As the origin of an increasing proportion of cultural touchstones, so too has the Internet spawned its own genre of memorabilia. Inspired by "the way designers showcased their work by holding it in front of them," Nadia Ahmad's "Handvas" is among the more successful examples we've seen—a clever way to display a poster or print, modeled after a popular trope of product photography.

In fact, Ahmad isn't a product designer by training or trade: the Sydney-based art director works in advertising by day and simply wanted to make her idea a reality. "I didn't have the skills or knowledge to produce it," she noted by e-mail. "So I went in search of a company that could help [me] bring my idea to life."

One hundred and seven degree heat. The height of the monsoon season. A country recently ruled by a brutal military dictatorship where US sanctions have just been lifted and foreigners are free to investigate and invest: time, thinking, money. What could be a better location for a design workshop?

Last week, 300 colleagues of mine—fellow members of the World Economic Forum's Young Global Leaders cohort - convened in Myanmar for our annual meeting. About 100 YGLs are selected each year from around the world for their work in the public and private sector to serve a five-year term to exchange ideas and collaborate on projects that create new value on topics such as the circular economy, gender parity, food security, human trafficking, and political reinvention. The mission is to help reinvent our global economy by advancing the concepts of dignity, equality, and fairness in innovative ways.

Before attending the WEF East Asia meeting in the new strangely sci-fi capital of Nay Pyi Taw, eight of us representing six countries went into the field to collaborate with Proximity Designs, a 10-year old social enterprise founded by Skoll Entrepreneurs Jim and Debbie Taylor. Proximity is a Myanmar organization that looks for high-impact opportunities to increase income for the 70% of the Burmese population (of 60 million) who are dependent on agriculture to survive, and they use design methodology to try to lift them out of poverty. Our goal for the daylong workshop was to brainstorm solutions for two important strategic issues with Proximity and to come up with actionable plans.

It is items like MisoSoupDesign's Anti-Loneliness Ramen Bowl (below), from earlier this year, that fuel my "Hell in a Handbasket" posts and tweets.

But now Brazilian art director Mauricio Perussi (and his team at ad agency Fischer&Friends) have designed an opposite sort of device with their Offline Glass, which can only stand if there's a cell phone under it:

The Offline Glass from Mauricio Perussi on Vimeo.

Yes, it's just a gag, done in conjunction with the Bar Salve Jorge in Cacador, but it's a trenchant one. The idea of creating a co-dependent drinking glass for the sole purpose of subsuming your drinking mate's celly is sadly attractive. So why does this post still get the HIAH moniker, given that the design is attempting to rectify a social ill? Because the fact that Perussi needed to make this comment at all shows we're all going to Hell in a Handbasket. Put your freaking phone down or find more interesting people to drink with.

Get your cameras ready. On June 23rd the celestial event known as the Supermoon will happen. The sun, Earth and moon will be in alignment, with the moon hitting its perigee; that means it will be closer to the Earth than normal, making it bigger and brighter. And yes, it will be full.

A Supermoon isn't as rare as, say, a comet sighting; it happens every 14 months or so. During this time, NASA says, it will appear 14% larger and 30% brighter than when it's at its furthest, and you're surely going to see a rash of awesome photos.

[image by Sean Parker]

You're also going to hear all kinds of kooky theories. Its scientifically documented that the Supermoon will only raise the tides by a matter of a few feet, but Tweeters will insist it's causing flooding, earthquakes, tsunamis and tornadoes, none of which will be true.

Conspiracy theorist and comedian Bill Burr will probably use the Supermoon to once again insist the moon landings are fake. "How come when you look at the moon," he's said onstage, "you can't see that jeep we left up there?"

[image by Ian Doktor]

Yet another pet video is going viral on Facebook, but this time it's not something furry doing something cute; it's a reptile doing something visually awesome. An unnamed offscreen puppetmaster puts his chameleon through the paces, and if you haven't seen this yet, it's quite the sight:

Here's the problem: The video's a fake! It's a four-year-old advertisement for Ray-Ban, done by ad agency Cutwater, to promote their then-new color lines; CG overlays provide the rapid color change. The actual pace at which a chameleon changes color does not make for compelling viewing, which is why the Ray-Ban fake video has 7-million-plus hits and relatively lethargic YouTube footage of chameleons really changing can't seem to crack the six-figure barrier.

