Let me be honest, I don't want surfboards to be designed on computers, sent to factories in Thailand and shipped back to us en masse without the shaper ever touching the material. I'm not a purist – really I'm not. And as someone who doesn't make surfboards, and will never try, I have no right to expound righteously on this subject. But still, a big part of me – I think the part that wishes we all grew a different rare vegetable on our windowsills and bartered with each other from our front porches at meal time – wants surfboard shapers to be people who still draw their visions in the sand and give boards away from banana leaf huts.

To anyone actually trying to make a living from designing surfboards, which have notoriously low profit margins, that's unfair. But you should know my bias, and know that as I drive to meet this former Apple designer guy, Thomas Meyerhoffer, the man who designed that translucent eMate for Apple in the 90's and has become recently renowned for using his technology chops to design some revolutionary type of surfboard, one that looks like a compressed hour-glass alien spaceship, I have my reservations. It doesn't help that Meyerhoffer, a very hip man with a Swedish accent, a thin goatee, and a shaved head, meets me in the parking lot of his home break in Montara in a shiny white BMW.

Man, this is not how it should be, I'm thinking from the smelly confines my rusting van with 230,000 miles on it (you do detect a hint of jealousy). This is just not, not – not wholesome.

But neither would it be wholesome for me to judge this man so early in our daylong relationship. I have to give him a chance. It's our first date. And since the waves are slop here in Montara, we decide to drive up to Ocean Beach, San Francisco, for a better shot at testing out his gizmos. (And no, I don't like calling surfboards gizmos, and yes, I'm feeling a little bitter that Meyerhoffer wouldn't let me take photos of his Miami Vice looking home to remember the scene. I mean, what surfer cares about that kind of stuff? But the drive will give me a chance to drop into a less judgmental space. We are all one, all one.)

We are rounding the bluffs on Highway 1, chatting casually now, and while Meyerhoffer explains about quitting Apple 10 years ago and starting to surf everyday, I'm not really listening. I'm thinking about the fact that I too am so dependent on technology, recording our conversation on my iPhone. I'm forcing myself to see myself as the same as Meyerhoffer. These are the exercises strange people have to do to feel normal. And surprisingly, it doesn't take long.

For starters, Meyerhoffer is nice. And I like nice people. And he doesn't seem at all weirded out by the fact that the doors on my van don't work, which goes a long way in my book. Also, he went to art school. One I haven't even heard of. And he's deep. "A surfboard is a very complex shape, a never-ending curve," he says at some point in the conversation, and I like this statement. With his accent, it sounds like a sort of koan. Can curves really never end?

And like this, five minutes into our drive, Meyerhoffer has transformed into a sort of bohemian guy who just happens to have lots of money, a friend you might want to give you advice on your love life or what sort of refrigerator to buy or whether to quit your job and take up oil painting.

In other words, I can finally listen to him.

So let's start over, shall we?

Curves are a good place to start. Meyerhoffer is all about them. He recently designed the first "soft computer" for a start-up called Chumby, which is like a little beanbag with Wifi. It's very cute. He also designs bubbly ski goggles, snowboard bindings, expensive chairs that look like something George Clooney would model in, windsurfing sails. He is a refiner, taking stuff that already works well and making that stuff work better, in an out of the box kind of way of course.

That's cool. Whatever.

But a surfboard? This is sacred terrain. Every surfer knows that real shaping is an art that only a select few – usually hand-craftsman who have been surfing since they were in the womb and who have been anointed by the Hawaiian gods – really excel at, and even fewer become innovative enough to design something that is profoundly innovative and functional. Meyerhoffer started surfing later in life and he designed these alien boards with CAD software, which would be the equivalent of making French wine in steel barrels. You might get away with it in Napa, but you'd be barred from Bordeaux for life.

Meyerhoffer is clearly used to the heavy skepticism. "I never did this to get famous," he says without my prompting. "I did it so people could enjoy a different feeling…People see the board and they think that I made it like this to differentiate it from other surfboards. Or they think, ‘oh parabolic, it's like a ski.' But it has nothing to do with that. I didn't design the board to look like this. It just became like this. I started to take away, and I took away a lot of mass. So where do you take away? You take away where you don't need."

