For almost as long as I’ve been interested in industrial design, I’ve been reading the Core77 website. Between their inspirational blog posts, informational articles and conversational community, you can get lost for hours. We asked Allan to take us back to the beginning, and found out how they started.
Core77 started in 1995. That’s really early; most design sites were only started in the last 3-5 years. How did anyone think to create a design site back then?
Core77 was started by Stu Constantine and Eric Ludlum while they were graduate ID students at Pratt Institute in 1995. They were interested in interface design, and thought about making a website to help future students find the information that they themselves had found so hard to piece together during their school search process.
They had in their possession a “guidebook for industrial design students,” and thought that this kind of material would make for a great start. So they entered some of the information–lists of art supplies, stores, model-making tricks–and turned it into a website. They also added a list of schools–this was key, and how the site got its strong resource feel right from the get-go.
They linked to people, and people linked back. You have to remember that this was 1995, and the World Wide Web was only a couple of years old. Core77 was the first design site–indeed, it was one of the very first online magazines–and the project grew and grew to the point where Stu and Eric were able to hand in a CD of the site as their master’s thesis.
The first Core77 office in the Engineering Building at Pratt
That’s probably one of the best thesis projects anyone’s ever done.
No doubt. I met Stu and Eric, almost randomly, at their year-end show in the Puck Building. They had a local copy of Core77 set up on a desktop computer (no internet access in the gallery in those days), and it was amazing. Pratt also saw that this was a great thing, and decided to incubate Core77, giving Stu and Eric a room in the Engineering building and a T1 line. They continued to build out Core, designed the first pratt.edu website, and took on other client work.
I used to teach all day on Thursdays, and on my lunch hour I would go and hang out in the Core office. Everybody did. It was an incredibly exciting place and time, and there were parties, beer, people writing articles, people learning HTML. A lot of students came through there, and Core77 was really a labor of love for a lot of them.
So that went on for a few years. I started collaborating with Eric, doing consulting work for Herman Miller and other clients, and it got very busy. Ultimately, the three of us formed a new partnership, and the websites started to generate more revenue, until they reached the point where they were self-sufficient. Coroflot, our job and portfolio site, grew really well, and we launched Design Directory in association with BusinessWeek. The whole thing became a pretty well-diversified publishing platform, serving everyone from high school students looking for gossip about design colleges to Fortune 500 companies looking for design firms.
The sparkly sign. We’ve dragged this all over hell and back.
Core77 isn’t a blog; it’s really a community of people who talk to each other. It seems to me that the message board is really what enabled that. When did that come in?
The discussion boards went up pretty early, and are in many respects the life-blood of the community. When people describe Core77 as a blog, they’re not really capturing the whole offering. Although our blog is very popular and is something we put a lot of effort into, the eco-system around the blog is vast–we’ve described ourselves as the “industrial design supersite,” which we use only a little bit ironically. And as you described it, the beating heart of the thing is the people and their participation in the site, whether it’s through the discussion forums, design competitions, blog and article comments, portfolios of designers’ work, or the design job offerings people post at Coroflot. It’s just this great community.
I’m interested in the interplay between meeting people on the internet and then bringing that into the real world. Core’s really captured that. When did you begin holding events?
Almost from the start. As wonderful as the internet is, there’s no replacement for face-to-face. I remember seeing the founder of MeetUp speak at an event at Parsons a few years ago, and he said, “Unlike most internet companies, our objective is to get people OFF the internet. We are America Offline.” I thought that was great.
Holding events has always been important to us. We’ve held the Core77 Offsite series for years now, at various scales. Sometimes we’d invite an individual designer to present their work in a bar and then have drinks and networking afterwards, or other times convene an entire half-day with a full-on panel discussion in a swanky gallery or meeting space. We recently held a design and creative employment confab at SXSW, which was a bit more business-oriented. But then we had the blacklight ping-pong party last May, down in Chinatown, which was not, um, very business-like.
When we interviewed Harry Allen he told us about a great Core77 party where you built a replica of Moss out of foam core.
It was down at Gallery91 in SoHo in 2003. We were producing the first ever Coroflot Members Show, an exhibition designed to celebrate some of the best talent on Coroflot. Eric went through thousands of portfolios on the site, picking out work from designers all around the world that he thought represented some future design indicators (the show was called Canary in a Coalmine).
He also had this very brilliant, very dangerous idea to recreate Moss.
