Looks cool, but what does it actually do?

The acronym "P.O.S." always struck me as somewhat ironic: most folks who have worked in retail know that it's short for Point Of Sale, but it also has a pejorative meaning in common parlance. When it launched in 2010, Square's register app marked a digital solution to the former—precisely because extant payment gateways so often might be characterized as the latter.

Today, they announced a major upgrade from the now-iconic card reader. Square, the company making commerce easy for everyone, today announced Square Stand, beautiful new hardware for brick and mortar businesses that turns an iPad into a complete point of sale. With local businesses increasingly tearing out their old point of sale systems to run Square Register, Square Stand gives merchants a remarkable new way to manage and grow their business, all for the price of a cash register.

Designed by Ammunition Group in collaboration with Square, the simple swiveling stand is designed as an all-in-one system. The card reader is discreetly integrated into the base, providing a larger and more stable slot for swiping.

They've also managed to cast a young Julianne Moore in the role of a lifetime:

The Pop artist flexes his business muscles and crowd-pleasing prowess with two new shows in New York.

Sensation-seeking Jeff Koons opens his newest exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in New York this week. New Paintings and Sculpture will include Koons classics, such as the painting and sculpture series Hulk Elvis, along with his now-iconic balloon animals. (The L.A. balloon artist Buster Balloon, whom Koons hired, told New York magazine that it took him 85 versions using a 60-inch-long balloon to perfect Koons’s Balloon Venus piece. Koons cat-scanned it to guarantee the exact measurements.)

Suffice it to say, the Gagosian exhibit is a big deal. Curious then, that Koons is opening a second, competing retrospective this week, titled Gazing Ball, at the rival David Zwirner gallery in New York, just blocks away. In sync with the Frieze Art Fair, and interestingly timed--Gagosian has severed ties with two other mega-artists, Damien Hirst and Yayoi Kusama--the show makes it clear that Koons is angling for a less pop and more grandiose positioning. That sensibility is reflected in the pieces he’s showing. There’s no gold-plated Michael Jackson, no pristine vacuum cleaner housed away in a plexiglass box. Instead, Koons frames himself firmly in art history by designing white-plaster-cast sculptures that nod to their Greco-Roman originals. (It’s also his way of riffing off Picasso, who favored plaster.) The "gazing balls" are hand-blown blue glass spheres, which he places on the undulating white sculptures.

While each effort tries to be historically epic--in over-the-top art world speak, Gagosian describes the works as "baroque creations that extol innocence, beauty, sexuality, and happiness in confounding combinations of abstraction, figuration, sumptuous effect, and pure spectacle"--both shows nod to Koons’s obsession over working with epic parameters. Last year, we reported on his proposal to install a $25 million sculpture of a suspended train car over the Highline in New York. An ominous, crane-held locomotive hanging over people’s heads is no small statement. So while these two retrospectives don’t come as a shock, they’re worth thinking about.

See New Paintings and Sculpture at the Gagosian, and Gazing Ball at David Zwirner. Both exhibits run until June 29.

It turns from a perfect square into a perfect triangle in moments--to fit virtually any space.

Back in 1903, mathematician Henry Ernest Dudeney discovered the formula to turn a perfect square into an equilateral triangle. His trick was to break the square into four distinct shapes, rotating each like a geometric brain teaser.

It just so happens that, more than 100 years later, design and architecture firm D*Haus has found a new life for the formula. Their D*Table, on Kickstarter now, is like a hinged puzzle that can be rearranged to fit multiple spaces and purposes. And it’s not just a square or a triangle; it’s everything in between. That’s eight distinct shapes, most of which reveal drawers and shelves otherwise hidden by the clean lines of the base square.

It’s a neat piece, to say the least. But we had to ask D*Haus, who is this really designed for? How many of us really rearrange our living rooms that often?

“We feel adaptable and multifunctional products are becoming increasingly popular, just look at how the smartphone has revolutionized the mobile phone industry,” Director Daniel Woolfson explains. “Nowadays, people’s lifestyles change more frequently, so creating products that can change with us is a response to this trend.” It’s not a bad point: We’ve become accustomed to a certain malleability in our digital lives. (Imagine if, like a kitchen table, Chrome’s browser window was stuck to a single aspect ratio forever and ever.) So the idea that this malleability would spill over to analog products--even if it’s not an app--makes perfect sense.