Meyerhoffer determined that what you don't need is all that rail, and he basically scooped out chunks at the waist of the board and took in the tail drastically, making it long and narrow.

The idea came over five years of trial and error at solving a problem. Meyerhoffer loved longboarding because of the momentum you get with a big boat-like plank. But he missed the agility of a high performance shortboard. He also liked single-fin hulls, a sort of in between model, for their speed and glide. But those boards, Meyerhoffer found, really only work well on point waves that usually have a predictable way of peeling down the line. Most of us surfers find ourselves in the same predicament and so spend enormous amounts of time and money acquiring just the right combination of boards to fit the changing conditions and our fickle moods. Meyerhoffer set out to make a board that could do it all. He was bound to be criticized, at least by those closed-minded surfers, whoever they are.

The model he has started to settle on, the one we are about to ride, is the result of letting himself make a lot of boards that simply failed. "Sometimes I'd go out on these really weird boards that I know won't work at all and I look like a total kook," he laughs. "But I still have to take them out to test a theory." Anyone who has suffered the stink eye one gets from surfing poorly on a good wave knows what a sacrifice that is. But it appears, at least from the press, to be paying off with this model, which has been receiving praise from the likes of pro surfer Peter Mel. Retired pro surfer Mike Tabeling has gone so far as to buy one Meyerhoffer in every size. He recently told Surfer Magazine, "That's what the Meyerhoffer does-it brings back the fun of your shortboard days, as you can make this longboard really turn."

But this is all rhetoric. I may like Meyerhoffer after our friendly drive, but I still think his alien babies in the back of my van are likely dripping radioactive material into the bag of stale chips I'm planning on salvaging for lunch. And since I'm not a longboarder, I wonder if Meyerhoffer's claim that I can surf it like a shortboard will be even close to true. Doubtful.

We've arrived at Ocean Beach, which is basically slop as well: two to three feet and disorganized. Meyerhoffer doesn't seem like the stressed out type, but he is visibly uncomfortable from this. Even after good press in Surfer Magazine, The Surfer's Journal and some The New York Times, Meyerhoffer seems to be trying to convince the surfing community that his works of art are worth around $800 a pop, not to mention worth every single person you meet on the beach asking, "what the hell is that?"

"It's just going to feel like crap if we go out here," he says.

Excuses excuses. He's already lowering our expectations.

And there is no time to keep looking for waves. So, after fielding 10 or 15 questions from surfers who approach with their heads cocked – "are you the Apple surfboard guy?" –in we go, paddling over the rough, textured deep green lines, through wisps of fog, on our brand new Meyerhoffers, which, to my surprise, feel really good to paddle: light, streamlined, comfortable.

I have a theory that any good board feels that way from the very first paddle. So far, I have to admit that the alien board feels down right proper. And fortunately, it's not as bad as it looked from shore. A relatively clean line churns toward me.

Game time.

I get in easy, just like I would on a longboard, minimal paddling, and begin cruising down the line of a waist-high crumbler. I do some pumps along the face and – wow, ok — it bobs along the face much more easily than a normal board this length. Less responsive than a shortboard, but still, impressive. Without much rocker, the board is certainly fast and as the wave peters out, I edge toward the nose to hang five. That works too. Damn it, these things actually surf – like, well.





I paddle back unable to conceal my grin, but trying. Meyerhoffer grins back. He can tell I like it. Technology is winning. Maybe a dolphin will come and bite the nose off. Yea, that'd be cool.

And besides, that was just one wave. I didn't need to turn. I'm pretty sure that when I do the board will just topple over with all that rail missing. But, on my next wave, as I go to cut back, the thing just flips around in a 180, like one of my little twin-fin boards would. And that's just weird. Boards this long and buoyant don't turn like that, not the ones I've ridden.

This is – I admit – very, very fun.

And so I surrender to the superiority of the machine. My crusade is over. Insert a chip in my head and get it over with. And the icing on the cake is that you can feel how the Meyerhoffer works while you're riding. If feels just the way he described it to me in the car. "Once you're on a steeper wave," he explained, "you ride on the back of the board, the tail, so you don't need the stuff on the front of the board and it will feel like a shortboard. But you still want to be able to nose ride it and have that length, plus have the board transition so that once you paddle into a slightly steeper wave it has the drive of a shorter board too. And that's it." I get it: a shortboard inside a longboard. It's sort of like, oh screw it, an iPhone.

