If you're a Karim fan, a bottled water decrier, or have been closely watching the internet for the past week or so, you've probably seen Bobble, the brand new, self-filtering water container designed by Rashid for Move Collective.

At the Home and Housewares Show (happening now in Chicago), we caught up with founder Richard Smiedt and Karim Rashid at their very first Bobble booth, where guests swarmed for autographed giveaways (yes, we got one). Both took some time out to tell us Bobble's story.

Karim, above, discusses the product from a design and use perspective, pointing out just how much plastic we can really save, and how he's been using Bobble in his own travels.

Bobble, in pink.

Richard, who came to the US from Australia after working for 20 years in product development at design-centric housewares companies like Casabella, Bodum and Breville, described the Bobble story in depth: with the particular goal of reducing water bottle usage, he and his team unearthed a very buried patent for a bottle-mountable filter; this incredible system had been used in only one crude product thus far.

So now it begins to simplify: as Smiedt put it, they had "found the shell of something quite interesting that had absolutely no design." No design? Hire a designer. Which designer? Karim Rashid, who, as is his way, developed an immediately recognizable form.

[photo credit: Greg Southam of Edmonton Journal]

One of the things I love about ID is its broad scope. With an ID skill set you can design anything from toothbrushes to furniture to stores to cars, and whether the economy's good or bad it's a great way to move between industries, as you're not tied to the fortunes of any one specific product.

Remember Pure Design, the Umbra-esque design firm from the '90s? Founded by the design trio of Geoffrey Lilge, Randy McCoy and Daniel Hlus, the firm was the epitome of hip design of that era, starting out with a CD rack (sooooo '90s) and expanding into furniture that wound up on the sets of Ally McBeal and a Janet Jackson video (ditto).

So whatever happened to them? Following the departure of Lilge in 2002, McCoy and Hlus sold the company in 2005, and it subsequently morphed into an upstate-New-York-based design retailer. And in an example of the resilience and diversity of the profession, McCoy has recently popped up on the design radar again--doing nightclubs and bars in Edmonton.

After leaving Pure, McCoy was asked by friends for help with renovations; with the successful completion of each project the requests started to pile up, and he realized he had a viable business on his hands and founded Retrofit Design LTD. Since its inception in 2005, McCoy's firm has expanded from kitchens and residential interiors into nightlife.

The Edmonton Journal recently did a piece on McCoy and his bar design, and you can read more about him and check out Retrofit's stuff here.

Unless you've severed your internet connection recently, your probably aware that Seoul is currently basking in the glory of the title, World Design Capital 2010. This award, still in it's infancy having started with Torino in 2008, has been met with mixed feeling from the wider design community, some sceptical of its value to the understanding of "design".

Well, Seoul are not letting this get in the way of putting on great, profile-raising show. We reported on the spectacular Seoul Design Olympiad back in October last year in the run up to the 2010, but many a designer is now left wondering, what is actually going on in the South Korean capital now that 2010 has actually arrived? As it transpires (design enthusiasts passing through Seoul this year beware) the answer is - not an aweful lot.

Check out the only design related event we found in Seoul - the Seoul Design Assets Exhibition, after the jump.

The Guardian, one of the leading UK newspapers, has publish an eight-page supplement on service design - subtitled "Design innovation in the public and private sector - in association with the Service Design Network.

"Design is a highly pragmatic discipline. That is why it is of such interest to business: it gets results. But if at its heart lies the idea of experience, then, as this supplement shows, the methods and ideas behind service design can equally be applied to the public sector.

We also take a look at developments in sustainability for transport and water systems, as well as at changes in the voluntary sector, where the question: "Can design help change the world?" is increasingly gaining relevance."

Articles cover service innovation management in major industries, service reform in the public sector, sustainability in the financial sector, car design as service ecosystem design, environmental design and social innovation. Much attention is devoted to methodology. Also included are interviews with Dan Pink (author), Joe Ferry (Virgin Atlantic) and others.

The conference "Designing Slow Life" on 24-25 March in Lahti, Finland brings together international experts of design, service design and wellness to talk about and develop services under the main theme of better, slower and more meaningful life.

The conference aims at collecting visions of how design practices and methods can be more powerfully used when developing services and practices under the Slow Life theme. Service design is the newest and most interesting area of multidisciplinary design. The

The challenge is to develop multidisciplinary know-how, methods for service as well as service-product analyses and development. The Slow Life conference will try to solve how to develop our surroundings in future in order to support slower life. What kind of multidisciplinary know-how is needed to do this and what kind of new business can be evolved to this area?