After all, the D*Table could theoretically fit any space--and not just between moves--it’s even on wheels should you want to roll it around the house for impromptu setups. Now, no doubt, the $1,500 pricetag will be sticker shock to anyone who’s never delved outside of borderline disposable furniture at Ikea. But could the D*Table’s geometric logic be mass produced for a lower cost? Of course it could. That’s the best part about good design: It scales.

Order it here.

Like my train pass wallet, these objects fall into the category of things I touch and use every day. Carabiners are intended for mountain climbing, but their simple design and great utility make them super-useful to city dwellers like me, who only climb subway steps. I use them in the photo studio, during event coverage, and for my dogs, and I now wonder how I ever got by without them.

Leash Splitter

These were initially pet-driven purchases. I own two dogs and was looking for a way to hold both of their leashes in one hand without them becoming entwined. First I bought this thing, which is called a rotor swivel:

I spotted it at a mountain climbing equipment store across the street from Core77 HQ. It's just two aluminum loops attached by an enclosed bearing that allows them to rotate independently, and it set me back forty bucks. Being designed for climbing, I figured it's got to be watertight, which I'd need to weather thunderstorms (I'm out with the dogs for up to two hours a day, rain or shine).

Next I sewed a length of webbing through it to serve as a handle. (If any of you are interested in working with canvas webbing but don't know how to sew, please pipe up in the comments and I'll prepare a basic tutorial. With a simple trick, someone with no skill can use even a junky sewing machine to sew canvas webbing.)

Then I needed a carabiner to attach the two leashes to the rotor. Mistakenly thinking beefier would be better, I initially bought this Omega Pacific locking carabiner at the same equipment store for ten bucks.

However, I found this carabiner too bulky, and together with the rotor it added too much weight to the leashes for my taste. But at the hardware store I spotted these cheapie "key holder" carabiners for just a few bucks.

They appear to be made from aluminum and one can be used to handily attach the rotor to the two leash handles.

the illuminated work is composed of a network of triangular frames each covered in silk which expresses a visual dynamism through its gathering, causing a gradient of warm tones to be emitted.

The post aqua creations: pyramid lighting sculpture appeared first on designboom.

Tonight! Core77's Hand-Eye Supply Curiosity Club enthusiastically welcomes Frank Novak of Modernica, Inc.!

Tonight's talk starts at 6pm at Core77's Hand-Eye Supply store in Portland, OR. Come early and check out our space or check in with us online for the live broadcast!

Frank Novak (Modernica, Inc.)
How to Make an Eames Fiberglass Chair? The History & Revival of an American Icon
Hand-Eye Supply
23 NW 4th Ave
Portland, OR 97209
Tuesday, May 14th, 6pm PST

Frank Novak is the co-founder of Modernica, Inc. Modernica owns the original presses and the original preform machine that were used by Zenith Plastics for Charles Eames production of Herman Miller chairs. Their preform machine is the only such machine in existence. Both the presses and the preform machine are the very same pieces of equipment used to create thousands and thousands of chairs since their very first run in 1950 and now sixty years later, these seminal pieces of equipment are located at Modernica's new Los Angeles factory.

From the Modernica Archives

From the Modernica Archives

From the Modernica Archives

Frank Novak grew up in Omaha Nebraska where his family owned car dealerships from the 30's to the 70's, and an antique store from 75 to 2001. He went to Goddard College, Evergreen College and New College of California. Frank moved to California in 1986 and worked as a set builder and production designer for Roger Corman. He was the Art Director for Woody Harrelson's first film, Cool Blue. In 2000 his directorial debut Good Housekeeping was an official selection at the Cannes Film Festival. While working on films he began building furniture and in 1989 founded Modernica with his brother Jay. Together they were one of the first American companies to reproduce out of production mid century furniture. Modernica products, including the George Nelson Bubble Lamp and the Eames Fiberglass chair are sold worldwide. Modernica employs over 100 people in the Los Angeles area at their factory and film prop rental house.

Just like the name suggests, the Easy-to-View Compass makes reading the radius of circles or arcs in technical drawings a cinch. Numerical values are instantly calculated and displayed on its bright LCD screen. It’s not only more accurate, but decreases fatigue by eliminating the needs to constantly readjust and monitor the setting.

