Hyphen, a London-based industrial design and development consultancy, was drafted in by global brand agency Fitch London and its client McLaren Automotive to help design and realise mobile customer configurator kits for the new McLaren MP4-12C supercar.

The unique kits include a full range of configurable options for the car – even down to the colours of the upholstery stitching and brake calipers.

Fitch developed the concept design of the case with McLaren, as part of a larger project to design the dealership experience and communication material. Hyphen was then tasked with taking Fitch’s loose concept design and turning it into reality: a robust, very high end product, and a perfect representation of the McLaren brand.

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I wasn’t aware that anything like the National Preparedness Month existed. Well, we are in it (if you live in the US) and the timing is pretty apt with Hurricane Irene having recently ravaged its way through much of North America and it is of course also the 10th anniversary of September 11th.

Having an emergency supply kit in your home, car or workplace seems a very sensible thing. The American Red Cross obviously thinks so too and teamed up with outdoor electronics specialist Eton Corporation to create a new line of self-powered emergency products called the TurboDyne Series.

Launched earlier this year the three products in the series have already received a number of awards including the Red Dot 2011. Each product contains a powerful dynamo crank that powers emergency radio channels and a phone. Road Torq is a roadside emergency tripod with a very bright flashlight and emergency flasher. Axis and Rover are high power dynamo crank radios that integrate wideband, AM/FM/NOAA and mobile phone charger.

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Unbeknown to me being a female, a rather unpleasant phenomenon often occurs in the men’s urinal – splash back. Although many men may not realise it, conventional urinals routinely splash the user, the walls, the floor and potentially other users with urine.

This is due to a simple design flaw: fluid hitting a flat, perpendicular surface will always reflect back as splash. Many solutions to this problem have been proposed however, these generally aim to cure the symptoms (say, by catching the splash) rather than actually removing the fundamental problem. Goodwin Hartshorn have taken a different approach.

The London-based product designers originally approached sanitary-ware company Ideal Standard in 2005 with a new design for eliminating splash from conventional wall-hung urinals. The aim of the innovation, a central vertical ‘fin’ structure, was to ensure the fluid strikes the china tangentially rather than at 90 degrees to the surface. By doing this, surface tension causes the urine to cling to the surface rather than splashing off. Moreover, at such a shallow angle, any slight splashing is reflected away from the user, not back at them.

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Earlier in the week I was the envy of most of my friends and family as I jetted off to the home of Ferrari in Maranello, Italy, for the awards ceremony of the Ferrari World Design Contest 2011.

The competition, launched in collaboration with Ferrari’s technology partner Autodesk, challenged transportation students from 50 international schools and universities to create the Ferrari hypercar of the future. As a spokesperson for Ferrari told me at the ceremony: “Ferraris are not cars, they are dreams. We asked the students to design dreams of the future.”

It’s not surprising that over 200 projects were submitted when the prize up for grabs for the students in first and second place would be an internship at Ferrari. In the first round of judging Flavio Manzoni, Ferrari senior vice president of design, and Andrea Militello, Ferrari exterior designer, together with the rest of the jury whittled the projects down to just seven schools. These schools could then submit three concepts each, which would include 3D models created in Autodesk Alias and 1:4 scale physical models.

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With all the student degree shows taking place at the moment and with the New Designers event just around the corner, we thought that this week’s instalment of Prime Cuts should be from a product design student.

Bradley Wherry, an Industrial Design & Technology BA student from Brunel University, has created sunglasses as part of a campaign, Beat the Burn, to raise awareness about the dangers involved in over exposure to the sun. The frames change colour to indicate the strength of the sun’s UV rays and to remind users to head for cover or apply sunscreen.

At Brunel, final year students set their own briefs that tackle a particular problem. Wherry, having grown up in Jersey and spending a lot of his childhood on the beach, remembers how easy it was to get burnt. So, he settled on the problem of sunburn.

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When I found out earlier in the year that Phaidon would be launching a new book on Dieter Rams in the summer, I made sure that I was on the top of the list to receive a review copy. Rams, who was head of design at Braun from 1961 to 1995, is one of my most favourite industrial designers. I love his products, which all exemplify his design ethos of ‘Less, but better’.

He is well known for his ‘Ten Principles of Good Design’, which are still as relevant to designers today as they were when he wrote them (you can read what they are in a previous comment piece I did). However, his true talent as a designer really hit home to me when I went to a retrospective of his work last year at the Design Museum in London. The various products on display, both for Braun and Vitsoe, looked so contemporary in my opinion despite being over 40 years old. From coffee makers, alarm clocks, hair dryers, calculators through to radios, audio visual equipment and electric shavers, each are beautiful objects in the way in which they are functional yet simple… as little design as possible (quoting the title of this new book).

SK 4 record player, 1956

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Earlier this week I jetted off to Milan for the Delcam European press conference. Despite the weather (I clearly brought the rain with me) it was an interesting and informative visit with trips to Sandvik and Mazak, both users of Delcam’s CADCAM software.

Delcam has grown steadily since being founded in 1977. Just in the last ten years revenues have increased from £17.0 million to £31.8 million. Over 220 people are currently employed at its Birmingham headquarters, with more than 300 in the company’s overseas subsidiaries (one of which is Delcam Italia in Milan). Customers in a broad range of industries use its software and in fact, the company recently celebrated its 35,000th customer.

Presentations at the press conference covered highlights and new developments in its various product ranges including PartMaker, PowerSHAPE, PowerMILL, ArtCAM, FeatureCAM, Delcam for SolidWorks (above) and PowerINSPECT. A lot of these developments have already been or will be covered in the software reviews section of the magazine by Al. For instance in the June issue’s Reverse Engineering supplement he wrote a review of PowerINSPECT 2011. 

However, what really interests me is Delcam’s dedicated healthcare division, which was only established a year ago and since that time has experienced a 50% growth in dental solutions and a 350% in orthotic solutions. In fact, as Chris Lawrie, Delcam’s healthcare business development manager, said orthotics is the fastest-growing area of Delcam’s business. But this is not just down to its software solutions, which include DentCAD and DentMILL programs for the design and manufacture of dental restorations and the OrthoModel and OrthoMill software for the development of orthotics, but also the development of its own hardware. These iSeries hardware products for the orthotic and dental markets integrate with Delcam’s software to provide a complete solution.

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