The conference highlights current topics of Slow Life themes through examples from both academic research and end-user point of view. The aim is to combine know-how from design and wellness areas in order to share and create new information.

via SDN

Over the past couple of days, there's been a flurry of information coming from our live-blogging team at The Big Rethink, The Economist's Redesigning Business Summit. To make it easier for you to navigate, we've rounded up all their reports in one handy place.

In chronological order:

The Big Rethink: Introducing the Core77 team

The Big Rethink: Four visions of the world tomorrow, and how to shape your company around them

Our penultimate session is billed as an innovation master class with the Design Council

Professor Eddie Obeng, Director of Learning at the Pentacle The Virtual Business School and the man behind the monetisation of MSN, the innovation burst at Cadbury and the turn-around of Rolls Royce motor cars introduces some principles of design-led innovation. He's also our incredibly enthusiastic host/facilitator jumping around the stage spilling words and images at 100 miles an hour.

Eddie introduces us to some numbers: 23, 7.1m, 366,000 and 1 in 100,000

23% number of projects that set out and actually achieve what they intended
7.1million results in Google for 'Innovation change consultants'
1 in 100,000 ideas that you have in your organisation that actually get to be realised
366,000 Number of books on Amazon about Innovation

He shares a number of diagrams with us to help us understand the change from an old world where we where able to understand and react to the pace of change to one where that ability is diminishing and as a consequence so is our inclination to take risks.

Click to enlarge

Our most popular Core-toon illustration, The Dreaded Killer Jellyfish of Graphic Design Favors is now available as a poster! A limited-edition of 150 prints have been silk screened by the Post Family printers in Chicago on French Smart White paper, and Individually numbered and initialed by the artist lunchbreath. The print is 18" x 24" (45.7cm x 61cm) and ships in a super tough reusable metal-capped tube.

Available now for just $20 (plus shipping), it's the perfect "note-to-self" for next time you're even contemplating another quick design favor for a friend -- or thank you gift if you are indeed that friend!

Buy Now!

IxDA has done a phenomenal job documenting all of last month's presentations from the Interaction Design 2010 conference in Savannah, GA. There are so many gems here, but we've picked out a few favorites, The first is Ben Fullerton's talk on Designing for Solitude. Alone time— or the "ability to switch off and contemplate"—is becoming harder and harder to find as our media is increasingly socialized; Ben discusses why this is not a good thing. Solitude is important and we now find ourselves with a particular need to create it. What does an off state look like?

Timo Arnall, who works with near field communications and emerging RFID technology, delivered a talk entitled "Designing for the Web in the World." A nice contrast to Fullerton's main points, Timo discusses the 'on' state in depth—we can move off the screen and into the world by embodying our digital services in real, tactile, networked objects.

During my mother's childhood in her country of origin, a neighbor might swing by your house and deliver a plate full of chow, delicacies or baked goods. Local custom was that when you returned the plate to them a few days later, you never gave it back empty, but loaded it with the fruits of your own kitchen labors.

When I was a waiter my boss used to dress me down if he caught me traveling empty-handed between the ground floor and the storeroom in the basement. He had grown up in a four-storey Brooklyn brownstone, he explained, and his mother would admonish him if he traveled between floors without carrying anything. "There's always something that needs to be brought up or down," she'd say.

These lessons are universal, and no one knows them better than logistics coordinators for shipping companies. If a container crosses the Pacific loaded with Toyotas and goes back empty, that's a huge waste of fuel. But despite their best efforts, it happens all the time. And even if they weigh different amounts, 1,000 empty containers take up the same amount of space as 1,000 full containers, meaning the ships are forced to make the same amount of trips each way.

That will change if Dutch entrepreneur René Giesbers' Cargoshell folding shipping container concept makes it into production. When empty, the Cargoshell can be folded flat, taking up only 25% of its original volume. Ships can carry four times as many empty containers as full. And the Cargoshell is made from composites rather than steel, which give off far less CO2 during the production process.

A video of the prototype is below. Non-Dutch-speakers will not be able to follow what they're talking about, but you can fast forward to 1:20 to see the ten seconds where they unfold the thing.

The Boisbuchet summer 2010 workshop schedule has just been released. From everything we've heard, the experience comes highly recommended—after all, what could be better than spending six to ten days on a country estate in the Southwest of France with Maarten Baas, the Campana Brothers, Tomoko Azumi or Dan Formosa?

Above, a shot of the castle and a scene from the a 2009 workshop on toys and games: participants navigated a 2d maze by looking into a mirror mounted inside their helmet. (photo by Caroline Linder).

These always fill up fast, so take your pick and register!

Anyone who's ever moved house knows you've got to put everything in boxes, which is why U-Haul sells them.

Shipping companies figured this out as early as the 1700s; prior to that you had the "break bulk" cargo system, which meant scores of dockworkers going up and down gangplanks with bolts of fabric and sacks and whatnot across their shoulders. But the boxes and crates loaded onto ships (and later trains) differed in size, shape and composition depending on where they came from. Through the 1800s, some were made of wood, others of iron.