And there's your sure sign of the apocalypse – comparing a surfboard to a mini computer. We might as well, as Stephen Colbert recently put it, go have "end of the world sex".

I'm still holding out some hope that Meyerhoffer will stop having his boards manufactured in Thailand and start hand shaping them from recycled egg carton foam and sell them only to Tibetan refugees within a 10-mile radius of his garage. (He'll have to make an exception for my friends and me, of course.)

But I have a hunch that his new design may be the beginning of a whole new wave of surfboards. I still think the design has something to do with aliens and radioactivity, but that will just be fodder for a cool comic book series where Meyerhoffer becomes immortal.

Trademark on that idea by the way. I'm not that much of a hippie.

[Video/Photos by Robert, who took many waves to the head to get them]

Summermodo is a chance for Giz to get outside and test our gear where it belongs.

[noquedanblogs via notcot]

Simply put, the Teflon-coated back just feels and looks a lot better than the iPhone's—now crappy looking, I admit—plastic back. The Hero's polytetrafluoroethylene—the technical name for DuPont's Teflon—coating feels perfect in your hand. It doesn't appear to get any skin oil at all. No greasy fingerprints, just a perfect matte finish no matter how much I touched it.

It feels and looks like a white thermal tile out of NASA's shuttle.

The iPhone's plastic finish, on the other side, is a fingerprint magnet that looks as cheap as any Chinese knockoff after holding it for a few seconds. The Hero wins hands down on appearance, even while its front is too complicated for my taste. For a company like Apple—which takes such pride in their design and manufacturing—this is bad. For a consumer like me, this sucks.

"They are getting so boring"

Once upon a time Apple used to be innovators in the use of new materials. Those were the times in which they experimented with the iMacs and PowerMacs, which finished with the arrival of aluminum. Today, apart from the unibody manufacturing—which is just a form of aluminum manufacturing, a material that has been used forever in consumer products—their use of groundbreaking materials has stagnated.

I'm not the only one saying this. About a month ago Matt Buchanan and I asked the top executive of one of the most important industrial design firms in the world about his thoughts on Apple's design. After seing Objectified—and watching a legend like Dieter Rams glorifying Apple as the only consumer electronics company that counts when it comes to industrial design—I was expecting an ode to Jon Ive and his team. Instead, he replied:

They are great, but we [him and his colleagues in the industrial design world] think they are getting so boring. I mean, don't get me wrong, they got the use of aluminum perfected now... but what happened with the excitement that they used to generate with new materials? We all expect a lot more from Apple.

He is right. Their use of plastics in the iMac spread to every single consumer appliance out there. And Kara Johnson, materials expert from IDEO believes it'll be going out of style any day now (Maybe yesterday.) But now, even aluminum is the new beige. (Even if some experts believe there are few alternatives, there are a few.)

So yes, Apple should use new materials. Not for the sake of it, of course. They should use whatever materials fit the product technical needs. And for me, one of these needs as a consumer is that the product should look great at all times, and not just look great in the box or behind a store glass.

The need for new materials

The iPhone has this problem. It looks like crap with little use. They have tried to fix part of it with the oleophobic coating on the front glass—something that the HTC Hero also has—but the overall effect keeps being the same: Its back still looks cheap after some time.

One thing to note

For this reason we were all hoping for a matte back in the iPhone 3GS, but apparently Apple decided not to release it for one reason or the other.

I don't know and I don't care. What I do care about is that, after playing with the Hero, my iPhone now feels like cheap crap. And I don't even like Android.

Related reading: What Beautiful Gadgets Will Be Made Of

Is it a matter of preference and practice? Yes, but no.

Think about it. The distance it takes to move your hand from the QWERTY to the trackpad, usually below the spacebar, is much closer than the distance it takes to drop your hand on a mouse, reorientate your arm/wrist and fingers into place. And a trackpad's control scheme uses a finger, which has a lot more dexterity than an arm/wrist you use when handling a mouse. Also, the future is multitouch trackpads. No other control scheme can match the potential of pinching/scrolling with multiple fingers, zooming, etc.

