Core77

A great and very practical article by Victor Lombardi, in which he tries to make concept design easier to learn by illustrating three simple tools for generating concepts.

Read also this backgrounder/FAQ.

We told you about the Living the Italian House pop at the end of October, but don't miss the sustainability seminar event tomorrow night. Here's the pitch:

Sustainability: Italian Style, on December 2nd, will focus on green initiatives and how Italian design companies are becoming more ecologically responsible in their products and manufacturing processes. Sustainability: Italian Style will be moderated by Susan Szenasy, Editor in Chief of Metropolis Magazine. Panelists will also include Peter Kercher of the Italian Association for Industrial Design and Kendall P. Wilson, founder of Envision, a Washington, D.C.-based multidisciplinary design firm with a focus on sustainability and smart design.

RSVP to rsvp4[at]bdeonline[dot]biz

Inhabitat has just launched their monster holiday eco gift guide, 150-items long with all the green gifts you could shake a hemp stick at! Categories range from DIY and HowTo through boys, girls, budget and pets! You WILL find the gift you're looking for here!

Inhabitat's Green Holiday Gift Guide!

Last week we showed you the nuttily high-level video quality you can now shoot with DSLR cameras, saving yourself a bundle; even at $2,800, Canon's 5D Mark II is still thousands cheaper than what a Pro HD camcorder would run you.

But you can easily piss those savings away with accessories--a company called Zacuto makes baseplate adapters you can attach your DSLR to, making it compatible with film-industry-standard tripods, steadicam rigs, dollies, shoulder mounts, et cetera.

Speaking of pissing away savings, Nikon has just released their D3X DSLR, which'll run you about eight large, before the government and UPS takes their cut. Gearlog's write-up on the camera is strictly by the numbers, but we love the new term they've used to coin the camera, which so handily encompasses most photography accoutrements: "Fexpensive."

via wired and gearlog

There's a lot of bike love here on Core (here, here, here, and here, for example), both on the part of our readers and some of our bloggers too, and why not? The bicycle is one of the world's great examples of good design: utilitarian, refined, efficient and available in mind-blowing variety, from the $60 K-mart kid's bike to to the $6000 carbon fiber road demon, and everything in between. It also offers plenty of opportunity for individual craftsmanship too, especially in the realm of handmade frames, as featured in the Core77 gallery on the North American Handmade Bicycle Show earlier this year.

As luck would have it, the exhibitor that took the Best New Builder prize at that show is closer to the design world than we thought: his name's Aaron Hayes, and he's an industrial designer. Formerly with Ziba, he is now the founder of Courage Bicycle Manufacturing, a custom bike builder in Portland, Oregon.

Over at Coroflot's Creative Seeds blog, Carl Alviani caught up with Aaron over email last week to ask him a little bit about making the transition from the studio to the workshop, and how his background in ID has helped. And what he misses too:

Is there anything you miss about consultancy or freelance ID work?

I miss always being surprised by the ingenuity and insights from my peers. It can get a little lonely working by yourself day after day, and it's easy to start second guessing things when everything goes through one filter. I also miss the comfort of a direct deposit paycheck...

For any designer who's given some long hard thought to switching careers to something more hands-on, it's worth a read.

>>Read the whole interview here<<

Photo: David Regen

Well, you gotta love the attitude. Link.

A bite-sized list of what's happenin' now:

business standard
India: How National is the National Institute of Design?

massey news
Interview with Mark Pennington, designer of Formway Life chair

telegraph
Computer mouse celebrates 40th birthday (and may be facing redundancy)

virtualization
Revolve Design tapped to conceive next generation luxury grills

luxist
Green Designers Win National Award for Mobile

babson
Babson, Olin & RISD: Entrepreneurs, Engineers, and Designers Collaborate and Present Results

cuba headlines
Cuban pieces exhibited at the Iberian American Design Biennial Exhibition

With the early devices that we used to consume media, form basically followed function: Radios had control knobs and a speaker on the front, televisions had screens front and center, and rabbit ear antennas stretched high to capture signals.

Nowadays screens have become little more than flat rectangles, and the need for set-top boxes like Blockbuster's 2Wire MediaPoint player, Netflix's Roku, and the Apple TV beg the question: How can form follow function when the functions are a bunch of transistors, microchips and wires?

The answer, apparently, is...more rectangles. Sigh.

Renzo Piano, Marco Visconti, Jean Nouvel; these are three of the star architects commissioned as part of a ten-year project to redesign the Ferrari automotive works, encompassing everything from the administrative offices to the assembly halls, finishing plants and wind tunnels.

"Ferrari is not a car, it is a dream, and the ingredients must remain innovative," says Ferrari president Luca Cordero di Montezemolo. Read all about where they make the dream in the Times' "The Prestigious Design of Ferrari's Factory."

For a fascinating, if slightly older look inside the factory, check out this link.

Close followers of car design already know about the "catfish g(r)ill" styling trend featured in the three cars above. (For us laypeople, the term refers to the vertically-oriented slits at the front corners of the car, by the headlights.)

The sharp-eyes over at Car Design Fetish know where they've seen the look before and reach wayyyy back, like fifty years, to bring you the source: The 1956 Club de Mer concept car, by Pontiac. And man is this thing sweet!

Call us crazy, but we think Pontiac oughta dust the old blueprints off and start cranking these out at the factory. Oh wait a sec, that's right, they're having some sort of financial difficulties right now. How far the mighty have fallen....