In the 20th century, organizations ranging from British railroad consortiums to the U.S. Army all made efforts to standardize their own shipping boxes, but it wasn't until 1956 that an innovation appeared which has taken root around the globe and is still with us today: The invention of the shipping container.

American trucking entrepreneur Malcom McLean came up with what's called "intermodal" shipping containers, that is to say, a box that could be loaded on a ship, train or truck. The cost savings was staggering and sounded the death knell for longshoremen: What once cost $5.86 per ton to load now cost only 16 cents.

Coming up with a standard-sized box might not sound like a big deal, but the intermodal concept was an early success in systems design, something like what Apple does with iPods, iTunes and iMacs. Much of the things in our homes, including the computer I'm typing this on, the monitor you're reading it from, and the chairs we're both sitting in, spent time in McLean's boxes.

(Side note: Entrepreneur McLean, who only had a high school education and starting off pumping gas but later amassed a fortune of $400 million, has a fascinating life story loaded with business lessons too convoluted to encapsulate here--take a look. Said the then-U.S.-Secretary-of-Transportation Norman Mineta upon Mclean's death, "A true giant, Malcom revolutionized the maritime industry in the 20th century. His idea for modernizing the loading and unloading of ships, which was previously conducted in much the same way the ancient Phoenicians did 3,000 years ago, has resulted in much safer and less-expensive transport of goods, faster delivery, and better service. We owe so much to a man of vision, 'the father of containerization,' Malcom P. McLean.")

The Economist's Robin Bew, who opened the conference yesterday by reminding us of exactly how deep the s*** is we're in, posed what are perceived to be the four trends (or challenges for business) that will shape tomorrow's world.

Sir George Cox (former Design Council Chairman), in his calming, measured, reassuring way, offered some reasons why we shouldn't all start panicking and freak out. This was a nice reflective antidote to the information overload of the last two days, and perhaps the most genuinely insightful session for those business leaders who had attended to learn what they should be planning for.

So, the 4 Trends:
1. the shift to emerging markets
2. rich world ageing
3. carbon pricing
4. a lack of capital

One Off has just released the call for entries for their 2010 edition of Food Design, now six years in the running. Open to all, the aim of the competition is to foster design culture through food culture, and vice versa. There are three categories to submit to: Design with Food, Design for Food, and Tasting Kit.

The list of judges is long and distinguished, including designers Marti Guixe, Joe Colombo, Heston Blumenthal and Grant Achatz.

Here's the brief:

Participation in the competition is free and is open to all those who want to put to test their abilities in projects linked to the theme of Food Design. Particularly architects, professionals, artists, craftsmen and designers creatives, high school students, university students and students of the sector. Participation can be either individual or collective and in the latter case a person must be appointed and will be the only referent for the promoters of the competition. When students or a group of students from a class or a course are coordinated by a teacher, he/she acts as a referent.

The aim of the competition is spreading, promoting and fostering design culture through projects that re-interpret customs and functions linked with food. In particular the shaping of new behavioural models, new rituals and habits combining the materials with colours, flavours and inspirations. Research and experimentation are brought forward on the theme of food, of its packaging and of its use. They stimulate the quest for new functional solutions which must also be sustainable and flexible..

Read more here, or download the call for entries (pdf).

Deadline: June 15, 2010

Wooden ships used to set sail from New York fully laden with American goods to bring to the Old World. If the trade balance was perfect, they would unload their stuff in Europe and sail back to America loaded up with an equal amount of European goods; but since more Europeans wanted American resources than vice versa, that wasn't the case.

After unloading in Europe, something was needed to load the empty ships up with for ballast for the return journey. At the time cobblestones were the cheapest, densest, most easily mass-produced and most compact units of weight around, and their squarish shapes made them space-efficient and easy to stack. They became the ballast of choice.

I like to imagine that cobblestones then started piling up around New York docks, after thousands of dockworkers got free, mandatory take-home paperweights. ("What the hell am I supposed to do with this? It's the 1600s and I've never touched a piece of paper in my life.") But most likely some European mentioned to the Americans "Oh by the way, you can make roads out of these bricks. We've been doing it since the 15th century."

The end result is that you can see tons of cobblestone streets in New York, Boston and elsewhere, often close to the water. Cobblestones were holy hell on carriage wheels and they meant horses would have to wear horseshoes, but they had an added technological advantage: In that pre-asphalt and pre-storm-drain era, they allowed water to run between the individual stones, preventing mud build-up and ruts that carts would get stuck in.

Stay tuned for "Shaped by Our Shipping, Part 2: Thinking inside the box."