This is a true story. Descriptions of companies, clients, schools, projects, and designers may be altered and anonymized to protect the innocent.

Editor: This True I.D. Story is a good one! Fitting in that it comes to us from "Good Ol' Boy." Enjoy!

The Design Grad Blues

Maybe it's not fair to say my school's industrial design program, at a well-known university in a big-ass city, didn't adequately prepare me for the real world. But I'll say it anyway. As one example of the low demands placed on us, during my final year I basically spent an entire semester making Muppets. And I got an "A."

Illustrations by Alex Basio

By the time I graduated, I had a portfolio full of weird stuff. The school encouraged us to do bizarre conceptual work and my portfolio was loaded with it. When I look back at that stuff now, I don't know how anyone made heads or tails of it. And people who interviewed me for jobs, particularly the job that I badly wanted, couldn't either.

My Plan to Get a Job

During senior year I'd heard of [Hot Design Consultancy], and I very badly wanted to work there. That was the only ID job I wanted. They did awesome work, they had great clients and they were located in [Cool City], where I really wanted to live.

But I figured I'd better cover my bases. I moved back home to [Below the Mason-Dixon, East of the Mississippi] after graduation and looked through I.D. Magazine—remember them?—to locate 50 ID firms, then I faxed out 50 resumes. And waited. And waited. And waited.

Turns out 12 of those fax numbers were no longer in service. I got two faxes back saying Thanks But No Thanks, they weren't hiring. Then I got two other faxes back saying I could come in to interview.

One of them was from [Hot Design Consultancy]!

Elemen'tary Screwdriver sets are made in a London workshop, based on the design of a cabinet maker who was dissatisfied with the grip of screwdrivers that he had purchased. As any maker worth his salt would do, he sat down and crafted grips that fit his hands comfortably. The handles are made from beech and are finished by dipping in linseed oil. Unlike rubber, the wood surface is kind to hands and won't encourage blisters. After prolonged use the handles will develop a natural patina. Available from Hand-Eye Supply as a set for $50 or individually for $24 and $35, respectively.

When we last heard from Bruce Nussbaum, on the occasion of the HarvardxDesign Conference, he mentioned his forthcoming book, Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect and Inspire (HarperBusiness 2013). Available now, it makes for a surprisingly good beach or travel read (Kindle version recommended, as the print version comes in hardcover), at least for those of you who prefer nonfiction for leisure reading.

But the insights and learnings from Nussbaum—a former editor at BusinessWeek and current professor at Parsons the New School from Design—are applicable for a broad audience, from recent grads to practicing designers to C-suite execs. We had a chance to speak to Nussbaum about those very insights.

Core77: What is Creative Intelligence?

Bruce Nussbaum: Creative Intelligence is a way of amplifying our creative capacities. It's a series of five competencies that we can all learn to bolster our skill at generating originality that has value, often economic value. Individuals and business organizations can increase their Creative Intelligence by getting better at Knowledge Mining, Framing, Playing, Making and Pivoting or Scaling. The concept embraces the notion that creativity is crucial to capitalism and the source of most economic value.

You write about "creativity anxiety, noting that "creativity scares us." Why do you think that is?

We have false notions of creativity. We are taught that creativity is rare, random, and reduced to special brains. We feel we should be creative but can't perform creatively. Rubbish. We are all born creative and can easily learn to be more creative and innovative. Creativity is a social activity, an ensemble or team play, not an individual gift of genius.

Many of us picture so-called creative types sitting alone in a studio or office, either filled with inspiration or waiting for it to strike, yet you write of interactive creativity and collaboration. Is there a difference between the two?

The "Aha" moment of insight, when we connect the dots of different things to come up with something new, are often done alone, walking or running, taking a long shower or slowly drinking your morning coffee. These insights come after intense social interaction and observation. They come after the research, the learning, the gathering of information and the engagement with the world. You need both.

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If you'd like to work for this famous brand as their Senior Graphic Designer, you'll need to live for creative challenges, work well independently as well as with others, have the leadership skills to lead photo shoots, and be an all around graphic design dynamo.