The touchpad is also a really natural movement, practiced by everyone since childhood days of drawing in the sand on the beach, or fingerpainting. The only more natural movement is to trace movement on an actual screen, but any screen we use in a non mobile environment is too big and vertical to do this easily on, for extended periods of time. Besides, the touchpad itself would work great with a secondary LCD display under it, making it essentially, a touchpad.

So, here's to a future where the trackpad is everywhere. I look forward to it.

[SanwaNexus404, AdessoNexus404, Adesso2Nexus404, DinovoGiz, KeysonicKustomPC, SandbergTechhook, Adesso3Pcrush, MCEallproducts, McsaiteGeekalaert, TruFormProKeyboardco, ToshibaOverclockers, iKeyGadgetadvisor, iKey2Geekwithlaptop, FentexMiniGeekwithlaptop, EeeKeyboardDeviceDaily, LogitechHomeTheaterDialectical, special thanks to Quinton Ma for researching the models in this gallery.]

Oh wait, yes I can. Say I'm downstairs reading and my wife is upstairs reading, and I'm all like, damn, this light is too dim! And then she's like, no, my light is now too dim. Pretty soon you'll either have a strobe scenario to rival the heyday of Club MTV, or you'll have two people yelling at each other in the dark.

But maybe that's it, the point of Share Aware and the other Aware products conceived by designers Karin Ehrnberger and Loove Broms (not "Love Brooms") of the Interactive Institute in Sweden is to bring this sort of thing to our attention: We do all share a finite amount of electricity, whether our lightbulbs show it or not. Still doesn't change the fact that I would be labeled a "light hog" in no time. [Dezeen]

Core77 says Liquor Master was conceived by Atelier Van Lieshout, and made from foam, fiberglass and metal, and is intended to be part of a furniture collection that "uses the human form as a jumping-off point for process-based, sculptural furniture."

(Pardon me for one quick second while I get this out of my system, but doesn't all furniture by definition use the human form as a jumping-off point? And isn't all furniture sculptural? And while we're at it, doesn't Champagne need to be chilled?)

Pseudo-intellectual yammering aside, Atelier Van Lieshout is my new favorite Dutch art posse. (Sean already knew about them.) If you think the man-shaped liquor cabinet is wacko, check out Lieshout's inhabitable large purple sperm (named Darwin), or CasAnus, another house modeled—anatomically correctly—after the human digestive tract, or the extra large BikiniBar, or the sculpted entity simply known as Dickhead Baby, all thumbnailed for your pleasure below.

Yes, Lieshout, we'll be watching you and your sick sick creations from now on. Keep up the full-bore insanity. [Atelier Van Lieshout via Core77]

The goo surpasses other 3d circuit technologies based on wires or solid material because it saves even more space. In that case, we're talking about 1.6mm of height, but that's enough to fit in a bigger screen or battery in something as thin as an mp3 player or slim phone.

The piece is pegged to ex CEO of Seagate Bill Watkins' arrival there. [NYT]

I was rushing off to meet with Owen from Valleywag, and I was late. I forgot that a surfboard on my roof was not tied down on my roof rack and as I stopped for a stop sign at the bottom of a steep hill, it just slid off and jammed itself under a car. Thank god no one was hurt. As I strapped it back on, carefully, some guy in a teal benz rolled down his window and said "nice pahking jaab!", to which I shook my fist and made a giant "errrrrrr" sound. I was a little annoyed, since the board belonged to a friend and is now scratched up.

I was not happy. And through this angry, angry lens, every gadget's flaw is amplified 1000 fold. It has nothing to do with how much they deserves the scorn. Sharp edges and obtuse design end up bothering me more when in a wicked state because I've become more sensitive to their design hiccups and less patient.

I got back in my car and drove a block, now really late for my meeting. I tried to call to say I would be late, but the call dropped. And since I was angry, so I did that thing where you try redialing 20 times in a row, pushing the buttons really hard. Then I noticed that I couldn't get my car's GPS to simply route to an intersection without clicking through two dozen buttons presses. And later on, every moment my phone hung while going through apps felt like an eternity. My rage built upon itself, one red wave after another, driving my ability to see clearly down deeper and deeper.* I got there and settled down, but for a good 30 minutes, every moment of delay and inconvenience caused by traffic lights, other drivers and especially my own gadgets kicked up my temper as if it were a humming, ticking needle of a seismograph through an earthquake.

