Renowned industrial designer Arnold Wolf, 85, a former president and CEO of the JBL audio company, passed away Tuesday, April 30, 2013, at his home in Pacific Grove, CA.

Industrial designers at RKS draw inspiration from the legends of their field every day. The firm is honoring a handpicked selection of the men and women who transformed the industrial design profession with a series of portraits, quotes and portfolio galleries.

Photo courtesy of Core77.

Rama Chorpash, IDSA, the director of the Parsons BFA Product Design program, was profiled on Core77 for his new potato masher called "Spiraloop."

In Building 1 at GE’s massive Appliance Park, where topload washing machines have been built for about 60 years, two new assembly lines, costing over $100 million, have begun producing high-efficiency frontload washing machines and dryers. This is the first time GE has produced a frontload washing machine and matching dryer from one of its US plants. The new products will create about 200 more jobs.

The Atlanta Chapter Chair Chris Livaudais, IDSA and Vice Chair Kevin Shankwiler, IDSA were on local TV on April 19, 2013, promoting the Atlanta's Chapter "Chair Hack" event that the Chapter organized with the Museum of Design Atlanta (MODA) as part of the Dogwood Festival. Livaudais and Shankwiler along with a few Georgia Tech ID students conducted a one-hour mini "chair hack." Check out their IDSA T-shirts!

Photo by Ziba.

Not long ago, Sohrab Vossoughi, FIDSA and his team in Portland created an internal skunkworks group, Ziba Labs, to explore ideas in the form of speculative projects. The lab is a good example of a design firm building into its business model the space to treat itself as a client and  gather a cross-disciplinary team for some interesting and wild explorations.

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Carbon Design Group has named design thinker, researcher and strategist Linda Wagner as director of user experience for the world-recognized product design and development consultancy. As director of user experience, Wagner’s role expands to leading not only research and strategy teams, but the design team as well.

For the past few months, University of Kansas students at the Center for Design Research (CDR) have partnered with Ford Motor Co. on a project to eliminate something most people use every day: the automobile gearshift.

Charles Austen Angell, IDSA, founder of Modern Edge, discusses the varying design aesthetic over the years in the automobile industry and the return to style. He appears on Bloomberg Television's "Market Makers."

Watch the video: America Now in Car Design Renaissance: Angell

IDEO's chairman and founder, David Kelley, IDSA, is profiled in a Fortune magazine article titled "How IDEO brings design to corporate America."