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Built NY's original neoprene wine tote

This is the third profile in our series on American design entrepreneurs, looking at how they got where they are, what they do all day, and what advice they have for other designers running their own businesses. Read last week's profile here.

Growing up, Aaron Lown's mom had a saying: "Why buy it when you can make it?"

That mantra inspired Lown, now 44, to launch the company Built NY in 2003 with business partner John Roscoe Swartz. Built's first product was the now iconic neoprene wine-bottle carrier. When the totes debuted at the New York International Gift Fair in 2004, the company received $100,000 in orders within 48 hours. A year later, Built logged its millionth sale. "Wine was on the rise at the time, yet the wine accessories market had nothing young and hip and cool," Lown says. "We had a great product and a niche in the market that wasn't being filled."

Aaron Lown (left) and his business partner, John Roscoe Swartz

So how do you grow a good idea and a modest $30,000 investment into a multimillion dollar company with a full line of products and 40 employees? Lown attributes his success, in part, to his upbringing in Bangor, Maine. "My mom played an important role in my ethos," he says. "She taught me how to sew and there was always a crafts project happening."

Meanwhile, Lown's father ran a shoe manufacturing business and Lown remembers the smell of glue on the factory floor and seeing the components of shoe patterns strewn around their house. "The influence of my father gave me the entrepreneurial part of my personality, while my mom gave me the making gene," Lown says. (Not to mention an uncle who invented the defibrillator.)

At 13, while his other friends were shipped off to sports camps, Lown threw pottery at a crafts retreat called Camp Horizons (where he accidentally broke fellow camper Jonathan Adler's ankle in a basketball game.) After that summer, Lown built a woodshop in his parent's basement where he made objects like jewelry boxes that he sold to local crafts stores. In high school, he and a friend became interested in skimboarding, "so we spent the winter coming up with a brand and making skimboards in the garage," Lown says. "The first day out in the spring, we tested the prototype and I fell and broke my wrist. That was my first taste of failure, which is something that you have to let fly off your back."

Welcome to the 17th and final live jury broadcast for the 2013 Core77 Design Awards! We're on the line with Eddie Opara here in New York City, who is pleased to announce the winners for the Visual Communication category.

Thanks again to all of our esteemed jurors and, of course, the honorees and entrants—we couldn't have done it without you!

Professional
Winner: Volume Inc. - YBCA + You promotional campaign
Runner-up: Project Projects - Experiments in Motion, identity and website
Notables:
» Collective Assembly - Bushwick Open Studios 2012 - Event Program
» Kyuha Shim - Code & Type
» Accurat - Visual Data
» studio fnt - Graphic Design for Folk Culture Exhibition - Korean Furniture, Sensuality of Lines
» The Center for Urban Pedagogy - What's In The Water?
» Xbox Design Team and LucasArts - Xbox 360 Kinect Star Wars
» The Center for Urban Pedagogy - Power Trip

Student
Winner: Wael Morcos - Bozoni
Runner-up: Chan Young Park - Edgar Allan Poe Trilogy
Notables:
» Eunmo Kang - Time to Time
» Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) Center for Design Practice - Status Update
» Joe Faccio - Southern Tongues
» MFA Spring 2012 Studio Class - HealthcareVisualKibera

My ID classmate kept getting burgled. His second-storey East Village apartment was broken into multiple times, and in frustration he signed a year lease on apartment 6B of a six-flight walk-up. He reasoned that no thief would be willing to haul a television down six flights of stairs. But within a month, he was robbed again—this time they broke in through the roof door. And my TV-less buddy spent the next 11 months going up and down six flights of stairs every day.

Six storeys (some say seven) was the maximum height they'd build residential buildings in New York, prior to the elevator. No resident was willing to climb more stairs than that. After Otis' perfection of the elevator, that height limitation was gone, and within a century we had skyscrapers. Then the new height limitation was building technology.

Advanced construction techniques have since skyrocketed, if you'll pardon the pun; as the World's Tallest Building peeing contest continues, it is rumored that Saudi Arabia's Kingdom Tower will be a kilometer high. But the new height limitation is the thing that smashed the old one: Elevators. Steel cable is so heavy that at its maximum elevator height of 500 meters, the cables themselves make up 3/4s of the moving mass. You can stagger elevator banks to go higher, but the heaviness of steel cable makes long-haul elevators prohibitively expensive to run.