Recreating Moss using Foamcore and AutoPoles
Moss had reached the pinnacle of design stores at the time; it was this shrine, this temple. So the idea was to build a replica of Moss using stainless-steel photographer’s AutoPoles and half-inch white Foamcore. We had a pretty good idea of Moss’s layout, but we had to do a little espionage. (One of my jobs was to recreate the signage placed beside each of the various products–down to the font and the story-telling style. The people at Moss didn’t like you hanging around and taking pictures, but I managed a few.) We brought tape measures to make sure that we had the right fixture dimensions, and were pretty confident that we could build a convincing replica.
Anyway, we’re in this mad rush to build a Foamcore double of the store, and after the press opening we realize that a lot of the objects on display were very small and precious, and that there could be a real theft problem. So, frantically, we installed plastic sheeting to mimic Moss’s glass boxes–which actually turned out to be the perfect finishing touch, evoking the precious vitrine aesthetic that Murray talks about. But even with this protective sheeting, sure enough, one of the items got stolen–Tobi Wong (who was just catching fire back then) had worked with Robert The to create a gun out of Karim Rashid’s I Want to Change the World book. And it was gone.
We had this other item on display that was one of the nicest things in the show–Michael Sans’ set of six bullets exploding into little die-cast flowers at their tips. It was incredibly desirable, and we thought that if the thief were still in the exhibition, he would go for those next. And sure enough, he was caught tucking his hand under the plastic. He was tackled to the ground…the police came…it was epic. We were shaken but thrilled; the best parties are when the cops come.
The infamous “shower scene” at fake Moss
We also re-enacted an infamous stunt that Moss had done a year or two before. They had a shower stall set up in the middle of the store, and every 20 minutes a guy would come out and take a shower, naked. So we HAD to recreate that. We made a Foamcore showerhead, and found someone on Craigslist. Every 20 minutes he would come out wearing a bathrobe and a wrestler’s mask (one of our trademarks at the time), then strip down naked and mime lathering himself up. So ya, between that and the cops coming…arguably one of the strongest things Core’s produced.
I’d like to switch over to talking about your teaching career. What does teaching mean to you?
Teaching’s a really important part of my life, and I’ve been at it for about 15 years now. I am forever amazed at design students, and I think teaching product design is a privilege–it’s like inventor school, with all these people making stuff and breaking stuff and making it again, only better. When I first started out, I was teaching sophomores. Sophomores are 19, generally fearless, and will make almost anything if you ask them to. They’re so excited to be there, and I feel like a sophomore teacher’s job is to just not fuck it up; they’re yours to lose.
A couple of years later, I was very intrigued with the idea of teaching graduate students, so I picked up a thesis class, which was great. So in those days, I taught the first class in the undergraduate program and the last class in the graduate program–an intriguing way to spend a Thursday. I soon learned that the grad students are sort of the exact opposite problem from the sophomores. They’re old enough to know that their decisions have consequences, they worry all the time, and they don’t build anything. They just read another book.
So that’s how you were able to do both; they have the solutions to each others’ problems.
That’s a nice way of putting it. By talking up to the undergrads and placing tight constraints on the graduates, I found some success with them both. The tricky part was making sure there were enough fundamentals taught with the undergraduates, and to not be too much of an asshole with the graduates. (I hope I managed that most of the time.)
Ifaat Qureshi tries on a prosthetic arm “demonstrator” in an SVA Design in 3 Dimensions class
We always ask people what their advice is for young designers. What is your advice?
That’s probably a more complicated question now than it’s ever been. It used to be, “Should I start my own business, or should I work for a consultancy, or should I go work at an in-house department at a larger company?” Many things have changed to alter that equation. We have this amazing convergence of awesomely powerful tools of creation and insanely powerful tools of dissemination.
Designers have never been equipped with so much ability in terms of 3D software, materials technology, or the ability to get questions answered…almost instantly. Designers can send out their stuff to design sites, or post it in online portfolios. A piece of work can find its way around the world in half a day, and suddenly you can be a hit, fielding inquiries for more press, or orders, or nibbles from potential manufacturers. I’ve seen it happen many times.
The other things that have changed are more sober. Designers are the people who have these unique talents and methodologies around ingenuity and innovation; who are problem solvers. And given the magnitude of the problems right now, the world needs designers more now than ever. It just may not need them to design teakettles or toasters or MP3 players.
Happily, for a lot of students I meet, this isn’t a burden. Design students, for all their eagerness to design “cool products,” really do seem to come out of the box interested in design for social good, in making a difference and creating meaningful experiences for people. I think the future’s never been brighter for design, and it’s incredibly gratifying to support the field both through teaching and through my work at Core77.