Greener Gadgets Design Competition 2009
In association with CEA, Core77 is proud to announce the launch of this year's Greener Gadgets Design Competition 2009, challenging designers to create the next generation of greener gadgets. Once again, finalists will be JUDGED LIVE at the Greener Gadgets Conference, this year slated for February 27th in New York City. Prize money is $3000 for 1st Place, $1000 each for 2nd and 3rd Places.
We were thrilled with the response from last year's competition, and in addition to the prize money, winners, finalists, and several notables received an incredible amount of press from magazines and websites around the world. Since this year's competition will also incorporate public online voting during the 2-week period before the conference, top designs will be receive unprecedented media attention. This is an amazing chance to use design to contribute positively, so we encourage all designers to get in the game!
Entry deadline is January 15th.
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World's first energy generating revolving door installed in the Netherlands
Natuurcafé La Port in the Netherlands recently installed a rotating door that captures kinetic energy generated by pedestrian traffic. Designed by architects RAU and built by Boon Edam, they claim the door is the first realization of this concept in the world generating roughly 4600 kwh of energy each year—granted it's not much but surely a step in the right direction.
via inhabitat
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CompostModern Conference 2009: February 21
We've been fans of the CompostModern conference since its inception in 2003 (last year was a standout); here are the details on this year's installment:
Compostmodern is fertile ground for sustainability by design. Presented by the San Francisco chapter of AIGA and the AIGA Center for Sustainable Design (CFSD), this interdisciplinary conference explores the range of design thinking necessary to create a socially and ecologically responsible society. Designers, manufacturers and business leaders come together to find inspiration, share knowledge and explore real world opportunities for transforming products, industries and lives.Compostmodern 09 will be held at the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco on Saturday, February 21. This year's conference demonstrates how sustainable solutions converge in our interconnected world as design, ecology, social impact, business strategies and economics intersect. Speakers include Eames Demetrios of Eames Office, Allan Chochinov of Core 77, climate strategist Michel Gelobter, Nathan Shedroff, Project M founder John Bielenberg, Emily Pilloton of Project H Design, and Autodesk Sustainable Design Program Manager Dawn Danby. GreenBiz editor and sustainability author Joel Makower will reprise his role as emcee.
Get more info and (very affordable) tickets at www.compostmodern.com.
Can't make it? This year the conference will be webcast live (and available for 90 days afterwards). Details also at the site.
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Local Motors Boston design competition winners announced
Local Motors does it again with their city-specific auto design competition, this time focused on Boston. The question asked: "How to design for a town full of history and brimming with antithesis?"
As usual the entries were manifold and high-quality, and auto design fans may recognize winner Mihai Panaitescu's name--he's the designer who took top prize in last year's Peugeot design competition.
Get your Friday eye-candy fix by peeping all of the entries here.
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NYU's 120-foot monitor will give you a tan
New York University's ITP (Interactive Telecommunications Program) assembled a 12-by-120-foot monitor and built a course around it entitled Big Screens. The course's singular assignment: What do you do with a screen this big?
Responses by 12 students are up on their website; those of you familiar with ITP's work would have accurately guessed that the answers deal with abstract interactions rather than, say, watching the Superbowl on it. Check 'em all out here.
via hack n mod
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the designer's dilemma
Mikal Hallstrup of Designit.dk frames the dilemmas faced by designers, particularly when their product is intended for an entirely different culture or geography. Here's a snippet:
Prabhu Kandachar, associate professor at TUDelft, told a story that illustrates this ethical dilemma perfectly. A company developed an affordable ultra-sound scanner for the Indian market. It was meant to improve pregnancy healthcare and pregnant women's quality of life. But the company soon discovered that the scanners were being used for gender selection.How should the company deal with this? Stop designing? Seek answers from the ethical experts? Keep designing, learning and trying to solve something that seems unsolvable? Or proactively attempt to design new behaviour patterns and value sets in the country so the product is used as intended? That's according to a western value set, at least.
As a designer, I think the way forward is focusing on context. Address and understand the underlying contradictions - whether they be cultural, economic or social - and make the solution fit. And most importantly, remember that policies and visions alone won't bring tangible differences to users' everyday lives - to achieve this, we need well-designed products and services.
What do you think is the responsibility of the designer? What is the role of ethics in product design?
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Vaja cases
As our society gets more and more gadget heavy, an entire industry has formed around designing cases to hold those gadgets.
Vaja's beautiful, high-end, mostly leather products are worth a look. They manufacture cases to hold cell phones, cameras, laptops, MP3 players, et cetera. Josh Spears also has a closer look at their new clip system (below) which, while we're not sure we'd use, is different enough that you oughta know it's out there.
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PowerUp Canada
Canadians for climate leadership: PowerUp Canada is a new website aimed at educating and encouraging Canadians to lobby their elected officials toward better environmental policies. Here's the pitch:
Countries around the world are proving that well-designed laws and policies create jobs and stimulate the economy. Germany has created a quarter million green jobs ramping up clean energy. Israel is building a nation-wide plug-in electric car network. The United Kingdom is putting people to work retrofitting buildings and saving its citizens money with green building mandates.PowerUP Canada is a citizens' coalition to launch a green economy and brings together many who have never considered themselves "environmentalists." All of us have been trying to do our part but our actions are swamped by big industrial decisions. So we are driving towards stronger laws and government stimulus for the clean economy. In September, five of Canada's living Prime Ministers joined Canada's Association for the 45+, business leaders, the Canadian Jewish Congress, United Steelworkers along with other associations, experts and regular citizens in a national call to action: "Time to get serious on climate change."