Finnish elevator manufacturer Kone believes they have the answer. After ten years of development they've just announced the debut of UltraRope, a carbon-fiber cable that's stronger than steel, lasts twice as long, and weighs a fraction of the older stuff:

It's just about time for lunch for many of us, and we invite you to feast your eyes on our second-to-last 2013 Core77 Design Awards live jury broadcast. We're celebrating Food Design for the second time now, since we introduced the category last year, and our jury team, led by Francesca Sarti of Arabeschi di Latte, is pleased to present their picks.

Professional
Winner: Tattfoo Tan - New Earth MRE
Runner-up: IDEO & Food Genius - Food Genius Reports Dashboard
Notables
» Blendtec - Blendtec Stealth - Quiet + Smart in a Blender
» Sagel & Krzykowski - Point and Line to Plate
» Delphine Huguet - Sensitive explosion

Student
Winner: Team SEALEAF - SEALEAF - Floating Farms for Coastal Megacities
Runner-up: Robert Provo Kluit - Time wand
Notables
» Omer Polak - Culinary Slow Food project
» Annelie Berner - Cupcakes Index
» Kelly Vormelker - Seed till fork
» Wei He - COMPETITIONANDRELIC
» Eddie Licitra - Traverse Tailgating Grill

They Innovate Inc. is the name of an upstart design company out of Port Hope, Canada. Focusing on the phone mounting space, their first product is the Clipless, a magnetic means of attaching your phone or tablet to any surface (including your own clothes).

Early prototypes were 3D-printed, but the team didn't get much traction; early test runs indicated what more and more people are discovering—not everyone digs the occasionally janky results you get with 3D-printed plastic. But after switching to a CNC mill and changing materials to aluminum, user feedback went positive and the group knew they had a hit on their hands.

Here's how Clipless works:

Introducing Clipless from Jeffrey McLarty on Vimeo.

Image via FanPop

In every job there is a line between personal time and employment. In some roles, the line is very clear, demarcated by a klaxon, punch card or timesheet. In other fields of work, the line is blurred, sometimes to the point of vanishing altogether. Design is one of those fields.

Every designer is a cultural voyeur—a perpetual sponge for inspiration and a running faucet for ideas. When we design, we draw on experiences from our private lives, from our travels and observations. Design is a lifestyle, the method acting of careers. Design doesn't stop at 5pm.

When individuals take jobs with design firms, they sign contracts and begin to serve their clients. With that step comes a disconnect between employment and personal time. Contracts typically draw hard lines around the two with a variety of privacy and commitment clauses. Personal projects are often relegated to second place in the hierarchy of creativity, and referred to euphemistically as moonlighting. This is a thorny issue with some Paleolithic attitudes, but one which would benefit from open discussion.

Genera of Moonlighting

As I see it, all moonlighting work sits upon a sliding scale:
- A blog or other public writing
- Public speaking or conference appearances
- Work for friends, family or self
- External client work

Every case is different, but at some point in the scale, every company draws a line. Some are more flexible, some are more regimented, but every contract has a clause referring to this behavior. Let's take a quick look at the key drivers behind these clauses (followed by a quick debunking of each):

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They're looking for a fun/cool, personable Interactive Designer to develop and execute concepts based on project briefs, present concepts to internal teams and clients, and be an overall creative powerhouse. Eventually, this role will progress to mentoring other designers.

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We recently had the chance to chat with designer Naoto Fukasawa and IDEO's Jane Fulton Suri, who served on the jury for last year's Braunprize selections. As keen observers of the world at large and the man-made objects and obstacles we encounter on a regular basis, both Fukasawa and Suri had plenty of interesting things to say about the current state of design and just what it means to be 'normal.'.

Core77: It seems that you are both highly attuned to the world around you—or rather, us. Both the Super Normal and Thoughtless Acts document what might be considered as everyday or mundane, but actually have been accepted or adopted by users as conventions. Have either of you noticed memorable examples of these things that we take for granted lately?