Once, I crossed a line with my gadget-rage. I was trying to install a music player on a new notebook, and, as many of you know, sometimes wireless settings do not stick. It doesn't matter who makes the operating system here, that's not the point. What happened was that I was having a pretty frustrating day for various reasons, and after an hour of setting it repeatedly and having it reset repeatedly, I ended up discus throwing it onto a couch and jump-punching in the keyboard. Ridiculous, I know. I am guilty of ridiculous things, often. But I never would have been this incensed on a machine that worked flawlessly.

The point is, I wonder how many gadget companies test user experiences when users are rushing, focusing on other things, stressed out about work, or plain pissed off. Maybe they should, because I bet they'd find such a test—a super pissed off user experience test—to be most useful for their designs for gadgets to be used in the real world. A gadget that would sooth would have to have been designed by a gadget god.

Just like phones that can withstand drops from table height without shattering, and militarized solid state drive laptops that are dust and moisture proof, I would bet that testing gadgets to be smooth and invisible during user experiences where the users are in less than ideal states of mind would probably go a long ways towards making them better for all users. Angry or calm as monks.

*To feel better, I spend time with my dogs or hang out in the water.

Technically, the elastic membrane covering the desk and chair is to stretch so that you can stash your own stuff, whether it's books or silverware or hashish. But in the example, Carbonell apparently chose something a little close to mammalian intestines for my taste.

The rest of the furniture is just cool, in an organic Buckaroo Banzai 8th-dimensional sort of way, all with little pockets to store your bidness. As Carbonell himself said to Dezeen, "You'll feel like playing hide and seek!" I don't know, Nacho. I don't feel like playing anything right now. Hey, is your brother really Bat Manuel? [Dezeen]

And that's exactly the point. Like Helvetica, director Gary Hustwit's previous documentary triumph about the most prevalent typeface on earth, Objectified sings the praises of those very people who, while not necessarily under-appreciated, definitely operate in the background—they design your stuff. It's a secret little world, and through Objectified, we get to live in it.

Take this lamp I bought at a flea market last weekend. I Googled the only thing on the bottom that would identify it ("WINDSOR L-10") and got zero relevant results. It's old, pre-internet for sure, so I wasn't surprised. But who designed it? It's so tiny and Wall-e like (essentially a hybrid of Wall-e himself and the task lamp Pixar uses in their logo)—I want to know more! Someone designed this, and I love imagining the moment of its conception.

My lamp only cost $15, so odds are it wasn't designed by any of the überheavyweights featured in Objectified: There's Apple's Jonathan Ive, Smart Design (of Flip Video fame) founders Davin Stowell and Dan Formosa, the legendary Dieter Rams of Braun, the folks at IDEO (who designed the first laptop, among many other things), Naoto Fukusawa (father of the Infobar), Chris Bangle, the infamous (and former) chief designer of BMW, and many others. It's a star-studded group. Also featured prominently is Rob Walker, who writes my favorite New York Times column "Consumed" in the magazine every Sunday—he is a joy in every scene he is in, including where he dreams of an ad campaign encouraging people to got out and use and be satisfied with the stuff they already own.

But what's great (and where Helvetica also ruled) is that Hustwit is a master interviewer. He gets his subjects to speak about what can be a jargon and marketing-voodoo laden industry with total clarity and comfort that folks that didn't go to design school can comprehend freely. Ive, holding up the single aluminum block from which a unibody MacBook is hewn while trying to control his massive biceps, speaks about how designers are ultimately obsessive, borderline neurotic people. He can't look at an object anywhere without seeing the multiple layers of intent involved-who designed it, who it's designed for, what it does well. To Ive, it's an illness.

To others, it's desire. Marc Newson, who designs everything but is famous especially for aviation-related like the EADS spaceplane, puts it this way: "I want to have things that don't exist yet," which I think we can all relate to here.

One place where Objectified gets somewhat tripped up is in its hesitance to boldly define the inherent conflict of the designer, especially now: good design should last and improve with time, which is often directly opposed to the interests of a commercial designer's clients who want people to keep buying things. This theme does come up in the film, but where Helvetica had the postmodernism vs. modernism conflict-in-a-bubble at its heart, which served as the perfect organizational structure to not only be entertaining, but to also school everyone in design theory, Objectified lacks a similar conflict by which everything can be defined.