Designers: Cheol Woong Seo & Jae Hee Park

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Yanko Design
Timeless Designs - Explore wonderful concepts from around the world!
Shop CKIE - We are more than just concepts. See what's hot at the CKIE store by Yanko Design!
(A Perfect Circle was originally posted on Yanko Design)

Related posts:

1. The LMacTouch: Perfect Desktop for a Perfect World?
2. Circle of thrust
3. The Circle Printer

Starting this Friday night, the students of the new MFA in Products of Design will be appearing at WantedDesign from May 17–20, where they will present ALSO!, a series of interactions that explore how we experience new design.

Through a roving set of mobile interventions—both cart-based and human-worn—visitors to the show will participate in "an unfolding narrative around celebration, sustainability, digital mediation, storytelling, and scale, each expanding the conversation around design beyond form, function, and materiality." There are teasers up at www.alsoproject.com, and ALSO! on Facebook, but here are some intriguing particulars:

Through this series of moving, participatory installations, the work hacks the exhibition at large, prompting visitors to see design through a variety of new lenses.

The event is free. Located at 269 11th Avenue, New York City, WantedDesign is a creative destination for the design community that offers innovative installations, student workshops, and engaging discourse.

This year, WantedDesign is being held in concert with NYCxDESIGN, New York City's inaugural citywide event to showcase and promote design of all disciplines.

Day not going well? Don’t worry. Because in the grand scheme, today is woefully insignificant.

Here is today. And it’s only today because there was a yesterday--a whole lot of yesterdays, in fact--the yesterdays of 13,789 million years in the history of the universe.

That’s an overwhelming thought, but Luke Twyman eases you into it during his interactive visualization Here Is Today. It starts with a simple yellow block that represents today. Then, with each click of the mouse, today is contextualized in a wider and wider scope. Today is placed on a timeline of this month, then this year, this century, this eon, the history of the Earth, the history of life, and the history of the universe.

Twyman’s inspiration was simply “to be able to visualise such large scale.”

“This is something I struggle with; I guess most people do,” he tells Co.Design. “I wanted to have a little emotional impact as well, though that largely just comes from the subject matter. I was keen to present solely the information without any message, and let people generate their own meaning, if they choose to give it a meaning at all.”

The visual, filled with an array of basic colors, is certainly too vibrant to be labeled as inherently pessimistic. Even still, Twyman has found the conclusion to often be one of hopelessness, which wasn’t his intent at all.

“It’s been a little painful to see some people using something I’ve made as if it’s propaganda for apathy,” Twyman admits. “I’d say to them that if they’re looking for perspective then they shouldn’t only look at their place in time, but their place in humanity…and that any idea or human change can only ever start with one person, so being an individual in a massive expanding universe isn’t so powerless or matterless.”

Twyman makes a fair counterpoint, but it does beg the question: Could he have designed Here Is Today differently, to leave viewers with the taste of optimism and activism? I think so, and it wouldn’t require any new graphics or copy. If the graphic started with the widest view--today in the history of the universe--and zoomed in, rather than out, we’d be left with a very different conclusion. The last thing we saw wouldn’t be today as a sliver on countless years of history, but that simple, dominant yellow square.

You’d see that, despite every unfathomable thing that’s come before, here is today. We’re standing on it. It’s ours. Now let’s make the most of it.

See it here.

[Hat tip: FlowingData]

What if, instead of toy camera filters, we rearranged our photos into logic-driven confetti?

Most photos we take document reality. Just look at Instagram. It’s full of pictures of ourselves, our friends, our pets, and our dinners. But just as art has long since ventured out from the representational, couldn’t we do the same thing with our smartphone photography?

That’s the question posed by User Studio’s Matthieu Savary, creator of the free iPhone app Pixel Is Data. It’s a photo-filter set driven by a concept Savary calls "non-deterministic pixel organization.” These wild images are actual CMOS sensor data from real photographs. But rather than add a few vintage effects to your latest picture, Pixel Is Data allows you to rip into the core of the photo’s information, rearranging pixels by tone and color value, stretching, blurring, and triangulating reality in a strange cross of expressionism and impressionism, new aesthetic and social media.