Learn more, donate, or start lobbying at the site.
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Night & Day Backpack for Cycling
Brooklyn-based designer and avid cyclist Vanessa Marie addresses the dilemma of being safety conscious while riding, and maintaining a level of street cred with her 'Night Day Backpack'.
The concept behind the backpack was to create a chic look with (hidden) versatility. The flaps have magnets inside of them with 3M Scotchlite material on the underside. During the day the flaps are held in place magnetically and at night - before jumping on your bike - you flip them up to become super visible.
A variation with smaller squares for writing pixel letter messages to drivers behind you could be fun. Vanessa is second year Masters in Industrial Design (MID) candidate at Pratt Institute.
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New design compeition launches: Design the Screens of the Future for Nvidia
We're happy to announce the launch of a three-part design competition, presented by our friends at Nvidia. The first theme for this competition is to "Visualize the screens of the future." We've seen an explosion in the ways people get their information--from dashboard touchscreens and head-mounted displays to ebooks and green technologies. Screens can be personal or communal, data-rich, or optimized for entertainment.
For this design competition, we're challenging all designers to visualize the screens of the future, using any technology, material, interface, or embodiment. Your design can be an e-ink belt buckle or an LED-clad sports stadium, a dynamic computer desktop or a simple watchface.
But hurry - the entry deadline for this first phase is Dec. 28, 2008. Use your down time over the holidays to stretch your design muscles. Winners will get the NVIDIA Quadro CX card bundled with the Adobe CS4 Master Collection. Good luck!
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Author of Designing Gestural Interfaces sounds off on touchscreen desktop possibilities
Speaking of screens, Dan Saffer, author of the hot-off-the-presses Designing Gestural Interfaces book, writes to us:
With the launch of HP's TouchSmart and TX2 computers, I'm occasionally asked what a purely touchscreen system would be like for a desktop. (It's rumored that Jeff Han of Perceptive Pixel is currently working on one, and of course, the iPhone, Instinct, Dare, et al have touchscreen OSes for mobile.) With the publication of my book last week, I thought I would discuss what some desktop concepts could be like.
Check out Saffer's thoughts here, and order (or download!) Designing Gestural Interfaces here.
thanks dan!
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"Organic Resourcing": Incubators made from car parts
The Science Times featured a story both inspiring for its design thinking and heart-breaking for the problem it addresses. Design That Matters has contributed its efforts toward a low-cost neo-natal infant incubator...made from car parts. We love projects like this, and look forward to the term "organic resourcing" finding its way into the design vernacular alongside its like-minded sibling, "appro-tech". Here are a couple snippets from the article:
"It's so frustrating to see these preventable deaths," he said. "They won't name babies in Aceh, Indonesia, until they're two months old. It's a cultural adaptation to expect a death."[...]
In truth, experts say, the developing world doesn't need more incubators. It needs incubators that work. Over the years, thousands have been donated from rich nations, only to end up in "incubator graveyards--most broken, some never opened. According to a 2007 study from Duke University, 96 percent of foreign-donated medical equipment fails within five years of donation--mostly because of electrical problems, like voltage surges or brownouts or broken knobs, or because of training problems, like neglecting to send user manuals along with the devices.
Read the whole thing here.
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Screw-less folding chair design
The "Good-bye Screw" folding chair (designed by Taiwanese student/teacher duo Fang Po-hsiung and Chen Chun-tung of Shu-Te University) uses no screws in its construction and is designed to be assembled in about sixty seconds. Made from gas-injected polypropylene, the GBS has won a Red Dot award in the Design Concept category. Fang and Chen are currently seeking backers for mass production.
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FLOTspotting: Malaria Must Go, by Andrew Stordy
From the Coroflot portfolio of : Andrew Stordy (London, UK)
Featured Project : Malaria Must Go
Recently coming out of the RCA's Industrial Design Engineering program, engineer/designer Andrew Stordy has put an enormous amount of thought and effort into developing a system to reduce infections from malaria--the world's single largest killer of children. Starting with an extensive research trip to Tanzania, the Malaria Must Go project seeks to work in conjunction with existing anti-malarial technologies like pesticide-impregnated mosquito nets, offering a pair of products that repel and/or kill mosquitoes with locally-sourced materials.
The two prototypes--a charcoal-powered mosquito killer (shown above) and a modified mosquito-repelling oil lamp--are explained and demonstrated in a long but fascinating video on Stordy's website, and the work has earned Stordy both an IDEA Gold award and a 2008 Dyson fellowship, among others.
It's rare to see this sort of research-driven, holistic problem solving at the student level, and even rarer to see it applied to such an urgent, global problem. Deeply encouraging.
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Early New Years resolution: Murketing's challenge to commercial persuaders
And finally, a bit early--but then there's never a bad time for a good idea, is there?--Rob Walker has proposed a New Years Resolution to ad agencies and allied professions on his Murketing blog, and we couldn't have said it better ourselves: rather than resolving to be "good" by working for clients that do "good" things, he suggests something a little more basic:
Pick an idea that you believe in -- with social or environmental responsibility at its core.Now go out there and use your persuasion talents to advance that idea in the public sphere. Change behavior in ways that do not involve buying your clients' stuff, that do not involve the profit motive at all.
Do it because you -- yes, you; not an entrepreneur or a brand that you work for; you -- actually believe in something, and you stand for something, and you have ideas, and you care.
Don't look for a client, pro bono or otherwise, who has values. Just have values.
While not directed specifically at designers of other stripes, the suggestion translates well across many disciplines.
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Special thanks to Niti Bhan for her contributions to this week's newsletter!
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