I was disappointed to not see more of the good design vs. capitalism conflict mainly because it's going to be the most important concept in gadget design over the next few decades—not only for the environmental concerns, but because software is more than ever the representation of a gadget's heart and soul. This is not a new concept: when fondling the Grid Compass (the world's first laptop computer he helped design), Bill Moggridge of IDEO says it only took a few seconds for the user experience to be completely about the software interface on its 320x200 screen, with the hardware dropping away almost completely. And he designed it! As an interesting contrast, Naoto Fukasawa explains that in Japan, interactions with a tangible object are much more important, culturally, to the Japanese. Which makes sense when you see the horrid software being run by such a beautiful phone as the Infobar.

This concept also fits snugly in with a designer's environmental concerns—since software doesn't fill up a landfill, having hardware that can be re-upped to latest and greatest status over the web makes the earth happy too.

This choice to not hang the whole film on this idea was of course a conscious one, and it probably ensured a broader, more appealing film in the end. I just missed the elegance of everything fitting together into nice ideological halves in Helvetica.

But when judged alone, Objectified gets the job done beautifully and does for industrial designers what Helvetica did for graphic designers: lets us step into their frame of reference and greater appreciate, or at the very least notice, their omnipresent work.

Trailer:

More info: objectifiedfilm.com

Check out the videos—they're practically immobile, but remain menacing.

If you want to build a Mantis of your own (like you ever could!), you can read how Nemo did it on Instructables. [Nemomatic via BoingBoing]

I like the choice to omit the actual shell of the controllers themselves, opting instead to focus on the button arrangement, floating ghostlike without any housing. I also kind of like that this is overlaid on a what may be the back of a Waffle House paper placemat.

Attention designers: please continue to chart interesting thigns using the schema of the periodic table. [Flickr via Technabob]

If you're one of the 20 people still listening to AM/FM broadcasts and not streaming from the Mac Mini that's an integral part of this setup, then this will suit your fancy just fine. [Yanko Design]

Even though that guy from Dyson is right re: these things never, ever drying your hands sufficiently, it's fascinating to see the variety of designs. (Looks like Wilson has yet to run across an AirBlade in his travels).

Check out the full set on Flickr, and Douglas's portfolio site as well. [Flickr, Douglas Wilson via Build]

Since we only care about Apple products here at Gizmodo, I see a Mac Pro, a number of iPods, MacBook Pro, a clickwheel, iPhone, iPhone SIM ejector tool (!!) and an original iMac...

Oh we kid. There's some fine Dieter Rams Braun action in here, just about every important chair from the last century or so, a Wii, Kanye's favorite glasses, a Swatch...so much goodness. As an aviation junkie though, I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit I can't place that profile of a flying-wing-type glider. Anyone know what that is?

Update: The guys who designed the poster, Build, are playing a similar game of "identify the iconic design" over on their blog, and they've provided a great high-res JPG of the poster to help make the game more fun. They also point out, as many of you have, that the word "Objectified" is hidden in the sixth row, and everything in the last row was used to make the film itself. Awesome.

You can grab one for $20 here: [Objectified]

Designers Squidspot created the table, with fonts arranged roughly into related group columns showing (although Akzidenz Grotesk and Helvetica not being in the same family! Ok, I'll stop). They've also ranked each roughly according to popularity according to a number of sources.

It's really cool to see who designed which typeface and when, and where everything falls in the popularity queue. [Periodic Table of Typefaces (full-res JPG) by Squidspot via Lifehacker]

1. It's built atop two chestnut trees that were chopped down, so no roots, just engineering.

2. You can only get inside by using free-standing ladders.

3. It sways.

4. Tea is apparently brewed over an open fire.

5. I don't see no safety nets.

6. Its name. When the architect and owner, Terunobu Fujimori, set it up in Chino City, in the Nagano Prefecture in Japan, he called it Takasugi-an, which roughly translates as "tea house that's too high." Now there's a vote of confidence.

Lots more information and plenty of Edmund Sumner's great pictures over at Dezeen. [Dezeen]