Archives for "February, 2010"
An electric hand dryer that actually dries hands…really!
As someone who picks paper towels over electric hand dryers every time, I never would have expected to find a dryer that I not only want to use, but actually want to talk about too. Until, that is, I discovered the Dyson Airblade™ at San Francisco International Airport a few weeks ago. (Before this, the [...]
Retro manufacturing: vinyl record pressing
I’m kind of a vinyl nerd. When things get hectic, I retreat to the man-cave in my garage, play some pinball and play my records on a little turntable perched on my workbench. I’ve always been curious about the process for making vinyl records. I found the answer in a video filmed at Rainbo Records [...]
Cloudy…with a chance of clearing
There’s a lot of talk these days about the cloud…some of it from us even. However, we can’t help but share the concern Kenneth Wong expressed in a recent blog post, where he asserts that the term ‘cloud’ is being “interpreted, reinterpreted and misinterpreted (sometimes deliberately) till it becomes a fuzzy buzzword.” So we were [...]
“We have this product idea…it’s going to change the world!”
When I was a design consultant, potential clients would tell us all about how their cool new products were going to take over the market. Sometimes a company’s product really was cool and new–though it was doubtful it was going to make its mark in the manner envisioned. Occasionally a company was so enamored with [...]
Thoughts on outsourced manufacturing…inspired by the 2010 World Cup soccer ball
I was fascinated by the video in Marc’s recent post about the official soccer ball of the 2010 World Cup. What struck me was the highly optimized combination of handwork and custom tooling involved in the manufacture of a high-quality commodity product. For example, the inner shell panels are die-cut from sheet (tooling), then sewn [...]
Adidas uses thermal-bonding, not stitching, to create perfectly round ball for 2010 FIFA World Cup
The official match ball for the upcoming FIFA world cup, the Adidas Jabulani, features a newly developed “Grip’n’Groove” surface for enhanced grip in all conditions and an exceptionally stable flight path. Thanks to a new spherical-molding process for the eight thermally-bonded panels, the ball is perfectly round and thus more accurate for passes and shots [...]
What makes a “killer” product?
A friend recently posted the following Facebook status: “Krysten has just achieved her first Sock Wars kill by delivering a pair of hand knit socks to a stranger in Sacramento—on to victim #2…” Sock Wars is like the game of Assassin, where players knock each other off using suction cup darts based on assigned contracts—but [...]
Product recalls: 5 tips to keep your company out of the headlines
As a parent of young children, product safety is always top of mind. So when two products I count on were recently recalled in what felt like short succession, it got me thinking. (While I did have a moment of panic when I realized that my babysitter drives my children around in a Toyota RAV4—not [...]
Dear SolidWorks, Welcome to the cloud.
Today at SolidWorks World, Jeff Ray, CEO of SolidWorks, announced Product Data Sharing (PDS) as the first of the company’s online services to be available on the Enovia v6 backbone. SolidWorks definitely took a cue from social networking and online communities like LinkedIn and Facebook. Now designers can open a SolidWorks add-in and select other [...]
Dispatch from SolidWorks World: A very rapid prototype?
SolidWorks leadership issued an internal challenge to a small group of hands-on designers: design an electric vehicle using SolidWorks and build it in 9 months. The result? This hot rod, which uses an electric bus motor that delivers 500+ ft-lbs of torque and launches this neo-vintage beauty to 60 mph in 3.8 seconds. And that’s [...]
Subscribe to the Arena Blog
Follow us on Twitter
Like us on Facebook
Read the Arena Dispatches