’s efforts, as well as try to decipher where they're going next, with my buddy Peter Rivera-Pierola. Besides being an avid gamer and tech nerd like myself, Peter is also an industrial designer and a manager of strategic concepts at McDonald's in Chicago.

Comic book artist Paolo Rivera has done everything from lusciously handpainted origin stories of Captain America, Hulk, Spiderman, Xmen, and Fantastic Four to helping reboot Daredevil to an untold number of covers for titles such as Wolverine and Guardians of the Galaxy. His work has a graphic, handcrafted quality that mixes elements from many genres outside of the the comic world. Best of all? He’s our guest today on Afterschool.

Brooklyn-based design firm Pensa, is helping to pioneer the movement for consultancies to bring their own projects to market. Earlier this summer they partnered with Goal Zero and AT&T to develop Street Charge, a solar powered charging station that can be easily installed in public spaces. Today I talk with two of Pensa's partners: Marco Perry and Mark Prommel, about their new project: the DIWire, a desktop wire bender that launched today on Kickstarter.