Naoto Fukasawa: I have been conducting the 'Without Thought' workshop to young designers for over 15 years. In these workshops, what I have been hoping for the participants to understand is that our behaviors and movements are not produced by ourselves thinking of how to move our bodies every second but instead, such acts are produced by our body naturally responding to given situations and environments.

For example, walking is defined by a sequence of movements of our legs and feet: placing one foot forward on the ground and then moving the other to follow. When we recognize a surface that is not the greatest to step on, we naturally avoid it and if we lose balance by doing so, perhaps we try to put our hands on walls and so on. Mountaineering and rock climbing face limited surfaces to place our hands and feet and sometimes the areas everyone subconsciously grabs get polished. Making a decision for a behavior is a response of body beyond one's consciousness, and in this context, we are all sharing something greater than being individuals: human as bodies.

Our environments, situations and information ignite our behaviors. Specifically, our environments, situations and our body are synchronized to each other and create our environments.

Thoughtless Acts

Jane Fulton Suri: Boarding planes these days there's always a scramble to find space to stash luggage in an overhead bin—people close the bin when it's full and thereby simplify the search for everyone. And I see lots of new habits have emerged with our attachment to flat-screen mobile phones: The phone is always with you so it's a handy bookmark for your magazine when you have to put it down for a minute; it's a weight to hold the page open when cooking from a recipe book; an immediate surface to attach a sticky-note as a reminder, the lit screen is a flashlight to find the bathroom at night or, in unity with a crowd of fans, to light up a stadium, and if you reverse your phone camera, the screen is better than a mirror for checking if there's something in your teeth or putting on makeup! Social cues come into play at meetings too: if your phone is placed on the table face down, you're there to pay attention, if it's face up, you signal that something else is important!

Pro photographer Gerald Donovan isn't really content with the Instagram level of quality you and I might be fine with. "I...use what is quite simply the best digital still image equipment money can buy," writes Donovan, referring to his collection of Rodenstock lenses, ALPA cameras and Medium Format Digital Back. Of course, you and I could buy this same equipment and never get Donovan's results; to see some examples of what 40 years of shooting experience brings, check out these shots of his awesome Burj Khalifa Collection.

The globular panorama, by the way, was just made public yesterday to Gizmodo; Donovan had previously Photoshopped out the Burj itself for aesthetic effect, but decided to throw it back in. (You can see the Burj-free version here.)

Our nostalgia for paper manifests itself in more than just bespoke greeting cards and pocket-sized Moleskines. Papers of different thicknesses and colors can be cut and folded into forms that take on a strange intimacy, or even digitally recreated into characters from the craft store. Here's what's pertinent this week in pulp.

Just as beers and backyards are finally having their moment in the sun, the French design studio Zim & Zou crafts another seasonal staple: a full-sized barbeque grill made entirely of paper, complete with stacked skewers, drumsticks plump as hot air balloons and a geodesic bottle of Heinz to accompany it all. Although some of the images look like computer renderings, everything is handmade by the 25-year-old designers Lucie Thomas and Thibault Zimmermann, whose previous constructions include a paper Game Boy, a stop-motion greeting card for IBM and a lush leather-and-paper jungle for an Hermès window display.

Wow, what a week! With 14 jury broadcasts in the bag and just three to go, the live announcement of the 2013 Core77 Design Awards winners for the Furniture & Lighting category is our final broadcast of the week (Food and Visual Communication will be on Monday, June 17, at 2pm and 4pm EST respectively).

Unfortunately, Jury Captain Matali Crasset is unable to make it, so Core77 Editor-in-Chief Eric Ludlum is stepping up to announce the winners. (Rest assured she will prepare a video with her jury comments by next week—stay tuned for more.)

Professional
Winner: David Irwin - M Lamp
Runners-up:
»Lydia Cambron and Von Tundra - 99
»Ryszard Manczak - Tango Pouf
Notable: Michael Yates Design - Giacoma Rocker

Student
Winner: Erika Cross - Vertebral Chair
Runner-up:
» Michael Neville - Rocking Lump
» Dan Ipp - Illuminated Side Table
» Ryan Pieper - High/Low' Table
Notable: Knauf & Brown - Profile Chair