“One thing is always overlooked in proper digital cameras and in photo apps on smartphones: the order and shape of pixels could be changed. Though they never are,” Savary tells Co.Design. “Even if a CMOS camera module is going to gather data about the real world in the ‘right’ order (i.e. the figurative way) … there is nothing less truthful in an image produced by an algorithm that’s going to reorganize the pixels of a photo in the order of their RGB components than in the corresponding, figurative image.

“The RGB-organized image--which, by the way, holds the exact same pixels--brings forward new information such as the density of a color or the general luminosity of the picture.”

Savary’s arguments get to the core of the last century or so of art criticism, but they also directly challenge cellphone photographers to think beyond the Instagram filter. Digital cameras, full of all sorts of helpful exposure, color, and autofocus features, have raised the bar of consumer photography to pro levels, making us so competent at representational work that even a really amazing Instagram feed is somewhat typical. By considering the photo anew, Savary would like to enable photographers to push the medium forward, to rethink “what photography looks like” and to challenge the status quo by inundating Instagram with algorithmic art.

Because let’s face it, our selfies could really benefit from a fresh approach.

Download it here.

[Hat tip: Creative Applications]

a play of solids and voids are generated through the geometry of three rotating caps - criss-crossing with horizontal and vertical bands of different colored felt.

The post luca nichetto: loos lamp for zero lighting appeared first on designboom.

Since 2005, Jeremy Harris has visited abandoned mental asylum and hospitals in a quest to preserve them.

Abandoned buildings are creepy. Abandoned asylums, downright terrifying. They’re the stuff of horror movies: long, dark hallways; trap doors; surgical rooms; creaking staircases; crumbling plaster walls. All of which harbor secrets of the site’s malevolent past and how exactly the place met its demise. Something must have gone down in an abandoned mental hospital, right? You couldn’t pay me to visit one.

Some people are made of tougher stuff. Case in point: Photographer Jeremy Harris, who has been exploring abandoned asylums, hospitals, and sanitariums across New England and the East Coast for nearly a decade.

In that time, Harris has pieced together an extensive portfolio detailing each, complete with photographs and artifacts taken from the sites. The materials, which can range from patient files to personal affects left behind, shed light on an important but neglected part of American history, Harris says. Just as the buildings are historically significant--they’re notable for their massive size and structural innovations that made such huge spaces possible--so are the contents they contain. By archiving all of the buildings and their contents, he hopes to reconstruct a sense of each place and of the material conditions that shaped the lives of the people who passed through their halls.

While most ruin-porn presents a lugubriously attractive snapshot and little else, Harris’s work is hinged on his extensive research, plus on-site excavation and archival probing. “I’ve done research on the history of all the hospitals I’ve visited,” including, he says, delving into the architectural practices behind the design of the buildings, the treatment of the patients interred in them, and the methods-- experimental or otherwise--of hospital doctors employed there. (Harris has even found documents related to famed lobotomist Walter J. Freeman.)

In large part, Harris’s cataloguing is all that’s left of the buildings. Because despite his wishes and preservation efforts, many of the buildings have since been demolished. Still, Harris continues his pursuit. When we asked why, he told Co.Design it’s because he enjoys it. “To see a place for the first time,” he says, “it’s one of my favorite things.” Exploring a new site brings with it its own surprises and experiences: Harris describes an odd slew of scenarios that he found himself in, from snaking through miles of tunnels to breaking into locked building to star-gazing on hospital roofs and even camping out in patient rooms.

“It’s always very exciting,” he says. “You can spend days photographing a particular building, and the light changes throughout the year, so it can be different on each visit.”

Imagine, if you will, a design exercise in which the primary constraint is simply to answer a brief with ideas that have never been dreamt of. The themes range from Global Warming to Time, and are selected based on passion as much as relevance and timeliness, and as such, design teams are expected to come up with ideas that meet those criteria as well.

These are the guiding principles behind IDEO's "Designs On—," an ongoing internal project that has taken off since IDEO Associate Partner and Industrial Design Director Blaise Bertrand introduced it in 2008. The global design consultancy has just launched a dedicated microsite for the fifth annual edition, which tackles the seemingly mundane (or otherwise overdone) issue of Packaging. And while the topic is ostensibly more pragmatic than past themes such as Food and Birth (as well as the two mentioned above), it's not so much a departure from the spirit of the platform as it is an affirmation of its breadth.

The idea of "Designs On—," according to Bertrand, is to "let designers pick a personal perspective" on the topic at hand. The goal is "to push the edge of a particular content area [as well as] to constantly question our assumptions about design." IDEO employees organize themselves into teams as they see fit, developing, iterating and ulimately packaging their ideas over the course of four to five months.

"The 'Expired' concept is one of my favorites," says Bertrand. "It feels natural—to take a simple analogy of a banana, [which has] a very powerful emotional aspect."

Bertrand excitedly noted that "Biomimicry is a growing domain."

Melon explores an interesting new frontier of the quantified self: your noggin’.

Does checking Twitter during the workday really leave you scatterbrained? Could taking up meditation help you tune out the noise and focus better? Melon, a stylish EEG headband and elegant companion app, is one of the first products to try to give empirical answers to those questions. It’s an early foray into a new frontier for the quantified self: the brain.

You can think of Melon as a Fitbit for your noggin’--just instead of counting steps, it quantifies concentration. The hardware component is a sci-fi chic headband that registers brain activity with the help of an EEG sensor and a handful of filtering algorithms. That data gets sent to a companion app that visualizes the user’s focus as a fluid, flowing line. There, whether you’re slogging through a project at work, doing yoga, or finishing a crossword puzzle, you can get a sense of just how focused you really are.

The product, now the center of a Kickstarter campaign, was created by Arye Barnehama and Laura Michelle Berman, former cognitive science students at Pomona. The idea was to create something that "made the invisible activity of the mind visible and meaningful in everyday life," Barnehama says. They worked for a while under the name Axio, testing out various technologies and shoring up the scientific foundations for the product. The final headband, created in partnership with NeuroSky, a leader in consumer EEG tech, "effectively measures neural activity in virtually any condition with 96% accuracy when compared to similarly configured research grade EEGs," according to the company.

With Melon, the founders had the challenge of turning the geeky (and potentially creepy) world of brain sensors and cognitive science into a "lifestyle oriented brand." A key part of that is the headband itself, which looks like something you’d be more likely to find in a sporting goods store than a research lab. And that was very much the point.

"The headband was definitely designed to make it possible for people to wear during lots of different activities, everything from exercise and athletics to studying to sitting in bed and reading," Barnehama explains. Compared to the typical image you might conjure up of someone getting their brain scanned--a scalp outfitted with sensors and covered in a wig of wiring--Melon is decidedly nonthreatening.

The app shows a similarly thoughtful design. The main screen visualizes focus in the moment, giving users an at-a-glance view of their activity. After a session is complete, you can dive into more in-depth data. The app also optionally dispenses tips at moments when concentration is waning; it will suggest things like taking deep breaths or going for a walk--and then register how those suggestions subsequently affect mental balance. It’s a feature that starts to address one of the major shortcomings of many quantified-self products, namely, that quantification isn’t especially useful if you don’t get any guidance for turning it into actual improvement.

And that, it seems, is where Melon could be most useful. The Fitbits and FuelBands of the world operate in the tangible, familiar world of physical activity. We know that taking the stairs is a little bit healthier than riding the elevator, and those devices let us quantify and catalog all those little decisions to err on the side of exercise throughout the day.

The world Melon’s trying to tap into is far murkier. Compared to our bodies, the brain is like a black box. Most of us, I’m sure, feel like the Internet has sapped at our powers of concentration, but that’s about all we know. Assuming it works as advertised, Melon could show just how distracting multitasking really is when you’re trying to meet a deadline. It could give you some reassurance that the time you’re setting aside to read or meditate really is having a calming effect. Just like seeing a step count has proven effective at keeping us walking, maybe seeing our focus visualized and quantified will encourage us to work out not just our bodies, but our minds, too.

See more on the Kickstarter page.

wants an Associate Creative Director
in Seattle, Washington

POP, Inc. is all about delivering substance - not stunts. This independent digital agency transforms ideas into experiences for the world's most visible and vibrant brands.

This dynamic team of digital artisans is seeking an Associate Creative Director who will think big, then execute bigger. With a crystal clear vision and the expertise/accumen to deliver on it, the perfect person for this role will assist the Creative Director in leading the creative team to consistently deliver a compelling customer experience.

If you're the right person for this great opportunity, Apply Now